....and if it was mentioned here I missed it.

The NYT----yes---the NYT which is so voraciously criticised by those who don't read it, ran a series of articles the beginning of this week about a serious diplomatic failure as well as the involvement of Hunter Biden in a Chinese "monopolization" of the global supply of cobalt in the Congo.

I was amazed that the news went so widely ignored. The "exposes" traced the "cultivation" of the Congo, apparently through the efforts of our diplomatic corp with little strategic planning on the part of either the State Department or a progression of Presidents. That cultivated favor began to be squandered, at least as far back as GWB, and continued unabated until now. The "now" is that we have lost influence and control of the largest cobalt mine in the world---to China who now has a lock on the majority of known reserves of an element critical in the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries.

That loss came about by the sale of that mine from a US company to China in a deal orchestrated by a group headed by Hunter Biden.

Here is a link to the NY Post--but if you have an honest interest in learning about this you need to go to the NYT---everything else I have found is based on the NYT story---they are like reading a condensed book

The main links to the NYT reporting of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/w...sultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/w...sultPosition=2

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/w...sultPosition=3

Even the vaulted Fox News pulled their report from the NYT work