KINSHASA (FT) – The United States is reportedly engaged in exploratory talks with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) regarding a potential deal on rare earth elements, marking the latest effort by the Donald Trump administration to secure access to vital resources overseas following unsuccessful negotiations with Ukraine. According to a report, the proposed agreement involves the U.S. gaining access to crucial minerals in exchange for providing security assistance to the African nation. FT cited unnamed sources as saying talks between Washington and Kinshasa about a potential mineral deal have intensified recently, “although several obstacles remain” and they are “at a relatively early stage.” According to reports by the United Nations, rebels backed by Rwandan troops have taken large swathes of land in eastern DRC, looting the resources of the mineral-rich region. Kinshasa “invites the USA, whose companies source strategic raw materials from Rwanda ... to purchase them directly from us the rightful owners,” Tina Salama, a spokesperson for President Felix Tshisekedi, wrote on X last month. Rebels are aiming to consolidate their hold in Congo’s east, which has trillions of dollars of mostly untapped mineral wealth,  including cobalt, lithium, tantalum, and uranium. 

 

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WASHINGTON (AFP) – U.S. Secret Service agents shot a gunman near the White House, a spokesman said early Sunday, adding that the man had been hospitalized and his condition was “unknown.” The agents had earlier been warned by local police of a “suicidal” man traveling to Washington from Indiana, and encountered him on a street very near the White House, where “an armed confrontation ensued, during which shots were fired by our personnel,” according to a statement posted by spokesman Anthony Guglielmi on X.

 

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MONTREAL (AFP) – The remains of an Indigenous woman murdered by a convicted serial killer three years ago have been found in landfill in central Canada, local authorities confirmed following a months-long search. Morgan Harris was one of the Indigenous women slain by Jeremy Skibicki, who is serving multiple life sentences after being convicted of four murders last year. Skibicki met his victims in homeless shelters, in a case seen as a symbol of the dangers faced by Indigenous women in Canada, where they disproportionately fall victim to violence, termed a “genocide” by a national public inquiry in 2019. Testimony at Skibicki’s trial said he raped, killed and dismembered Harris and another woman, Marcedes Myran, in 2022. Police believed their remains were dumped at the Prairie Green Landfill site, north of Winnipeg, the capital of the province of Manitoba. 

 

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PARIS (AFP) – French officials are urging their country’s research institutions to consider welcoming scientists abandoning the United States due to President Donald Trump’s funding cuts, AFP learned on Sunday. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, his government has cut federal research funding and sought to dismiss hundreds of federal workers working on health and climate research. “Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States,” France’s minister for higher education and research, Philippe Baptiste, wrote in a letter to the country’s institutions. “We would naturally wish to welcome a certain number of them.” Baptiste urged research leaders to send him “concrete proposals on the topic, both on priority technologies and scientific fields”. The government is “committed, and will rise to the occasion”, he added, in a statement sent to AFP on Sunday. This week, Aix-Marseille University in the south of France announced it was setting up a program dedicated to welcoming U.S. researchers, notably those working on climate change.

 

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SEOUL (Dispatches) – Tens of thousands of people were expected to gather in Seoul on Sunday to rally for or against impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol a day after his surprise release from detention.  Sarang Jeil Church, led by conservative activist pastor Jeon Kwang-hoon, held a Sunday service outdoors near the presidential residence in central Seoul. Around 4,500 people had gathered as of noon, according to an unofficial police estimate, Yonhap news agency reported. “With President Yoon’s release, the impeachment trial has become meaningless. It’s over,” Jeon said. “In the event the Constitutional Court does something funny, we will exercise the people’s right to resist and get rid of them with a single slash.” On Saturday, Yoon was released from the detention center where he had been held since mid-January over his failed martial law bid in December, after a court ruled that his detention was invalid.

 

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PARIS (AFP) – A prominent French journalist on Sunday announced he was stepping down from his role as an expert analyst for broadcaster RTL after provoking an uproar by comparing French actions during colonial rule in Algeria to a World War II massacre committed by Nazi forces in France. Jean-Michel Aphatie, a veteran reporter and broadcaster, insisted that while he would not be returning to RTL he wholly stood by his comments made on the radio station in late February equating atrocities committed by France in Algeria with those of Nazi Germany in occupied France. “I will not return to RTL. It is my decision,” the journalist wrote on the X, after he was suspended from air for a week by the radio station. On February 25 he said on air: “Every year in France, we commemorate what happened in Oradour-sur-Glane -- the massacre of an entire village. But we have committed hundreds of these, in Algeria. Are we aware of this?” He was referring to the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where an SS unit returning to the front in Normandy massacred 642 residents on June 10, 1944. Leaving a chilling memorial for future generations, the village was never rebuilt. Challenged by the anchor over whether “we (the French) behaved like the Nazis”, Aphatie replied: “The Nazis behaved like us”.