The Ugandan president committed to meeting with American “experts” on homosexuality to try to change his mind about the Anti-Homosexuality Act signed into law last month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday during a forum at the State Department moderated by BuzzFeed.

On a Saturday morning in late January, Russ Feingold descended a tight path in the hilly forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park to look for gorillas. The former Democratic senator from Wisconsin wore a long-sleeved safari shirt over a blue polo, a coiled bracelet to repel mosquitos, a surgical mask to protect the gorillas from human germs and two pairs of socks, with his zip-off cargo pants tucked into the outer pair to keep out ants.

So, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni doesn’t like gays. In fact, he thinks they’re “disgusting.” Oh, and he doesn’t think much of the West either. And he says Uganda would be just fine without Western aid. So why haven’t we halted — in a New York minute — the $450 million a year or so in foreign aid we give this clown and his country?

A Ugandan tabloid, The Red Pepper, published a list with names and photos of the nation’s ‘top homosexuals’ on Tuesday, outing 200 people, many of whom have not openly identified as gay. A popular Ugandan hip-hop star, a Catholic priest, and several gay activists were on the list. 

Sunday is a special day in Uganda, the conservative east African country that is threatening to put gay people behind bars for life. On Sunday you can see families flocking to churches all over the country for prayer, wearing their best clothes. But not at a tiny church tucked away in one of Kampala's suburbs. Here, gay people meet in devoted challenge to mainstream denominations that have declared them outcasts. With dreadlocked hair and in jeans and bathroom slippers, members of this congregation would stand out in the prim and proper evangelical church I sometimes go to.

According to an article in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released January 30 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pilot projects between CDC and Uganda and CDC and Vietnam have resulted in improvements in disease detection and response that may serve as a model for increasing global health security in the rest of the world.

Joseph Kony has been called Africa’s most wanted man, and for good reason: Over the past 27 years, he has led a rebel militia of child soldiers that is responsible for the death of more than 100,000 people and the kidnapping of some 50,000 young boys and girls. From 1986 to 2006, Kony savaged northern Uganda, terrorizing defenseless villages. But after losing clandestine support from Sudan and refuge in neighboring South Sudan, he took his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and began peace talks with the Ugandan government.

If not for a view of the ornate Uganda National Mosque or the sprawling, congested taxi park in the distance, it would be hard to tell that Outbox, a technology incubator and accelerator, is in a high-rise in Kampala (Uganda’s capital city) and not some non-descript office building in Silicon Valley. The vibe is intense and laid-back all at once. Modern, cushy chairs and long conference tables are used by casually-dressed young people typing furiously on MacBooks in a quest to create the next big thing.