GEORGE CLOONEY RELEASED FROM JAIL

　　George Clooney and other human rights activists were released from jail on last Friday afternoon after being arrested during a protest at the Sudan Embassy earlier in Washington.

　　The Hollywood star was protesting Sudan's efforts to block humanitarian aid from reaching a volatile border region where its army is fighting rebels aligned with South Sudan.

　　Clooney: "What we're trying to achieve today is we're trying to bring attention to an ongoing emergency, one that's got about a six-week timetable before the rainy season starts and a lot of people are going to die from it. So our job right now is trying to bring attention to it - one of those ways was apparently getting arrested. I guess we're not allowed to hang out at the Sudanese embassy."

　　Clooney, his father Nick, and other anti-Sudan activists ignored three police warnings to leave the embassy grounds and were led away to a Secret Service van in handcuffs.

　　George Clooney met with U.S. President Barack Obama last week as part of his fight to establish humanitarian access to food-starved regions on South Sudan.

　　Clooney, who recently returned from the Nuba mountains region, said he and the president discussed how to gain international co-operation for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor.

　　Clooney said, "With the escalation of danger for the people of the Nuba mountains, there's a real concern of opening some form of a humanitarian corridor. Obviously that's not something we could do unilaterally, it will have to be done with the help of many different countries.

　　There's a great interest in working with China, not in any adversarial relationship, but actually working together for their own economic interests since China's losing a considerable amount of money in oil revenue right now, so there seems to be a unique moment and a unique time to be able to act on some of that and the president has a meeting with President Hu, I think in two weeks and said that he would have a discussion with him about that very specific issue."

　　One day before he met with President Obama, Clooney told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Washington must get tough on Sudan President Omar al-Bashir and two other Sudanese officials indicted by the International Criminal Court as part of an investigation into atrocities in Darfur from August 2003 to March 2004.

　　U.S. officials and aid experts have warned that as many as 250,000 people in the Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile border states could be on the brink of famine by the end of April and have demanded Khartoum stop blocking humanitarian access and allow aid groups in.

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