New York (AFP) – The US Justice Department announced federal hate crimes charges Tuesday against Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old who shot dead 10 African Americans at a Buffalo, New York supermarket in May. The charges say Gendron was motivated by racist hate when, on May 14, he took a semi-automatic assault weapon to a grocery store in a largely Black neighborhood of Buffalo and killed 10 people, while wounding three others. They said he was driven by belief in a conspiracy theory called “The Great Replacement” — that white people’s lives and communities are threatened by minorities — a vie…