RAEL’S COMMENT:
Wonderful! We need millions of people like that! Yes, it’s time for a world revolution. Even if the revolution is “strictly prohibited”…
A woman who climbed up on the Statue of Liberty and sat on the monument’s base has been charged with trespassing.
Tourists were evacuated from Liberty Island in New York Harbour on Wednesday during a three-hour stand-off involving local and federal authorities.
She was identified as Therese Okoumou, a 44-year-old naturalised US citizen from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ms Okoumou said she was protesting against President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration.
She pleaded not guilty to charges of misdemeanour trespassing and disorderly conduct in a Manhattan court on Thursday. She faces up to six months in jail on each charge.
A federal magistrate judge released Ms Okoumou without bail after she spent a night behind bars, US media report.
Ms Okoumou, donning a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “White Supremacy is Terrorism”, told reporters outside the courthouse that she scaled the landmark in an impromptu protest over the Trump administration’s immigration policy, which has left thousands of migrant children separated from their parents.
“When they go low, we go high and I went as high as I could,” she said, quoting former First Lady Michelle Obama. “No children belong in a cage.”
US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement that Ms Okoumou “staged a dangerous stunt that alarmed the public and endangered her own life and the lives of the NYPD officers who responded to the scene.
