The quickest way to separate gold from rock, Sadio Camara says, is with a drop of mercury. In Senegal’s Kedougou Region, far from the capital Dakar and near the borders with Guinea and Mali, she and dozens of other women spent the day washing piles of sediment in search of gold. In front of her house a short walk away, she emptied a dime-sized packet of the silvery liquid into a plastic bucket of that sediment.

With bare hands and no mask, she swirls the mixture as her children watch. “I know it’s dangerous, because when we go to exchange the gold and they heat it again, those guys wear masks to avoid the smoke,” she says. But she says since she only processes a little gold at a time, she believes she is safe. But even small-scale exposure can carry serious risks.

Across West Africa, mercury — a potent neurotoxin — remains the dominant method for extracting gold from ore in the region’s booming informal mining sector, much of it illegal and unregulated. In Senegal’s gold-rich Kedougou region, women like Camara use the metal regularly, often without protective gloves and masks, to make a living. Mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, tremors, and loss of vision, hearing and coordination.

Once released, it spreads easily through air, water and soil. Particularly after heavy rains, it contaminates rivers, poisons fish and accumulates up the food chain. “We are doing this because of ignorance and lack of means,” Camara says as her son played at her feet in the courtyard of her family’s home. “If the government know what is good for us, come and show us.” In artisanal mining, mercury is prized for its ability to bind quickly and easily to gold. Inside her kitchen hut not far from the stream, Camara heats a nugget of mercury-laced sediment with a metal spoon over an open flame. The toxic metal evaporates and leaves behind a kernel of gold.

There’s no mask, no gloves – just the raw materials and her bare hands. Her children stand just a few feet away, watching and breathing the fumes. The process is cheap, effective and dangerous. Camara said she doesn’t usually handle the burning herself – that task is typically left to men. But she and other women regularly mix and shape the mercury amalgam with no protection. “If you stabbed yourself with a knife it wounds you, if mercury did the same, people wouldn’t touch it. But with mercury you can go years without feeling the effects.

The consequences come later,” says Doudou Dramé, president of an organization that advocates for safer conditions for gold miners in Kedougou. Women are also particularly vulnerable, says Modou Goumbala, the monitoring and evaluation manager at La Lumiere, an NGO that supports community development in southeastern Senegal. He says the mercury being used to separate the gold from the earth ends up in the region’s waterways, which women interact with a lot more than men in Senegalese society. “Women do the laundry with water, women do the dishes. Women wash the children. And women often use the waterways for this, not having sources of safe drinking water,” he says. That exposure can be especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women. Mercury can cross the placenta, putting fetuses at risk of developmental delays and birth defects. Infants may also absorb the toxin through contaminated breast milk.

Gold can be extracted from earth without using mercury, using gravity separation, often achieved with machines like shaking tables. In 2020, the Senegalese government promised to build 400 mercury-free gold processing units, but so far only one has been constructed. During a recent visit, the rusting slab of metal sat unused beneath a corrugated roof. The machine is in Bantaco, 15 miles from Camara’s home, and it isn’t practical for most miners to use because of the logistical challenge of transporting ore there and back to where they are from. Goumbala says one machine per village would come closer to solving the problem.

Jen Marraccino is the senior development director at Pure Earth, an NGO that works to fight against mercury and lead poisoning, particularly in artisanal small-scale gold mining. She says that gravitational separation is a technology that can provide miners a way to get gold without endangering their health. “The more that this type of work happens in a particular region, the costs then go down for these technologies such as shaking tables. Building the supply chains to the international market, the costs go down. So, solutions can build and grow within a region,” she says.

AP’s repeated efforts to schedule an interview with Senegal’s director of artisanal and small-scale mining were unsuccessful. The director later said the department had been suspended. He did not provide a reason.

Cristiano Ronaldo Jr., son of Portugal great and five-time Ballon d’Or winner Cristiano Ronaldo Sr, is among the Portugal under-15 squad for the Vlatko Markovic International Tournament, which will be held between May 13 and 18 in Croatia.

Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Junior, affectionately called Cristianinho (little Cristiano), was born on June 17th, 2010, in San Diego, California, USA, is also eligible to play for his country of birth. The 14-year-old started playing football at a very young age, training frequently at age 6.

The young player from Al Nassr’s youth academy makes his debut in the U-15 squad chosen by coach Joao Santos, who has called up 22 players for the competition, in which the national team will face Japan (May 13th), Greece (14th) and England (16th). The fourth and final match will be held on May 18th, with the opponent yet to be defined.

A group of 49 white South Africans departed their homeland Sunday for the United States on a private charter plane, having been offered refugee status by the Trump administration under a new program announced in February.

The group, which included families and small children, was due to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on Monday morning local time, according to Collen Msibi, a spokesperson for South Africa’s transport ministry.

They are the first Afrikaners — a white minority group in South Africa — to be relocated after U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7, accusing South Africa’s Black-led government of racial discrimination against them and announcing a program to offer them relocation to America.

The South African government said it is “completely false” that Afrikaners are being persecuted.

The Trump administration has fast-tracked its applications while pausing other refugee programs, halting arrivals from Afghanistan, Iraq, most of sub-Saharan Africa and other countries in a move being challenged in court.

Refugee groups have questioned why the white South Africans are being prioritised ahead of people from countries wracked by war and natural disasters. Vetting for refugee status in the U.S. often takes years.

The Trump administration says the South African government is pursuing racist, anti-white policies through affirmative action laws and a new land expropriation law it says targets Afrikaners’ land. The government says those claims are based on misinformation and there is no racism against Afrikaners and no land has been expropriated, although the contentious law has been passed and is the focus of criticism in South Africa.

South Africa also denies U.S. claims that Afrikaners are being targeted in racially motivated attacks in some rural communities. Instead, the South African government said Afrikaners, who are the descendants of Dutch and French colonial settlers, are “amongst the most economically privileged” in the country.

The first Afrikaner refugees were traveling on a flight operated by the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based charter company Omni Air International, Msibi said. They would fly to Dakar, Senegal and stop there to refuel before heading for Dulles.

They departed from OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, where they were accompanied by police officers and airport officials when they checked in. Msibi said they would have to be vetted by police to ensure there were no criminal cases or outstanding warrants against them before being allowed to leave.

The South African government said there was no justification for them being relocated but said it wouldn’t stop them and respected their freedom of choice.

They are expected to be greeted at Dulles by a U.S. government delegation, including the deputy secretary of state and officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, whose refugee office has organised their resettlement.

The flight will be the first in a “much larger-scale relocation effort,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday. Miller said that what was happening to Afrikaners in South Africa “fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.”

“This is persecution based on a protected characteristic — in this case, race. This is race-based persecution,” he said.

The HHS Office for Refugee Resettlement was ready to offer them support, including with housing, furniture and other household items, and expenses like groceries, clothing, diapers and more, a document obtained by The Associated Press said. The document said the relocation of Afrikaners was “a stated priority of the Administration.”

There are around 2.7 million Afrikaners among South Africa’s population of 62 million, which is more than 80% Black. They are only one part of the country’s white minority.

Many in South Africa are puzzled by claims that Afrikaners are persecuted and meet the requirements to be relocated as refugees.

They are part of South Africa’s everyday multi-racial life, with many successful business leaders and some serving in government as Cabinet ministers and deputy ministers. Their language is widely spoken and recognised as an official language, and churches and other institutions reflecting Afrikaner culture hold prominence in almost every city and town.

The Trump administration has criticised South Africa on several fronts. Trump’s February executive order cut all U.S. funding to South Africa over what it said was its anti-white stance and also accused it of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy. It cited South Africa’s ties with Iran and its move to lodge a genocide case against U.S. ally Israel over the war in Gaza as examples of it taking “aggressive positions towards the United States.”