🌐⛏️ Volkswagen to invest directly in mines for key battery metals.

"The bottleneck for raw materials is mining capacity - that's why we need to invest in mines directly.”

📎 U.S. News

🇸🇻 His growing soft power abroad is based on a ruthless exercise of hard power at home. Since March last year, Salvadorean police have locked up 62,000 people, 2% of the adult population.

📎 The Economist

🇲🇽 Julián Leyzaola is a former Mexican military officer, police chief and public safety secretary of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

He is credited with “cleaning up Tijuana" during his time as state police chief of Baja California from the drug violence of the early 2000’s, as outlined in the documentary “Mexico’s Bravest Man.”

📎 Ed’s Manifesto

⚡️🇲🇽 Video showing sicarios engaged in a firefight likely in Zacatecas. The battle is possibly between CJNG and MZ/Sinaloa Cartel.

📎 All Source News

⚡️🇲🇽 More footage from last night’s battle between CJNG and Sinaloa Cartel in Teocaltiche, Jalisco.

📎 All Source News

🇮🇳🇷🇺🇺🇦 No country is as well-positioned as India in mediating between Russia and US, and bringing the Ukraine conflict to an end.

“Although India failed to cajole the participants into issuing a G20 joint declaration because of ongoing great power squabbles over the conflict, New Delhi’s crucial role as a future mediator between the US & Russia should not be underestimated.”

📎 ORF

🇦🇫🇵🇰 Afghanistan's new rulers were presumed to be friends of Pakistan, which had covertly protected and supported the group.

However, the rise in terror attacks in Pakistan since then has cast the country’s previous cultivation of the Taliban in a new light.

📎 Nikkei Asia

🇮🇩 Indonesian President urges country to abandon the use of foreign payment networks like Mastercard and Visa.

“Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem.”

📎 Al Mayadeen

🇵🇭 Marcos' investment fund moment?

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is making the case for creating his country's first sovereign wealth fund, which he envisions will foster economic development and help face-lift his family's legacy.

📎 Nikkei Asia

🇦🇲🇮🇷⚡️🇦🇿🇮🇱 If an attack takes place in the south region of Armenia to create a corridor between Azerbaijan and Turkey, Iran vowed it will enter into an armed conflict against Azerbaijan.

Simultaneously, an attack on Azerbaijan by Iran could unleash Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

📎 Caucasus War Report

🇦🇲⚡️🇦🇿 Armenian telegram channels have been sounding the alarm since September. I am convinced that we will see a new war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and/or Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh this year.

Azerbaijan wants to realize the Zangezur corridor and they are running out of patience.

📎 FayTuks

🇮🇶🇺🇸 The Iraq War was a great, historic error. And it should discredit the foreign policy vision that underwrote it. Pursuing it in 2003 was a disaster. Today it would be a catastrophe.

It is essential that we correctly interpret the Iraq War.

🧵 by Elbridge Colby

🇦🇺🇬🇧🇺🇸 "This is a decision informed by some of the most rigorous, disciplined and critically self-aware analysis I have observed in more than three decades in public policy-making"

📎 Lowy Institute

🇻🇳 Vietnam neither endorses nor condemns AUKUS. Hanoi is about as non-committal and non-aligned as possible.

📎 Derek Grossman

🇦🇺🇺🇸 Defending Australian submarine ports against PLA attack is going to be pricey.

📎 Shashank Joshi

🇦🇺⚡️🇨🇳 "Australia is beyond the reach of the DF-26, and to attack it with cruise missiles launched from bombers or submarines, Chinese forces would have to run the gauntlet of the first island chain with these capabilities."

📎 RUSI