Free Republic

Afrikaners, white South Africans long reviled as the architects of a racist state, are now being recast by Donald Trump as the victims of one. The U.S. president has accused South Africa’s Black-majority government of plotting to seize white farms and failing to stop “violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers.” His top adviser, white South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, has accused some of the country’s politicians of actively promoting a “white genocide.” Trump, who has centered his presidency on a promise to evict millions of migrants from the U.S., is clearing away obstacles so that white Afrikaners who want...

The U.S. is turning to a much-criticized source as it races to secure supplies of battery metals to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles. To do so, it is homing in on cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s informal mining sector, where miners, sometimes including children, often work with no safety equipment in dangerous, hand-dug mines. Congo supplies around 70% of the world’s cobalt, a key metal in the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs, with about a third of that coming from these so-called artisanal miners. The U.S. Agency for International Development said earlier this year that it...