President Donald Trump on Tuesday directed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to begin a national security probe of tariffs on critical U.S. imports, including rare earths and other vital substances.
China has restricted the export of several crucial rare earth minerals to the United States in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff increases.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss a minerals deal and Ukraine war funding.
President Donald Trump said on Monday that he wants Ukraine to trade “rare earths and other things” for continued American military and financial support.
President Trump’s first day executive orders make it clear that the administration plans to unshackle American energy production.
The Chinese government issued record-high mining quotas for rare earth minerals this week, reaching a new high of 270,000 tons that exceeds 2023’s total by 5.88 percent.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC), a human rights advocacy group based in London with an international research team, published a report last week that warned of human rights violations and environmental damage in the supply chain for electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Sweden and Turkey announced large discoveries of rare earth minerals this month. Sweden’s discovery in particular could be a major step toward breaking Chinese dominance in the rare earth industry.
The European Union is completely reliant on foreign imports for 14 “critical” raw materials needed for industry, a study has found.
The U.S. government is reportedly turning to Canadian mining operations in a bid to break China’s stranglehold on vital mineral resources, especially lithium, cobalt, and manganese.
China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday gloated that a waiver from the U.S. government to take delivery on F-35 fighter jets exposed America’s “dependence on Chinese rare-earth products” and demonstrated that China can bring the U.S. military to heel whenever it wishes by choosing to “limit the export of such strategic resources to safeguard its national security.”
China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday warned the United States could “spark World War III” by pushing too hard to decouple from the Chinese minerals industry by developing its own supply.
China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday highlighted soaring rare-earth exports as a bright spot in the sputtering Chinese economy, suggesting the international obsession with “green energy” could be the Communist Party’s path to riches and power in the years ahead.
The Chinese government on Wednesday approved a merger of rare earth companies to form what the state propaganda newspaper Global Times described as a “behemoth” corporation, powerful enough to control the global supply chain for the vital minerals.
In the course of hectoring the United States for its “bungled and embarrassing withdraw from Afghanistan” on Thursday, China’s state-run Global Times admitted Beijing has a rapacious interest in Afghanistan’s vast rare-earths mineral resources, and snarled it was none of America’s business if China makes deals with the Taliban to get what it wants.
China’s state-run Global Times reported Sunday that Chinese rare-earth companies are discovering they can no longer secure their supplies easily from Myanmar, a major Chinese supplier whose civilian government fell to a military coup last month.
President Trump signed an executive order to increase domestic production of critical minerals needed for the economy and national security.
Finally, YouTube has found the flimsy pretext it needed to cancel the controversial Michael Moore-produced eco-documentary which has been infuriating greenies with its anti-renewables message: ‘copyright infringement.’
