Free Republic

The British government is funding projects pushing Africans to farm and consume insects, including school-age children, in randomized trials, to assess their effects. The United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) – a subsidiary of the country’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – is responsible for backing the projects taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe. With a roughly $320,000 grant from the aid office, researchers in Zimbabwe will be experimenting with using mopane worms in porridge served to children in schools. Poor children aged seven to 11 in the towns of Gwanda and Harare...

A bridge in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) collapsed as officials gathered to inaugurate it, according to local Khaama Press news agency. Videos of the accident are circulating on social media where people are mocking the construction quality. The small bridge was built to help locals cross a river during the rainy season. The temporary structure that was there before the bridge used to break frequently, the news agency said in its report. One of the videos shows officials standing on the bridge to formally inaugurate it during an official event. The inauguration would have been complete with the cutting...

At least five people have been killed and fifty others wounded on the second day of anti-United Nations protests in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo city of Goma, according to the government. A Reuters reporter at the scene said UN peacekeepers fired tear gas and live bullets at a largely peaceful crowd on Tuesday, killing two and wounding at least two others. Army and police officers deployed to the scene did not open fire. A soldier and a policeman in a bulletproof vest were also hit by bullets, he added. An AFP journalist also reported seeing a UN...

BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - Gunmen killed a policeman and kidnapped five Chinese nationals near a mine in southeast Democratic Republic of Congo overnight, a local official and an army spokesman said on Sunday. It was not clear who carried out the attack near the village of Mukera in South Kivu province. Relations are already strained between Chinese mining companies and local authorities, who say some firms are operating illegally without licenses. "An armed group exchanged fire with police. Five Chinese nationals were kidnapped," Major Dieudonne Kasereka, the army spokesman in the region, said. A spokesperson at the...

An investment firm that counts Hunter Biden among its founders helped a Chinese company purchase one of the world’s most lucrative cobalt mines from an American company, according to a report by The New York Times. Biden established the firm Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) Equity Investment Fund Management Company with two other Americans and some Chinese partners in 2013. The American members controlled 30 percent of the Shanghai-based operation and served on the board. The company notably completed a deal in 2016 that saw a Congo cobalt and copper mine transfer from American company Freeport-McMoRan to Chinese outfit China Molybdenum...

The president’s son was part owner of a venture involved in the $3.8 billion purchase by a Chinese conglomerate of one of the world’s largest cobalt deposits. The metal is a key ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles. An investment firm where Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was a founding board member helped facilitate a Chinese company’s purchase from an American company of one of the world’s richest cobalt mines, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Biden and two other Americans joined Chinese partners in establishing the firm in 2013, known as BHR and formally named Bohai Harvest...

A lawsuit filed this week in Washington, D.C., alleges that some of the world's largest technology firms knowingly engaged in the usage of child labor in Africa's cobalt mines. The suit was filed by nongovernmental organization International Rights Advocates and mentions Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Tesla and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, USA Today reports. Cobalt is an essential part of rechargeable lithium batteries that power many of the electronic devices that the listed companies sell. According to the suit, two mining companies — British company Glencore and Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — supplied cobalt to all of the...

Secretary General. Joined by 34 other countries, the document enshrines the Trump administration’s pro-life diplomacy on the official record of the General Assembly. “The United States strongly supports the dignity of all human beings and protecting life from the moment of conception throughout the lifespan,” Ambassador Kelly Craft wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres transmitting the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Following the letter, the declaration was issued as an official document of the United Nations last week and circulated on December 11, after having been translated into all six official UN languages....

The accident in the makeshift mine occurred on Friday about 3pm local time (13:00 GMT) following heavy rains in the town of Kamituga in South Kivu province. The mine was not located on the Kamituga gold concession owned by the Canadian miner Banro Corporation, the company's chief executive said. Thousands of informal miners operate in and around mines in DRC, which produces more than half of the world's cobalt, a key component in electric car batteries. Mining accidents are common, with dozens of deaths every year in mines where often ill-equipped diggers burrow deep underground in search for ore. Last...

A second Ebola outbreak has been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, some 600 miles from an ongoing epidemic that has claimed more than 2,200 lives. According to the World Health Organization six cases of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever have been identified and four people have so far died near Mbandaka, the regional capital of Équateur Province. The outbreak was first announced on local radio by the region's governor, Bobo Boloko Bolumbu, on Monday morning. He said samples from the cases were sent to the INRB, the country’s national medical research organisation in Kinshasa, for secondary confirmation.

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight. His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for...

Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusadePicking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight. His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and...

<p>Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset who was used by Israeli intelligence to blackmail politicians, according to a former Israeli spy.</p> <p>Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy and alleged “handler” of Robert Maxwell, told the authors of a new book, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, that Epstein ran a “complex intelligence operation” at the behest of Mossad.</p>

The eastern DR Congo province of South Kivu has recorded its first confirmed cases of Ebola in the country's year-old epidemic, one of which was a fatality, the provincial government said Friday. "Two cases which tested positive for Ebola were confirmed overnight in South Kivu, in Lwindi district in the Mwenga region," it said in a statement South Kivu Governor Theo Ngwabidje told reporters: "Teams from the national anti-Ebola coordination campaign arrived yesterday to provide support." The disease is spread by contact with infected bodily fluids and is fought with time-honored but laborious techniques of tracing contacts and quarantining them....

Fox News' Laura Ingraham addressed politicians who are putting America's health and well-being "at risk," specifically the government of California. "Over the weekend, we learned that California has gone from sanctuary state for dreamers to just being a sucker state for Americans. The just announced state budget deal will not give health care benefits to many adult illegals too. ... ICE to hire contractor to transport 225,000 migrants to shelters across America. Ingraham argued Californis is ignoring their homeless problem and homeless vets and instead helping in favor of illegals. ... The Fox News host also brought up the 500...

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is flaring up again, with a surge in violence that has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. The attacks, which started on March 30 in Beni, North Kivu, have escalated in recent weeks and could get worse for people that remain trapped between the border of Uganda and an area of DRC that is terrorised by armed groups close to the Ebola outbreak that has claimed 1,000 lives, humanitarian agencies warned on Friday May 3. Over April alone, local health authorities in these areas report that over 60,000 people were displaced,...

The Islamic State claims first jihad massacre in Democratic Republic of Congo, murdering 18 soldiers The caliphate is gone from Iraq and Syria, but the caliphate dreamers remain a global threat. “ISIS claims first attack in DR Congo, saying it killed soldiers near Uganda border,” by Joanne Stocker, The Defense Post, April 18, 2019: Islamic State on Thursday, April 18 claimed that it killed Congolese soldiers in an attack in Kamango near the border between Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. A message posted by its Amaq propaganda agency said there were Congolese army “dead and wounded” following an attack...

Nearly 80 percent of the equipment for staging the December 23 election in DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, was destroyed when a fire ripped through a warehouse, as violence flared just 10 days before the vote. The blaze, which officials blamed on arson, was the latest drama of an increasingly tense election campaign ahead of the December 23 election when the country will choose a successor to President Joseph Kabila. Also Thursday, a teenager was shot dead in the central Kasai region as party faithful gathered ahead of a rally by Felix Tshisekedi of the UDPS, one of the leading opposition...

The ongoing Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has now reached Butembo, a city of over one million residents near the Ugandan border, according to the Associated Press. ...So far, there are over 470 confirmed cases and more than 270 deaths due to the viral hemorrhagic fever, which has an extremely high fatality rate. Another 100-plus cases are under investigation, and Congo’s health ministry confirmed an additional 13 cases on Thursday, the highest one-day total since this latest outbreak was declared in August. This Ebola virus outbreak in the Congo is second only to the outbreak in...

A massive pro-migration group partnered with liberal billionaire George Soros has been accused of “hushing up” allegations of more than 37 cases of sexual assault, fraud, and bribery. The United Kingdom froze the funds to the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization, after evidence surfaced that the group was paying off people to remain quiet about sexual assault and fraud the group committed. The IRC was given more than five and a half million pounds — which is just shy of $8 million U.S. dollars — of taxpayer funds to support a charitable mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo....