Liberal Blogosphere

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:45:11 +0000

Trump admin gives wildlife 'one-way ticket to extinction' with new policies: expert

Common Dreams
July 18, 2026

Dolphins swim in front of a boat in the Pacific Ocean outside Long Beach, California, U.S. July 17, 2026. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

“Yet again, the Trump administration has sold out our endangered wildlife to the highest bidder,” said one biodiversity advocate after the US Department of Interior, in a Friday news dump, issued two new policy changes that would weaken the Endangered Species Act and make it easier for corporate polluters to prioritize their own bottom lines over habitat protection.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) rescinded a policy that has been known as the “blanket rule” since 1975, which has given threatened species the same protections from illegal killing, trapping, harassment, and other forms of “take” under the ESA, as species that are officially designated as endangered.

The rollback would apply to species that have been newly declared as threatened, including the Florida manatee, the Pygmy rabbit, the Aztec Gilia, and Clover’s Cactus—which could now go for years without protections despite their habitat loss and declining populations.

“Today’s decision represents a profound failure by Interior Secretary [Doug] Burgum and his department, and it amounts to an utter abdication of the federal government’s responsibility to protect America’s wildlife,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund. “The department’s role is to faithfully implement—and certainly not to dismantle—the Endangered Species Act.”

The other policy change will require the FWS to consider the economic impact on various industries of designating areas as “critical” habitats in order to protect threatened and endangered species. The agency has previously had discretion over whether to consider economics when making habitat protection decisions.

Under President Donald Trump’s new rule, said the Center for Biological Diversity, the FWS will be forced “to accept at face value claims by corporations and landowners of economic impacts from designating critical habitat, which could greatly limit the amount and quality of habitat protected for imperiled wildlife.”

“The way this is written, a landowner could falsely claim they planned to build the next Disneyland on their property, so designating critical habitat would supposedly cost them tens of millions of dollars,” said Noah Greenwald, CBD’s endangered species co-director. “This rule is clearly intended to prevent the protection of the wild places that endangered animals and plants need to survive. It’s a despicable move that cheapens the value of our most imperiled wildlife so corporations can make more money. Anyone can make outrageous claims about how much their property is worth, but that shouldn’t be taken as gospel.”

Advocacy groups said both policy changes amounted to giveaways to the logging, mining, drilling, and cattle ranching industries. The latter industry has long lobbied against land being designated as a critical habitat for the ‘I’iwi bird in Hawaii, Clay Samford, an attorney with the environmental legal group Earthjustice, told The Washington Post.

“It’s part of this administration’s push to reduce protections for public lands and wildlife that are enjoyed by all Americans, in favor of narrow business interests,” Samford told the newspaper.

A senior attorney for the group, Elizabeth Forsyth, said in a statement that “the Trump administration is turning the law on its head by letting extractive industries dictate where critical habitat can be destroyed.”

“This prioritization of industry interests over science is fundamentally at odds with the clear purpose of the Endangered Species Act,” said Forsyth. “We won’t let this dangerous giveaway go unchallenged.”

There is currently a backlog of more than 500 species awaiting consideration for listing as threatened or endangered, and the rule changes, along with the Trump administration’s 18% reduction in the FWS workforce, are expected to leave imperiled species waiting even longer for protections.

“In the midst of an extinction crisis, with hundreds of species like the Florida manatee and the wolverine desperately needing stronger protections for their habitats, the Trump administration is gutting protections to benefit industry interests,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “Where we see our nation’s irreplaceable wildlife, they see dollar signs. But our federal lands and waters, and the species they support, belong to all Americans, not to the logging, drilling, and mining industries that oppose all limits on maximizing their private profits.”

In a statement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asserted that the ESA has long been “weaponized to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security,” continued Secretary Burgum.

He added that the endangered species list has “fallen short,” with 97% of listed species remaining designated as endangered, and called for “species recovery and delisting.”

But Defenders of Wildlife noted that the ESA “has succeeded in preventing extinction for 99% of listed species.”

“Public support for protecting our native wildlife remains overwhelmingly high, with 84% of voters supporting the ESA, according to nationwide polling conducted by Defenders of Wildlife,” said the group.

The rules announced on Friday came days after the Interior Department proposed a new rule under which management of threatened grizzly bears would be transferred from the federal government to the states, where Republican leaders have pushed to end protections for the species.

The administration also exempted oil and gas companies from having to protect endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, and earlier this month changed the regulatory interpretation of the word “harm” in the ESA.

“These rules are a one-way ticket to extinction for our most imperiled animals and plants, from monarch butterflies to giraffes to alligator snapping turtles,” said Greenwald. “Trump is bending over backward for corporate polluters by ripping away the blanket that protects so many struggling wildlife species as well as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the natural places where we seek peace of mind. This is the last thing we need in the middle of an extinction crisis, and we’ll fight it with everything we’ve got.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:34:10 +0000

Mamdani Says He Is Examining Whether His Government Can Arrest Netanyahu During NYC Visit

The mayor said he is in “an active conversation with our legal department” on the matter.

Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani speaks in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 2026. S
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jul 18, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Saturday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made clear that he plans to take any action available to him to ensure the city complies with the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the opportunity arises.

Netanyahu, said Mamdani, “belongs in The Hague,” and he is currently examining whether his government has the authority to arrest the prime minister if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” said the mayor. “I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city.”

He then clarified that “whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.”

The mayor told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper’s “The Interview,” that he is having “an active conversation with our legal department” to determine the scope of Mamdani’s authority on the matter.

In November 2024, the ICC issued a warrant for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was killed by Israeli forces. Netanyahu was accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, where Israel began a relentless assault in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.

Israel and its top military funder, the US government, have insisted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been targeting Hamas in attacks that are still continuing in Gaza despite a ceasefire that was reached last October.

But evidence has steadily mounted that children, aid workers, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals have been attacked, and experts found last year that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza as a method of warfare.

More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and more than 173,000 people have been wounded. Israeli attacks have made Gaza home to the largest number of child amputees in the world, and have decimated over 90% of housing units in the exclave.

Garcia-Navarro questioned Mamdani on the “political weight” he gives to the issue of Israel and Palestine, which has seen a marked shift in US public opinion since Israel began its latest US-backed assault on Gaza. More than half of Democratic voters and nearly a third of all voters told The Associated Press last month that they viewed the war in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.

Three-quarters of respondents to a New York Times poll in May said they opposed continuing to send military aid to Israel, compared to 45% three years ago.

“It’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their needs are not even being discussed, and yet we have billions of dollars to kill civilians halfway across the world,” said Mamdani, who has been laser-focused during his term and his campaign last year on lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers and passing universal public programs.

“I think what we have seen from New Yorkers, what we’ve seen from Americans, when we talk about this hunger for a new kind of politics, it’s a hunger to move beyond the bankruptcy that characterizes a lot of politics today,” said Mamdani. “And it is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine and how it hasn’t been specific to any one party. It’s been, again and again, an insistence to tell New Yorkers, and to tell Americans, that what they are seeing is not something they should in fact either be concerned by or believe in. It is hard to then turn to another issue and say, Believe me here.”

A post shared by The Interview (@theinterview_nyt)

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that Netanyahu will be at the UN meeting in New York City in September, despite Mamdani’s threats—which date back to his mayoral campaign—while the prime minister said on a radio show this week that the mayor “hates America” and champions Hamas.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan said it was “pretty amazing to hear” Mamdani repeat his earlier conviction that Netanyahu should be arrested under the ICC warrant, given that he first publicly remarked on the issue “when he was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary polls and no one expected him to actually be mayor.”

Netanyahu has thus far evaded arrest when traveling to countries that recognize the ICC’s authority under the Rome Statute. The court opened an inquiry into Hungary last year when it failed to detain the prime minister when he visited. France also said it would not execute the warrant for Netanyahu because Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.

UN Ambassador Michael Waltz responded to Mamdani’s interview on Saturday, saying the US is also not party to the Rome Statute.

Journalist Zaid Jilani said that although the mayor of New York likely lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu, “he can certainly troll him.”

House GOP panics as Mamdani mulls arresting Trump ally

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026

RAW STORY

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall in New York, NY, U.S., July 3, 2026. Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

House Republicans lashed out at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Saturday after reports revealed that the rising star in the Democratic Party was actively considering arresting a key ally to President Donald Trump.

Speaking with The New York Times, Mamdani revealed that he was having “active” conversations with the New York City Law Department about whether he could order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s scheduled to visit New York City in September for a gathering of the United Nations General Assembly.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged crimes related to Israel’s siege on Gaza, which countless human rights groups and a United Nations committee have labeled a genocide. The ICC alleged that Netanyahu has used starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directed attacks on civilians.

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani told the Times when asked whether he planned to order the arrest of Netanyahu, long a key ally to Trump.

Responding to reports of Mamdani’s remarks, the official House Republicans account on X lashed out at the progressive mayor and urged him to instead focus on addressing “antisemitism” in his city.

“Mamdani is threatening to arrest the head of one of our closest allies,” reads a post from the House Republicans’ account on X published Saturday. “He should stop politicizing local law enforcement and interfering with US foreign policy and instead focus on rising rent and housing prices and antisemitism in NYC.”

House Republicans’ post was shared by Netanyahu’s son, Yair Netanyahu, a podcast host and avid supporter of Israel who since 2023 has lived in a “luxury Florida apartment,” despite being eligible for military service, The Jewish Chronicle reported.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:08:56 +0000

TATE BROS; RAPISTS ON THE RUN
Pro-Trump influencer jailed in Florida under ‘sealed’ warrant: report

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026

RAW STORY

Bucharest, Romania. 21st June, 2023: Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate, surrounded by bodyguards, leave the Bucharest Court/ (LCV - Shutterstock)

Far-right influencer Andrew Tate, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, was arrested Saturday in Miami, Florida, the U.S. Marshals Service told the Associated Press.

In 2022, Tate was arrested on rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, though after pressure from the Trump administration, the case ultimately didn’t move forward.

On Saturday, British prosecutors revealed they were “seeking the extradition of the brothers on rape and sex trafficking charges,” the Associated Press reported, offenses that allegedly occurred between 2010 and 2017. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that both Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, were arrested in Florida Saturday, but could not comment further as the “warrant was sealed,” per the Associated Press.

“The pending charges in the United Kingdom accused the brothers of abusing women between 2012 and 2015 in an area north of London, where they grew up,” the Associated Press’ report reads. “Their lawyers had said they denied the allegations.”

The Trump administration was accused of pressing the Romanian government to ease travel restrictions for the Tate brothers, who hold both U.S. and British citizenship. Further reporting revealed that the brothers were closer to Trump’s inner circle than previously known, with Andrew Tate joining Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, on a video call in 2024.

A probe was launched last year over the Trump administration’s alleged intervention in investigations into the Tate brothers.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:23:58 +0000

Trump admin accused of 'war crime' after strike leaves thousands without water: report

Julia Conley,

Common Dreams
July 18, 2026

A U.S. warship launches a munition at an unknown location during what the U.S. military says is its latest wave of strikes on Iran, hitting "Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities," in this still image taken from handout video released July 16, 2026. U.S. Central Command/Handout via REUTERS

About 10,000 people in nearly two dozen villages in southern Iran were without drinking water while the region was under an excessive heat warning on Saturday, after the US struck a water desalination plant in the village of Bonji in one of its latest attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting said the drinking water supply was expected to be restored within a week, and emergency supply operations had begun.

Drop Site News reported comments from the deputy governor for political and security affairs in Hormozgan province, who said several missiles had hit power infrastructure and water desalination plants in the region near the Strait of Hormuz, which President Donald Trump has demanded control over as he’s ramped up attacks on Iran in recent days, despite a ceasefire and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end hostilities that was agreed to in June.

On Saturday, Iranian officials said the country was suspending its commitments to the MOU after the US violated the agreement repeatedly over the past week.

“The US has violated and suspended all its commitments within the framework of the Islamabad MOU,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi. “We also likewise have suspended all of our commitments as a result; we are no longer implementing those commitments.”

He added that Tehran is now “busy defending the country.”

A representative for Hormozgan province, Ahmad Moradi, told Iran’s Tasnim news agency that over the past two nights, “about seven to eight people” have been killed in US attacks, all of whom were civilians. One attack targeted a bridge and hit two family cars. The neighborhood of Tappeh Allaho Akbar in Bandar Abbas was also hit, killing a woman and injuring a one-year-old, whose wounds required doctors to amputate.

At least 116 telecommunication towers were out of service in southern Iran Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.

The Iranian Embassy in India posted a video of the destruction of a bridge and also condemned the US attack on a maritime surveillance tower at the Chabahar Port, which US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth boasted about on social media on Thursday.

“For

“For a state that once cast itself as the global champion of order, liberalism, and the war on terrorism, proudly displaying images of destroyed bridges and civilian infrastructure has become its only remaining ‘victory,’” said Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Saturday. “Yet with the collapse of every bridge, every tower, and every civilian facility, it is not merely steel and concrete that is being reduced to rubble. It is America’s moral standing—along with the entire architecture of international law and the civilizational claims of the West—that is crumbling before the world’s eyes.”

According to Drop Site, US attacks have targeted nine bridges, two airports, a railroad junction, and a road tunnel since Wednesday. At least 41 Iranians have been killed and 408 have been wounded in US attacks so far this month, with Iranian authorities reporting that at least three women and one child are among those killed.

In a letter to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent UN representative, wrote on Saturday that US attacks had “targeted and caused extensive damage to ports, transportation networks, communications facilities, logistics hubs, radar installations, coastal defense systems and other infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population, and to the functioning of the national economy.”

“The continued commission of these unlawful armed attacks poses a grave threat to international peace and security, freedom of navigation, regional stability, and the security of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” wrote Iravani.

Iran has retaliated against the US this week by striking American allies, including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. Kuwait’s government Saturday said a power plant and water treatment plant had been attacked for the second time in two days, as well as an oil facility.

Two US soldiers were killed and a third was missing after an Iranian attack on a US military base in Jordan—the first American service members to be killed from hostile fire since an initial ceasefire was brokered in April.

Roxane Farmanfarmian, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that Iranian forces are “using Kuwait, in particular, as an example of what they can do in retaliation.”

“The US is clearly hitting the south in Iran and hitting airports, desalination plants, and bridges, and so the same kinds of things are being hit now in Kuwait to show what kind of effect Iran really can have on those countries that are hosting American bases,” she said.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, echoed Iranian officials’ condemnation of the US attack on the southern water desalination plant on Saturday, saying it was “not a legitimate military target.”

“It is a war crime to target it,” he said.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:37:17 +0000

Creator defends AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood after feature film backlash

Reuters

Published: July 17, 2026

LONDON - The founder of the studio behind AI “actor” Tilly Norwood has defended the character amid backlash from parts of the entertainment industry, saying she aims to spark debate and showcase possibilities rather than replace human performers.

“Tilly was made to be a talking point,” said Dutch actor-producer Eline van der Velden, who founded London-based AI production studio Particle6 in 2015. “I’m glad that she’s entertaining people, whether it’s positively or negatively.”

Criticism has intensified after Particle6 announced this month that Tilly Norwood would lead a feature film, “Misaligned.” Set in a digital realm called the “Tillyverse,” the comedy-drama follows an AI being “with no real body, no childhood and no lived experience.”

The project is in early development. Particle6’s tools can currently only generate up to 30 seconds of video, but van der Velden said she hopes to complete it within 12 months.

She rejected critics’ claims that her work will cut actors out. “People think, just because AI is here, all the traditional stuff is going to go away,” she said. “Just because photography is here, doesn’t mean we don’t paint anymore.”

After Particle6 introduced Tilly Norwood at a Zurich film industry conference in September, SAG-AFTRA, the U.S. union representing about 160,000 performers and other media workers, condemned replacing humans with “synthetics.” It also warned that AI characters may be built on systems trained on performers’ work without permission or compensation.

Van der Velden said Tilly Norwood was built with publicly available tools, acknowledging limited visibility into their training data. “I think we just have to accept that it’s been trained on all of us,” she said. “What’s important going forward is a strong AI policy.”

She added that Particle6 bars uploading copyrighted content to its systems without consent and forbids copyrighted trademark references in prompts.

Particle6 is working with a number of “very well-known Hollywood directors, writers, actors” to teach them how to use AI. Their identities are being kept private because of potential backlash, van der Velden said.

She rejected claims audiences won’t empathize with an AI actor. “We’ve empathized with animated and all sorts of made-up characters,” she said. “It’s just a storytelling vehicle.”

Two Years After CrowdStrike, We Are Still Afraid Of The Wrong AI Apocalypse – OpEd

July 19, 2026
By Burak Oktenli

Key Takeaways:

The 2024 CrowdStrike outage (July 19, 2024) that crashed ~8.5 million Windows machines worldwide demonstrates real-world catastrophic risk: a single defective update from one trusted vendor caused global disruption without any attacker or malicious AI.

Popular AI doomsday scenarios (worldwide shutdown, grid takeover, rogue nuclear launch) are overstated; they confuse computational capability with real-world authority and permissions, which are gated by human decisions, credentials, and physical systems.

The real danger lies in eroding human oversight: we are automating critical systems while reducing manual fallback competence. Defense requires human-approval gates, clear inventories of automation permissions, and maintained manual procedures — the unglamorous discipline of limiting what machines are allowed to touch.

This Sunday marks two years since the morning the modern world stuttered. At nine minutes past four Coordinated Universal Time on July 19, 2024, a routine software update from a single security company began crashing Windows machines, roughly 8.5 million of them. Flights were grounded, emergency rooms went to paper, broadcasters went dark, and the federal government issued alerts as the disruption spread. There was no attacker and no malevolent intelligence. There was a defective file, pushed automatically to millions of computers configured to trust whatever that one company sent them.

That morning explains more about catastrophic risk in the age of AI than any disaster movie. The anniversary is a good moment to say so. Our public imagination is stuck on three scenarios that are vivid, terrifying, and mechanically wrong: an artificial intelligence that switches off every device on earth, one that escapes into the power grid, and one that seizes the nuclear arsenal and launches on its own.

All three rest on the same confusion. They mistake what a system can compute for what it is permitted to touch. An AI model can generate plans, code, and persuasion, but turning any of that into action in the physical world requires a chain of intermediaries: interfaces, credentials, integrations, and standing permissions that people decided to grant. The scarce resource that converts capability into consequence is not intelligence but authority.

Hold that key and the myths deflate one by one. There is no universal off-switch to press, because the world’s devices do not share one. The power grid moves energy, not instructions; electricity cannot carry a stowaway. And the nuclear scenario collides with the documented architecture of nuclear command: the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review commits to a human in the loop for all actions critical to informing and executing the President’s nuclear employment decisions, and launch runs through procedures, people, and physical authentication that no model can talk its way past.

The nuclear domain does hold a real lesson, just not the cinematic one. In September 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged his own instruments more likely to be wrong than the United States to be attacking, and he was right. The danger was never a machine that decides to launch. The danger is humans who trust a confident machine that is wrong. What saved the world that night was a person still willing and able to doubt the screen.

The incident record since then confirms the pattern. When attackers cut power to roughly 225,000 Ukrainians in 2015, operators restored it within hours by switching to manual operations, driving to substations and throwing breakers by hand. When ransomware hit Colonial Pipeline in 2021, it reached the billing systems; the company itself shut the pipeline as a precaution. The CrowdStrike outage ended the same way, with humans at millions of keyboards rebooting machines and deleting one file. Real failures are bounded, they travel through doors we built, and every recovery has run through people who could still operate things manually.

Which points at the quiet danger the myths obscure: we are automating away exactly that layer. Each year there are fewer operators who can run the grid, the pipeline, the hospital, or the trading floor by hand, and manual competence is the thing that has saved us every single time.

So the defense against the AI catastrophe is duller than the movies and entirely available. Put human-approval gates on consequential automated actions. Inventory what your automation is actually permitted to touch, because that inventory, not the model’s IQ, is your real risk surface. And treat manual fallback as critical infrastructure: document it, staff it, and drill it, the way we once drilled fire escapes.

The machine is not going to wake up. But somewhere right now, someone is granting an automated system standing permission to act on infrastructure that people depend on, without a gate, without an inventory, and without a fallback. Two years after the morning the world stuttered, what deserves marking is not our fear of smarter machines but the unglamorous discipline of deciding what they may touch.

About Burak Oktenli

Burak Oktenli holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. His research addresses the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and his writing has appeared at the Modern War Institute at West Point, RUSI, RealClearDefense, RealClearMarkets, and Geopolitical Monitor.
View all posts by Burak Oktenli

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:56:50 +0000

China’s Moonshot unveils world’s largest open AI model, closing in on U.S. rivals

Reuters

Published: July 17, 2026

Chinese AI startup Moonshot on Friday unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model that it said is the world’s largest open-weight AI system and delivers performance approaching U.S. giant Anthropic’s frontier Fable model.

The launch, which comes a month after Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models were abruptly withdrawn by the U.S. government due to security concerns, underscores how quickly China’s open AI ecosystem is narrowing the gap with the most advanced U.S. systems.

Companies including Moonshot, Z.ai and MiniMax are releasing increasingly powerful models at sharply lower cost, challenging long-held assumptions in the West that Chinese developers trail their American peers by months.

Moonshot said Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model to approach the 3 trillion-parameter mark and is designed for advanced reasoning, long-horizon coding and knowledge work. The model features a 1 million-token context window, allowing it to process and retain substantially more information than earlier generations in a single prompt.

Open-weight models allow users to download, run and customize the underlying systems, unlike proprietary, closed-source models.

Kimi K3 “performed competitively with Fable 5 (with fallback) and substantially outperformed Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, GPT 5.6 Sol, and GPT 5.5” in terms of GPU kernel optimisation, the company said. The term refers to techniques that maximize AI hardware utilization and minimize latency.

The model has also posted strong results in third-party evaluations.

Arena.ai ranked Kimi K3 first in a benchmark assessing web interface-building capabilities, while Vals AI placed it second overall behind Fable 5 and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol. Artificial Analysis said the model delivered performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, particularly on tests measuring complex, multi-step tasks.

The Moonshot news drove shares of domestic AI competitors Zhipu and Minimax sharply in Hong Kong; just before market close, they were down 27.7 per cent and 16.5 per cent, respectively.

Faster release cycles

Chinese AI firms are accelerating their model release cycles as the global AI race intensifies. The shift follows the debut of Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, which stunned industry observers by scoring near top U.S. closed-source models on benchmark tests, undermining a consensus among Western analysts that Chinese AI models were at least six months behind.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, said Chinese models were gaining traction because they could be deployed far more cheaply than leading U.S. systems.

Brazil coffee faces El Niño headwinds, but crops more resilient

SAO PAULO — El Niño could cut Brazil’s expected record harvest by up to a fifth, according to the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association (Abic), as excessive heat and irregular rainfall threaten production.

For this year, state crop agency Conab forecast a bumper total output of 66.7 million 60-kilogram (132.3 lb) bags of arabica and canephora beans, with the latter including varieties like robusta and conilon.

But deteriorating weather conditions amid an El Niño weather cycle could dramatically reduce production, said Abic executive director Celirio Inacio da Silva.

“We are now talking about a crop loss of 15 per cent to 20 per cent, which in a normal year would be within expectations. But in the current scenario, that is very bad news,” he said in an interview.

Despite the gloomy outlook, coffee growers are better prepared than during previous El Niño episodes thanks to technological advances producing a more climate-resistant crop.

“We’ve made significant advances and today we’re able to plant and harvest more efficiently,” said Silva.

Coffee farmers in recent years have shored up their ability to mitigate climate risks by rapidly expanding irrigation systems, investing heavily in such technology to reduce their dependence on increasingly erratic rainfall driven by climate change.

Even so, El Niño is expected to disrupt the crop’s biological cycle, particularly during the flowering period in the second half of 2026. Excessive heat and irregular rainfall can lead to uneven and unsuccessful flowering, specialists said.

“Irregular ripening creates quality problems and makes harvesting more challenging,” said Wellis Caixeta, coffee purchasing manager at Minas Gerais-based cooperative Expocacer.

The 2023/24 El Niño, combined with heatwaves and irregular rainfall, cut Brazil’s 2024 coffee crop from an initial government forecast of 58.8 million to 54.2 million 60-kg bags. Despite arabica’s positive biennial cycle, output rose just 0.2 per cent, while conilon productivity fell 5.9 per cent.

El Niño may already explain some anomalies, such as unusual rainfall in southeastern Brazil over the past month.

Expocacer estimates that rainfall exceeding 50 millimeters in arabica-growing regions about 40 days ago delayed the harvest and caused a significant amount of coffee cherries to fall to the ground, hurting bean quality.

Espirito Santo, Brazil’s largest producer of canephora coffees, has also faced irregular weather this year, with longer intervals between rainfall and shorter, more intense downpours, said Luiz Carlos Bastianello, president of Cooabriel, Brazil’s largest canephora cooperative.

Growers in the state are concerned El Niño could prolong dry periods and excessive heat through January 2027, disrupting bean filling, Bastianello said.

While conilon production in the state is expected to decline by 15 per cent this year due to conilon’s natural biennial cycle - which alternates between high- and low-yield years - Bastianello said it would be too early to forecast the impact of El Niño in 2027.

Trump admin gives wildlife 'one-way ticket to extinction' with new policies: expert

Julia Conley,

Common Dreams
July 18, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:45:25 +0000

Climate Crisis-Denying Trump Threatens Canada With New Tariffs Over Wildfire Smoke

“When wildfires hit America, Canada sends firefighters,” said one journalist. “When wildfires hit Canada, America sends tariffs.”

Smoke from massive wildfires in Canada engulfed the New York City skyline on July 16, 2026.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A day after a Republican senator pledged to introduce legislation sanctioning Canada for the wildfire smoke impacting various US communities this week, President Donald Trump on Friday threatened the United States’ northern neighbor with new tariffs.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it.”

Out-of-Control Canadian Wildfires Prompt Calls for ‘Nuremberg Trials for Big Oil’

“The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result,” Trump continued. “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

Melanie D’Arrigo, a campaigner for single-payer healthcare in the United States, responded, “So can Canada hold US oil companies, their lobbyists, and the congresspeople they bribe for the climate crisis that increases droughts and the risk of these wildfires?”

“When Trump talks about increasing tariffs on Canada, he’s talking about Americans paying more for the things they need—because the increased costs are paid by American consumers,” she also stressed.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, when asked for a comment on Trump’s post, a spokesperson for Canada’s Embassy in Washington, DC only said Ambassador Mark Wiseman has “engaged directly with key administration and Hill officials regarding the wildfire emergency in Canada, our efforts to address it, and the impact of wildfire smoke on Canada and the US.”

CBC noted that a day earlier, four Michigan Republicans in the US House of Representatives had made similar statements in a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who didn’t address the missive when asked about it, but told reporters in French that “climate change is everyone’s responsibility—truly everyone’s—including the United States.”

Big Oil-backed Trump has notably rejected scientific conclusions about the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency on the world stage and, throughout both terms, made various policy decisions that serve industry polluters—even as his own government continues to publish climate science.

While Carney has publicly embraced climate science, the Liberal leader has also recently faced criticism for “pouring fuel on the flames of the climate emergency” by “expanding tar sands and the fracked gas industry.”

Meanwhile, the fires raging across Canada—and prompting air quality alerts across the US Midwest and Northwest—have spurred calls for “Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” given that the burning of fossil fuels has made the blazes more extreme and frequent.

Despite the science, Republicans on Capitol Hill seem hell-bent on strictly blaming Canadian forest management. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a key ally of Trump and the fossil fuel industry, said Thursday on the social media platform X that “I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

Replying to the post, climate reporter Kate Aronoff wrote that a “major function of this site during climate-fueled disasters now is providing a space for right-wingers to beta test increasingly insane talking points for avoiding the obvious.”

More Perfect Union producer Jordan Zakarin also fired back on X, writing, “The United States sanctioning another country, much less Canada, for pollution and environmental destruction is the stuff of bad satire.”

Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, “How about sanctioning the companies fueling the climate crisis that’s making these fires more frequent and intense?”

Democrats in Washington, DC “should introduce a Make Polluters Pay bill that taxes oil and gas companies’ record profits and uses the revenue for wildfire relief, air purifiers, and all the adaptations we need to... deal with these climate disasters they helped create,” he proposed.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent who caucuses with Democrats, also took aim at Republican climate lies in a lengthy social media post on Thursday, noting that “in both the United States and Canada, this heat and drought is driving longer and more intense wildfire seasons, including the more than 800 wildfires across Canada and northern Minnesota that are currently causing dangerous levels of air pollution for at least 115 million people across 20 states.”

“NO, Mr. President: Climate change is not a hoax. It is reality. And your ignorance is putting our kids and grandkids at risk in exchange for the short-term profit of your billionaire friends in Big Oil,” Sanders said. “Our job: Reject President Trump’s lies and take on the crisis of climate change and the greed of the fossil fuel industry by transitioning our energy system to energy efficiency and sustainable forms of power. When we do that, we cut carbon emissions, reduce energy bills, and create millions of good union jobs.”

Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, charged that “blaming Canada for these wildfires is like blaming a homeowner when an arsonist sets their house on fire. Canada is choking on the same smoke we are, and sanctioning our closest ally doesn’t clear a single acre of burned forest or stop the next fire from starting.”

“If Republicans actually wanted to hold someone responsible, they’d go after the fossil fuel companies whose executives knew what their products were doing to the planet and buried the science anyway,” she argued. “Instead, Congress is moving in the opposite direction, weighing legislation that would grant the fossil fuel industry total immunity from climate liability. And if Republicans wanted policies that actually protect their constituents’ health, they’d support climate superfund bills that fund public health programs, help wildfire survivors rebuild, and prepare communities for the risks still ahead.”

Moreno’s bill, she added, “is a shameless attempt to make sure the blame lands anywhere but on the fossil fuel industry, and everyday Americans will pay the price for that misdirection while the companies that caused this crisis walk away untouched.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:31:14 +0000

Brazil calls Trump’s 25% tariff unjustifiable, vows to impose reciprocal tariffs

The Associated Press

Published: July 16, 2026

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil has described the latest U.S. tariffs on certain Brazilian imports as unjustifiable and politically motivated and threatened on Thursday to impose reciprocal tariffs against U.S. products. The country’s top diplomat criticized U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the move.

The U.S. said on Wednesday it would impose a new 25 per cent tariff on certain imports from Brazil, citing unfair trade practices by the world’s 10th-biggest economy.

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira accused Trump administration officials of pressuring the South American nation to give American companies exclusive access to some sectors of its economy. He said Brazil has never left the negotiating table.

Trade War coverage on BNNBloomberg.ca

The tariffs, first proposed last month, will take effect July 22. The order exempts some goods that are not produced in the U.S. or that officials worry would disrupt supply chains — including coffee, beef, oranges and orange juice and aircraft components.

Brazil’s government said the decision hits about 3,000 items, but is yet to decide whether and how it could retaliate with a law its Congress passed in 2025 in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

In a statement late Wednesday, the office of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva refuted the U.S. allegations of unfair trade practices. It said 76 per cent of imports from the U.S. entered Brazil duty-free in 2025, and said the average tariff effectively applied to U.S. products was only 3.1 per cent.

It said it has taken steps to impose reciprocal tariffs, along with other trade-related countermeasures, through its own law and through the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement mechanism.

Vieira said Rubio made statements that are “unacceptable, offensive to the Brazilian people and the Brazilian government” after the new tariffs were announced. Rubio said in a post on X that the tariffs were the result of Lula putting “his own ego ahead of making a deal” and not negotiating with the U.S. in good faith.

“Rubio launches a crude and arrogant attack on the Head of State of a friendly nation, who has personally sought to open channels for dialogue on several occasions,” Vieira told a press conference in the capital, Brasilia. ”What Secretary Rubio dismisses as ‘ego’ is, in fact, President Lula’s steadfast resolve to defend Brazil’s sovereignty and the interests of our businesses and workers.”

U.S. has a robust trade surplus with Brazil

The United States has for years run a massive trade deficit with the rest of the world, and Trump has cited the lopsided trade numbers to justify his aggressive use of tariffs.

Iraq grants Starlink licence as Washington summit yields $60bn in US deals

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By bne IntelliNews July 18, 2026

Iraq has granted Starlink a licence to provide satellite internet services, the Communications and Media Commission said, after an agreement was signed in Washington on July 17.

The signing ceremony at the US Chamber of Commerce was attended by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and the commission's executive chairman, Baligh Abu Kalal.

The commission, Iraq's converged telecoms and media regulator, said Starlink's entry would widen internet access for consumers and businesses, particularly in remote areas where fixed and mobile infrastructure remains limited, and would support investment and the government's digital transformation programme.

Starlink, operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, delivers broadband through a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, bypassing the ground-based networks on which Iraqi connectivity has traditionally depended. The regulator approved the company's operating licence in June, a decision welcomed at the time by al-Zaidi and Tom Barrack, the US special presidential envoy for Iraq.

The deal was one of 48 agreements and memoranda of understanding Iraq signed with the US government, international companies and global institutions during the Washington summit, with energy, infrastructure and technology projects making up the largest share. Initial agreements with US firms were worth more than $60bn in total, including a deal with Chevron to rebuild the crude pipeline from Kirkuk to Baniyas in Syria.

"We are using an open-door policy," al-Zaidi told the summit. "Everybody who has a project can come and talk to us."

Starlink's arrival adds a new competitor to a telecoms market the regulator has been working to clean up. The commission has spent three years pursuing debts owed by mobile operator Korek Telecom and began seizing the company's assets in May, while pledging to accelerate Iraq's 5G rollout and attract foreign investment to the sector.

Negotiations over Starlink's entry ran through two Iraqi governments. Former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani met SpaceX delegations in May and December 2025 to discuss licensing, coverage areas and the terms of the company's market entry.

U.S. oil firms sign deals with Iraq to develop alternative shipping routes

The Associated Press

Published: July 17, 2026

WASHINGTON — U.S. companies signed roughly US$60 billion in agreements and partnerships with the Iraqi government Friday, including deals intended to create alternative routes for shipping oil out of the Persian Gulf.

‘They are afraid’: Writer flags major tell in Trump admin’s ‘far-left’ crackdown

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026

RAW STORY

The Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on what it calls "far-left terrorism" in recent days, though the move actually exposed a growing fear within the White House about losing its grip on power, political writer Caitlin Johnstone argued in an analysis published Friday.

On Thursday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller previewed the Trump administration’s renewed crusade against what it argues to be far-left extremists, vowing to “defund, debank” and “arrest these political terrorists.” In recent months, however, the Trump administration has broadly expanded its definition of terrorism, adding new indicators such as publicly expressing "anti-Americanism” views.

The crusade, Johnstone argued in an analysis published on her Substack, bore striking similarities to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) started in the 1950s to illegally disrupt and discredit leftist and anti-war movements in the United States.

“Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political [movements] in the United States,” Johnstone wrote.

“It's clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.”

However, the crackdown actually revealed a weakness on the part of the Trump administration, Johnstone argued, one that she argued “should inspire hope.”

“The fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to,” she wrote.

“They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children. They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing. Keep pushing.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:33:50 +0000

Macron toughens stance on arson, with dozens arrested as wildfires sweep France

French President Emmanuel Macron has said there would be "zero tolerance" for arson after France was hit by wildfires that have scorched thousands of hectares, as multiple heatwaves since May have dried out forests and fields. Dozens have been arrested across the country over starting fires, including a volunteer firefighter.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

A firefighter works to extinguish flames in Noisy-sur-Ecole, in the Fontainebleau forest, 13 July 2026. © Stéphane Mahe/Reuters

Around 35,000 hectares have been impacted by the recent fires – more than during the entire 2025 fire season, according to authorities.

France "has never faced so many outbreaks of fire across the country since the end of World War II", Macron said during a visit to the historic Fontainebleau forest near Paris, where more than 2,000 hectares have been hit by fires since 5 July.

"Here, as everywhere else in France, there will be zero tolerance [for arsonists] because it is, of course, our national territory that is under attack every time a fire breaks out", Macron added.

'Unprecedented pressure'

The president arrived at the operational command centre at Fontainebleau to speak with emergency teams who have been working since Sunday to contain two fires in the forest, which are now under control but still burning.

“France is facing unprecedented pressure” from wildfires, Macron said, expressing his “gratitude” to the firefighters mobilised across the country.

Fifty-nine arrested over French wildfires, as Fontainebleau blaze continues

Around 950 firefighters remain deployed in the Fontainebleau forest, with 120 additional military personnel being sent to help soak the edges of burned areas to prevent flames from reigniting.

The fire came close to the Fontainebleau Palace and park, a Unesco World Heritage site since 1981.

Nearly 1,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes in villages scattered throughout the forest, while the fires forced the closure of the A6 highway, which connects Paris with the south of France.
Firefighter arrested

Two men are in custody, suspected of having set the Fontainebleau fires. One is an 18-year-old volunteer firefighter who admitted to deliberately starting a fire.

The two men are unrelated, and accused of starting two separate fires.

The volunteer firefighter admitted to "setting fire to twigs with a lighter and gasoline”. The other suspect, an 18-year-old student, admitted to "accidentally starting a fire by throwing away his cigarette", prosecutor Diane Ngomsik told French media.

Both men have been charged with “destruction by fire” and are due to see a judge on Thursday. They have been placed in pre-trial detention.

Six people were arrested as part of the wider investigation into the fires that have burned though the forest, which has been a Unesco biosphere reserve since 1998.

The fires have destroyed much what Unesco calls the “exceptional diversity of habitats” in the forest that “support a remarkable array of plant and animal species”.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the Fontainebleau blaze is contributing to what will likely be a record year for wildfires in France. Around 32,000 have already burned this year.

Another major fire broke out Wednesday in the La Grande-Verriere, in the Morvan region.

Nunez said 59 people have been arrested across France on suspicion of starting fires.

(with newswires)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:23:06 +0000

Oil prices may be driving the U.S.- Iran war, instead of just reacting to it, explains expert

Anam Khan

Updated: July 17, 2026

Lower oil prices may actually be driving the U.S. Iran war, instead of just reacting to it, says a geopolitical expert.

The price of oil is an independent variable in the ongoing conflict. While most investors naturally want to predict it using war as a catalyst, the opposite may be true, explains Marko Papic, chief investment strategist at BCA Research.

“I think oil prices are what are catalyzing kinetic activity,” says Papic, adding that oil prices are likely influencing how aggressively the two sides behave.

Papic says when oil prices fall to a level that is comfortable for the U.S. and Iran government, they have room to maneuver, which allows them to react to domestic political pressure, act tough and engage in ‘kinetic action.’

“But when oil prices get to an uncomfortable level, you start hearing them talk about going to Islamabad to figure out how to get vessels through,” he says, pointing to when Pakistan initiated its vessel transit agreement with Iran to allow 20 Pakistani-flagged vessels to sail through the Strait of Hormuz when Brent Crude hit a four-year high at US$126.

On the flip side, Papic points to a situation over two weeks ago when Brent Crude fell below US$70. It dropped to its lowest level since before the U.S.–Iran war, after concerns about oil supply eased and tankers began moving through the Strait of Hormuz again

“That made both sides pretty comfortable with going back towards aggression,” says Papic .

Two traditional dhows sail by a large container ship in the Strait of Hormuz Friday, May 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)

He expects that dynamic to reverse.

“As we get back to US$90 to US$95, you’re going to see both sides step off the gas,” says Papic.

A lower trading range

Papic says the conflict has created a potential trading range of between US$70 and US$95 per barrel for Brent crude.

That is lower than the US$95-to-US$120 range he associated with the height of the conflict, when investors faced greater uncertainty about whether the two sides could de-escalate and restore shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

LNG Canada equity option agreement reached with five First Nations

The Canadian Press

Updated: July 14, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:22:15 +0000

‘An emergency measure’: Wood products industry calls on Ottawa to impose tariff on foreign goods

Abigail Bimman

Updated: July 17, 2026

COATICOOK, Que. – Even though there are up to 15,000 moving parts on any given day at Alain Ouzilleau’s custom cabinet plant in Coaticook, Que., it’s only running at half capacity.

Ouzilleau spent $25 million to expand Cabico&Co’s operations over the last five years, with a new 50,000-sq. ft building and state-of-the-art robots. But instead of growth, the double hit of 25 per cent U.S. tariffs and a flood of foreign imports now has him breaking even.

He laid off about 200 of his 700-person workforce, which includes the company’s second plant in St. Catharines, Ont.

“It’s very frustrating and painful,” he said. “We love our people.”

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to double those tariffs to 50 per cent in January, but delayed that move by a year. However, even at the 25 per cent level, Ouzilleau says Cabico&Co “cannot be profitable.”

“We’re breaking even, but we want to continue to invest. We want to continue to grow,” he told CTV News at the plant. “One of the options we’ll have to start looking at, to continue to protect our Canadian jobs, will be to look at having operations south of the border, which I would hate to do.”

Ouzilleau is a member of the Canadian Wood Products Alliance (CWPA), which represents the kitchen cabinet, hardwood flooring and wood furniture industries. They have been pushing the federal government for help, and Ouzilleau says the biggest “milestone” was securing the launch of a rare trade tool: a safeguard inquiry into foreign imports.

The Canadian Kitchen Cabinet Association (CKCA) says that concern focuses on the short term while ignoring a longer-term risk if measures aren’t taken to protect the industry. (Abigail Bimman/CTV News

Mexican foreign minister says trilateral trade talks will happen when 'appropriate'

The Canadian Press

Updated: July 17, 2026

OTTAWA — Mexico’s foreign affairs minister said Friday his government will engage in trilateral talks with the U.S. and Canada on the continental trade pact when “it’s appropriate.”

Roberto Velasco Alvarez, who was in Ottawa to meet with Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, was asked whether Mexico would consider making a bilateral agreement with the United States that leaves Canada behind.

“The (Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement) is a trilateral agreement,” Velasco responded. “And of course I think the three countries agree that that architecture should continue.”

The Trump administration opted not to renew the trade pact, better known in Canada as CUSMA, at the start of July. Mexico and Canada had both requested a 16-year extension.

The U.S. decision triggered rolling annual reviews for up to a decade, at which point the agreement will expire if the partners can’t agree on an extension.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has received pushback over his approach to trade negotiations from some opposition Conservatives who claim that Mexico is further ahead in trade talks.

Mexico and the U.S. are set to hold their third round of official negotiations next week, but Ottawa and the Trump administration have not started similar talks.

CUSMA was negotiated during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first administration to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

There were times during the tumultuous negotiations when Mexico and the United States were talking without Canada. Ultimately, all three countries signed the agreement and called it a success.

Velasco and Anand both said there are separate issues between the three countries that need to be negotiated bilaterally.

“There are many issues that their own nature is bilateral and because of that we need to work with the United States each to resolve them,” Velasco said. “Of course, when it’s appropriate, we have trilateral conversations.”

When asked whether the increasing share of Mexico’s EV market held by Chinese electric vehicle makers has become an obstacle to negotiations, Velasco said it’s part of CUSMA talks with the United States.

Trump administration won’t give Canada credit for concessions: U.S. trade official

The Canadian Press

Published: July 16, 2026

WASHINGTON — The United States’ top trade official says the Trump administration isn’t going to give Canada credit for its trade concessions as official negotiations between Ottawa and Washington remain stalled.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Wednesday he’s glad Canada dropped its digital services tax and “rolled back” its Online Streaming Act but they “don’t really get credit for doing something bad and then undoing it.”

“That’s just good practice on their part,” Greer said at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colo.

Prime Minister Mark Carney dropped the tax last June, hours before payments from tech giants would be due, in a bid to resume suspended trade talks. The tax was to require the companies to pay tax on some of their revenues earned from Canadian users.

The effort seemed to steady the Canada-U.S. relationship briefly and a limited deal on some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s sector-specific tariffs appeared imminent last October.

But the U.S. froze talks again that month after Trump was angered by an Ontario-funded ad quoting former president Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Prime Minister Mark Carney are seen in this composite image. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson; THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)

In June, Ottawa directed the CRTC to reconsider its decision to triple streamers’ financial contributions to Canadian content as part of its work to implement the Online Streaming Act. The decision came down after protests from American interest groups and U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra.

The relationship between Canadian and U.S. trade officials slowly thawed this year. Greer said he’s in weekly contact with his Canadian counterparts and he’s offered Ottawa proposals to “put us in a better position.”

He also said “we just haven’t seen a lot of movement.”

The United States formally announced that it was not renewing the Canada-U.S.-Mexico-Agreement on trade, known as CUSMA, at the start of July.

The agreement stays in place under annual rolling reviews for up to a decade, at which point it will expire if no extension agreement is negotiated.

ANIMIST CATHOLICS

Faith vs therapy: Inside the Philippine school for exorcists

Manila (AFP) – Asia's only dedicated exorcism centre -- designed to train not only Philippine priests but clergy from across the region -- sits just off a busy thoroughfare in Metro Manila.

Issued on: 19/07/2026 - RFI

An exorcism centre in the Philippines says demands is steady for both the ritual and training of exorcists © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

Inside, neatly made-up rooms for visiting priests line warmly lit halls that lead to a chapel where the 400-year-old ritual takes place.

Holy relics employed in the proceedings line one wall, another features a one-way mirror that allows family members and novice exorcists to observe.

The Michael Center for Spiritual Liberation and Exorcism -- five months old this week -- was built because "cases were piling up", Father Jose Francisco Syquia told AFP.

Trauma driven by bullying, sexual abuse and the pain of separation as family members leave for work abroad has increasingly opened the door to spiritual attacks, he said.

"We had to find a more permanent and secure and private place to pray over people," Syquia said.

The centre's function as an effective school for exorcists, however, is what makes it unique.

Father Jose Francisco Syquia said the exorcism centre in Manila was built because "cases were piling up". © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

"I don't know of any other center in the world that trains exorcists," Syquia said of the two-storey facility built largely with donations from local families of the previously afflicted.

Priests from countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and India were already lining up for training, Syquia added.

A key element of that training is discerning the difference between psychological and spiritual problems, he said.
'Beyond science'

While the centre operates without strict Vatican oversight, it follows long-standing Church rules governing exorcism, including mandatory vetting by mental health professionals.

"We have clinical psychologists. We have a psychiatrist... There are also neurologists, so they work hand in hand with us," Syquia told AFP on a visit to the centre.

Still, he insists he knows a demonic possession when he sees one.

Priests from countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and India were already lining up for training, the centre said. © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

"You will see a change in behaviour... a different consciousness. Something else takes over a person," Syquia said, noting he had personally exorcised a demon only a week earlier.

"When it comes to the spiritual world, we need something beyond science."

But attempts to draw that distinction have long worried the mental health community.

"If a condition isn't recognised as medical, it delays appropriate treatment," Christopher French, a psychologist and emeritus professor at the University of London, told AFP.

"It's more dangerous to accept the supernatural explanations," he warned, noting that conditions ranging from schizophrenia to Tourette's syndrome were once interpreted as spirit possession.
'A lot of stigma'

The Philippines has roughly one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people in the archipelago, according to the World Health Organization. Some provinces have none at all.

Given the choice between an exorcist and a mental health professional, many in the heavily Catholic country will choose the former, Dr. Kathryn Tan, a Manila-based psychiatrist, told AFP.

"It's a lot of stigma when somebody is brought to a psychiatrist," she said.

"If it's an exorcism... you're a victim, but if you're brought to a psychiatrist, there's a lot of shame," she said.

Many of her own patients came only after first visiting indigenous healers, Tan said, viewing psychiatry as a "last resort".

Tan, who said alleged possessions are often accompanied by symptoms of psychosis, insisted Philippine psychiatrists were not seeking to "compete with the Catholic Church", but rather to bridge the gap between culture and science.

"It's about... compassion and empathy and trying our best to understand without judgement what our patients are experiencing," she said.

Both Tan and French agreed that cultural sensitivities need to be respected in treatment.

"You can shape a treatment to fit the belief system without explicitly endorsing it," French said, conceding an exorcism might even have a beneficial placebo effect in some cases.

Tan, who said she keeps an "open mind" about the supernatural, said it was not surprising when people seek spiritual explanations for something they cannot readily define.

"Perhaps this is our way of trying to control the unknown," she said.

Inside his office, Father Syquia told AFP he was confident science and faith could coexist.

"We're... focusing on the spiritual dimension. But of course, the body is always part of that," he said.

A greater national investment in mental health care might even lighten his own load, he conceded.

"If psychology and psychiatry, if proper mental and emotional health (are) fostered in our country, there will be (fewer exorcism) cases," he said.

"Science is a gift from God."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:39:36 +0000

Greenpeace Africa demands halt to $17bn Kenya coastal oil refinery

Climate rights group Greenpeace Africa has called for a halt to a proposed oil refinery project by Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, in Kenya's coastal region, warning of the environmental risks.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

A mangrove forest near the resort town of Lamu, on Kenya's north coast.

AFP - TONY KARUMBA

The east African oil refinery, with a planned capacity of 700,000 barrels per day, was confirmed earlier this month to be located at Kenya's Lamu port, ending months of speculation that Tanzania could host the project.

"This project threatens to damage one of East Africa's most fragile coastal ecosystems while locking Kenya into a risky fossil fuel future," Sherelee Odayar, Greenpeace Africa Oil and Gas campaigner, said in a statement.

The group said the oil refinery, which is expected to take about 30 months to build, will lead to "habitat destruction, marine degradation, oil spill risk and dangerous air pollution".

"Lamu's mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable. They support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection," the NGO said.

Nigerian businessman and Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote attends the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi on 11 May. AFP - LUDOVIC MARIN

Greenpeace Africa called for the $17 billion project to be suspended pending an independent environmental assessment before any approvals are granted.

"No approvals should move forward without a full, independent environmental and social impact assessment, genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks," Odayar said.
Job creation

Kenyan President William Ruto has praised the project, arguing it will create jobs.

Around 800,000 Kenyans join the labour market each year, according to the World Bank.

But Greenpeace said the project will only "create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies".

"This refinery also risks becoming a stranded asset as the world moves toward cleaner energy. It would also lock Kenya into decades of carbon-intensive development, worsening climate change and its impacts," it said.

Lamu was designated a World Heritage Site in 2001, as it includes the oldest and best preserved example of a Swahili settlement – lamb Old Town – as well as a number of marine protected areas surrounding the archipelago.

Lamu Old Town. © Unesco

The site was at the centre of previous disputes over fossil-fuel projects.

Last year, Kenya’s High Court halted plans for a proposed $2 billion coal-fired power plant, stating that the project "failed to meet public participation requirements," ending a six-year legal battle over the facility.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:39:08 +0000

Zimbabwe’s gold rush adds fuel to a deadly surge in malaria

Mutare, Zimbabwe – In Zimbabwe, open pits left by informal gold miners and filled with stagnant water create breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Health experts say mining is worsening a surge in malaria infections, already spiralling due to funding cuts and climate change.

Issued on: 18/07/2026 - RFI

A miner panning for gold along Mutare River in Mutasa, in Zimbabwe's Manicaland Province. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

By: Farai Shawn Matiashe

In Penhalonga, a gold-rich area in eastern Zimbabwe, George Mutsoka woke up one morning suffering from fatigue, a severe headache and joint aches.

The 43-year-old artisanal miner was too weak to work, so he went to rest at his home in Chishakwe village, just outside Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Mutare.

By late afternoon, his situation had deteriorated and he sought help from a village health worker. He tested positive for malaria and the health worker gave him treatment.

“I took the medicine for three days. After a week, I had recovered,” he told RFI.

Mutsoka soon returned to Penhalonga, where he works as an informal miner searching for gold.

Ideal conditions for mosquitoes

There are thousands of artisanal miners in Penhalonga, who carry out open-pit and riverbed mining.

Malaria cases have been spreading fast in this mining community and others across Zimbabwe, as stagnant water pools left by miners prove ideal conditions for the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.

Virginia Chakandinakira, the village health worker in Chishakwe who diagnosed and treated Mutsoka, says that all the malaria cases she documented in her community this year originated elsewhere.

“I have treated four people. Interestingly, they are not based in this village. Some of them are artisanal miners from Penhalonga and others are family members who followed to stay with their husbands in that area,” she says.

A Ministry of Health official, who was not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed to RFI that movements of mining communities are making it harder to get malaria under control.

“Our interventions usually target immobile people. Artisanal miners are mobile and bring complications to the interventions,” said the official.

Stagnant water in open pits left by artisanal miners in Mutasa, in Manicaland Province in eastern Zimbabwe. Such pools are breeding grounds for mosquitoes that can transmit disease. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Sungano Mharakurwa, director of Africa University’s Malaria Institute in Mutare, says artisanal mining – and mining in general – has intrinsic environmental impact, including habitat expansion for mosquitoes.

“There is a high risk of outdoor malaria transmission, which is not amenable to control by mainstay indoor-based house spraying and bed nets in the mining areas,” he says, adding that research is underway to innovate more ways to prevent malaria in such settings.

Another complication is “the cosmopolitan background of the miner population”, Mharakurwa explains. Many miners migrate from non-malarious regions where they did not grow up exposed to strains circulating locally, leaving them especially susceptible to the disease.

How technology is helping African countries fight malaria from the skies

Deadly surge

Artisanal miners often sleep in makeshift tents without mosquito nets or repellents.

Nyasha Mungwasho, another informal miner from Penhalonga, says his wife and child contracted malaria after they visited him in May. They successfully recovered after Chakandinakira treated them in Chishakwe, their home village.

Mungwasho reports seeing several of his colleagues infected while they worked in Penhalonga.

A village health worker testing a patient in Mutare for malaria. Zimbabwe has since cases surge in the past year. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Malaria cases have spiked in Zimbabwe in recent months. Between January and mid-April 2026, 65,399 cases were recorded, compared to roughly 36,000 in the same period in 2025 and 17,000 in 2024, according to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health’s National Malaria Control Programme weekly surveillance report.

Deaths from the disease also surged to 174 between January and April 2026, double the 85 recorded in 2025 in the same period and five times the 34 in 2024, according to the same report.

Experts say this rise in malaria cases is because of a combination of factors, including mining as well as funding cuts and climate change.
Loss of US funding

United States funding cuts imposed shortly after President Donald Trump assumed office in January 2025 led to the discontinuation of critical malaria control programmes in Zimbabwe.

Some of the programmes crippled included the Zimbabwe Entomological Support Programme in Malaria (Zento) at Africa University, which provides the country’s national malaria programme with scientific research to combat the disease, and the Zimbabwe Assistance Programme in Malaria II (Zapim II) that supported high-burden districts by strengthening malaria diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

“The funding cuts affected Zento, which was contributing key malaria mosquito surveillance technical data for guiding game-changing malaria vector control by the National Malaria Control Programme,” says Africa University’s Mharakurwa.

The university has since used emergency funding from private donors to restart its malaria work.

Malaria fight under threat as US funding cuts raise fears in Africa

Thomas Chuchu, a health programme lead at Save the Children Zimbabwe, which helped implement Zapim II, said the funding cuts disrupted key activities such as the distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets.

The programme worked through the existing Ministry of Health system, targeting 11 districts across Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland East and Matabeleland North. There are shortages of diagnostic kits, frontline health workers report, while some communities are without mosquito nets.

A malaria test showing a negative result in Mutare. Zimbabwe relies heavily on foreign donors for essential equipment such as diagnostic kits. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

The cuts also disrupted the leading US malaria control programme, the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), which operated across dozens of countries in Africa. Mharakurwa says the withdrawal of funding left communities in Zimbabwe stranded, given that PMI provided substantial budgetary support for procuring malaria medicines.

Given that US funding was supporting an impactful portfolio of health programmes, including malaria, he believes its abrupt termination is bound to have aggravated the disease’s spread.

South Africa faces HIV crisis as Trump’s aid freeze halts treatment and research

Effects of climate change

Heavy rains have also played a role. Chuchu says Zimbabwe’s current malaria surge appears to be linked, at least partly, to the high rainfall experienced in the previous season.

“The rains created favourable breeding conditions for mosquitoes, particularly in already endemic provinces such as Mashonaland Central, Manicaland, Mashonaland East and Mashonaland West,” he says.

Mharakurwa says climate change is worsening malaria outbreaks amid a lack of resources to control the vector-borne disease.

Without protection, Mutsoka and other artisanal miners remain at risk.

“I recently bought a sleeping bag. But we still do not have a mosquito net or repellent,” he says.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:53:20 +0000

France's wheat production to fall after heatwaves push early harvest

The wheat harvest in France, Europe’s largest grain producer, is expected to fall by 4 percent compared to 2025 after an unusually early harvest carried out during successive heatwaves.

Issued on: 17/07/2026 - RFI

A French farmer harvests wheat in his field, in Ligne, near Nantes, western France, 30 June 2026. © Stephane Mahe/Reuters

France is forecast to produce 32 million tonnes of wheat in 2026, according to the French agriculture ministry's first estimates published on Thursday.

The ministry's statistics office, Agreste, estimates the average yield at 6.93 tonnes per hectare, down from 7.42 tonnes per hectare in 2025.

This drop comes despite an increase of three percent in the amount of land planted with wheat.

Deteriorating growing conditions

The decline is largely due to deteriorating growing conditions towards the end of the season, as crops were hit by successive heatwaves, according to Agreste.

France is the European Union's biggest wheat producer and one of the world's largest wheat exporters, making its harvest an important benchmark for global grain markets.

For many French farmers, the smaller harvest is another setback after months of protests over low incomes, rising costs and regulation.

Industry groups have increasingly warned that more frequent heatwaves and droughts are adding to the financial strain on farms.

Heat hitting harvests

Conditions for the crop were generally good until May, before early heatwaves accelerated the cereal harvest, first for barley and then for wheat.

The extreme heat also made harvesting more difficult, with restrictions introduced in some regions where even a small spark from a combine harvester could start a fire.

The biggest losses were in central and western France, which have been hit hardest hit by drought and repeated heatwaves, while northern and eastern regions generally reported better yields.

France’s barley production is also expected to fall, down six percent, to 11 million tonnes, driven by a drop in spring yields of the crop that is particularly affected by the hot weather.
Global prospects

The heat has also taken a toll on maize. FranceAgriMer said crop conditions had fallen to their lowest level in at least 15 years following repeated heatwaves and a lack of rainfall.

French farmers race to adapt as repeated heatwaves hit crops and livestock

In its latest monthly update, the International Grains Council (IGC) left its 2026/27 global wheat crop forecast unchanged, but it cut its outlook for global maize production by 4 million tonnes, to 1.306 billion tonnes.

"Prospects for the 2026/27 maize harvest have been adversely affected by successive heatwaves in parts of Europe," the IGC said.

It lowered its forecast for France’s maize forecast to 9 million tonnes, down from its previous estimate of 12 million tones.

European grain trade association Coceral has also lowered its outlook for the EU maize harvest, citing weather damage in France and Hungary.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:19:34 +0000

Trump blasts Canada over wildfire smoke, threatens to increase tariffs

Luca Caruso-Moro

Updated: July 17, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump says the cost of pollution from wildfire smoke drifting south of the border “must” be added to the tariffs imposed on Canadian goods.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” the president wrote Friday on Truth Social.

“This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

U.S. President Donald Trump shares a post on Truth Social criticizing Canada for its handling of the wildfires on July 17, 2026. DONALD TRUMP/Truth Social

Trump is the latest U.S. politician to criticize Canada for its handling of the wildfires. Earlier this week, a handful of Michigan state representatives claimed Canada has not done enough to address the smoke, which has led to deteriorating air conditions in northern U.S. states.

Republican representatives John James, Jack Bergman, Lisa McClain and John Moolenaar penned a letter Thursday titled “Canada’s Apologies Won’t Clear Michigan’s Skies.”

They accused Canada of not acting with “urgency” to address wildfire smoke in recent years, and claimed “nothing has changed except that our patience has run out.”

James, a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan, took to social media Thursday to issue a “Government investigating CN’s actions after rail crew caught in wildfire

By The Canadian Press
Updated: July 17, 2026

CN Rail crew fled train engulfed by wildfire on foot

Wildfire surrounds train in Northern Ontario

‘Climate change is the responsibility of everyone, including the United States’: Carney

Nearly 200 active wildfires in Ontario causing widespread devastation

Heat, fires trigger evacuations across northern Ontario

Wildfire smoke from Canada pushes Detroit to top of world pollution rankings

MONTREAL -- Federal authorities are looking into whether Canadian National Railway Co. broke the law after a crew had to be evacuated from a train engulfed in flames in northwestern Ontario.

The government is “conducting followup oversight” to determine if CN failed to comply with rules under the Railway Safety Act, said Transport Canada spokesperson Hicham Ayoun.

“Transport Canada will not hesitate to implement operational restrictions or protective measures when necessary,” he said in an email Friday.

The department is also working with Employment and Social Development Canada to determine whether health and safety violations occurred, he said.

The Transportation Safety Board said it was “gathering information” as well. “It’s too early to say what the next step will be,” said watchdog spokesperson Liam MacDonald in an email.

A video of the incident shared widely on social media showed a curtain of orange-red flames closing in on the train near Armstrong, Ont., earlier this week as trees burned on both sides of the tracks.

“Y’all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we’re encased in flames now,” a worker can be heard telling radio operators

Video provided to CTV News shows footage from inside a train. CN says everyone on the train made it out safely.

A trade union representing more than 10,000 railworkers said the crew had to be treated for smoke inhalation and called on CN to stop operating through active wildfire zones.

“Make no mistake, this incident should never have happened. CN should never have sent a train down those lines,” said Teamsters Canada president Paul Boucher in a news release.

“That fire has been raging for five weeks.”

Both he and CN commended the crew for their courage and professionalism.

The railway said it is investigating the circumstances around the incident, noting the crew was safely pulled out of the area — more than 200 kilometres north of Thunder Bay — on Monday.

Two other crews were also evacuated from trains stopped in their tracks by the blazes, CN said.

The Montreal-based company suspended rail operations in a portion of northwestern Ontario on Monday, halting all freight traffic along a stretch of mainline track crucial to cross-country hauls.

CN said it is rerouting as much traffic as possible to its network that runs south of the Great Lakes through the U.S. upper Midwest, from Duluth, Minn., to the Ontario cities of Sarnia and Windsor.

“At this stage, there is no timeline for reopening the affected route in Ontario,” said spokesperson Michelle Hannan in a statement Friday.

“Safety is our core value, and we will never compromise the well-being of our employees.”

Two of the three evacuated trains have since been moved to safety, CN said. But billowing smoke has prevented access to the third, which must be inspected along with the surrounding rail infrastructure before it can be relocated, the company said.

Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. said its operations are not directly affected by wildfires in Ontario or Western Canada, with trains in those regions “operating normally at this time.”

Roughly 190 wildfires continue to rage across the northern part of Ontario, prompting 10 community evacuations so far and already burning through more land than all of last year’s fire season total, said Premier Doug Ford on Friday.

Some First Nations leaders have criticized the government’s response and communication, in particular in the case of Whitesand First Nation and Namaygoosisagagun First Nation — also known as Collins First Nation — which was evacuated without help from the province.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 17, 2026.

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press

With files from Kathryn Mannie in Toronto

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:13:15 +0000

US Oil and Gas Employment Hits a 2026 Low Even as Production Sets Records

By Michael Kern - Jul 18, 2026

U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers in June, the second-lowest June on record, even though domestic output is near an all-time high.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and Imperial Oil have all announced big layoffs this year, and it's mergers and automation driving it, not falling oil prices.
The jobs disappearing fastest (roustabout and wellhead labor) pay a fraction of what the jobs going unfilled (electricians, automation techs) pay, and geothermal projects and AI data centers are already soaking up some of the overflow.

Chevron is cutting up to 9,000 jobs this year. That's a fifth of its global workforce, gone, while it digests the $53 billion Hess deal. ExxonMobil trimmed 2,000. BP shed more than 5 percent of its staff, plus 3,000 contractors. ConocoPhillips is cutting 20 to 25 percent. Imperial Oil is cutting a fifth of its people and shutting its Calgary office entirely. And in June, U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers, the second-lowest June the Bureau of Labor Statistics has on record, beaten only by the pandemic bottom of 2021.

Production didn't fall; it's near record highs…but the jobs are disappearing anyway.

And before anyone assumes it’s renewable energy’s fault…it isn’t, not directly, at least. Nobody at Chevron got a pink slip because a wind farm opened next door. Automation, mergers, and a decade of investors who'd rather see returns than growth did this.

Ten Years, 72,800 Fewer Jobs

Back in January 2016, extraction employment topped out at 187,300, right before the price crash gutted the sector…

A decade on, the workforce sits almost 40 percent below that number, even while wells across the Permian and Eagle Ford keep breaking output records. This year alone tells the story in miniature… 115,500 in January, a bump to 116,200 in February, then a slide every month after, down to 114,500 by June.

The May-to-June dip isn't even new. Extraction jobs have fallen in that exact window in 7 of the last 11 years. Call it seasonal if you want. The floor keeps dropping every year regardless.

One footnote worth knowing: these figures get revised constantly. May's number came in at 115,600 first, then got walked back to 115,300 a month later. Treat any single month less like gospel and more like a rough read on direction.

Extraction, though, is the smaller of the two numbers that matter here.

Oilfield services, the drilling contractors, completions crews, pressure pumpers, employs something like 627,000 people, more than five times the extraction headcount, and it's been losing jobs even faster.

The ripple effects run deep, too…every upstream job is estimated to support roughly 232,000 supply chain jobs and 421,000 more through spending, more than 850,000 positions riding on an industry that keeps figuring out how to need fewer people directly.

The productivity data backs this up. Output per hour jumped 11.4 percent in 2023 while labor input barely budged, and total factor productivity swung from a 14.7 percent drop in 2021 to a 30.2 percent gain two years later. Nobody's working harder out there. They're working with better tools, and fewer of them.

Who's Actually Getting the Call

This year's layoff wave has less to do with oil prices than with a decade of mergers finally catching up.

Chevron's cuts, the Fears over foreign influence in France, as Musk backs Le Pen presidential bid

Billionaire Elon Musk has thrown his support behind far-right leader Marine Le Pen's bid for the French presidency, calling her "France's last hope", and prompting accusations of foreign interference in the 2027 election.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

Elon Musk in May 2026. The billionaire has supported French far right leader Marine Le Pen's bid for president, raising criticism that he is interfering in France's elections. © Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Musk on Wednesday called Le Pen "France's last hope" on his social media platform X, in a post declaring his support for her presidential bid – which she confirmed earlier this month, even after her conviction for embezzlement was upheld on appeal.

Musk has shown support for figures on the far right and had personally backed Le Pen, particularly throughout her legal proceedings, but had previously stopped short of openly endorsing her presidential campaign.

‘Free Le Pen’: US conservatives rally behind French far-right leader

Election interference

His latest message has drawn criticism over possible interference in French politics.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot urged Musk to reconsider his position, writing, also on X: "Like we say in French: only fools don't change their minds."

Musk's support carries particular weight, as he became the world's first trillionaire after his company SpaceX went public last month, and he controls the algorithms of one of the world's leading social media platforms.

Formerly known as Twitter, X has been the target of a French criminal investigation following two complaints alleging that its algorithm had been used for foreign interference.

French MP Antoine Léaument, of the hard-left France Unbowed, described Musk's post as "foreign interference, which has begun for the presidential election".

He called on Arcom, France's independent communications regulator, to investigate.

Far-right voices

Musk has previously taken positions in several European election campaigns, often backing nationalist or populist figures.

He supported Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party, saying in December 2024 that it was the only force capable of "saving Germany".

He called Romania's constitutional judges who annulled the first round of the presidential election "dictators", after concerns were raised about Russian interference in support of nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called out Musk's alleged interference in European politics, after the billionaire published a string of hostile attacks on Starmer and Olaf Scholz, who was German chancellor at the time.

The Financial Times has reported that Musk had used his platform to amplify far-right voices, including extremist Tommy Robinson and Ashlea Simon, co-founder of the white supremacist group Britain First.

Million-dollar cheques

In the US, Musk is facing possible criminal proceedings over his political action committee's decision to hand out $1 million cheques to voters at a rally ahead of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission recently referred two complaints from voters to the county district attorney's office, which can decide whether to bring criminal charges. Prosecutors have 40 days to respond to the commission.

Musk's political action committee used a similar approach before the 2024 presidential election, offering $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.

A judge in Pennsylvania ruled that prosecutors had not shown the initiative was an illegal lottery, allowing it to continue until Election Day.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:25:31 +0000

IEA report flags critical minerals risks as France steps up its strategy

The International Energy Agency has warned that investment in critical minerals fell in 2025 and supply chains grew more concentrated, posing fresh risks for France as it races to secure the raw materials needed for its industrial and energy transition.

Issued on: 17/07/2026 - RFI

Workers transport soil containing rare earth elements for export at a port in Lianyungang REUTERS - CHINA STRINGER NETWORK

In its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, published on 16 July, the Paris-based agency said investment in mining and refining dropped by nine percent last year, citing geopolitical tensions and price volatility.

At the same time, supply chains have become more concentrated, with China and Indonesia accounting for more than three-quarters of growth in refined output over the past two years.

“Concerns about high supply concentration have moved from a theoretical vulnerability into an immediate economic security challenge,” said the IEA’s chief economist Tim Gould.

The report highlights the growing use of export controls, particularly by China, as a key risk.

Restrictions on rare earth exports introduced in April 2025 forced some manufacturers to scale back or halt production.

The IEA estimates that if Beijing expands such measures, as much as $6.5 trillion in annual downstream production outside China could be exposed.

A mining/crushing supervisor at MP Materials displays crushed ore before it is sent to the mill at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass REUTERS - Steve Marcus

Despite these vulnerabilities, the agency noted some progress. Public financing commitments for critical minerals projects more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, while countries including the United States and Malaysia have begun to erode China’s dominance in rare earth refining.

Yet the overall picture remains one of fragile supply chains at a time when demand is surging, driven by clean energy technologies, electric vehicles and advanced electronics.
Central challenge

For France, these global trends may cause problems: the country’s industrial ambitions depend heavily on materials whose supply remains largely external.

France’s €500 million critical minerals strategy, launched in 2023 under the France 2030 investment plan, is designed to reduce that dependence. It targets 26 raw materials deemed essential for industrial sovereignty, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements and semiconductor inputs such as gallium and germanium.

At the heart of the strategy is an effort to build domestic extraction and processing capacity. The Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM), France’s geological survey agency, has identified lithium-rich geothermal brines in the Alsace region as the country’s most promising domestic resource.

An employee walk in the open-pit mine at the lithium plant of French multinational industrial minerals company Imerys in Echassierres, central France, on January 17, 2024. Minerals group Imerys has undertaken the Emili project, aimed at extracting lithium at its Beauvoir site to help Europe limit its dependence on China. AFP - OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE

Several projects are now under development. Lithium de France, backed by TotalEnergies and Renault, aims to produce 34,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide annually by 2028 using direct extraction technology. A parallel initiative, known as Emili, and developed by French industrial minerals company Imerys, targets production from 2027.

Europe's largest lithium mine to open in France

If successful, these projects would make France one of the first European countries with domestic lithium output, offering a strategic advantage for its emerging battery industry.

France is also seeking to strengthen its position in processing. In Normandy, the company Carester is developing a rare earth separation facility capable of supplying materials for up to 300,000 electric vehicle motors per year. The move addresses a critical bottleneck, as China currently processes around 85 to 90 percent of global rare earths.
'Urban mine'

Meanwhile, Paris-based mining multinational Eramet plays a central role in securing upstream supply. Its operations span manganese in Gabon, nickel in New Caledonia and lithium in Argentina. The company is also investing in refining capacity in France, notably in Dunkirk, where it produces high-purity manganese for battery cathodes.

However, volatility in global commodity markets illustrates the risks involved. The sharp drop in nickel prices, driven by increased Indonesian production, has put pressure on operations in New Caledonia, prompting French government support to maintain the sector.

France seeks deal to salvage New Caledonia's nickel sector

Beyond extraction and processing, France is investing in recycling as a strategic pillar. Companies such as Veolia, SUEZ and Eramet are developing facilities to recover lithium, cobalt and nickel from end-of-life batteries, seen as a future European “urban mine,” shorthand for the process of recovering valuable metals from manufactured products that have reached the end of their useful life, rather than extracting them from natural deposits.

(With newswires)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:23:11 +0000

The Blue Ridge Mountain mine powering the world’s digital economy

One of the most abundant minerals in the Earth’s crust, quartz is essential for manufacturing core components of smartphones and computers. Most of the world’s supply comes from a single mining district in the Appalachian Mountains of the southeast United States, which has become an unlikely linchpin of the global tech economy.

Issued on: 18/07/2026 - RFI

A sample of a Spruce Pine pegmatite displayed in Appalachian State University's rock garden. The mines at Spruce Pine produce the world's purest known natural quartz.

© Marguliesgm, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, some 800 metres above sea level, lie a few square kilometres that feed the global computer chip industry.

The Spruce Pine mining district is estimated to supply more than 80 percent of the world’s ultra-pure quartz, a key material for making the semiconductors on which computers and other complex electronic devices depend. They are also essential for solar panels.

“We’re seeing the development of the components industry, and with it the need for materials of extremely high purity,” says geographer Laurent Carroué, director of research at the French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG) at Paris VIII University.

Spruce Pine produces some of the purest quartz in the world. Some 380 million years ago, major tectonic shifts occurred that generated intense heat deep below the surface of the Earth, creating silicon-rich magma that eventually cooled and crystallised. In this area, the process took place without water – and therefore without the trace impurities it can introduce.

This “truly rare phenomenon”, as Carroué describes it, created quartz deposits that are 99.999 percent pure.

Extremely heat-resistant, high-purity quartz is used to make crucibles in which semiconductor-grade silicon is melted at temperatures of more than 1,400C. The refined silicon then crystallises and can be sliced into thin “wafers” that form the basis of microchips or solar cells.

Strategic supply

The size and purity of Spruce Pine’s deposits make them highly sought after by chipmakers and solar developers in the US and beyond.

A handful of private companies currently have mining rights, including Belgian group Sibelco and French-Norwegian venture The Quartz Corp. While The Quartz Corp announced last month it was closing its Spruce Pine plant indefinitely due to “persistent losses” in the solar industry, Sibelco doubled its production capacity between 2023-25 and is planning to invest another $500 million in expanding by 2027.

As Carroué points out, these operations are by nature “non-transferable and non-relocatable”.

Quartz can also be found in other countries including Russia, Brazil and China, though the cost of extracting it is much higher. Europe has a supply in Norway, though production remains a fraction of Spruce Pine’s output.

Earlier this year, researchers identified a new source of high-purity quartz in Chinese-controlled Tibet, with deposits of almost as high a grade as found at Spruce Pine. State-run media hailed the discovery as an opportunity to end China’s dependence on imports from the US.

China produces the bulk of the world’s rare earth minerals and according to Carroué, the sector “has become a point of contention with Washington, prompting the United States to start rehabilitating previously abandoned mines in the American West”.

Seeking substitutes

In September 2024, a natural disaster highlighted the risks of relying on a single source.

Hurricane Helene smashed into the southeastern United States, causing flooding from the Atlantic Coast to the Appalachians. Landslides felled trees, cut power and closed roads, forcing Spruce Pine’s mines to halt production.

A satellite image by Maxar Technologies shows the North Toe River and market place after flooding in Spruce Pine, North Carolina on 2 October 2024, shortly after Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States. © Maxar Technologies / AFP / Handout

While the disruption was short-lived, a prolonged closure would no doubt lead to scarcity and higher prices on global markets – especially as rapidly developing artificial intelligence continues to demand more and higher-performing chips.

If manufacturers are to diversify their quartz supply, Carroué says, it would mean “accepting minerals that are initially less pure, and financing heavy infrastructure” to refine them.

In the longer term, lab-grown synthetic quartz could provide an alternative. However, it is significantly more expensive than mining natural deposits.

In that case, the world’s supplies of this critical material will no longer depend on geographical fortune, but on political and financial commitment.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:55:16 +0000

Iberian rabbit: species hidden by Spain and Portugal for 2 million years

By Jesús Maturana

Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS

A CSIC team and universities in Spain, Portugal and the UK say the European rabbit is in fact two species split 2 million years ago, one now in decline.

For more than a century, scientists took it for granted that only a single species of rabbit lived on the Iberian Peninsula, at most divided into two regional variants. A study published in 'Biological Conservation' now calls that into question.

According to its authors, from the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA-CSIC) and research centres in Portugal and the United Kingdom, it is in fact a case of two species with separate evolutionary histories: two lineages, a single label.

The study 'When taxonomy lags behind evolution: Consevation implications of cryptic diversity in the Iberian rabbit' (PDF (source in Spanish)), coordinated by Rafael Villafuerte and Miguel Delibes-Mateos together with researchers from the TRAMAS group, distinguishes between the Iberian rabbit ("Oryctolagus algirus") and the European rabbit ("Oryctolagus cuniculus").

The former occurs naturally in Portugal and western Spain, while the latter dominates the eastern part of the peninsula and is the source of the populations introduced in Europe, Oceania and the Americas, where it often behaves as an invasive species.

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320726003137?via%3Dihub#f0010

The two animals diverged roughly two million years ago, when they became isolated in different refuges during glacial periods: one in the Ebro valley, the other in the Gulf of Cádiz. Since then, the researchers explain, they have barely interbred to any significant extent, despite looking very similar at first glance.

What sets them apart

The differences are not confined to the genome. The Iberian rabbit is smaller, with darker fur, smaller litters and earlier sexual maturity than the European species.

They also differ in their gut microbiome, the composition of their meat and the parasite communities they harbour. In Villafuerte's words, "the two species have always been there; what has changed is our knowledge of them".

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320726003137?via%3Dihub#f0010

The authors themselves point to precedents: something similar happened with giraffes, long grouped in a single species until genomics revealed that there were in fact four, or with African elephants, now divided into savannah and forest species.

Why does the discovery matter?

This is the aspect that most worries the researchers. While European rabbit populations remain stable or are even increasing across much of their range to the point of causing agricultural damage in some areas, the Iberian rabbit is in marked decline in Portugal and south-western Spain. Managing both as if they were the same species, they argue, has masked the severity of that fall.

The problem is not just statistical. Game restocking operations usually release European rabbits (source in Spanish), which are more abundant and prolific, into areas where only the Iberian rabbit previously lived. That can accelerate its replacement through competition and hybridisation, Delibes-Mateos warns: "We cannot go on managing as a single species two rabbits that have evolved separately for almost two million years".

The issue goes well beyond the animal itself. The rabbit is prey for up to 40 predator species, including the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle, so its conservation status shapes that of much of Mediterranean wildlife.

Formally recognising the two species would, according to the authors, make it possible to design monitoring programmes, recovery plans and hunting regulations tailored to each lineage, instead of applying criteria devised for just one of them.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:37:48 +0000

Spain’s Global Presence Inches Up – Analysis

July 19, 2026
Elcano Royal Institute
By William Chislett

Key Takeaways:

Spain ranks 13th in the 2025 Elcano Global Presence Index (score 312.1), the only major EU country in the top 20 to see a slight increase from 2024, driven by strong service exports, tourism recovery, and scientific output.

Economic presence dominates (61.8% of Spain’s global score), followed by soft presence (26.6%, boosted by tourism and migration) and a declining military share (11.7%).

Spain has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1990, with its global presence rising significantly (from isolation under Franco) thanks to EU integration, multinational expansion, and demographic support from immigration — though challenges remain in manufacturing and long-term demographic sustainability.

Spain remains in 13th position in the 2025 Elcano Global Presence Index and among the other EU countries in the Top 20 –Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy and Belgium– is the only one whose score is higher than in 2024, although only marginally (see Figure 1). The UK, which left the EU in 2020, recorded a fall, part of which can be put down to Brexit. The Conservative government’s post-Brexit foreign policy slogan ‘Global Britain’ has been little more than a hollow promise. The Labour government scrapped it in 2024.

Figure 1. Top 20 countries in the 2025 Elcano Global Presence Index and score change since 2024

Ranking	Score	Change 2024/25	Ranking	Score	Change 2024/25
1. US	3,323.6	+32.7	11. South Korea	408.3	+13.1
2. China	1,980.1	+82.8	12. Italy	381.0	-3.1
3. Germany	904.7	-23.0	13. Spain	312.1	Why The Indus Waters Treaty Matters, In A Warming World – OpEd Map of the Indus River basin. Credit: Kmhkmh, Wikipedia Commons. July 18, 2026 0 Comments By Amina Jabbar Key Takeaways: Climate change is fundamentally altering the Indus Basin’s hydrology, with faster glacier melt, erratic monsoons, prolonged droughts, and more frequent floods creating new levels of uncertainty for water availability across South Asia. Cooperative transboundary governance is becoming essential for climate resilience, as shared data, early warning systems, joint forecasting, and coordinated planning enable better preparation for extreme events than unilateral action. The article argues that effective river basin management must integrate climate science, ecosystem health, and food security, positioning ongoing dialogue and institutional cooperation as critical tools for regional stability and sustainable development in an era of accelerating environmental change. Climate change is, in a practical sense, changing how the world’s river systems behave. Across South Asia, higher temperatures, faster glacier breakdown, monsoons that act more erratically, long dry spells, plus more common flooding events are all reshaping the hydrology in the Indus Basin. What used to look like a straightforward question of how to share water is turning into something else climate resilience, and also basic human security. The Indus Basin is home to hundreds of millions of people, and many of those communities depend on relatively steady river behavior. Farming depends on seasonal water timing, drinking water systems follow the same pattern, hydropower needs predictable volumes, fisheries rely on water levels, and wetlands plus nearby local ecosystems are tied into the basin’s natural pulse. But climate change is unsettling that pulse, and it is doing it with a level of uncertainty that is new and hard to plan around. Against this backdrop cooperative handling of shared rivers becomes more and more crucial, because if you do not coordinate it, the whole system just gets harder. With more stable institutional arrangements, regular technical discussions, and openly shared information, riparian states can usually react better to climate related threats than they would by acting alone. What the research shows is that the Himalayan glaciers, which are basically the origin of many key South Asian rivers, are changing in noticeable ways as temperatures climb. Even if glacier melt can give a short-lived boost to river flows in certain places, the longer-term loss of glacier mass might shift and reduce the seasonal water supplies. On top of that, precipitation patterns are also moving, so you end up with intense flooding in some periods and prolonged dry stretches in others. This combination makes water planning way more intricate than before, in a kind of ongoing back and forth. Extreme weather events seem to be happening more and more across South Asia. Big, catastrophic floods have pushed millions of people out of their homes, smashed parts of infrastructure, and basically disrupted farming production. At the same time, drought conditions have been doing their own damage, lowering crop yields, draining groundwater, and raising the stakes for water access when resources are already limited. It’s clear that transboundary water governance can’t just lean on old historical hydrological patterns, like everything will behave the same way. Climate adaptation needs institutions that can deal with uncertainty, and they have to do it through scientific cooperation, sharing data, and synchronized planning. One of the most useful parts in international river agreements is the regular back-and-forth exchange of hydrological and meteorological information. Measurements of river flow, precipitation logs, and flood forecasts give authorities a better chance to prepare for emergencies, well before disasters actually happen. Early warning systems are kinda really important in the Indus Basin, because upstream rainfall or glacial lake outburst floods can hit downstream communities fast. When communication happens in time between riparian states, emergency agencies are able to mobilize resources, get people to safer areas, and ultimately lower the overall disaster losses, not just the immediate damage. Climate adaptation also rides on improving the accuracy of seasonal forecasting and honestly that means better timing and fewer surprises. With shared scientific data, the water allocation choices get more solid, reservoir management becomes more controlled, and agricultural planning can be done with more confidence. And as climate variability keeps ramping up, this kind of cooperation becomes more and more valuable, even if that wasn’t obvious at first. Food security is another big challenge. Agriculture in much of the Indus Basin still relies heavily on irrigation. So farmers need reliable water availability to decide planting schedules, choose crops, and set irrigation practices. If that predictability drops, the whole season can turn into a real problem. Climate induced uncertainty kind of complicates these choices. Like delayed monsoons, irregular snowfall, and shifting river flows can mess with agricultural output quite a lot. Cooperative basin management can help create a more steadier working situation for both governments and farming communities. At the same time, environmental sustainability should get more focus too. Rivers aren’t just water supplies for people to drink; they also hold up wetlands, forests, fisheries, and biodiversity, which in turn provide important ecosystem services. Environmental flows, for instance, help keep water quality healthier, sustain wildlife habitats and also improve resilience when climate shocks happen. Healthy ecosystems, kind of like natural infrastructure, they often do a lot of the heavy lifting. For instance, wetlands can reduce flood severity by soaking up excess water, and forests improve watershed stability, also lowering erosion. Keeping these ecological “assets” in place pairs well with more conventional engineering, and it helps climate adaptation last longer. International water law has, more and more, acknowledged that when rivers cross borders the answer usually isn’t unilateral control, it’s cooperation. Even though countries naturally try to safeguard their national interests, shared river basins tend to work better when there are clear, predictable legal rules, plus ongoing technical engagement. Climate change actually reinforces this principle, a bit like its “pushes” on everything already there. When uncertainty gets bigger than the value of institutions that help people communicate, sort out technical disputes and also nudge evidence-oriented decisions goes up too. Trust building steps become especially important when the water world is changing quickly in hydrological terms, like the baseline starts to move, fast. The Indus Basin shows the wider global dilemma of governing shared natural resources during a period of environmental shift, not just locally but across borders. Similar complications show up for nations dealing with the Mekong, the Nile, the Danube and plenty of other cross boundary rivers. What the basins have been teaching, over time, is that steady dialogue generally leads to more durable results than long institutional disengagement periods, even if disengagement feels “cleaner” in the moment. Future water governance should, therefore start weaving climate science in a more systematic way into basin management. Like, joint research helps, but also better monitoring technologies and satellite observations together with modern forecasting systems can strengthen the shared view of emerging risks . That means investment in climate resilient infrastructure, groundwater management, efficient irrigation technologies and ecosystem restoration should go alongside legal agreements. Technical cooperation between scientists, engineers and water managers might prove just as vital as the diplomatic negotiations themselves. Ultimately, climate change is turning water from something pretty predictable, into one that is getting more and more uncertain. And with that shift, cooperation, transparency and institutional resilience kind of move to the front row. Governments might argue about political questions, sure, but the shared environmental realities across the Indus Basin push everyone to keep talking and keep working together. South Asia’s future stability will hinge not just on how much water there is, but also on how well the countries cooperate to deal with climate risks that are getting larger all the time. In an era where environmental change is accelerating, cooperative river governance stays one of the more practical levers for building regional resilience, safeguarding ecosystems, and backing sustainable development. About Amina Jabbar Amina Jabbar is a Research Fellow at Quaid e Azam University. She can be reached at missaminajabbar@gmail.com Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:01:37 +0000 New Jersey Bets Big on Small Nuclear Reactors By Haley Zaremba - Jul 17, 2026 New Jersey has approved a competitive procurement process for at least 1,100 MW of advanced nuclear generation, positioning itself as an early adopter of next-generation reactor technology. State officials see advanced nuclear as a way to improve grid reliability and provide clean baseload power as electricity demand rises from AI and data center expansion. While the United States is accelerating support for advanced reactors, China continues to outpace the U.S. in nuclear construction and is expected to become the world's largest nuclear power producer. The newest frontier for the global nuclear renaissance is none other than New Jersey. This month, the state officially enacted a law launching a competitive procurement process to review and select a minimum of 1,100 megawatts (MW) of nuclear power. That power is set to come from next-generation nuclear power projects such as small modular reactors (SMRs), which have been receiving increasing attention on a global scale for their potential to scale at a relatively affordable price tag as compared to traditional large-scale fission reactors. New Jersey already sources a large amount of its electricity from nuclear energy. At present, 40 percent of the state’s energy and 80 percent of its clean energy come from traditional nuclear power plants. But now the state wants to be at the vanguard of innovative next-gen nuclear rollouts as well. “Giving serious consideration to additional supplies of nuclear power would serve our energy needs,” said New Jersey Senator Burzichelli. “Advanced nuclear power is clean, reliable and strengthens our long-term energy security.” The legally binding procurement process includes a strict review timeline for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) to compile and select expressions of interest for advanced nuclear technologies. A quick timeline is needed in order to keep up with the state’s ballooning energy needs, which are being driven up at a rapid clip thanks to the buildout of data centers and other energy-hungry infrastructure to support the growing tech sector. “This new law is an important step toward increasing base load capacity, improving grid reliability, and ensuring our state has the energy needed to support residents, businesses, and economic growth,” Erick Ford, President of the New Jersey Energy Policy Coalition, wrote in a recent press release. With the artificial intelligence boom demanding more and more energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, building out round-the-clock, baseload clean power sources is more important than ever. Against this backdrop, nuclear is an increasingly obvious choice for its ability to produce constantly and at high capacity without producing greenhouse gas emissions. However, in the United States, the nuclear revolution has been hampered by extremely high development costs and miles of red tape. This is where SMRs come into the picture. The emerging technology has a number of advantages as compared to traditional nuclear reactors. These smaller models can be built in a factory and then assembled on-site at a fraction of the cost. They also include passive safety features that make them safer than full-scale plants. Finally, their output can be easily and quickly manipulated. “This flexibility helps balance the power grid during extreme weather events, which often cause sudden disruptions to less resilient infrastructure,” highlights a recent report from Interesting Engineering. The Trump administration has been particularly bullish on building out advanced nuclear technologies, including SMRs, in the United States as part of its aim to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market.” Executive Order 14301, issued by Trump in May 2025, mobilizes resources from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to accelerate the testing and commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies in order to bring them to scale. However, some critics think that this focus is misguided and that a focus on next-gen technologies could be undermining Trump’s goal of quadrupling the nation’s nuclear energy production capacity by 2050. A recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal argued that “The administration is chasing unproven technology when it could encourage Wall Street investment in large-scale reactors.” Moreover, the Trump administration’s desire to keep America first when it comes to nuclear mobilization and innovation may be far too little, too late. China has been building nuclear capacity, including advanced technologies, at a breakneck pace, and is on track to overtake the United States and France to become the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy within the next decade. “By a wide margin, China will have the world’s most dynamic and significant nuclear industry through 2035,” an analyst for Gavekal Technologies recently told the South China Morning Post. “Construction efficiencies mean China can build a new plant in about six years, compared with more than a decade for the latest Vogtle reactors in the US.” New Jersey’s new law will no doubt be a winning strategy for the state’s own energy security and clean energy goals, but it is ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to the buildout being spearheaded by Beijing. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com Bangladesh's $12.65 Billion Nuclear Bet Faces Its Biggest Test Yet By Haley Zaremba - Jul 17, 2026 Bangladesh's Russian-built Rooppur plant, priced at $12.65 billion, is set to connect its first reactor to the grid next month. Emerging economies now account for most of the 80 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, a shift from nuclear's traditional wealthy-nation dominance. Bangladeshi officials plan to skip another mega-project and pivot to small modular reactors after Rooppur, pointing to costs driven up by the falling taka. The world is turning toward nuclear power as a solution to the increasingly dire energy trilemma – the tricky issue of sourcing energy that is simultaneously affordable, sustainable, and secure. As the artificial intelligence boom pushes energy demand into the stratosphere in rich nations, and back-to-back oil shocks and soaring temperatures leave poor nations scrambling for alternative energy sources, the nuclear option is looking increasingly appealing for a broad range of national contexts. “With energy security now ranking alongside climate commitments as a top policy priority, nuclear power appears positioned to play Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:42:03 +0000 Jeff Currie: Illusion of Oil Abundance Is Gone By Alex Kimani - Jul 17, 2026 Carlyle Group Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Currie, has declared that the global oil market's "illusion of abundance" has vanished, warning that the market has rapidly transitioned from a standard supply deficit into a structural energy shortage. According to the former head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, the real signal of a market deficit comes from refined product markets, where crack spreads have skyrocketed to an unprecedented $70 a barrel--a historic level wherein the processing spread nearly equals the price of the crude itself. Currie says the perception of an oil glut was temporarily created by large inventory drawdowns from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of 32 IEA members, including the release of 172 million barrels of crude from the U.S. SPR. The fragile supply balance has been further exacerbated by various systemic bottlenecks, with the lack of sufficient buffers to absorb the supply shocks putting oil markets in a precarious position. Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain highly volatile, with recent U.S. naval actions and renewed retaliatory strikes by Iran causing crossings to plummet again after a brief recovery. Meanwhile, damage to many of Russia's refineries has severely tightened global fuel supplies, cutting Russian crude processing to its lowest level since 2005 and wiping over 1.4 million barrels per day of refinery capacity from the markets. This has forced Russia to ban exports of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, driving up global diesel margins and leaving importers scrambling for alternative supplies. The IEA has warned that global oil inventories are on track to plunge to historical lows due to an unprecedented supply shock ahead of the Northern Hemisphere’s peak summer driving and flying season. Global observed inventories crashed by over 250 million barrels between March and May, drawing down at an average rate of 3.8 million bpd since the start of the Middle East conflict. OECD government inventories have been aggressively depleted to cushion the market, dropping to their lowest levels since December 1990, while Strategic Reserve stockpiles in the United States dropped to roughly 316 million barrels following record drawdowns. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:39:51 +0000 Hitachi Energy and Eve Join Forces to Power Electric Air Taxis By Charles Kennedy - Jul 17, 2026 Hitachi Energy has signed a memorandum of understanding with Eve Air Mobility (NYSE: EVEX) to jointly develop the electrical infrastructure required to support large-scale urban air mobility, as the emerging electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) industry moves toward commercialization. The collaboration will focus on enabling vertiport operations by addressing key infrastructure challenges, including grid connectivity, power availability, and high-power charging systems for electric aircraft. Hitachi Energy will contribute its Grid-eMotion charging platform and expertise in grid integration and power electronics, while Eve will provide its eVTOL aircraft and urban air mobility ecosystem expertise. The companies also plan to evaluate the reuse of retired aircraft batteries as stationary energy storage systems, a move aimed at improving the sustainability and efficiency of urban air mobility infrastructure. The agreement further includes joint business planning and customer engagement efforts intended to accelerate deployment of global eVTOL charging networks. The partnership comes as the urban air mobility sector works to overcome one of its biggest hurdles: ensuring that vertiports can reliably support frequent, high-power charging while integrating new electricity demand into existing grids. Eve Air Mobility, which is backed by Brazilian aerospace manufacturer Embraer, expects to certify its electric aircraft and begin commercial operations in 2028. The company says it has accumulated letters of intent for roughly 2,700 eVTOL aircraft, reflecting growing interest from airlines, helicopter operators and mobility providers. The agreement also aligns with Hitachi Energy's broader investment strategy. The company has committed more than $9 billion to expand research and development, manufacturing capacity, engineering resources and strategic partnerships aimed at supporting electrification and grid modernization worldwide. By combining aviation technology with power infrastructure expertise, the companies aim to establish a scalable foundation for the future deployment of electric urban air mobility services. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:36:36 +0000 EU Sets Target To Double Electrification Rate, Cut Oil & Gas Use By Alex Kimani - Jul 16, 2026 The European Union has unveiled the Electrification Action Plan, aiming for electricity to account for 46% of total energy consumption within the bloc by 2040, effectively doubling the current rate. Spearheaded by the European Commission, the aggressive policy shift is a direct economic and security response to the energy fallout amid the Middle East conflict. Currently, ~23% of the EU's final energy consumption is powered by electricity, a level that has plateaued for a decade. In effect, Europe now considers electrification no longer purely a climate initiative but rather a matter of state sovereignty and national security. The region remains highly exposed to global market turbulence, importing over 80% of its natural gas and over 90% of its oil. The EU estimates that reaching the 46% target could slash its fossil fuel import bills by up to €260 billion annually by 2040. However, this aggressive shift in the energy mix also forms a core pillar of the EU's long-term decarbonization strategies. The shift will encompass transitioning sectors such as transportation and domestic heating to renewable-powered electric grids and heat pumps to avoid paying volatile market prices for imported oil and natural gas. Electrification is also expected to yield inherent efficiency gains: to wit, electric motors and heat pumps are fundamentally more efficient than traditional combustion engines and fossil fuel boilers. However, the electrification drive is expected to come with its own set of challenges. To meet this 46% electrification target, the EU is likely to face several systemic challenges, including high consumer electricity-to-gas price ratios as well as resistance from member states opposing new carbon pricing levies. The electricity-to-gas price ratio compares the cost of one unit of electricity to one unit of gas per kWh. In the EU, high consumer electricity-to-gas price ratios act as the biggest barrier to electrification. The EU electricity-to-gas price ratio currently exceeds 3.0x, above the bloc’s targets of 2.5 for households and 2.0 for industry largely due to non-energy charges, levies, social tariffs and legacy subsidies. Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:33:34 +0000 Japan's LNG Giant Weighs U.S. IPO to Accelerate Global Expansion By Charles Kennedy - Jul 17, 2026 JERA, the biggest Japanese LNG importer and largest power producer, is studying a potential listing in the United States as part of a plan to boost its international footprint, Reuters reported on Friday, quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter. The unlisted JERA has launched a feasibility study to assess potential investor demand and the U.S. market conditions and regulatory requirements, according to two of Reuters’ sources. No plan for a U.S. listing has been finalized yet, and no decisions have been taken at JERA as the feasibility study is at an early stage, Reuters’ sources said. While JERA has always viewed the Tokyo Stock Exchange as a primary listing venue in the event of an initial public offering, it is now considering the global New York equity markets as a potential springboard toward increasing its international operations. Early this month, JERA took a step toward boosting its international presence by creating a wholly owned subsidiary to develop and manage its LNG, upstream, low-carbon fuels, and shipping businesses. The new company, JERA Global Energy Solutions (JERA GES), will be the Japanese utility giant’s response to increasingly volatile and complex energy markets. JERA GES will be a vertically integrated LNG company that can quickly respond to the market needs while maintaining security of supply for Japan as its highest priority, the company said. JERA GES, which will be headquartered in Singapore, will focus on “developing a stable and diversified long-term LNG portfolio that balances supply sources with market opportunities, while advancing lower-carbon fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen,” JERA said. The move reflects growing efforts by major LNG buyers to separate long-term supply management from commodity trading as markets become more volatile and global demand shifts. JERA is one of the world's largest LNG purchasers and produces roughly one-third of Japan's electricity. Establishing a dedicated Singapore-based LNG platform also reinforces the city-state's role as a global LNG trading and commercial hub. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:09:10 +0000 U.K. nationalizes Chinese-owned British Steel to protect nation’s steelmaking capacity Opens in new window\\ Published: July 16, 2026 Britain's Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Peter Kyle, left, and Swiss Federal President Guy Parmelin talk prior to a press briefing, held as part of a bilateral meeting, at the Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern, Switzerland, Monday, July 13, 2026. Parmelin and Kyle announced the conclusion of negotiations on a modernised free trade agreement between Switzerland and the United Kingdom. (Anthony Anex/Keystone via AP) LONDON — The U.K. government has nationalized British Steel to protect the nation’s steelmaking capacity after the company’s Chinese owners moved to shut the plant’s blast furnaces. The Department for Business and Trade announced the move on Thursday, saying it would save thousands of jobs and protect the U.K.’s national interest by ensuring a supply of domestically produced steel for major construction projects and the defense industry. “British Steel now belongs to the British people, and our focus is on the future: stabilizing the business, backing the communities that rely on it and building a sustainable, competitive and decarbonized steel sector for the years ahead,” Business Secretary Peter Kyle said in a statement. An independent evaluation will be carried out to determine whether any compensation will be paid to the firm’s former owner, China’s Jingye Group. The U.K. government took operational control of British Steel last year after Jingye said that it was considering closing the blast furnaces at its Scunthorpe plant in northern England. The blast furnaces are the last in the U.K. that make “virgin steel” from raw materials. British Steel and its forebears have been making steel at Scunthorpe for more than 130 years, building on the U.K.’s development of improved steelmaking technology during the Industrial Revolution. The plant currently employs about 2,700 people. Jingye bought British Steel in 2020 and says it has invested more than 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) to keep the plant running in the face of “ongoing production instability.” --- Danica Kirka, The Associated Press Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:12:56 +0000 UK by-election: Nigel Farage faces 'record' number of rivals Copyright Temilade Adelaja/AP By Harry Bligh Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS A fresh by-election has been called in the UK constituency of Clacton, after Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, resigned his seat to seek re-election. Farage had won the seat in 2024, securing 46% of the vote share. Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, is set to face a "record" number of opponents in a by-election for the coastal constituency of Clacton in August. A total of 34 candidates will contest the seat, thought to be the highest number recorded in any UK parliamentary election, according to Tendring District Council, the local authority administering the vote. The previous record for a by-election is believed to have been set in 2008, when 26 candidates contested the Haltemprice and Howden seat after Conservative MP David Davis stepped down, also to seek re-election. Farage won Clacton in the UK general election in 2024, but he resigned as an MP earlier this month amid mounting media scrutiny and a parliamentary investigation over an undeclared gift of £5 million (€5.88 million). Announcing his resignation, Farage, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, said he had "decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions," calling it "a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment". The country's mainstream parties are not taking part in next month's by-election, after Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party all declined to field candidates, dismissing Farage's move as a stunt. The Labour Party accused Farage of "desperately trying to change the subject," while the leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, accused him of "running away from scrutiny". Nigel Farage resigned earlier in July, triggering the by-election in Clacton, where he will seek re-election The cost of this by-election to the taxpayer could be more than £275,000 (€323,345), according to an estimate reported by The Independent. Reform UK has offered to cover the cost of holding the vote, however, the UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that would be illegal, as election costs must be met from public funds “to maintain the independence and impartiality of the electoral process”. Of the candidates taking part, 20 are independent, meaning they don't belong to a political party. Many others are novelty candidates, including three members of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Perhaps the most well-known is Count Binface, who wears a bin-shaped helmet and a black cape. Related Who is Count Binface – the alien space warrior standing against Brexit champion Nigel Farage? Other rivals include the actor and right-wing political activist, Laurence Fox, who is standing for The Reclaim Party, of which he is the founded and is leader. Find the full list of candidates for the 2026 Clacton by-election here. At the 2024 general election, Farage and the Reform UK party won the constituency with a vote share of 46.2%. Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:10:12 +0000 Mount Olympus seeks place on UNESCO World Heritage List By Foteini Doulgkeri Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS UNESCO’s final decision is keenly awaited, as the inscription of Mount Olympus on the World Heritage List would mark major international recognition for a place where mythology, history and unique nature converge. The mythical realm of the gods of ancient Greece is just one step away from historic international recognition. Mount Olympus’s nomination for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a mixed site, of both natural and cultural value, is expected to be examined at this year’s session of the World Heritage Committee, which will take place from 19 to 29 July in Seoul. ADVERTISEMENT Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest mountain, with its summit at 2,918 metres, is not only a unique natural landscape. For centuries it has stood at the heart of Greek mythology, as tradition holds it was the home of Zeus and the twelve gods of the ancient world. At the same time, it shelters a rich ecosystem, rare species of flora and fauna, as well as important monuments that link the area to history and culture. Mount Olympus Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved Greece submitted the nomination for the inclusion of the wider mountainous mass of Mount Olympus on UNESCO’s list back in 2014. However, international evaluators from IUCN and ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory bodies, requested additional information in order to strengthen the dossier. According to their observations, further evidence is needed to substantiate the international significance of the area’s geological features, biodiversity and ecological processes. At the same time, they have called for the mountain’s cultural value to be clarified even more, with a proposal to add the archaeological site of Dion, at the foot of Mount Olympus, to the nomination. US Pacific Northwest Earthquake Experts Say More Coordination, Investment Needed To Prepare For ‘Big One’ July 19, 2026 Oregon Capital Chronicle By Alex Baumhardt Key Takeaways: Oregon is making targeted progress on earthquake resilience, including retrofits to the state Capitol, Portland International Airport, and some critical infrastructure, but experts say far more is needed before the anticipated Cascadia Subduction Zone quake (magnitude 7.4+). Key vulnerabilities remain, including coastal U.S. Route 101, aging bridges, power grid infrastructure, and water supply corridors; a major concern is that many state-owned buildings and essential lifelines would not survive or be usable post-quake. Experts urge urgent policy actions, such as accelerated retrofits, microgrids/battery storage for coastal areas, better disaster workforce planning, and coordinated regional investment to ensure recovery corridors and infrastructure remain functional after the event. (Oregon Capital Chronicle) — If the “Big One” — the anticipated massive Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake — hit today, Oregonians west of the Cascades would be luckiest to find themselves at the recently-retrofitted state Capitol in Salem or on the roof of the new terminal at the Portland International Airport. The comment from Tom Wharton, an engineer at the Port of Portland, drew laughs from an audience Thursday at the 13th annual National Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Portland, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. Jonna Papaefthimiou, state resilience officer in Gov. Tina Kotek’s office, said few of the 4,000 buildings the state owns would survive. Just five would likely remain standing and be immediately usable in the weeks and months after, she said. The Port of Portland and the governor’s office are among the members of the region-wide multi-agency Cascadia Lifelines Program housed at Oregon State University, operating as a think tank for stakeholders who meet twice annually to discuss preparation for what seismologists project will be a 7.4 or greater magnitude earthquake in the Northwest in the next 50 years. The Cascadia Subduction Zone quake occurs off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California every 500 years and was last recorded in 1700. It could cause Northwest coastlines to lower and retreat, spur widespread flooding and landslides and displace millions of people. The experts discussed progress: Renovations at the Portland airport and state Capitol that made the buildings more likely to withstand earthquakes, a plan to ensure Washington County residents have access to water sourced from beyond Portland’s system and Kotek’s 2025 executive order mandating large state-owned buildings be retrofitted during the next 35 years and new ones be built to a worst-case-scenario earthquake code. But the experts also discussed policies that they say should be enacted urgently. If coastal U.S. Route 101 isn’t retrofitted before the Big One hits and shuts down for any extended period following the quake, “then you’ve lost those coastal communities, and you’re not going to get those back,” said Mike Olsen, an Oregon State University civil engineering professor and the director of the Cascadia Lifelines Program. The highway is also already under frequent threats of coastal landslides and flooding. “We don’t need to wait for the earthquake to cause a lot of damage to it. It’s already under a lot of pressure,” he said. Race to retrofit In coastal areas that will be most heavily impacted, and that are heavily reliant on grid power from the Bonneville Power Administration, policies that promote community microgrids and battery storage will be key to post-quake recovery, said Leon Kempner, a BPA engineer. BPA controls most of the Northwest electricity distribution grid. In some coastal areas, such as Lincoln City, it is the source of nearly all power. Kempner said the agency is racing to retrofit the grid to withstand earthquakes, but it didn’t start implementing seismic code into projects until the 1980s, and it lacks resources to move as quickly as needed. He also suggested that the Oregon and Washington state legislatures should require BPA and all regional utilities to regularly report to state officials on what they are doing to prepare for the Big One to increase awareness, transparency about planning gaps and potential for collaboration. Wharton, who explained that much of the state would rely on the airport and the port’s four Willamette and Columbia river terminals to receive recovery aid, said the Port of Portland needs nearly $500 million to upgrade a runway that can survive the quake and handle large Federal Emergency Management Agency aircraft, and other aircraft, landing for support or evacuation. Port officials will meet with Kotek’s office in the next few weeks to discuss some potential budget requests, he and Papaefthimiou said. Some funding could also come from requesting an advance on annual maintenance dollars from the Federal Aviation Administration or grants from FEMA, “as long as FEMA still exists,” Wharton said. A recent study by the National Institute of Building Sciences found that the, for now, roughly $450 million investment would have a net $7 billion savings benefit for the state as it tries to recover and rebuild after the quake, he said. But none of that matters if roads and bridges are unusable or nonexistent. Critical corridors The Oregon Department of Transportation has identified $40 million worth of bridge deficiencies that, if left unaddressed, leave them vulnerable to the quake, said Yumei Wang, a civil engineering and infrastructure resilience and risk expert from Portland State University. Olsen and other experts also called for more investment in preparing a disaster response workforce for the state and the region, which would require months of emergency attention and years of rebuilding. Everyone agreed that municipal governments, state leaders, and all regional infrastructure stakeholders need to be more regularly talking and planning together, now. Mike Britch, an engineering and construction manager at Tualatin Valley Water District, is overseeing a $1.6 billion water infrastructure project to shift the half of Tualatin that relies on water from the Portland Water Bureau to water sourced from the Joint Water Commission that also supplies water to the cities of Hillsboro, Forest Grove and Beaverton. Part of the project involved building a 2,000 foot “micro tunnel” under the Tualatin River to transport drinking water. Above it, the Roy Rogers Road bridge over the river would not survive the Big One, Britch said, leaving people south of the bridge stranded and unable to get to any area hospitals. “If I could create a policy and make people do things, I would say I want the state to identify some of these really critical corridors,” he said. “We need some sort of policy to address that.” About Oregon Capital Chronicle The Oregon Capital Chronicle, founded in 2021, is a professional, nonprofit news organization. We focus on deep and useful reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy. Staffed by experienced journalists, the Capital Chronicle helps readers understand how those in government are using — or abusing — their power, what’s happening to taxpayer dollars, and how citizens can stake a bigger role in big decisions. View all posts by Oregon Capital Chronicle → Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:54:14 +0000 Billions in US-funded rare earths flowing to Asian markets: report Staff Writer \| July 9, 2026 \| Cargo ship vessel leaving the port of Miami. (Stock image by Be Free.) US-backed rare earths producers are selling much of their output to Japan and South Korea because American magnet manufacturing has yet to catch up with Washington’s drive to build a domestic critical minerals supply chain. A report from Financial Times shows that rare earth products from MP Materials (NYSE: MP), Energy Fuels (NYSE American: UUUU; TSX: EFR) and Phoenix Tailings, companies that have collectively secured billions of dollars in US government support, are being shipped to Asian customers where magnet manufacturing remains far more established than in the US China has tightened exports of rare earths and other critical minerals, prompting Washington and its allies to accelerate efforts to secure alternative supply chains for materials used in everything from defence systems to electric vehicles. “Unless the [US defence] primes move quickly, I will sell out,” Phoenix Tailings CEO Nick Myers told FT. “Other companies are paying top dollar faster.” He said the company’s customers are “primarily in Korea and Japan,” where demand has surged following China’s export restrictions. The sales underscore the challenge facing the Trump administration’s push to build an integrated domestic rare earths industry. While the US is rapidly expanding mining and processing capacity, downstream magnet manufacturing remains limited, leaving producers dependent on overseas buyers until American demand develops. Building capacity MP Materials, the largest US rare earth producer, said sales of its neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide and metal were primarily made through Sumitomo Corp. for distribution to Japanese customers, according to its latest quarterly results. The company, owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California, has stopped selling mined rare earths to China’s Shenghe Resources under its agreement with the US government. It expects to begin shipping finished magnets to General Motors later this year under previously announced supply agreements with GM and Apple. Energy Fuels, which received conditional US government funding worth $725 million last month, also expects to export material to Asia in the near term. The company has said it plans to ship rare earth oxides to South Korea while advancing its acquisition of Australian Strategic Materials, whose South Korean facility produces rare earth metals. Energy Fuels also agreed in June to acquire German magnet maker Vacuumschmelze in a $1.9 billion deal that is expected to increase shipments to the company’s US operations. China dominates global NdFeB magnet production, accounting for about 90% of output, according to US government estimates. Japan is the largest producer outside China, while South Korea, the US and Europe have smaller or emerging production bases. Phoenix Tailings, which secured conditional $500 million in government support in June, said the funding will help expand production of rare earth metals and oxides. MP Materials, meanwhile, continues to benefit from a federal pricing agreement that guarantees minimum prices for certain products while the broader US rare earths supply chain continues to take shape. Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:51:45 +0000 Fortescue’s Super Special Fines iron ore stocks at China ports tumble to four-month low Reuters \| July 17, 2026 \| Stock image. Stocks of Fortescue’s Super Special Fines, a type of lower-grade iron ore, held at Chinese ports dropped 16.5% to a four-month low in the week to July 14, traders said, as steelmakers rushed to take delivery of cargoes before restrictions by Beijing kicked in. China Mineral Resources Group (CMRG), the state iron ore buyer, notified domestic steel mills in early July that from July 15 they must not take delivery of Super Special Fines held at ports. It later widened the restrictions to new purchases of Fortescue’s Super Special Fines cargoes, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. Inventory of Super Special Fines at some major Chinese ports slumped by nearly 17% week-on-week to 6.01 million metric tons as of July 14, the lowest since mid-March, said three traders. That represents the steepest weekly fall in nearly nine months, according to one of the traders, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. CMRG is locked in talks with Fortescue on a new supply contract. The restriction on portside cargoes escalates CMRG’s campaign to assert control over the giant iron ore market, following a months-long standoff with BHP that ended in April. Fewer deliveries of Super Special Fines cargoes at Chinese ports partly due to a typhoon in China also contributed to the sharp inventory drawdown, an industry analyst said. (Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise) Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:50:05 +0000 ETM battles Greenland over rare earth ‘expropriation’ Staff Writer \| July 17, 2026 \| Managing director Daniel Mamadou. (Image: MINING.COM.) Energy Transition Minerals (ASX: ETM) says Greenland has effectively expropriated one of the world’s largest rare earth deposits outside China by blocking development of the Kvanefjeld project and refusing to renew the exploration licence underpinning it. The Australian-listed company says it has invested about $150 million in Kvanefjeld through subsidiary Greenland Minerals since 2013, advancing the project through resource definition, environmental studies and public consultation before applying for a mining licence in late 2020. Months later, Greenland’s new coalition government passed Act 20, banning projects with uranium concentrations above 100 parts per million (0.01%), halting Kvanefjeld’s application. Managing director Daniel Mamadou argues the legislation was designed specifically to stop the project after the government campaigned on opposing its development. “We’ve got a Greenlandic government that states that it is open for business and that it wants to do more mining projects,” Mamadou said this week on The Northern Miner Podcast. “And yet we have what is the most advanced shovel-ready project in Greenland in rare earth, in critical minerals, that is essentially stopped.” ‘Pack up and go’ The dispute has since widened beyond the mining application. Mamadou said Greenland had routinely renewed the company’s exploration licence every three years, including once after Act 20 became law, when officials maintained the legislation applied only to mining, not exploration. The current government has since reversed that position, refusing to renew the permit on grounds the project can never comply with the uranium threshold. ETM argues the decision ignores exploration results from 2025 identifying rare earth mineralization with uranium levels well below the legal limit across largely unexplored parts of the licence area, while also rejecting proposals to separate uranium from the rare earth concentrate and permanently return it underground. At the centre of the legal battle is whether Act 20 applies retroactively to Kvanefjeld and, if so, whether doing so amounts to expropriation. Mamadou said the legislation’s explanatory notes allow the government to waive the law where applying it would constitute expropriation, yet Greenland has avoided answering that question despite more than three years of arbitration and court proceedings. ETM says its objective is not financial compensation but reinstatement of its mining licence application. Strategic stakes Kvanefjeld hosts neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, rare earth elements essential for permanent magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and defence technologies. ETM has previously estimated the project could supply as much as 15% of global rare earth production, potentially providing Europe with a significant non-Chinese source of critical minerals as Western governments seek to diversify supply chains. Greenland’s government has consistently maintained the project lacks community support. Foreign Minister Múte Egede has said residents do not want the mine near Narsaq, reflecting longstanding concerns about uranium and environmental impacts. Mamadou disputes that characterization, pointing to support from some local labour leaders and opposition politicians while acknowledging the company lost ground in public engagement during the covid-19 pandemic as criticism of the project intensified. While the Greenland dispute continues through the courts, ETM has broadened its strategy by acquiring the Penouta brownfield project in Spain, which it aims to restart as Europe’s only producing tantalum mine. The company has also assembled an advisory board including former foreign ministers from Denmark and Australia as it continues pursuing Kvanefjeld, which Mamadou still views as ETM’s defining asset. “Our case comes down to one simple question,” Mamadou said. “Are you expropriating us? Yes or no?” Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:46:40 +0000 Canada’s Churchill Port to Export Grain for the First Time in Six Years Located in the Far North, the Port of Churchill looks to grow as an export center (AGG) Published Jul 16, 2026 5:36 PM by The Maritime Executive Efforts to revitalize and expand Canada’s Port of Churchill, located in Manitoba in the reaches of the Arctic, are building momentum as shipments of prairie grain are again starting to move toward the port. For the first time since 2020, Churchill will serve as an export port for Canada’s grain crop as the owners of the port, Arctic Gateway Group, work to expand its operations. The federal government of Canada and the province of Manitoba are supporting the efforts to expand the operations at Churchill. The Globe and Mail newspaper reports the governments have provided C$262.5 million (US$187 million) to support the efforts, including for planning, design, and upgrades to the port and the Hudson Bay Railway that moves cargo to the port in the Far North. Arctic Gateway Group reports loading will begin on Friday, July 17, to bring grain from Manitoba on the Hudson Bay Railway to Churchill. It reports that multiple export vessels will ship the grain later in the summer to global markets. Grain exports at the port had plummeted since 2021, when the Canadian Wheat Board ceased operations. Currently, the port exports small volumes of critical minerals, reports the Globe and Mail, and it is expected to also start potash exports from a small mine in Manitoba. In addition, Churchill handles cargo such as building supplies and hardware coming in for the communities and industry in the Nunavut territory, operated by the Inuit people. Port of Churchill supports supply ships that transport material to the indigenous communities in the Far North (AGG) The first supply ship of the 2026 season for the Far North, Qamutik (12,760 dwt), departed Churchill on July 12. Company officials highlight that the ship, operated by Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping (NEAS), arrived on July 9, and they had been working hard to move materials on the railway. It departed, transporting a wide range of construction equipment, industrial supplies, trucks, and other goods. Critics of the expansion efforts and the government financial support argue that the shipping season is too short to make Churchill a meaningful contributor to Canada’s exports. They also say that rail and insurance costs are very high, and the port lacks sufficient storage capacity. Arctic Gateway Group, which is owned by the indigenous and northern communities, operates the port as well as the railway and the Churchill Marine Tank Farm. It acquired the railroad in 2018 and has been investing to upgrade its operations and capacity. “It’s a strong signal of the progress made to restore and rebuild this corridor, and of the opportunity ahead as we continue growing the business with a diversified mix of exports. In addition to grain, we will also this year export critical minerals and potash, as well as industrial goods, supplies and equipment to Nunavut - representing the most diversified mix of annual exports in the Port of Churchill’s history,” said Mike Spence, Chair of the Arctic Gateway Group and Mayor of Churchill. The port is also promoted as a vital link for businesses in Saskatchewan. The supporters cite the growing potential of Arctic shipping, saying Churchill can provide a vital export link. Company officials are promoting the restoration of grain exports as a “strong foundation” to continue to grow and rebuild long-term traffic through the corridor. Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:46:08 +0000 Canada’s first diamond mine to shut down Amanda Stutt \| July 16, 2026 \| The Ekati mine site includes multiple kimberlite pipes some 300 km northeast of Yellowknife. (Credit: Arctic Canadian.) Canada’s first diamond mine, Ekati in the Northwest Territories, will shut down following a Supreme Court of British Columbia ruling placed it into receivership this week. Arctic Canadian Diamond Company, a subsidiary of Australian-based Burgundy Diamond Mines operated the historic Ekati diamond mine approximately 300 km northeast of Yellowknife after it bought the asset from Dominion Diamond in 2021. Low global diamond prices compounded with tariffs, competition from synthetic stones, inflationary pressures, and supply chain bottlenecks were challenges too difficult to navigate. In December 2025, the government of Canada provided a C$115 million ($81.9 million) loan through the Large Enterprise Tariff Loan facility to help Ekati continue operations. But Arctic Canadian Diamond Company, incorporated in British Columbia, filed for insolvency protection under the Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) in May. Northwest Territories gov’t assumes responsibility The government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) said it will take responsibility for Ekati as the company enters receivership. The GNWT made an application to appoint a Receiver to assume responsibility of the mine site’s assets and activities and said it will advance funds to the Receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers, using the companies’ reclamation security to fund the reclamation and closure of the site. The Receiver, GNWT said, is on-site at Ekati and is overseeing activities to ensure site stability, safety and environmental protection. “The GNWT will continue to uphold its responsibilities to protect the land, water and public interest.” Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jay Macdonald said in a press release. “Environmental and regulatory obligations remain in place, and we will continue to work through the appropriate legal and regulatory processes to ensure those obligations are managed.” Ekati’s impending shutdown follows the closure of the nearby Diavik diamond mine in March, which was operated by Rio Tinto. Canadia’s only other diamond mine, Gahcho Kué, owned by De Beers, and Mountain Province, is expected to close by 2028. Mountain Province plans to voluntarily delist its shares from the Toronto Stock Exchange, signaling possible financial troubles, the CBC reported Thursday. Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:45:49 +0000 BC, Simpcw First Nation sign consent agreement for Trekor Metals’ Yellowhead copper project Staff Writer \| July 17, 2026 \| The Yellowhead Project has potential to be one of the most significant copper mines in North America. Credit: Taseko Mines The Province of British Columbia and the Simpcw First Nation have entered into a consent-based agreement for the environmental assessment and review of Trekor Metals’ Yellowhead copper project in Simpcwul’ecw (Simpcw) Territory. The agreement was signed by Simpcw Ku̓kwpi7 (Chief) George Lampreau; Tamara Davidson, Minister of Environment and Parks; Spencer Chandra Herbert, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation; and Jagrup Brar, Minister of Mining and Critical Minerals. Last week, Trekor Metals (TSX: TKO; NYSE American: TGB) said a Detailed Project Description for the Yellowhead project was submitted to the BC Environmental Assessment Office, providing more information about the proposed project, incorporating additional technical work and community feedback received during the early engagement Phase of the EA process. The company also released an economic impact study evaluating the potential impact of the construction and operation phases of the Yellowhead project. The company envisions the Yellowhead as a 90,000-tonne-per-day open pit mine that would run for 25 years, producing 178 million lb. of copper annually at cash costs of $1.90 per lb. Over the first five years, average production could reach 206 million lb. at $1.62 per pound. Last year, the company released a technical report that more than doubled the value of the project. CEO Stuart McDonald said at the time it “establishes Yellowhead as a world-class copper project in a tier one jurisdiction,” with potential to become one of the largest on the continent. “This marks the first time Simpcw has applied our consent process to a major project, and it is an important milestone for our Nation,” Simpcw Chief Lampreau said in a statement. “This agreement advances the exercise of Simpcw’s governance and decision-making responsibilities, while strengthening our relationships with the Province and project proponents,” Lampreau said. “This agreement is not just about one project — it is about establishing how decisions on new mining projects will be made in our territory going forward, in a way that respects Simpcw’s governance, our people and our responsibilities to future generations.” “Since 2024, Trekor has been advancing the Yellowhead project through the Simpcw process, an Indigenous-led, consent-based decision-making model, and in 2025 initiated the B.C. environmental assessment process,” McDonald said in Thursday’s statement. “We believe the agreement announced today can contribute to a more co-ordinated, efficient and transparent assessment process that benefits the Yellowhead project and all people in British Columbia.” Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:43:54 +0000 Panama bids for full ownership of strategic oil terminal Reuters \| July 17, 2026 \| 3:19 pm Energy Mexico and Central America Oil & Gas Panama Canal. Stock image. Panama’s government will buy the remaining 41% private stake in Petroterminal de Panama, the economy and finance ministry said on Friday, handing ‌the state full ownership of a strategic energy and logistics asset in a move aimed at tightening national control over critical infrastructure. The acquisition will give Panama 100% ownership of Petroterminal, which the government described as a key platform for the ⁠country’s logistics and energy development and an asset with broader strategic importance. The government said the deal would be financed through the company’s own cash flow and was a contractual purchase under an existing legal right dating back to 1977, rather than an expropriation. Officials said the option was established in the company’s association contract and accepted by all shareholders. The purchase price will be calculated ‌using ⁠a pre-agreed formula based on Petroterminal’s audited financial statements, the ministry said. It added that the transaction would not require funding from the national treasury, would not add to public debt and would not ⁠affect spending on public works, social programs or other state investments. President Jose Raul Mulino’s administration said full ownership would allow Panama to capture more ⁠of the value generated by the company, support investment in the energy, logistics and maritime sectors and reinforce sovereignty over a ⁠strategic national asset. Economy and Finance Minister Felipe Chapman said the company would be managed under international standards of efficiency, transparency and corporate governance. (Reporting by Elida Moreno; Editing by Natalia Siniawski) Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:42:47 +0000 BAN DEEP SEA MINING US proposes lease of seabed mining blocks off American Samoa coast Reuters \| July 17, 2026 \| American Samoa. Stock image. The U.S. Interior Department has proposed a lease of more than 31 million acres off the coast of American Samoa for seabed mining, part of President Donald Trump’s broader push to boost U.S. critical minerals production. The waters around the Pacific Ocean territory are estimated to contain large amounts of potato-shaped rocks known as polymetallic nodules filled with the building blocks for electric vehicles, weaponry and electronics. The department’s Marine Mineral Administration (MMA) said on Thursday it aims to lease two blocks, one of 16.3 million acres and the other 15.1 million acres, in federal waters off the eastern coast of Tau, one of the territory’s seven islands. Last year, Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting the industry to offset China’s control of minerals markets. The MMA is proposing the auction for November 19 at BOEM’s offices in Camarillo, California. It will be closed to the public but livestreamed on MMA’s website. Minimum bids are $3 million. Royalty rates would be 2% of the value of mineral production for the first five years and 5% thereafter. Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula, American Samoa’s governor and an opponent of deep-sea mining, will have 60 days to respond to the proposed lease. The MMA will need to give a final notice of the lease sale in October. Supporters of deep-sea mining say it would lessen the need for mining operations on land, which are often unpopular with host communities. Detractors say more research is needed to determine how the practice could affect ecosystems. Matt Giacona, acting MMA director, said the proposed lease “is an important step toward building a secure domestic critical minerals supply chain.” Oceana, a marine conservation organization, said the proposed lease “is yet another instance of this administration not only disregarding long-term damage to the environment but ignoring both science and the will of the people.” (Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Editing by David Gregorio) Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:13:14 +0000 Driving the speed limit cuts millions in fuel costs for less than a minute of your time New study finds an immediate, cost-effective solution by analyzing 120 million real-world trips University of Minnesota LinkedIn WeChat Bluesky Email MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/16/2026) - A nationwide study by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities reveals that adherence to posted speed limits could dramatically curb U.S. fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, saving Americans billions of dollars annually while adding less than a minute to the average daily commute. The paper was recently published in Communications Sustainability, a peer-reviewed journal. Researchers analyzed over 120 million real-world vehicle trips across the United States, showing that if drivers complied with posted speed limits, it could save an average of $22 million, 6.7 million gallons of fuel and 57,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide every single day for light-duty engine-powered vehicles — which account for 14.6% of total energy consumption in the country. “We already understand the physics of how speed affects fuel consumption, but quantifying the exact magnitude of those savings at a national scale gives us a clearer picture of the actual impact,” said Bharat Jayaprakash, Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota and lead author on the paper. Previous transportation research relied on localized, small-scale samples or general assumptions about fuel economy based on laboratory tests. This project marks a major milestone in transportation science. With volatile fuel prices and uncertainty about the expansion of electric vehicles in the marketplace, the study shows that changing driver behavior offers an immediate, cost-effective tool for reducing fuel use and emissions. The researchers were able to review a large amount of data including driving data on U.S. road networks, speed limits and elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey. They then calibrated multiple, vehicle specific energy-consumption models using advanced vehicle dynamics software developed by the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “While internal combustion engine-powered vehicles have become significantly more efficient in the past decades, they have also become much more powerful. Driving fast is easier than ever,” said William Northrop, University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor and corresponding author on the paper. “Our study examines an obvious yet difficult-to-implement intervention for major fuel savings that can be achieved without replacing our cars: driving slower.” The researchers noted that more work is needed to fully understand the impact of driving on fuel and emissions. “Key remaining challenges of our research are to expand our framework to more diverse roadways and understand the impacts of aggressive accelerations on fuel use and emissions,” added Northrop. “Exploring both speed and acceleration reductions will give us an even more complete picture of real-world fuel savings potential." Future phases of the project will utilize an instrumented electric vehicle equipped with multi-sensor perception systems to capture micro-scale driving behavior in real time. Sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Local Road Research Board, current research focuses on collecting high-fidelity, real-world drive cycles to precisely model how micro-scale driving habits impact energy consumption and emissions at the fleet level. The research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation. Read the entire paper, entitled “Speeding incurs substantial environmental and economic costs nationwide for negligible travel time savings, on the Nature website. Journal Communications Sustainability DOI 10.1038/s44458-026-00100-3 Article Title Speeding incurs substantial environmental and economic costs nationwide for negligible travel time savings Article Publication Date 16-Jul-2026

Ranking

Score

Change 2024/25

Ranking

Score

Change 2024/25

1. US

3,323.6

+32.7

11. South Korea

408.3

+13.1

2. China

1,980.1

+82.8

12. Italy

381.0

-3.1

3. Germany

904.7

-23.0

13. Spain

312.1

Why The Indus Waters Treaty Matters, In A Warming World – OpEd

Map of the Indus River basin. Credit: Kmhkmh, Wikipedia Commons.

July 18, 2026 0 Comments
By Amina Jabbar

Key Takeaways:

Climate change is fundamentally altering the Indus Basin’s hydrology, with faster glacier melt, erratic monsoons, prolonged droughts, and more frequent floods creating new levels of uncertainty for water availability across South Asia.

Cooperative transboundary governance is becoming essential for climate resilience, as shared data, early warning systems, joint forecasting, and coordinated planning enable better preparation for extreme events than unilateral action.

The article argues that effective river basin management must integrate climate science, ecosystem health, and food security, positioning ongoing dialogue and institutional cooperation as critical tools for regional stability and sustainable development in an era of accelerating environmental change.

Climate change is, in a practical sense, changing how the world’s river systems behave. Across South Asia, higher temperatures, faster glacier breakdown, monsoons that act more erratically, long dry spells, plus more common flooding events are all reshaping the hydrology in the Indus Basin. What used to look like a straightforward question of how to share water is turning into something else climate resilience, and also basic human security.

The Indus Basin is home to hundreds of millions of people, and many of those communities depend on relatively steady river behavior. Farming depends on seasonal water timing, drinking water systems follow the same pattern, hydropower needs predictable volumes, fisheries rely on water levels, and wetlands plus nearby local ecosystems are tied into the basin’s natural pulse. But climate change is unsettling that pulse, and it is doing it with a level of uncertainty that is new and hard to plan around.

Against this backdrop cooperative handling of shared rivers becomes more and more crucial, because if you do not coordinate it, the whole system just gets harder. With more stable institutional arrangements, regular technical discussions, and openly shared information, riparian states can usually react better to climate related threats than they would by acting alone.

What the research shows is that the Himalayan glaciers, which are basically the origin of many key South Asian rivers, are changing in noticeable ways as temperatures climb. Even if glacier melt can give a short-lived boost to river flows in certain places, the longer-term loss of glacier mass might shift and reduce the seasonal water supplies. On top of that, precipitation patterns are also moving, so you end up with intense flooding in some periods and prolonged dry stretches in others. This combination makes water planning way more intricate than before, in a kind of ongoing back and forth.

Extreme weather events seem to be happening more and more across South Asia. Big, catastrophic floods have pushed millions of people out of their homes, smashed parts of infrastructure, and basically disrupted farming production. At the same time, drought conditions have been doing their own damage, lowering crop yields, draining groundwater, and raising the stakes for water access when resources are already limited.

It’s clear that transboundary water governance can’t just lean on old historical hydrological patterns, like everything will behave the same way. Climate adaptation needs institutions that can deal with uncertainty, and they have to do it through scientific cooperation, sharing data, and synchronized planning. One of the most useful parts in international river agreements is the regular back-and-forth exchange of hydrological and meteorological information. Measurements of river flow, precipitation logs, and flood forecasts give authorities a better chance to prepare for emergencies, well before disasters actually happen.

Early warning systems are kinda really important in the Indus Basin, because upstream rainfall or glacial lake outburst floods can hit downstream communities fast. When communication happens in time between riparian states, emergency agencies are able to mobilize resources, get people to safer areas, and ultimately lower the overall disaster losses, not just the immediate damage.

Climate adaptation also rides on improving the accuracy of seasonal forecasting and honestly that means better timing and fewer surprises. With shared scientific data, the water allocation choices get more solid, reservoir management becomes more controlled, and agricultural planning can be done with more confidence. And as climate variability keeps ramping up, this kind of cooperation becomes more and more valuable, even if that wasn’t obvious at first.

Food security is another big challenge. Agriculture in much of the Indus Basin still relies heavily on irrigation. So farmers need reliable water availability to decide planting schedules, choose crops, and set irrigation practices. If that predictability drops, the whole season can turn into a real problem.

Climate induced uncertainty kind of complicates these choices. Like delayed monsoons, irregular snowfall, and shifting river flows can mess with agricultural output quite a lot. Cooperative basin management can help create a more steadier working situation for both governments and farming communities. At the same time, environmental sustainability should get more focus too. Rivers aren’t just water supplies for people to drink; they also hold up wetlands, forests, fisheries, and biodiversity, which in turn provide important ecosystem services. Environmental flows, for instance, help keep water quality healthier, sustain wildlife habitats and also improve resilience when climate shocks happen.

Healthy ecosystems, kind of like natural infrastructure, they often do a lot of the heavy lifting. For instance, wetlands can reduce flood severity by soaking up excess water, and forests improve watershed stability, also lowering erosion. Keeping these ecological “assets” in place pairs well with more conventional engineering, and it helps climate adaptation last longer.

International water law has, more and more, acknowledged that when rivers cross borders the answer usually isn’t unilateral control, it’s cooperation. Even though countries naturally try to safeguard their national interests, shared river basins tend to work better when there are clear, predictable legal rules, plus ongoing technical engagement.

Climate change actually reinforces this principle, a bit like its “pushes” on everything already there. When uncertainty gets bigger than the value of institutions that help people communicate, sort out technical disputes and also nudge evidence-oriented decisions goes up too. Trust building steps become especially important when the water world is changing quickly in hydrological terms, like the baseline starts to move, fast. The Indus Basin shows the wider global dilemma of governing shared natural resources during a period of environmental shift, not just locally but across borders. Similar complications show up for nations dealing with the Mekong, the Nile, the Danube and plenty of other cross boundary rivers. What the basins have been teaching, over time, is that steady dialogue generally leads to more durable results than long institutional disengagement periods, even if disengagement feels “cleaner” in the moment.

Future water governance should, therefore start weaving climate science in a more systematic way into basin management. Like, joint research helps, but also better monitoring technologies and satellite observations together with modern forecasting systems can strengthen the shared view of emerging risks . That means investment in climate resilient infrastructure, groundwater management, efficient irrigation technologies and ecosystem restoration should go alongside legal agreements. Technical cooperation between scientists, engineers and water managers might prove just as vital as the diplomatic negotiations themselves.

Ultimately, climate change is turning water from something pretty predictable, into one that is getting more and more uncertain. And with that shift, cooperation, transparency and institutional resilience kind of move to the front row. Governments might argue about political questions, sure, but the shared environmental realities across the Indus Basin push everyone to keep talking and keep working together. South Asia’s future stability will hinge not just on how much water there is, but also on how well the countries cooperate to deal with climate risks that are getting larger all the time. In an era where environmental change is accelerating, cooperative river governance stays one of the more practical levers for building regional resilience, safeguarding ecosystems, and backing sustainable development.

About Amina Jabbar
Amina Jabbar is a Research Fellow at Quaid e Azam University. She can be reached at missaminajabbar@gmail.com

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:01:37 +0000

New Jersey Bets Big on Small Nuclear Reactors

By Haley Zaremba - Jul 17, 2026

New Jersey has approved a competitive procurement process for at least 1,100 MW of advanced nuclear generation, positioning itself as an early adopter of next-generation reactor technology.
State officials see advanced nuclear as a way to improve grid reliability and provide clean baseload power as electricity demand rises from AI and data center expansion.
While the United States is accelerating support for advanced reactors, China continues to outpace the U.S. in nuclear construction and is expected to become the world's largest nuclear power producer.

The newest frontier for the global nuclear renaissance is none other than New Jersey. This month, the state officially enacted a law launching a competitive procurement process to review and select a minimum of 1,100 megawatts (MW) of nuclear power. That power is set to come from next-generation nuclear power projects such as small modular reactors (SMRs), which have been receiving increasing attention on a global scale for their potential to scale at a relatively affordable price tag as compared to traditional large-scale fission reactors.

New Jersey already sources a large amount of its electricity from nuclear energy. At present, 40 percent of the state’s energy and 80 percent of its clean energy come from traditional nuclear power plants. But now the state wants to be at the vanguard of innovative next-gen nuclear rollouts as well. “Giving serious consideration to additional supplies of nuclear power would serve our energy needs,” said New Jersey Senator Burzichelli. “Advanced nuclear power is clean, reliable and strengthens our long-term energy security.”

The legally binding procurement process includes a strict review timeline for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) to compile and select expressions of interest for advanced nuclear technologies. A quick timeline is needed in order to keep up with the state’s ballooning energy needs, which are being driven up at a rapid clip thanks to the buildout of data centers and other energy-hungry infrastructure to support the growing tech sector.

“This new law is an important step toward increasing base load capacity, improving grid reliability, and ensuring our state has the energy needed to support residents, businesses, and economic growth,” Erick Ford, President of the New Jersey Energy Policy Coalition, wrote in a recent press release.

With the artificial intelligence boom demanding more and more energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, building out round-the-clock, baseload clean power sources is more important than ever. Against this backdrop, nuclear is an increasingly obvious choice for its ability to produce constantly and at high capacity without producing greenhouse gas emissions. However, in the United States, the nuclear revolution has been hampered by extremely high development costs and miles of red tape. This is where SMRs come into the picture.

The emerging technology has a number of advantages as compared to traditional nuclear reactors. These smaller models can be built in a factory and then assembled on-site at a fraction of the cost. They also include passive safety features that make them safer than full-scale plants. Finally, their output can be easily and quickly manipulated. “This flexibility helps balance the power grid during extreme weather events, which often cause sudden disruptions to less resilient infrastructure,” highlights a recent report from Interesting Engineering.

The Trump administration has been particularly bullish on building out advanced nuclear technologies, including SMRs, in the United States as part of its aim to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market.” Executive Order 14301, issued by Trump in May 2025, mobilizes resources from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to accelerate the testing and commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies in order to bring them to scale.

However, some critics think that this focus is misguided and that a focus on next-gen technologies could be undermining Trump’s goal of quadrupling the nation’s nuclear energy production capacity by 2050. A recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal argued that “The administration is chasing unproven technology when it could encourage Wall Street investment in large-scale reactors.”

Moreover, the Trump administration’s desire to keep America first when it comes to nuclear mobilization and innovation may be far too little, too late. China has been building nuclear capacity, including advanced technologies, at a breakneck pace, and is on track to overtake the United States and France to become the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy within the next decade.

“By a wide margin, China will have the world’s most dynamic and significant nuclear industry through 2035,” an analyst for Gavekal Technologies recently told the South China Morning Post. “Construction efficiencies mean China can build a new plant in about six years, compared with more than a decade for the latest Vogtle reactors in the US.”

New Jersey’s new law will no doubt be a winning strategy for the state’s own energy security and clean energy goals, but it is ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to the buildout being spearheaded by Beijing.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Bangladesh's $12.65 Billion Nuclear Bet Faces Its Biggest Test Yet

By Haley Zaremba - Jul 17, 2026

Bangladesh's Russian-built Rooppur plant, priced at $12.65 billion, is set to connect its first reactor to the grid next month.
Emerging economies now account for most of the 80 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, a shift from nuclear's traditional wealthy-nation dominance.
Bangladeshi officials plan to skip another mega-project and pivot to small modular reactors after Rooppur, pointing to costs driven up by the falling taka.

The world is turning toward nuclear power as a solution to the increasingly dire energy trilemma – the tricky issue of sourcing energy that is simultaneously affordable, sustainable, and secure. As the artificial intelligence boom pushes energy demand into the stratosphere in rich nations, and back-to-back oil shocks and soaring temperatures leave poor nations scrambling for alternative energy sources, the nuclear option is looking increasingly appealing for a broad range of national contexts.

“With energy security now ranking alongside climate commitments as a top policy priority, nuclear power appears positioned to play

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:42:03 +0000

Jeff Currie: Illusion of Oil Abundance Is Gone

By Alex Kimani - Jul 17, 2026

Carlyle Group Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Currie, has declared that the global oil market's "illusion of abundance" has vanished, warning that the market has rapidly transitioned from a standard supply deficit into a structural energy shortage. According to the former head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, the real signal of a market deficit comes from refined product markets, where crack spreads have skyrocketed to an unprecedented $70 a barrel--a historic level wherein the processing spread nearly equals the price of the crude itself.

Currie says the perception of an oil glut was temporarily created by large inventory drawdowns from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of 32 IEA members, including the release of 172 million barrels of crude from the U.S. SPR. The fragile supply balance has been further exacerbated by various systemic bottlenecks, with the lack of sufficient buffers to absorb the supply shocks putting oil markets in a precarious position. Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain highly volatile, with recent U.S. naval actions and renewed retaliatory strikes by Iran causing crossings to plummet again after a brief recovery. Meanwhile, damage to many of Russia's refineries has severely tightened global fuel supplies, cutting Russian crude processing to its lowest level since 2005 and wiping over 1.4 million barrels per day of refinery capacity from the markets. This has forced Russia to ban exports of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, driving up global diesel margins and leaving importers scrambling for alternative supplies.

The IEA has warned that global oil inventories are on track to plunge to historical lows due to an unprecedented supply shock ahead of the Northern Hemisphere’s peak summer driving and flying season. Global observed inventories crashed by over 250 million barrels between March and May, drawing down at an average rate of 3.8 million bpd since the start of the Middle East conflict. OECD government inventories have been aggressively depleted to cushion the market, dropping to their lowest levels since December 1990, while Strategic Reserve stockpiles in the United States dropped to roughly 316 million barrels following record drawdowns.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:39:51 +0000

Hitachi Energy and Eve Join Forces to Power Electric Air Taxis

By Charles Kennedy - Jul 17, 2026

Hitachi Energy has signed a memorandum of understanding with Eve Air Mobility (NYSE: EVEX) to jointly develop the electrical infrastructure required to support large-scale urban air mobility, as the emerging electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) industry moves toward commercialization.

The collaboration will focus on enabling vertiport operations by addressing key infrastructure challenges, including grid connectivity, power availability, and high-power charging systems for electric aircraft. Hitachi Energy will contribute its Grid-eMotion charging platform and expertise in grid integration and power electronics, while Eve will provide its eVTOL aircraft and urban air mobility ecosystem expertise.

The companies also plan to evaluate the reuse of retired aircraft batteries as stationary energy storage systems, a move aimed at improving the sustainability and efficiency of urban air mobility infrastructure. The agreement further includes joint business planning and customer engagement efforts intended to accelerate deployment of global eVTOL charging networks.

The partnership comes as the urban air mobility sector works to overcome one of its biggest hurdles: ensuring that vertiports can reliably support frequent, high-power charging while integrating new electricity demand into existing grids.

Eve Air Mobility, which is backed by Brazilian aerospace manufacturer Embraer, expects to certify its electric aircraft and begin commercial operations in 2028. The company says it has accumulated letters of intent for roughly 2,700 eVTOL aircraft, reflecting growing interest from airlines, helicopter operators and mobility providers.

The agreement also aligns with Hitachi Energy's broader investment strategy. The company has committed more than $9 billion to expand research and development, manufacturing capacity, engineering resources and strategic partnerships aimed at supporting electrification and grid modernization worldwide.

By combining aviation technology with power infrastructure expertise, the companies aim to establish a scalable foundation for the future deployment of electric urban air mobility services.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:36:36 +0000

EU Sets Target To Double Electrification Rate, Cut Oil & Gas Use

By Alex Kimani - Jul 16, 2026

The European Union has unveiled the Electrification Action Plan, aiming for electricity to account for 46% of total energy consumption within the bloc by 2040, effectively doubling the current rate. Spearheaded by the European Commission, the aggressive policy shift is a direct economic and security response to the energy fallout amid the Middle East conflict. Currently, ~23% of the EU's final energy consumption is powered by electricity, a level that has plateaued for a decade.

In effect, Europe now considers electrification no longer purely a climate initiative but rather a matter of state sovereignty and national security. The region remains highly exposed to global market turbulence, importing over 80% of its natural gas and over 90% of its oil. The EU estimates that reaching the 46% target could slash its fossil fuel import bills by up to €260 billion annually by 2040. However, this aggressive shift in the energy mix also forms a core pillar of the EU's long-term decarbonization strategies. The shift will encompass transitioning sectors such as transportation and domestic heating to renewable-powered electric grids and heat pumps to avoid paying volatile market prices for imported oil and natural gas. Electrification is also expected to yield inherent efficiency gains: to wit, electric motors and heat pumps are fundamentally more efficient than traditional combustion engines and fossil fuel boilers.

However, the electrification drive is expected to come with its own set of challenges. To meet this 46% electrification target, the EU is likely to face several systemic challenges, including high consumer electricity-to-gas price ratios as well as resistance from member states opposing new carbon pricing levies. The electricity-to-gas price ratio compares the cost of one unit of electricity to one unit of gas per kWh. In the EU, high consumer electricity-to-gas price ratios act as the biggest barrier to electrification. The EU electricity-to-gas price ratio currently exceeds 3.0x, above the bloc’s targets of 2.5 for households and 2.0 for industry largely due to non-energy charges, levies, social tariffs and legacy subsidies.

Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:33:34 +0000

Japan's LNG Giant Weighs U.S. IPO to Accelerate Global Expansion

By Charles Kennedy - Jul 17, 2026

JERA, the biggest Japanese LNG importer and largest power producer, is studying a potential listing in the United States as part of a plan to boost its international footprint, Reuters reported on Friday, quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.

The unlisted JERA has launched a feasibility study to assess potential investor demand and the U.S. market conditions and regulatory requirements, according to two of Reuters’ sources.

No plan for a U.S. listing has been finalized yet, and no decisions have been taken at JERA as the feasibility study is at an early stage, Reuters’ sources said.

While JERA has always viewed the Tokyo Stock Exchange as a primary listing venue in the event of an initial public offering, it is now considering the global New York equity markets as a potential springboard toward increasing its international operations.

Early this month, JERA took a step toward boosting its international presence by creating a wholly owned subsidiary to develop and manage its LNG, upstream, low-carbon fuels, and shipping businesses. The new company, JERA Global Energy Solutions (JERA GES), will be the Japanese utility giant’s response to increasingly volatile and complex energy markets.

JERA GES will be a vertically integrated LNG company that can quickly respond to the market needs while maintaining security of supply for Japan as its highest priority, the company said.

JERA GES, which will be headquartered in Singapore, will focus on “developing a stable and diversified long-term LNG portfolio that balances supply sources with market opportunities, while advancing lower-carbon fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen,” JERA said.

The move reflects growing efforts by major LNG buyers to separate long-term supply management from commodity trading as markets become more volatile and global demand shifts. JERA is one of the world's largest LNG purchasers and produces roughly one-third of Japan's electricity. Establishing a dedicated Singapore-based LNG platform also reinforces the city-state's role as a global LNG trading and commercial hub.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:09:10 +0000

U.K. nationalizes Chinese-owned British Steel to protect nation’s steelmaking capacity

Published: July 16, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:12:56 +0000

UK by-election: Nigel Farage faces 'record' number of rivals

By Harry Bligh

Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS

A fresh by-election has been called in the UK constituency of Clacton, after Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, resigned his seat to seek re-election. Farage had won the seat in 2024, securing 46% of the vote share.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, is set to face a "record" number of opponents in a by-election for the coastal constituency of Clacton in August.

A total of 34 candidates will contest the seat, thought to be the highest number recorded in any UK parliamentary election, according to Tendring District Council, the local authority administering the vote.

The previous record for a by-election is believed to have been set in 2008, when 26 candidates contested the Haltemprice and Howden seat after Conservative MP David Davis stepped down, also to seek re-election.

Farage won Clacton in the UK general election in 2024, but he resigned as an MP earlier this month amid mounting media scrutiny and a parliamentary investigation over an undeclared gift of £5 million (€5.88 million).

Announcing his resignation, Farage, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, said he had "decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions," calling it "a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment".

The country's mainstream parties are not taking part in next month's by-election, after Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party all declined to field candidates, dismissing Farage's move as a stunt.

The Labour Party accused Farage of "desperately trying to change the subject," while the leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, accused him of "running away from scrutiny".

The cost of this by-election to the taxpayer could be more than £275,000 (€323,345), according to an estimate reported by The Independent.

Reform UK has offered to cover the cost of holding the vote, however, the UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that would be illegal, as election costs must be met from public funds “to maintain the independence and impartiality of the electoral process”.

Of the candidates taking part, 20 are independent, meaning they don't belong to a political party. Many others are novelty candidates, including three members of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

Perhaps the most well-known is Count Binface, who wears a bin-shaped helmet and a black cape.

Other rivals include the actor and right-wing political activist, Laurence Fox, who is standing for The Reclaim Party, of which he is the founded and is leader.

Find the full list of candidates for the 2026 Clacton by-election here.

At the 2024 general election, Farage and the Reform UK party won the constituency with a vote share of 46.2%.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:10:12 +0000

Mount Olympus seeks place on UNESCO World Heritage List

By Foteini Doulgkeri

Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS

UNESCO’s final decision is keenly awaited, as the inscription of Mount Olympus on the World Heritage List would mark major international recognition for a place where mythology, history and unique nature converge.

The mythical realm of the gods of ancient Greece is just one step away from historic international recognition. Mount Olympus’s nomination for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a mixed site, of both natural and cultural value, is expected to be examined at this year’s session of the World Heritage Committee, which will take place from 19 to 29 July in Seoul.

Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest mountain, with its summit at 2,918 metres, is not only a unique natural landscape. For centuries it has stood at the heart of Greek mythology, as tradition holds it was the home of Zeus and the twelve gods of the ancient world. At the same time, it shelters a rich ecosystem, rare species of flora and fauna, as well as important monuments that link the area to history and culture.

Greece submitted the nomination for the inclusion of the wider mountainous mass of Mount Olympus on UNESCO’s list back in 2014. However, international evaluators from IUCN and ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory bodies, requested additional information in order to strengthen the dossier.

According to their observations, further evidence is needed to substantiate the international significance of the area’s geological features, biodiversity and ecological processes. At the same time, they have called for the mountain’s cultural value to be clarified even more, with a proposal to add the archaeological site of Dion, at the foot of Mount Olympus, to the nomination.

US Pacific Northwest Earthquake Experts Say More Coordination, Investment Needed To Prepare For ‘Big One’

July 19, 2026
Oregon Capital Chronicle
By Alex Baumhardt

Key Takeaways:

Oregon is making targeted progress on earthquake resilience, including retrofits to the state Capitol, Portland International Airport, and some critical infrastructure, but experts say far more is needed before the anticipated Cascadia Subduction Zone quake (magnitude 7.4+).

Key vulnerabilities remain, including coastal U.S. Route 101, aging bridges, power grid infrastructure, and water supply corridors; a major concern is that many state-owned buildings and essential lifelines would not survive or be usable post-quake.

Experts urge urgent policy actions, such as accelerated retrofits, microgrids/battery storage for coastal areas, better disaster workforce planning, and coordinated regional investment to ensure recovery corridors and infrastructure remain functional after the event.

(Oregon Capital Chronicle) — If the “Big One” — the anticipated massive Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake — hit today, Oregonians west of the Cascades would be luckiest to find themselves at the recently-retrofitted state Capitol in Salem or on the roof of the new terminal at the Portland International Airport.

The comment from Tom Wharton, an engineer at the Port of Portland, drew laughs from an audience Thursday at the 13th annual National Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Portland, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. Jonna Papaefthimiou, state resilience officer in Gov. Tina Kotek’s office, said few of the 4,000 buildings the state owns would survive. Just five would likely remain standing and be immediately usable in the weeks and months after, she said.

The Port of Portland and the governor’s office are among the members of the region-wide multi-agency Cascadia Lifelines Program housed at Oregon State University, operating as a think tank for stakeholders who meet twice annually to discuss preparation for what seismologists project will be a 7.4 or greater magnitude earthquake in the Northwest in the next 50 years.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone quake occurs off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California every 500 years and was last recorded in 1700. It could cause Northwest coastlines to lower and retreat, spur widespread flooding and landslides and displace millions of people.

The experts discussed progress: Renovations at the Portland airport and state Capitol that made the buildings more likely to withstand earthquakes, a plan to ensure Washington County residents have access to water sourced from beyond Portland’s system and Kotek’s 2025 executive order mandating large state-owned buildings be retrofitted during the next 35 years and new ones be built to a worst-case-scenario earthquake code.

But the experts also discussed policies that they say should be enacted urgently.

If coastal U.S. Route 101 isn’t retrofitted before the Big One hits and shuts down for any extended period following the quake, “then you’ve lost those coastal communities, and you’re not going to get those back,” said Mike Olsen, an Oregon State University civil engineering professor and the director of the Cascadia Lifelines Program.

The highway is also already under frequent threats of coastal landslides and flooding.

“We don’t need to wait for the earthquake to cause a lot of damage to it. It’s already under a lot of pressure,” he said.
Race to retrofit

In coastal areas that will be most heavily impacted, and that are heavily reliant on grid power from the Bonneville Power Administration, policies that promote community microgrids and battery storage will be key to post-quake recovery, said Leon Kempner, a BPA engineer.

BPA controls most of the Northwest electricity distribution grid. In some coastal areas, such as Lincoln City, it is the source of nearly all power.

Kempner said the agency is racing to retrofit the grid to withstand earthquakes, but it didn’t start implementing seismic code into projects until the 1980s, and it lacks resources to move as quickly as needed.

He also suggested that the Oregon and Washington state legislatures should require BPA and all regional utilities to regularly report to state officials on what they are doing to prepare for the Big One to increase awareness, transparency about planning gaps and potential for collaboration.

Wharton, who explained that much of the state would rely on the airport and the port’s four Willamette and Columbia river terminals to receive recovery aid, said the Port of Portland needs nearly $500 million to upgrade a runway that can survive the quake and handle large Federal Emergency Management Agency aircraft, and other aircraft, landing for support or evacuation.

Port officials will meet with Kotek’s office in the next few weeks to discuss some potential budget requests, he and Papaefthimiou said. Some funding could also come from requesting an advance on annual maintenance dollars from the Federal Aviation Administration or grants from FEMA, “as long as FEMA still exists,” Wharton said.

A recent study by the National Institute of Building Sciences found that the, for now, roughly $450 million investment would have a net $7 billion savings benefit for the state as it tries to recover and rebuild after the quake, he said. But none of that matters if roads and bridges are unusable or nonexistent.
Critical corridors

The Oregon Department of Transportation has identified $40 million worth of bridge deficiencies that, if left unaddressed, leave them vulnerable to the quake, said Yumei Wang, a civil engineering and infrastructure resilience and risk expert from Portland State University.

Olsen and other experts also called for more investment in preparing a disaster response workforce for the state and the region, which would require months of emergency attention and years of rebuilding. Everyone agreed that municipal governments, state leaders, and all regional infrastructure stakeholders need to be more regularly talking and planning together, now.

Mike Britch, an engineering and construction manager at Tualatin Valley Water District, is overseeing a $1.6 billion water infrastructure project to shift the half of Tualatin that relies on water from the Portland Water Bureau to water sourced from the Joint Water Commission that also supplies water to the cities of Hillsboro, Forest Grove and Beaverton.

Part of the project involved building a 2,000 foot “micro tunnel” under the Tualatin River to transport drinking water. Above it, the Roy Rogers Road bridge over the river would not survive the Big One, Britch said, leaving people south of the bridge stranded and unable to get to any area hospitals.

“If I could create a policy and make people do things, I would say I want the state to identify some of these really critical corridors,” he said. “We need some sort of policy to address that.”

About Oregon Capital Chronicle
The Oregon Capital Chronicle, founded in 2021, is a professional, nonprofit news organization. We focus on deep and useful reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy. Staffed by experienced journalists, the Capital Chronicle helps readers understand how those in government are using — or abusing — their power, what’s happening to taxpayer dollars, and how citizens can stake a bigger role in big decisions.
View all posts by Oregon Capital Chronicle →

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:54:14 +0000

Billions in US-funded rare earths flowing to Asian markets: report

Staff Writer | July 9, 2026 |

Cargo ship vessel leaving the port of Miami. (Stock image by Be Free.)

US-backed rare earths producers are selling much of their output to Japan and South Korea because American magnet manufacturing has yet to catch up with Washington’s drive to build a domestic critical minerals supply chain.

A report from Financial Times shows that rare earth products from MP Materials (NYSE: MP), Energy Fuels (NYSE American: UUUU; TSX: EFR) and Phoenix Tailings, companies that have collectively secured billions of dollars in US government support, are being shipped to Asian customers where magnet manufacturing remains far more established than in the US

China has tightened exports of rare earths and other critical minerals, prompting Washington and its allies to accelerate efforts to secure alternative supply chains for materials used in everything from defence systems to electric vehicles.

“Unless the [US defence] primes move quickly, I will sell out,” Phoenix Tailings CEO Nick Myers told FT. “Other companies are paying top dollar faster.” He said the company’s customers are “primarily in Korea and Japan,” where demand has surged following China’s export restrictions.

The sales underscore the challenge facing the Trump administration’s push to build an integrated domestic rare earths industry. While the US is rapidly expanding mining and processing capacity, downstream magnet manufacturing remains limited, leaving producers dependent on overseas buyers until American demand develops.

Building capacity

MP Materials, the largest US rare earth producer, said sales of its neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide and metal were primarily made through Sumitomo Corp. for distribution to Japanese customers, according to its latest quarterly results.

The company, owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California, has stopped selling mined rare earths to China’s Shenghe Resources under its agreement with the US government. It expects to begin shipping finished magnets to General Motors later this year under previously announced supply agreements with GM and Apple.

Energy Fuels, which received conditional US government funding worth $725 million last month, also expects to export material to Asia in the near term.

The company has said it plans to ship rare earth oxides to South Korea while advancing its acquisition of Australian Strategic Materials, whose South Korean facility produces rare earth metals.

Energy Fuels also agreed in June to acquire German magnet maker Vacuumschmelze in a $1.9 billion deal that is expected to increase shipments to the company’s US operations.

China dominates global NdFeB magnet production, accounting for about 90% of output, according to US government estimates. Japan is the largest producer outside China, while South Korea, the US and Europe have smaller or emerging production bases.

Phoenix Tailings, which secured conditional $500 million in government support in June, said the funding will help expand production of rare earth metals and oxides.

MP Materials, meanwhile, continues to benefit from a federal pricing agreement that guarantees minimum prices for certain products while the broader US rare earths supply chain continues to take shape.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:51:45 +0000

Fortescue’s Super Special Fines iron ore stocks at China ports tumble to four-month low

Reuters | July 17, 2026 |

Stock image.

Stocks of Fortescue’s Super Special Fines, a type of lower-grade iron ore, held at Chinese ports dropped 16.5% to a four-month low in the week to July 14, traders said, as steelmakers rushed to take delivery of cargoes before restrictions by Beijing kicked in.

China Mineral Resources Group (CMRG), the state iron ore buyer, notified domestic steel mills in early July that from July 15 they must not take delivery of Super Special Fines held at ports.

It later widened the restrictions to new purchases of Fortescue’s Super Special Fines cargoes, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Inventory of Super Special Fines at some major Chinese ports slumped by nearly 17% week-on-week to 6.01 million metric tons as of July 14, the lowest since mid-March, said three traders.

That represents the steepest weekly fall in nearly nine months, according to one of the traders, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

CMRG is locked in talks with Fortescue on a new supply contract.

The restriction on portside cargoes escalates CMRG’s campaign to assert control over the giant iron ore market, following a months-long standoff with BHP that ended in April.

Fewer deliveries of Super Special Fines cargoes at Chinese ports partly due to a typhoon in China also contributed to the sharp inventory drawdown, an industry analyst said.

(Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:50:05 +0000

ETM battles Greenland over rare earth ‘expropriation’

Staff Writer | July 17, 2026 |

Managing director Daniel Mamadou. (Image: MINING.COM.)

Energy Transition Minerals (ASX: ETM) says Greenland has effectively expropriated one of the world’s largest rare earth deposits outside China by blocking development of the Kvanefjeld project and refusing to renew the exploration licence underpinning it.

The Australian-listed company says it has invested about $150 million in Kvanefjeld through subsidiary Greenland Minerals since 2013, advancing the project through resource definition, environmental studies and public consultation before applying for a mining licence in late 2020.

Months later, Greenland’s new coalition government passed Act 20, banning projects with uranium concentrations above 100 parts per million (0.01%), halting Kvanefjeld’s application.

Managing director Daniel Mamadou argues the legislation was designed specifically to stop the project after the government campaigned on opposing its development.

“We’ve got a Greenlandic government that states that it is open for business and that it wants to do more mining projects,” Mamadou said this week on The Northern Miner Podcast. “And yet we have what is the most advanced shovel-ready project in Greenland in rare earth, in critical minerals, that is essentially stopped.”

‘Pack up and go’

The dispute has since widened beyond the mining application. Mamadou said Greenland had routinely renewed the company’s exploration licence every three years, including once after Act 20 became law, when officials maintained the legislation applied only to mining, not exploration.

The current government has since reversed that position, refusing to renew the permit on grounds the project can never comply with the uranium threshold. ETM argues the decision ignores exploration results from 2025 identifying rare earth mineralization with uranium levels well below the legal limit across largely unexplored parts of the licence area, while also rejecting proposals to separate uranium from the rare earth concentrate and permanently return it underground.

At the centre of the legal battle is whether Act 20 applies retroactively to Kvanefjeld and, if so, whether doing so amounts to expropriation. Mamadou said the legislation’s explanatory notes allow the government to waive the law where applying it would constitute expropriation, yet Greenland has avoided answering that question despite more than three years of arbitration and court proceedings. ETM says its objective is not financial compensation but reinstatement of its mining licence application.

Strategic stakes

Kvanefjeld hosts neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, rare earth elements essential for permanent magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and defence technologies. ETM has previously estimated the project could supply as much as 15% of global rare earth production, potentially providing Europe with a significant non-Chinese source of critical minerals as Western governments seek to diversify supply chains.

Greenland’s government has consistently maintained the project lacks community support. Foreign Minister Múte Egede has said residents do not want the mine near Narsaq, reflecting longstanding concerns about uranium and environmental impacts.

Mamadou disputes that characterization, pointing to support from some local labour leaders and opposition politicians while acknowledging the company lost ground in public engagement during the covid-19 pandemic as criticism of the project intensified.

While the Greenland dispute continues through the courts, ETM has broadened its strategy by acquiring the Penouta brownfield project in Spain, which it aims to restart as Europe’s only producing tantalum mine. The company has also assembled an advisory board including former foreign ministers from Denmark and Australia as it continues pursuing Kvanefjeld, which Mamadou still views as ETM’s defining asset.

“Our case comes down to one simple question,” Mamadou said. “Are you expropriating us? Yes or no?”

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:46:40 +0000

Canada’s Churchill Port to Export Grain for the First Time in Six Years

Located in the Far North, the Port of Churchill looks to grow as an export center (AGG)

Published Jul 16, 2026 5:36 PM by The Maritime Executive

Efforts to revitalize and expand Canada’s Port of Churchill, located in Manitoba in the reaches of the Arctic, are building momentum as shipments of prairie grain are again starting to move toward the port. For the first time since 2020, Churchill will serve as an export port for Canada’s grain crop as the owners of the port, Arctic Gateway Group, work to expand its operations.

The federal government of Canada and the province of Manitoba are supporting the efforts to expand the operations at Churchill. The Globe and Mail newspaper reports the governments have provided C$262.5 million (US$187 million) to support the efforts, including for planning, design, and upgrades to the port and the Hudson Bay Railway that moves cargo to the port in the Far North.

Arctic Gateway Group reports loading will begin on Friday, July 17, to bring grain from Manitoba on the Hudson Bay Railway to Churchill. It reports that multiple export vessels will ship the grain later in the summer to global markets.

Grain exports at the port had plummeted since 2021, when the Canadian Wheat Board ceased operations. Currently, the port exports small volumes of critical minerals, reports the Globe and Mail, and it is expected to also start potash exports from a small mine in Manitoba. In addition, Churchill handles cargo such as building supplies and hardware coming in for the communities and industry in the Nunavut territory, operated by the Inuit people.

Port of Churchill supports supply ships that transport material to the indigenous communities in the Far North (AGG)

The first supply ship of the 2026 season for the Far North, Qamutik (12,760 dwt), departed Churchill on July 12. Company officials highlight that the ship, operated by Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping (NEAS), arrived on July 9, and they had been working hard to move materials on the railway. It departed, transporting a wide range of construction equipment, industrial supplies, trucks, and other goods.

Critics of the expansion efforts and the government financial support argue that the shipping season is too short to make Churchill a meaningful contributor to Canada’s exports. They also say that rail and insurance costs are very high, and the port lacks sufficient storage capacity.

Arctic Gateway Group, which is owned by the indigenous and northern communities, operates the port as well as the railway and the Churchill Marine Tank Farm. It acquired the railroad in 2018 and has been investing to upgrade its operations and capacity.

“It’s a strong signal of the progress made to restore and rebuild this corridor, and of the opportunity ahead as we continue growing the business with a diversified mix of exports. In addition to grain, we will also this year export critical minerals and potash, as well as industrial goods, supplies and equipment to Nunavut - representing the most diversified mix of annual exports in the Port of Churchill’s history,” said Mike Spence, Chair of the Arctic Gateway Group and Mayor of Churchill.

The port is also promoted as a vital link for businesses in Saskatchewan. The supporters cite the growing potential of Arctic shipping, saying Churchill can provide a vital export link.

Company officials are promoting the restoration of grain exports as a “strong foundation” to continue to grow and rebuild long-term traffic through the corridor.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:46:08 +0000

Canada’s first diamond mine to shut down

Amanda Stutt | July 16, 2026 |

The Ekati mine site includes multiple kimberlite pipes some 300 km northeast of Yellowknife. (Credit: Arctic Canadian.)

Canada’s first diamond mine, Ekati in the Northwest Territories, will shut down following a Supreme Court of British Columbia ruling placed it into receivership this week.

Arctic Canadian Diamond Company, a subsidiary of Australian-based Burgundy Diamond Mines operated the historic Ekati diamond mine approximately 300 km northeast of Yellowknife after it bought the asset from Dominion Diamond in 2021.

Low global diamond prices compounded with tariffs, competition from synthetic stones, inflationary pressures, and supply chain bottlenecks were challenges too difficult to navigate.

In December 2025, the government of Canada provided a C$115 million ($81.9 million) loan through the Large Enterprise Tariff Loan facility to help Ekati continue operations.

But Arctic Canadian Diamond Company, incorporated in British Columbia, filed for insolvency protection under the Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) in May.

Northwest Territories gov’t assumes responsibility

The government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) said it will take responsibility for Ekati as the company enters receivership.

The GNWT made an application to appoint a Receiver to assume responsibility of the mine site’s assets and activities and said it will advance funds to the Receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers, using the companies’ reclamation security to fund the reclamation and closure of the site.

The Receiver, GNWT said, is on-site at Ekati and is overseeing activities to ensure site stability, safety and environmental protection.

“The GNWT will continue to uphold its responsibilities to protect the land, water and public interest.” Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jay Macdonald said in a press release.

“Environmental and regulatory obligations remain in place, and we will continue to work through the appropriate legal and regulatory processes to ensure those obligations are managed.”

Ekati’s impending shutdown follows the closure of the nearby Diavik diamond mine in March, which was operated by Rio Tinto.

Canadia’s only other diamond mine, Gahcho Kué, owned by De Beers, and Mountain Province, is expected to close by 2028. Mountain Province plans to voluntarily delist its shares from the Toronto Stock Exchange, signaling possible financial troubles, the CBC reported Thursday.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:45:49 +0000

BC, Simpcw First Nation sign consent agreement for Trekor Metals’ Yellowhead copper project

Staff Writer | July 17, 2026 |

The Yellowhead Project has potential to be one of the most significant copper mines in North America. Credit: Taseko Mines

The Province of British Columbia and the Simpcw First Nation have entered into a consent-based agreement for the environmental assessment and review of Trekor Metals’ Yellowhead copper project in Simpcwul’ecw (Simpcw) Territory.

The agreement was signed by Simpcw Ku̓kwpi7 (Chief) George Lampreau; Tamara Davidson, Minister of Environment and Parks; Spencer Chandra Herbert, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation; and Jagrup Brar, Minister of Mining and Critical Minerals.

Last week, Trekor Metals (TSX: TKO; NYSE American: TGB) said a Detailed Project Description for the Yellowhead project was submitted to the BC Environmental Assessment Office, providing more information about the proposed project, incorporating additional technical work and community feedback received during the early engagement Phase of the EA process.

The company also released an economic impact study evaluating the potential impact of the construction and operation phases of the Yellowhead project.

The company envisions the Yellowhead as a 90,000-tonne-per-day open pit mine that would run for 25 years, producing 178 million lb. of copper annually at cash costs of $1.90 per lb. Over the first five years, average production could reach 206 million lb. at $1.62 per pound.

Last year, the company released a technical report that more than doubled the value of the project. CEO Stuart McDonald said at the time it “establishes Yellowhead as a world-class copper project in a tier one jurisdiction,” with potential to become one of the largest on the continent.

“This marks the first time Simpcw has applied our consent process to a major project, and it is an important milestone for our Nation,” Simpcw Chief Lampreau said in a statement.

“This agreement advances the exercise of Simpcw’s governance and decision-making responsibilities, while strengthening our relationships with the Province and project proponents,” Lampreau said. “This agreement is not just about one project — it is about establishing how decisions on new mining projects will be made in our territory going forward, in a way that respects Simpcw’s governance, our people and our responsibilities to future generations.”

“Since 2024, Trekor has been advancing the Yellowhead project through the Simpcw process, an Indigenous-led, consent-based decision-making model, and in 2025 initiated the B.C. environmental assessment process,” McDonald said in Thursday’s statement. “We believe the agreement announced today can contribute to a more co-ordinated, efficient and transparent assessment process that benefits the Yellowhead project and all people in British Columbia.”

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:43:54 +0000

Panama bids for full ownership of strategic oil terminal

Panama Canal. Stock image.

Panama’s government will buy the remaining 41% private stake in Petroterminal de Panama, the economy and finance ministry said on Friday, handing ‌the state full ownership of a strategic energy and logistics asset in a move aimed at tightening national control over critical infrastructure.

The acquisition will give Panama 100% ownership of Petroterminal, which the government described as a key platform for the ⁠country’s logistics and energy development and an asset with broader strategic importance.

The government said the deal would be financed through the company’s own cash flow and was a contractual purchase under an existing legal right dating back to 1977, rather than an expropriation. Officials said the option was established in the company’s association contract and accepted by all shareholders.

The purchase price will be calculated ‌using ⁠a pre-agreed formula based on Petroterminal’s audited financial statements, the ministry said. It added that the transaction would not require funding from the national treasury, would not add to public debt and would not ⁠affect spending on public works, social programs or other state investments.

President Jose Raul Mulino’s administration said full ownership would allow Panama to capture more ⁠of the value generated by the company, support investment in the energy, logistics and maritime sectors and reinforce sovereignty over a ⁠strategic national asset.

Economy and Finance Minister Felipe Chapman said the company would be managed under international standards of efficiency, transparency and corporate governance.

(Reporting by Elida Moreno; Editing by Natalia Siniawski)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:42:47 +0000

BAN DEEP SEA MINING

US proposes lease of seabed mining blocks off American Samoa coast

Reuters | July 17, 2026 |

American Samoa. Stock image.

The U.S. Interior Department has proposed a lease of more than 31 million acres off the coast of American Samoa for seabed mining, part of President Donald Trump’s broader push to boost U.S. critical minerals production.

The waters around the Pacific Ocean territory are estimated to contain large amounts of potato-shaped rocks known as polymetallic nodules filled with the building blocks for electric vehicles, weaponry and electronics.

The department’s Marine Mineral Administration (MMA) said on Thursday it aims to lease two blocks, one of 16.3 million acres and the other 15.1 million acres, in federal waters off the eastern coast of Tau, one of the territory’s seven islands.

Last year, Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting the industry to offset China’s control of minerals markets.

The MMA is proposing the auction for November 19 at BOEM’s offices in Camarillo, California. It will be closed to the public but livestreamed on MMA’s website. Minimum bids are $3 million.

Royalty rates would be 2% of the value of mineral production for the first five years and 5% thereafter.

Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula, American Samoa’s governor and an opponent of deep-sea mining, will have 60 days to respond to the proposed lease. The MMA will need to give a final notice of the lease sale in October.

Supporters of deep-sea mining say it would lessen the need for mining operations on land, which are often unpopular with host communities. Detractors say more research is needed to determine how the practice could affect ecosystems.

Matt Giacona, acting MMA director, said the proposed lease “is an important step toward building a secure domestic critical minerals supply chain.”

Oceana, a marine conservation organization, said the proposed lease “is yet another instance of this administration not only disregarding long-term damage to the environment but ignoring both science and the will of the people.”

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Editing by David Gregorio)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:13:14 +0000

Driving the speed limit cuts millions in fuel costs for less than a minute of your time

New study finds an immediate, cost-effective solution by analyzing 120 million real-world trips

University of Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/16/2026) - A nationwide study by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities reveals that adherence to posted speed limits could dramatically curb U.S. fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, saving Americans billions of dollars annually while adding less than a minute to the average daily commute.

The paper was recently published in Communications Sustainability, a peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers analyzed over 120 million real-world vehicle trips across the United States, showing that if drivers complied with posted speed limits, it could save an average of $22 million, 6.7 million gallons of fuel and 57,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide every single day for light-duty engine-powered vehicles — which account for 14.6% of total energy consumption in the country.

“We already understand the physics of how speed affects fuel consumption, but quantifying the exact magnitude of those savings at a national scale gives us a clearer picture of the actual impact,” said Bharat Jayaprakash, Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota and lead author on the paper.

Previous transportation research relied on localized, small-scale samples or general assumptions about fuel economy based on laboratory tests. This project marks a major milestone in transportation science. With volatile fuel prices and uncertainty about the expansion of electric vehicles in the marketplace, the study shows that changing driver behavior offers an immediate, cost-effective tool for reducing fuel use and emissions.

The researchers were able to review a large amount of data including driving data on U.S. road networks, speed limits and elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey. They then calibrated multiple, vehicle specific energy-consumption models using advanced vehicle dynamics software developed by the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“While internal combustion engine-powered vehicles have become significantly more efficient in the past decades, they have also become much more powerful. Driving fast is easier than ever,” said William Northrop, University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor and corresponding author on the paper. “Our study examines an obvious yet difficult-to-implement intervention for major fuel savings that can be achieved without replacing our cars: driving slower.”

The researchers noted that more work is needed to fully understand the impact of driving on fuel and emissions.

“Key remaining challenges of our research are to expand our framework to more diverse roadways and understand the impacts of aggressive accelerations on fuel use and emissions,” added Northrop. “Exploring both speed and acceleration reductions will give us an even more complete picture of real-world fuel savings potential."

Future phases of the project will utilize an instrumented electric vehicle equipped with multi-sensor perception systems to capture micro-scale driving behavior in real time. Sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Local Road Research Board, current research focuses on collecting high-fidelity, real-world drive cycles to precisely model how micro-scale driving habits impact energy consumption and emissions at the fleet level.

The research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation.

Read the entire paper, entitled “Speeding incurs substantial environmental and economic costs nationwide for negligible travel time savings, on the Nature website.

Journal

Communications Sustainability

DOI

10.1038/s44458-026-00100-3

Article Title

Speeding incurs substantial environmental and economic costs nationwide for negligible travel time savings

Article Publication Date

16-Jul-2026