Sweden is carving out a distinct lane within Europe’s post-2022 rearmament drive: building air defense not only to protect military units, but to harden society itself against the kinds of missile and drone campaigns that have defined Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The government said it will allocate 15 billion Swedish crowns (about $1.6 billion) for air-defense acquisitions focused primarily on shielding civilians and civilian infrastructure, with Defense Minister Pål Jonson explicitly citing Ukraine as the clearest demonstration that modern air defense must be robust, layered, and resilient under sustained attack.

The European Commission has moved to formalize a path for China-based electric vehicle exporters to swap the EU’s anti-subsidy duties for binding minimum-price commitments, but the terms Brussels is signaling are far narrower and more enforceable than the broadly applicable “price floor” Beijing has long favored.

In written guidance issued after talks with China’s commerce ministry, the Commission said it is willing to consider undertakings that replace tariffs only if they neutralize the injurious impact of subsidies, deliver an effect equivalent to the duties being waived, are workable in practice, and are structured to reduce the scope for “cross-compensation,” where profits or pricing strategies in one product line offset distortions in another.

Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are being brought into a U.S.-led “economic security” framework that treats the AI era’s physical foundations of chips, advanced manufacturing capacity, critical minerals, and the power-and-data infrastructure behind large-scale computing, as a single, security-relevant supply chain.

Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said that both Gulf states will soon join the initiative, known as Pax Silica, with Qatar expected to sign the declaration on January 12, 2026 and the UAE on January 15, 2026.

Copper’s price surge is doing more than inflating input costs for manufacturers. It is reshaping the mining industry’s strategic map, pushing large producers toward consolidation on the premise that owning producing copper assets is the quickest way to secure exposure to the metal that underpins electrification and the expansion of AI infrastructure.

That logic sits behind renewed talks between Rio Tinto and Glencore about a combination that could create a mining group valued north of $200 billion, and it also helps explain why other miners have been chasing scale in copper-heavy portfolios rather than waiting a decade or more for greenfield projects to reach first production.

Washington is using the finance minister level meeting to inject speed and coordination into what U.S. officials increasingly portray as a strategic-industrial emergency: reducing advanced economies’ dependence on China for the refined inputs that underpin weapons systems, semiconductors, batteries and clean-energy equipment.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is convening a Washington meeting beginning with a Sunday evening dinner and continuing Monday, bringing together the G7, the European Union and a set of invited partners, including Australia, India, South Korea and Mexico, an unusually broad grouping that U.S. officials say represents roughly 60% of global critical minerals demand.

Australia is moving to institutionalize critical minerals security in the same way major economies once treated oil security: not as a series of one-off projects, but as a standing capability that can be activated when markets or geopolitics tighten. On Monday, Canberra said its A$1.2 billion strategic reserve will initially prioritize antimony, gallium and rare earth elements, materials that sit at the intersection of clean energy manufacturing, high-end electronics and advanced defense systems.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers framed the reserve as both an economic buffer against global uncertainty and a tool to strengthen “reliable supply chains” for trading partners, explicitly positioning Australia as a stabilizing supplier for allies that remain heavily exposed to China’s dominance in processing and refining.

Japan has launched a technically ambitious and politically charged experiment in critical-minerals security: a government-backed mission to test whether rare-earth-rich seabed mud can be lifted continuously from roughly 6,000 meters below the surface near Minamitori Island, deep inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

The drilling vessel Chikyu sailed on Monday for a month-long campaign intended to validate the recovery method and quantify what could eventually be a domestic source of rare earths at a moment when Tokyo sees China’s export-control toolkit tightening around strategically sensitive inputs.

Lithium prices jumped in China at the start of the week because the market interpreted a tax-policy change aimed at battery exporters as an invitation to “pull demand forward” before the incentive disappears. After Beijing said it would phase down, and ultimately eliminate, value-added tax export rebates for battery products, traders immediately priced in a near-term burst of battery exports, higher short-run battery production, and therefore stronger near-term demand for lithium inputs.

On Monday, the most-active lithium carbonate futures contract in Guangzhou hit its daily limit and settled up 9% at 156,060 yuan a ton, the strongest level since November 2023.