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China had a head start on controling rare earths. Trump cut off oil from Iran to China, and uses that as leverage to get access to China rare earths. Israel is pioneering new rare earth extraction technology in the Negev, and working on recycling old electronics and batteries for their rare earth content.

Vietnam appealed to Beijing over its looming jet fuel shortage. The Philippines asked China not to restrict fertilizer exports. After a visit to China last month to press the subject, Australia’s foreign minister said Beijing would cooperate with Australian companies on jet fuel shipments. The outreach produced assurances from China to address regional energy security issues as well as commitments from other countries to advance diplomatic dialogue with Beijing and, in some cases, cooperate on future renewable energy projects, according to government readouts. The diplomacy kept some Chinese fuel flowing, helping Asia avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that experts...

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday evening he was pausing the U.S. effort to guide stranded vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz to allow time for a deal to end the Iran war, but that the American forces’ blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing on Wednesday morning, the official Xinhua news agency reported, without providing further details. It was the first time since the start of the war that Araghchi has traveled to China, whose close economic and political ties to Tehran...

Beijing's empire isn't built on factories, AI labs, or rare earths. It's built on a single nation the West spent two decades dismissing — Iran. And the day Tehran's regime falls, the entire architecture China assembled over thirty years folds inward like wet cardboard. In this deep dive, we expose the hidden financial, energy, and geographic dependencies binding Beijing to Tehran — from the secret yuan-settled oil deals and the petroyuan experiment, to the Belt and Road's only viable land corridor, to the $9–12 billion annual "shadow fleet" subsidy quietly underwriting Chinese export manufacturing. We examine why China cannot quietly...

An American scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China’s People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental...

Friday is May Day, the day radical leftists come out and scream about the evils of capitalism. Yet it's always a funny thing when they do that; Why are they still living here, rather than fleeing to a Communist country, if they hate capitalism so much? Of course, they don't because they're hoping to push our country further left. Now, you had a conglomeration of them out in D.C. for all the current causes: May Day, anti-Iran military action, and anti-ICE. While they were in for a day of chanting the same things robotically, President Donald Trump was off to...

SEATTLE, WA - Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Seattle on Friday to mark May Day, continuing a 140-year tradition of advocating for American workers' rights.While the day is rooted in labor history, this year’s participants also focused on immigration reform and opposition to current federal policies including the US's involvement in multiple wars.Participants at the rally spoke on how modern workers' rights are inseparable from immigration issues and international concerns.Many demonstrators voiced specific opposition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the current presidential administration’s handling of immigrant labor.

A group financed by a pro-Chinese Communist Party tech tycoon was one of the first on the scene for Friday's May Day demonstrations and socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s remarks. The People’s Forum and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which both receive direct or indirect funding from Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham, were key players in the organization of protestors in Union Square ahead of the May Day events. A self-identified speaker from PSL announced a People’s Forum spokesperson who was the second to speak into a microphone. The speaker rallied the crowd of demonstrators, asking them to repeat chants and...

An American scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China’s People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental...

US and five Latin American nations accuse Beijing of politicizing maritime trade after canal port dispute. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned China that "the sovereignty of our hemisphere is non-negotiable" after the U.S. and regional allies accused Beijing of detaining Panama-flagged ships in a dispute tied to canal port control. In a joint statement with Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guyana, Paraguay and Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S. said China’s actions targeting Panama-flagged vessels were a "blatant attempt to politicize maritime trade" and infringe on regional sovereignty, framing the dispute as a broader strategic test over control of one of the...

Host Bill Hamblet speaks with Admiral Harry Harris on how a war with Iran could reshape global strategy across two theaters. The discussion explores impacts on U.S. commitments, Indo-Pacific stability, China’s role, and regional security dynamics, highlighting how crises in the Middle East reverberate across East Asia’s strategic and economic landscape.

OSAKA -- China is increasing its presence in the race to develop replacements for the lithium-ion battery, a Nikkei analysis shows. A country-by-country tally of patents related to post-lithium-ion batteries over the past 10 years shows China in the lead, accounting for more than half of all patents. The evaluation of patents for sodium-ion batteries, perhaps the biggest horse in the race, also shows China dominating Japan and the U.S., with Chinese companies expected to begin mass production of these batteries this year. Japan and the U.S. are also rushing to develop inexpensive alternatives to resource-constrained batteries for their decarbonization...

THE approaching net zero ban on petrol and diesel vehicles could put Europe’s car firms at disadvantage compared with China. Speaking to the Financial Times ahead of the annual IAA Mobility conference in Munich, Oliver Zipse, BMW’s chief executive, warned that European electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers could not compete with China over prices. European Union plans to eliminate combustion engine vehicles are not welcomed by the car industry, which provides direct and indirect work for almost 14 million people. Misgivings extend from inconsistent access to the raw materials necessary for making car batteries to concerns that charging infrastructure was still...

When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work. They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to...

JPPI says Beijing’s escalating rivalry with the US, alignment with Muslim nations, and adoption of anti-Western narratives is changing its previously positive attitude to JewsAntisemitism is rising in China, a country previously considered almost free of anti-Jewish hatred, according to a new research report by the Jewish People Policy Institute. Anti-Jewish tropes have moved from marginal online spaces into official media, academia, and state-sanctioned discourse, often through a deliberate and complete blurring of distinctions between Israel, Jews, and Judaism, the study found. Update: After publication of this article, the Chinese Embassy in Israel firmly rejected the findings in the study,...

BEIJING: China's Commerce Ministry said on Friday (Apr 24) it was banning exports of dual-use items to seven European entities over arms sales to Taiwan, placing them immediately on its export control list, in a rare case of Europe-targeted, Taiwan-related sanctions. The entities, including German defence electronics firm Hensoldt and Belgian-based defence and sporting arms manufacturer FN Browning, have participated in arms sales to Taiwan or "colluded with Taiwan", a commerce ministry spokesperson said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies’ exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race.In a Thursday memo, Michael Kratsios, the president’s chief science and technology adviser, accused foreign entities “principally based in China” of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to “distill,” or extract capabilities from, leading AI systems made in the U.S. and “exploiting American expertise and innovation.”The administration, Kratsios wrote, will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses and...

Back to Flashpoints Building Navies Fast By James R. Holmes January 24, 2011 Underestimating the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is a matter of course for many Asia specialists in the West, as senior US military officials concede. Some reasons given for overlooking China’s naval potential are specific to China. Also commonplace, however, is the claim that a great Chinese fleet won’t take to the sea anytime soon simply because it takes so long to build one. Typical of the genre: writing last year, George Friedman of the private intelligence firm Stratfor maintained that China possessed only: ‘a weak navy...

Mahan, Malabar and China By Rahul K Bhonsle China's quest for great nationhood passes through the waters of the Indian Ocean. Chinese strategists have perhaps concluded that the rise of great nations is determined by the size of their navies. As China seeks to rise to greater glories, a Navy is assuming increasing importance for Beijing. Moreover, an economy, which is dependent on inward flow of raw materials including oil and gas and the outward transportation of goods by sea, cannot neglect the oceans. China's wealth is concentrated on the Western coast, thus it has to ensure that this is...

Food for thought. Iran Is Not Winning. It Is Unraveling. The prevailing narrative on Iran has it almost perfectly reversed. We are told that Tehran is winning a war of wills in the Gulf and that Donald Trump is gambling recklessly with the world’s most sensitive chokepoint. In reality, Iran is not consolidating strength; it is managing decline. And Trump’s play on the Strait of Hormuz has quietly forced energy markets to reprice security—tilting the balance decisively toward the Americas, and away from Europe, Asia and China. The Islamic Republic no longer resembles a confident revolutionary project. With the old...