Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

EU and US back trade corridor linking Europe, Middle East, and India

Summary: Over the weekend, leaders from India and the EU announced a new economic corridor meant to link Europe with the Middle East and India using train lines and sea lanes—a project that would initially link India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Israel, and the EU, and which would speed up trade between these regions by up to 40%.

Context: This project, called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment, could help normalize relations between governments in the region—including Israel and the Gulf states—but would also serve as an economic counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is meant to accomplish basically the same thing, connecting nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America using the Chinese economy as a center of gravity and Chinese assets for loans and infrastructure build-out; China has been criticized for their approach, as it’s left a lot of the involved countries with gobs of debt and not much economic benefit, and this project is ostensibly meant to do the same, but without that purported debt-trap diplomacy angle; announcing a project and building-out the requisite infrastructure and international deals are two separate things, though, and those involved with this new plan have said they’ll lay out more complete plans over the next few months, at which point we should have a better idea of timelines, costs, and so on.

—The Guardian

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Biden visits Vietnam to bolster alliance confronting China

Summary: US President Biden has made an official visit to Vietnam as part of a larger effort to build a wall of allies in Asia, and to make economic deals throughout the region that replace or exclude China.

Context: Vietnam has in recent years become a medium-sized manufacturing powerhouse, and there have been all sorts of efforts by Western nations to amplify that, the hope being that manufacturing currently being done in China could move elsewhere in Southeast Asia, to governments that are more willing to play ball with the current international order than China’s leadership seems to be—including that of Vietnam; this visit culminated with the announcement of a new, tight partnership between the US and Vietnam, which puts the US in the same, highest-tier diplomatic category as China and Russia, and some human rights activists are not thrilled about this, as Vietnam’s government is an enthusiastic jailer of activists and journalists.

—The Washington Post

Lithium cache found in US may be world’s largest

Summary: A new study estimates that a volcanic crater on the Nevada-Oregon border in the US may harbor the world’s largest supply of lithium, weighing in at somewhere between 20 and 40 million metric tons.

Context: If accurate, this would rival or far surpass the supply contained in Bolivia’s salt flats, which contains about a fourth of the world’s currently confirmed supply of the metal with about 23 million tons; the lithium in this caldera is reportedly contained in clay rather than brine, and is close to the surface, which would make it relatively cheap and easy to mine, and if these numbers are correct this could dramatically change the balance of global renewable energy manufacturing leverage—though there are environmental concerns with any potential mining project, and this one is contained in land Native American activists consider sacred and environmentalist groups have been trying to preserve, which makes further exploration and the utilization of this lithium anything but a done deal.

—Futurism

Nearly 2,500 people have been confirmed dead following a 6.8-magnitude quake in Morocco, which has devastated a slew of populated regions and destroyed essentially all the buildings in some cities and towns; this was the strongest quake to hit the area in more than 100 years, and it was a shallow quake (located about 11 miles beneath the surface), which is part of why it was so destructive.

—The Washington Post

122 grams

Volume of oxygen created on the surface of Mars using a microwave-sized device called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) located on NASA’s Perseverance rover.

That’s about as much oxygen as a small dog would breathe in 10 hours (this is the measurement all the press releases are using, which I think is great) and the device functions by converting some of the abundant CO2 on Mars into oxygen, demonstrating that this could be done on a larger scale if we were to put humans up there for long periods of time at some point (this small version of MOXIE produced about 12 grams of oxygen per hour, which was twice as much as NASA was hoping for).

—CNN

Trust Click

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