MP Materials is stitching together a new rare earths hub in Saudi Arabia, teaming up with Riyadh’s state miner Ma’aden, and strikingly, Washington itself. The plan is to build a refinery inside the kingdom that can take mixed concentrates from Saudi deposits and elsewhere and separate them into high-value oxides across the spectrum of “light” and “heavy” rare earths.

Under the structure announced, Ma’aden will hold a controlling 51% stake, while MP and the U.S. government, already set to become MP’s largest shareholder through a Pentagon investment, will jointly own the remaining 49%. The timing coincides with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Washington visit and signals that energy and security ties are being recast around critical minerals, not just oil.

Europe’s diesel crisis has now produced a number that has no precedent. Refining margins for the fuel hit a record 74 dollars a barrel on Wednesday, with regional stockpiles at their lowest level since 2014. To appreciate how fast this has escalated, the previous record, set only weeks ago, was around 65 dollars, itself an extraordinary figure by any historical standard.

A margin of that size is not a market signal. It is a distress call, and one refinery on India’s Gujarat coast has been the loudest respondent. Reliance Industries loaded between 4 and 5 million barrels of diesel at Jamnagar for European delivery this month, the highest monthly volume in ten months and a return to levels last seen before the American conflict with Iran began.

Canada’s government is set to introduce legislation this month to initiate subsidies for carbon capture and net-zero energy projects as part of a larger plan worth around $20 billion over five years. The move follows warnings from industry lobbies about potential risks to C$50 billion ($36 billion)…