内容摘要：File - Emily Rodia, owner of Good Buy Supply, holds concentrated laundry soap that customers can pump into their own refillable containers at her store in Philadelphia. At the dawn of 2024, also known as New Year’s resolution season, there are lots of small, easily achievable ways to lead more climate friendly lives. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

File - Emily Rodia, owner of Good Buy Supply, holds concentrated laundry soap that customers can pump into their own refillable containers at her store in Philadelphia. At the dawn of 2024, also known as New Year’s resolution season, there are lots of small, easily achievable ways to lead more climate friendly lives. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

In recent weeks, two U.S. companies opened doors to production in the region. Nathan Trotter, a U.S. firm, signed a letter of intent with Rwanda-based Trinity Metals, which owns Rwanda’s largest tin mine. And KoBold Metals, which uses Artificial Intelligence to further energy transition and is backed by, brokered a deal to buy Australia’s AVZ Minerals’ interest in Congo’s Manono lithium deposits.

Analysts warn that the implementation of a minerals deal in eastern Congo, if one was to materialize, will face many hurdles — especially with U.S. investors largely abandoning Congo in the last two decades.“Turning a headline announcement into sustainable progress will require resolving deep suspicions between Rwanda and the DRC,” Chatham House, a research institute, said in a recent report. “A deal will also need to account for complex local political problems of land access and identity, wider security challenges in a region that hosts myriad non-state armed groups, and issues of asset scarcity.”If the deal were to include Rubaya, where all mining is currently done manually, U.S. companies would have to contend with both security concerns and a severe lack of infrastructure.

“With coltan, you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of miners, and not just M23, but other so-called auto-defense armed groups and individuals who rely on mining for survival,” said de Brier from the International Peace Information Service. “You have to build all the infrastructure, you have to start from scratch. You will even have to build the roads.”Bahati Moïse, a trader who resells coltan from Rubaya’s mines, hopes that, regardless who controls the mines, the workers who labor to extract the minerals will finally be valued as much as the resources themselves.

“The whole country, the whole world knows that phones are made from the coltan mined here, but look at the life we live,” he said. “We can’t continue like this.”

Pronczuk reported from Dakar, Senegal.near the moon’s south pole in 2023 in a historic voyage to uncharted territory that scientists believe could hold reserves of frozen water. The mission was dubbed as a technological triumph for the world’s most populous nation.

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) — One song generating a lot of froth at theis “Espresso Macchiato,” a dance-pop ditty by Estonian rapper and visual artist Tommy Cash.

Estonia’s entry in the pan-continental pop competition, which, is a playful dance-pop track that reels off a string of Italian cliches — including references to spaghetti and “sweating like a mafioso” — before a singalong chorus: “Espresso macchiato, macchiato, macchiato.”