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The Democratic Republic of Congo has moved to increase taxes on mining firms and increase government royalties from the industry despite fierce opposition from international mining companies. President Joseph Kabila signed a new mining code into law on Friday.The country is Africa's biggest producer of copper and cobalt, a vital component in mobile phone batteries.

Its mining industry - which also produces diamond, tantalum, tin and gold - is the country's largest source of export income. The law, which was passed by parliament in January, will double government royalties on all minerals.

The impoverished yet mineral-rich nation provides more than 60% of the world's cobalt. Prices for it more than doubled last year thanks to an increased demand for electric cars, which require cobalt for batteries.

A generation ago, the United States supported a brutal warlord, Jonas Savimbi, in Angola’s civil war. He lost. Now, because of oil interests, we have allied ourselves with the corrupt and autocratic winner, President José Eduardo dos Santos, in a way that also will also be remembered with embarrassment.

Secretary of State John Kerry visited for two days last year, and, in December, he hailed “the great dividends of our partnership with Angola.” He and other officials have enveloped Angola in a big hug.

Tom Burgis of The Financial Times has a powerful new book, “The Looting Machine,” asserting that firms, including Goldman Sachs and Carlyle Group, backed an oil company called Cobalt in investing in oil operations in which Angolan officials secretly held stakes worth staggering sums.

The Biden administration moved to reverse an action that had benefited Dan Gertler, who has been accused of corruption over mining deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The reversal came after a chorus of complaints from human rights advocates, members of Congress and activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the businessman, Dan Gertler, secured access to mining rights for decades through what the Treasury Department during the Trump administration called a series of corrupt deals that had shortchanged Congo of more than $1.3 billion in revenue from the sale of minerals.

The State Department said on Monday that Mr. Gertler had “engaged in extensive public corruption” and that the Treasury Department in consultation with the State Department was reversing its action

Twice in an interview, McChrystal raised fears of existential threats—from a new pandemic, and in comparing the proliferation of social-media influence to the unchecked spread of nuclear weapons.

He also believes the United States needs to take its relationship with China more seriously. U.S. ambiguity over Taiwan is becoming increasingly problematic, he says. 

MarketWatch: You’ve advised state governments on the pandemic. What lessons can we take away from America’s federal response to Covid-19? 

connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.

some men are looking for alternatives, and some are finding them in fellowship organizations with names like EvryMan, the ManKind Project and the Journeymen, the group doing breathwork that night in D.C.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”