🚢 🇪🇬 🌍 "By avoiding the Suez, this will force nations to react, not the least of which, Egypt which will be losing tolls from the canal."

🔶️ All of this goes to the point of showing how global shipping is impacting not just the economics of the world, but also the politics.

🔶️ What political and military decisions are made with regards to the free transit of ships through the region will have lasting impact.

https://www.iss-shipping.com/suez-canal-authority-to-increase-transit-fees-by-5-15-from-2024/

📎 Sal Mercogliano

🇺🇸 Congress approves bill barring any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO

https://thehill.com/homenews/4360407-congress-approves-bill-barring-president-withdrawing-nato/

🔋 ⛏️🚗 Visualizing the World’s Largest Lithium Producers

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-worlds-largest-lithium-producers/

⚡️🇪🇬 Regarding Egypt and the shenanigans occurring at the mouth of the Red Sea.

Comparing the figures regarding the Suez Canal in November and in December, things are not looking too good.

In November of 2023, 2,264 vessels passed through the Suez Canal, while in October, 2,345 passed, that means a decrease of over 81 ships, and in terms of revenue, the revenues in November amounted to 854.7 Million US dollars, while the revenues in October amounted to 880.1 Million US dollars, a decrease of over 3% and 25.4 million US dollars less compared to the previous month.

To the blind man, it is obvious that the losses recorded in December will be much more severe than the decrease noted in November, and that, is bad news, because the Suez Canal is practically a main life artery for the Arab Republic of Egypt, economically speaking, as the 10 billion US dollars or so gained from the Suez Canal is one of the few reliable methods of gaining hard, foreign currency.

Egypt militarily did not involve itself much in the war in Yemen, our only real action was back at 2015, when the Egyptian navy bombarded Yemen after the Houthis ominously stated that they had Anti-Ship missiles and were capable of using them, since then, we have barely involved ourselves in the conflict, and we always kept pushing for peace and reconciliation, as war, contrary to popular belief, is bad for business in this specific case.

@themediterraneanman

☢️ 🇨🇳 🌊 Chinese researchers turn to seawater for nuclear fuel uranium

⬛️ Uranium ions float freely in the world's oceans at concentrations 1,000 times greater than ore deposits on land and serve as fuel for reactors.

🔶️ Researchers at the Northeast Normal University in China have successfully tapped seawater as a source of uranium, a widely used fuel for nuclear reactors. The approach could help fuel the transition to a carbon-free source of energy.

🔶️ Uranium fuel is extracted from its ore in various parts of the world. From here, the metal needs to be enriched to a level where it can used in a nuclear plant. The Nuclear Energy Agency, however, estimates about 4.5 billion tons of uranium floating around in seawater.

🔶️ This is 1,000 times the quantity of uranium estimated to exist in land deposits and serves as an unconstrained source of carbon-free energy if one could tap into this. The dissolved uranium exists in the form of uranyl ions in the seawater, and researchers Rui Zhao and Guangshan Zhu at the Northeast Normal University in China set about the difficult task of extracting them from seawater and developing a material to help them address the challenge.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/seawater-source-of-nuclear-uranium

NEW - China iPhone ban: Many Chinese agencies and government-backed firms across the country have ordered staff to stop bringing iPhones - Bloomberg