By GERALD IMRAY and MICHELLE GUMEDE

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa’s top law enforcement official said Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he “twisted” the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country.

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Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that showed an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side.

“Now this is very bad,” Trump said as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting. “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning.”

Mchunu said the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites, but were a temporary memorial put up in 2020 to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa. They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm, Mchunu said.

A son of the couple who were killed and a local community member who took part in the procession also said the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest.

South Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime, although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country’s overall homicides. Both white and Black farmers are attacked, and sometimes killed, and the government has condemned the violence against both groups.

Whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s 62 million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Whites make up the majority of the country’s wealthier commercial farmers.

Mchunu said Trump’s false claims that the crosses represented more than 1,000 burial sites was part of his “genocide story” — referring to the U.S. president’s baseless allegations in recent weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has said amounts to a genocide.

“They are not graves. They don’t represent graves,” Mchunu said regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House. “And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.”

“We have respect for the president of the United States,” Mchunu added. “But we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever.”

President Donald Trump meets South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The White House, when asked about Mchunu’s remarks, pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments a day earlier at her briefing, when she said that “the video showed crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government.”

Of the more than 5,700 homicides in South Africa from January through March, six occurred on farms and, of those, one victim was white, said Mchunu. “In principle, we do not categorize people by race, but in the context of claims of genocide of white people, we need to unpack the killings in this category,” he said.

Lourens Bosman, who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament, said he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played. It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September 2020. The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous 26 years, Bosman said.

Trump’s falsehoods that South Africa’s government is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country, which says the allegations are rooted in misinformation.

Ramaphosa pushed for this week’s meeting with Trump in what he said was an attempt to change Trump’s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties.

Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 that cut all U.S. financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land. The order accused Ramaphosa’s government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

Trump’s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy and specifically criticized its decision to launch a case at the International Court of Justice accusing U.S. ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that case.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Four of the 14 Planned Parenthood clinics in Minnesota and four of the six in Iowa will shut down in a year, the Midwestern affiliate operating them said Friday, blaming a freeze in federal funds, budget cuts proposed in Congress and state restrictions on abortion.

The clinics closing in Iowa include the only Planned Parenthood facility in the state that provides abortion procedures, in Ames, home to Iowa State University. The others are in Cedar Rapids, Sioux City and the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale.

Two of the clinics being shut down by Planned Parenthood North Central States are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, in Apple Valley and Richfield. The others are in central Minnesota in Alexandria and Bemidji. Of the four, the Richfield clinic provides abortion procedures.

The Planned Parenthood affiliate said it would lay off 66 employees and ask 37 additional employees to move to different clinics. The organization also said it plans to keep investing in telemedicine services and sees 20,000 patients a year virtually. The affiliate serves five states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“We have been fighting to hold together an unsustainable infrastructure as the landscape shifts around us and an onslaught of attacks continues,” Ruth Richardson, the affiliate’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

Of the remaining 15 clinics operated by Planned Parenthood North Central States, six will provide abortion procedures — five of them in Minnesota, including three in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The other clinic is in Omaha, Nebraska.

The affiliate said that in April, President Donald Trump’s administration froze $2.8 million in federal funds for Minnesota to provide birth control and other services, such as cervical cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

While federal funds can’t be used for most abortions, abortion opponents have long argued that Planned Parenthood affiliates should not receive any taxpayer dollars, saying the money still indirectly underwrites abortion services.

Planned Parenthood North Central States also cited proposed cuts in Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low-income Americans, as well as a Trump administration proposal to eliminate funding for teenage pregnancy prevention programs.

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In addition, Republican-led Iowa last year banned most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, causing the number performed there to drop 60% in the first six months the law was in effect and dramatically increasing the number of patients traveling to Minnesota and Nebraska.

After the closings, Planned Parenthood North Central States will operate 10 brick-and-mortar clinics in Minnesota, two in Iowa, two in Nebraska, and one in South Dakota. It operates none in North Dakota, though its Moorhead, Minnesota, clinic is across the Red River from Fargo, North Dakota.

McDonald’s said Friday that it’s closing down CosMc’s, a new restaurant format it began piloting in the U.S. last year.

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But the company said beverages inspired by CosMc’s will soon be tested at U.S. McDonald’s locations. Among the drinks on CosMc’s current menu: a matcha iced latte, a turmeric spiced latte, a prickly pear-flavored slushy with popping candy on top and a frozen sour cherry energy drink.

McDonald’s announced in late 2023 that it wanted to test a small-format store with customizable drinks and treats that would appeal to afternoon snackers – and potentially grab sales from rivals like Starbucks and Dutch Bros. McDonald’s sales often slump in the afternoon between mealtimes and the company wants to change that.

“This is a $100 billion category that’s growing faster than the rest of (casual dining) and with superior margins. And it’s a space that we believe we have the right to win,” McDonald’s Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski said at the time.

But Kempczinski said CosMc’s drinks might be too complex to fit in with regular McDonald’s store operations.

McDonald’s wound up opening one CosMc’s location near its headquarters in Chicago and seven in Texas. Five locations remain, but the company plans to shut them all down by the end of June. The company is also shutting down CosMc’s app.

McDonald’s said CosMc’s allowed it to experiment with bold flavors and different technologies, like drive-thru lanes that manage traffic based on the complexity of orders. It was also able to quickly edit the menu based on customer feedback.

BY MATTHEW LEE, AAMER MADHANI and SEUNG MIN KIM

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is ordering a massive overhaul of the National Security Council that will shrink its size and return many career appointees back to their home agencies, according to two U.S. officials and one person familiar with the reorganization.

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The move is expected to significantly reduce the number of staff at the NSC, according to the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel matter. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as national security adviser since early this month following the ouster of Mike Waltz, who was nominated to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

The NSC has been in a continual state of tumult for much of the early going of Trump’s second go-around in the White House.

Waltz was ousted weeks after Trump said that he’d fired several NSC officials, just a day after far-right activist Laura Loomer raised concerns directly to him about staff loyalty.

The White House days into the administration sidelined about 160 NSC aides, sending them home while the administration reviewed staffing and tried to align it with Trump’s agenda. The aides were career government employees, commonly referred to as detailees.

This latest shakeup amounts to a “liquidation” of NSC staffing with both career government detailees on assignment to the NSC being sent back to their home agencies and several political appointees being fired from their positions, according to the person familiar with the decision.

A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the overhaul, first reported by Axios, was underway but declined further comment.