Free Republic

Leftist Congressman Gabriel Boric, 35, will become the youngest president in Chile’s history after winning a comfortable victory in the South American nation’s most polarized election since its return to democracy more than 30 years ago. With virtually all of the vote counted, the millennial progressive who burst into prominence a decade ago as a shaggy-haired student protest leader had garnered almost 56% of the ballots. That compared with about 44% for his opponent, José Antonio Kast, 55, a far-right career politician and admirer of Chile’s former military dictatorship. *** the results represented the latest triumph for the left in...

<p>A major nickel mine in a Philippines rainforest has continued to expand, mowing down acres of trees as global demand for minerals essential for electric vehicle manufacturing surges.</p><p>The Rio Tuba mine in the region of Palawan supplies an important mineral for electric vehicle batteries in Tesla and Toyota cars, but the mine is nearing an expansion that would cause it to grow from four square miles to 14 square miles, according to an NBC News investigation. The growth of the mine would cause massive deforestation of the land which environmentalists warn could destroy the area’s ecosystem.</p>

The Nez Perce Indians of northern Idaho received the state’s first large-scale battery from Tesla in November.About the size of a standard shipping container, the Tesla Megapack will store power from solar panels, enabling the tribe to reduce its dependence on local dams. For decades, the Nez Perce have demanded the destruction of four hydropower plants along the Lower Snake River with claims the concrete barriers hamper a near-extinct salmon population.The Tesla Megapack, installation company RevoluSun CEO Josh Powell told Public News Service, “allows people like the Nez Perce to control their energy where it’s being produced where they have...

As an Apollo-class asteroid, Nereus’ orbit frequently puts it close to Earth. Its orbital resonance is approximately 2:1, meaning that it orbits almost twice for every orbit of the Earth. This makes a mission to explore the asteroid very feasible. Nereus will come the closest to our planet it has been in the past 20 years, yet it set to pass 7.4 million km away, which is about 10 times the distance between the Moon and Earth. No missions are currently known to be ready to explore Nereus, however it has been considered before. Both NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker (NEAR)...

China's economy is finally getting some good news: Its big factories are staging a recovery as a power crunch that held back production starts to ease because of a big jump in coal supply. A government survey of manufacturing activity increased to 50.1 in November from 49.2 in October, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday. It was the first reading above 50 — indicating expansion rather than contraction — in three months. It was also the first time since March that the index increased over the prior month. Beijing on Tuesday attributed the...

Another of grandfather Jack Bell's stories. This one is about a 1902 gunfight grandfather was in at the bottom of a mine. Later on he was, at various times, a game warden, Deputy Sheriff of Gunnison County, Colorado and Deputy Sheriff of Verdi, Nevada. The quotes in the story come from testimonials put out to get people to buy stock in his 1906 Jack Bell Gold Mining Company when he started a gold rush in Buckskin, Nevada.

SNIPPET: "Indonesian anti-terror police, Densus 88 secure a terror suspect's house during a raid in Mojosongo, Solo in Central Java. Indonesian police have arrested 11 members of an Islamic group allegedly planning attacks on American diplomatic missions, a spokesman says." SNIPPET: "The group had planned to hit the US embassy and a US consulate, as well as a building near the Australian embassy in the capital Jakarta that houses the office of American mining giant Freeport-McMoran, police said. Police said they were from a new outfit called HASMI, the Sunni Movement for Indonesian Society, and explosives and a bomb-making manual...

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...

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...

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...

The Biden administration on Thursday announced the deadline for his private employer vaccine mandate, raising serious questions about how the rule will exacerbate the supply chain crisis. According to RealClearPolitics’ Tom Bevan, there is no exemption for the trucking industry and there will likely be drivers who quit over the mandate. “So all the biggest trucking companies in America - who already face major driver shortages - will see a % of their workforce quit. Supply chain crisis is going to get much worse - very soon,” he warned. Bevan noted that a significant percentage of drivers are unvaccinated, which...

NEWRY — The richest known hard rock lithium deposit in the world lies a few miles northeast of the ski slopes of Sunday River and not far from Step Falls, where swimmers can wade in shallow pools formed by hundreds of feet of cascading granite ledge. Smaller deposits have been known in Maine for decades, but this recent discovery, just north of Plumbago Mountain in Newry, is the first to have a major resource potential.

Afghanistan’s newly ensconced Taliban regime has been looking to China for major economic support, but the Taliban’s lithium-mining invitation to South Korea has displeased the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To keep Beijing happy, the Taliban offered it copper mining rights.Enduring 20 years of war, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to the World Bank, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020 was $19.8 billion (compared to the United State’s $20.93 trillion), and its GDP per capita was only $508.8 (compared to United State’s $63,543.6). Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani revealed last year that 90 percent...

An apparent coup is underway in Guinea, with heavy military presence and gunfire reported in the country’s capital of Conakry. Guinean President Alpha Conde has seemingly been detained by the military.The fate of Guinea's President Alpha Condé is unclear after an unverified video showed him surrounded by soldiers, who said they had seized power. They appeared on national TV claiming to have dissolved the government. However, the defence ministry said the attempted takeover had been thwarted by the presidential guard. This follows hours of heavy gunfire near the presidential palace in the capital, Conakry. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and the...

After the fall of Kabul, US media regurgitates a 2010 New York Times frontpage story on Afghanistan’s mineral riches based on a secret Pentagon memo and a 1977 Soviet geologic map. Search for Afghanistan minerals and you get dozens of articles written in the last few days quoting a magical $1 trillion number including gems like The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs (CNN), Afghanistan: Taliban to reap $1 trillion mineral wealth (Deutsche Welle), Biden Just Handed Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth to China (Newsweek), China Eyes Afghanistan’s $1 Trillion of Minerals With Risky Bet...

Taliban Secures World’s Largest Lithium Deposits After US Withdrawal From Afghanistan It’s been more than a decade since we penned “The US “Discovers” Nearly $1 Trillion In Mineral Deposits In Afghanistan” in which we highlighted the colossal untapped mineral deposits that reside in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden’s decision to rapidly and completely withdraw from Afghanistan makes even less strategic sense if readers go back to our 2010 post where we quoted “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: Part 2, the 21st Century paradigm”? Which said, “Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a...

Was Trump right (again) after all? In August 2019, President Trump was ridiculed for reportedly expressing an interest in buying Greenland “Greenland is a strategic place… they’ve got a lot of valuable minerals,” he explained in August 2019, and he was right: Danish surveys have found that the owner of the island would stake a claim to around 900,000 sq km of the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. As we noted at the time, there is also – not surprisingly – a race for supremacy with China over the island’s future. So far, Washington has prevented Beijing from financing...

On June 28, First Nations mining contractor Nahanni Construction Ltd. dug a scoop of ore from the North T open pit at Vital Metals Ltd.'s Nechalacho project in Northwest Territories that marked a momentous milestone – Canada is now a rare earths-producing nation. This first REE ore mined at Nechalacho comes just two years after Australia-based Vital came up with a unique plan to take advantage of relatively small but high-grade mineralization coming to the surface at the project to rapidly produce the rare earths widely used in today's high-tech devices. North T has 101,000 metric tons of resources averaging...

* Local residents say a power plant is heating Seneca Lake and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases. * The gas-fired plant is used to power at least 8,000 computers that are mining bitcoin. * The plant's CEO says it's operating within the law, and has created 31 jobs. Local residents have blamed bitcoin mining for heating up the largest of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, with one saying it's "so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," according to a report by NBC News. Their complaints centre on a gas-fired power plant that's being used...

One autumn evening four years ago, Ivan Bender, a Hualapai man in his mid-50s, took a walk with his fluffy brown-and-white Pomeranian, Sierra Mae, to check on the ranchland he tends. Nestled in western Arizona’s Big Sandy River Valley, the ranch protects Ha’ Kamwe’ - hot springs that are sacred to the Hualapai and known today in English as Cofer Hot Springs. As the shadows lengthened, Bender saw something surprising - men working on a nearby hillside. “I asked them what they were doing,” Bender recalled. “They told me they were drilling.” As it turns out, along with sacred places...