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In a letter to the Prime Minister, shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel and shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick claimed the decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had “no proper basis in international law”. They said the UK’s refusal to explicitly say whether or not the Israeli premier would be detained if he arrived in the country “opens the farcical spectre of your Government trying to sanction the arrest” of an ally to Britain. Criticising the ICC warrant, the shadow ministers said: “It is hard to escape the conclusion this is an activist decision, motivated by politics and not the law.” They argued the court was established to pursue cases in instances where countries do not have robust and independent judiciaries, which could not be said of Israel. “The UK Government’s response to the decision has been nonsensical,” they said. “On Friday, the Home Secretary refused to say whether Mr Netanyahu would be detained if he travelled to the UK. “This opens the farcical spectre of your Government trying to sanction the arrest on UK soil of the leader of an ally of the UK, while you continue a diplomatic charm offensive with the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. “It falls to you to clarify the Government’s position – now. The Government must make clear that it does not support an arrest warrant being issued which has no proper basis in international law.” Downing Street on Friday indicated that Mr Netanyahu could face arrest if he entered the UK, refusing to comment on “hypotheticals” but saying Britain would always follow its “legal obligations”. The International Criminal Court Act 2001 states that a Secretary of State must, on receipt of a request for arrest from the ICC, “transmit the request and the documents accompanying it to an appropriate judicial officer”. Asked whether the UK would comply with requirements under the Act, Sir Keir’s spokesman said: “Yes, the Government would fulfil its obligations under the Act and indeed its legal obligations.” The ICC has issued a warrant for Mr Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza. Number 10 previously said the domestic process linked to ICC arrest warrants has never been used to date by the UK because no-one wanted by the international court had visited the country. It added that Israel remained a “key partner across a range of areas”. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “It is important that we have a dialogue with Israel at all levels to reach the ceasefire that we all want to see, to bring an end to the violence, to protect civilians and ensure the release of hostages.” The ICC also issued a warrant for Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s armed wing, over the October 7 2023 attacks that triggered Israel’s offensive in Gaza. A domestic court process would be required before Mr Netanyahu faced arrest if he set foot in the UK. The ICC said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant were responsible for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts”. The court’s pre-trial chamber also found “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”. The impact of the warrants is likely to be limited since Israel and its major ally, the US, are not members of the ICC.WASHINGTON — Yu Miao smiles as he stands among the 10,000 books crowded on rows of bamboo shelves in his newly reopened bookstore. It’s in Washington’s vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood, far from its last location in Shanghai, where the Chinese government forced him out of business six years ago. “There is no pressure from the authorities here,” said Yu, the owner of JF Books, Washington’s only Chinese bookseller. “I want to live without fear.” Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China, swept up in the ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. The Associated Press found that at least a dozen bookstores in the world’s second-largest economy have been shuttered or targeted for closure in the last few months alone, squeezing the already tight space for press freedom. One bookstore owner was arrested over four months ago. The crackdown has had a chilling effect on China’s publishing industry. Bookstores are common in China, but many are state-owned. Independent bookstores are governed by an intricate set of rules with strict controls now being more aggressively policed, according to bookstore owners. Printing shops and street vendors are also facing more rigorous government inspections by the National Office Against Pornography and Illegal Publication. The office did not respond to interview requests from The Associated Press. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement to AP, said it was not aware of a crackdown on bookstores. Yu isn’t alone in taking his business out of the country. Chinese bookstores have popped up in Japan, France, Netherlands and elsewhere in the U.S. in recent years, as a result of both stricter controls in China and growing Chinese communities abroad. It’s not just the books’ contents that are making Chinese authorities wary. In many communities, bookstores are cultural centers where critical thinking is encouraged, and conversations can veer into politics and other topics not welcomed by the authorities. The bookstore owner who was arrested was Yuan Di, also called Yanyou, the founder of Jiazazhi, an artistic bookstore in Shanghai and Ningbo on China’s eastern coast. He was taken away by police in June, according to Zhou Youlieguo, who closed his own bookstore in Shanghai in September. Yuan’s arrest was also confirmed by two other people who declined to be named for fear of retribution. The charge against Yuan is unclear. An official in Ningbo’s Bureau of Culture, Radio Television and Tourism, which oversees bookstores, declined comment, noting the case is under investigation. The Ningbo police didn’t respond to an interview request. Michael Berry, director of UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies, said a sluggish Chinese economy may be driving the government to exert greater control. “The government might be feeling that this is a time to be more cautious and control this kind of discourse in terms of what people are consuming and reading to try to put a damper on any potential unrest and kind of nip it in the bud,” Berry said. These bookstore owners face dual pressures, Berry added. One is the political clampdown; the other is the global movement, especially among young people, toward digital media and away from print publications. Wang Yingxing sold secondhand books in Ningbo for almost two decades before being ordered to close in August. Local officials informed Wang he lacked a publication business license even though he wasn’t eligible to obtain one as a second-hand seller. Faded outlines marked the spot where a sign for Fatty Wang’s Bookstore once hung. Spray-painted black letters on the bookstore’s window read: “Temporarily closed”. “We’re promoting culture, I’m not doing anything wrong, right? I’m just selling some books and promoting culture,” Wang said, tying a bundle of books together with brown wrapper and white nylon string. “Then why won’t you leave me alone?” Wang added. Half a dozen other people heaved boxes of books into the back of a van. The books, Wang said, were being sold to cafe and bar owners who wanted to burnish little libraries for their patrons. Some would be sent to a warehouse in Anhui. The rest, he said, were to be sent to a recycling station to be pulped and destroyed. Bookstores are not the only target. Central authorities have also cracked down on other places such as printing shops, internet bars, gaming rooms and street vendors. Strict inspections have taken place all over the country, according to Chinese authorities. Authorities in Shanghai inspected printing places and bookstores, looking for “printing, copying or selling illegal publications,” according to a government document. This shows the authorities are not just barring the sale of some publications, but tracing them back to the printing process. They found some printing stores did not “register the copy content as required” and demanded they fix the problem quickly. In Shaoyang, a city in China’s south, authorities said they will be “cracking down on harmful publications in accordance with the law.” The Communist Party has various powers to control which books are available. Any publication without a China Standard Book Number is considered illegal, including self-published books and those imported without special licenses. Books can be banned even after they are published if restrictions are later tightened — often for unclear reasons — or if the writers say something upsetting to the Chinese authorities. Yet despite these restrictions and the crackdown on existing booksellers, more bookstores are opening. Recent figures are unavailable, but a survey by Bookdao, a media company that focuses on the book industry, shows more than twice as many bookstores opened than closed in China in 2020. Liu Suli, who has been running All Sages Books in Beijing for over three decades, said there are many idealists in the industry. “Everyone who reads has a dream of having a bookstore,” Liu said, despite the challenges. In many cases, those dreams are being fulfilled outside China. Yu and other Chinese booksellers around the world stock their shelves with books from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as books published locally. Zhang Jieping, founder of Nowhere, a bookstore in Taiwan and Thailand, said there’s a growing demand for books from migrants who left China after the COVID-19 pandemic. “They don’t just want to speak fluent English or Japanese to fit in, they want cultural autonomy,” Zhang said. “They want more community spaces. Not necessarily a bookstore, but in any format — a gallery, or a restaurant.” Li Yijia is a 22-year-old student who arrived in Washington from Beijing in August. One Sunday morning, she wandered through JF Books where she found titles in Chinese and English. She said a Chinese bookstore feels like “another world in a bubble” which helps her critical thinking by allowing her to read books in both languages. “It also relieves homesickness, like a Chinese restaurant,” Li added. The closure of the bookstores leads the owners to different paths. Some ended up in jail, some went looking for jobs to feed their families. Some started a journey to leave censorship behind. Since he closed his Shanghai bookstore, Zhou, 39, has moved to Los Angeles, but hasn’t decided what his next step will be. He said his fully licensed independent bookstore, which sold art books and self-published works by artists and translators, was fined thousands of dollars and he was interrogated over a dozen times during the past four years. He’s seen colleagues jailed for selling “illegal publications.” All the self-published book artists and editors he worked with asked him to take down their work after warnings by local authorities. Zhou said he could not handle further harassment. He said it was as if he were “smuggling drugs instead of selling books.” The existence of his bookstore, Zhou said, was “a rebellion and a resistance,” which is not there anymore.
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Calin Georgescu, a Romanian hard-right critic of NATO, has unexpectedly climbed into a dead heat with the leftist Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu after the first round of the presidential elections. This surprising result could potentially challenge Romania's firmly pro-Ukraine foreign policy stance. Georgescu, an independent candidate, was initially polling in the single digits prior to Sunday's election. At 62, he was previously affiliated with the Alliance for Uniting Romanians (AUR), a hard-right opposition party that considered him a prime ministerial candidate. However, he left the party in 2022 due to his controversial views, which party officials claimed tarnished their image. Georgescu has openly criticized NATO, referring to its missile defense installations in Romania as a "shame of diplomacy." He has also expressed admiration for controversial historical figures, though he stops short of overt support for Russia. His sudden electoral surge has added a layer of complexity to Romania's political landscape. (With inputs from agencies.)Prosecutor at Lincoln man's sentencing: 'Mr. Thomas is evil'Nasdaq surges above 20,000 after US inflation data matches estimatesSilicon, a component in a range of common consumer products, was identified earlier this year by Canada and last week by the US as a material critical to supply chain security for clean energy transition technologies. The US’ newly amended Critical Mineral Consistency Act modifies the Energy Act of 2020 to expand the definition of critical minerals to include critical materials designated by the Department of Energy, and now includes copper, electrical steel, silicon and silicon carbide. This summer, silicon was named by the Biden administration in an initiative to provide up to $400 million to usher in a new era of semiconductor manufacturing, and on Wednesday, the administration finalized Chips Act incentives , awarding chipmaker GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in grants to support US factories as part of a broader semiconductor push. Silicon metal is critical in semiconductors and photovoltaic cells, and there is electric battery technology emerging with silicon as an anode component. Silicon can hold 10 times as many lithium ions by weight as graphite , but developing the battery technology to scale sustainably has met its share of challenges. As with many other metals critical to clean energy technologies, there is a projected near short term boost in demand for silicon– from 3.27 million tons in 2024 to 4.25 million tons in 2029 – a 5.4% CAGR increase. Ferroglobe (NASDAQ: GSM) produces silicon products for new technologies with operations in eight states and plans to expand its production capacity. The company’s US operations. Source: Ferroglobe Ferroglobe’s vice president of US corporate affairs, Bill Hightower, is concerned about the US’ ability to meet impending production demand increases, while having to rely on China, which controls over 70% of the world’s production. Hightower, a former Alabama senator and congressional candidate, points out the advantage to the US implementing industrial policy on silicon metal. China notoriously overproduces metals, subsequently flooding emerging markets with cheaper products. In an investigation on Silicon Metal from China , last year, the US International Trade Commission determined the “revocation of the antidumping duty order on silicon metal from China would be likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of material injury to an industry in the United States within a reasonably foreseeable time.” “If these countries are naming critical materials like silicon metal, then we can develop policy around it,” Hightower told MINING.com in an interview. “If [China] makes 70% of the world’s [supply], all they’ve got to do is dump it in another region, and it has an ultimate effect upon America and other markets. If China sneezes, the whole world feels it when it comes to silicon metal and other products. Graphite was the big scare last year.” The former politician turned resource company executive recently authored an Op-ed on the critical role of silicon metal production in the US energy sector. “All throughout my career, I’ve been very aware of what’s going on in Washington D.C...I’ve been through the cycle...where there was tremendous offshoring,” Hightower said. “We were looking for the lowest cost producer. It was a global economy. But things are changing.” Now, there’s an emphasis on reshoring or nearshoring. And we have to get on with it because the current suppliers of the product, if they decided to cut us off, we’d be in a lot of trouble.” Ferroglobe has forged a partnership with Coreshell, a company Hightower said has “broken the code” on displacing graphite in batteries, which could substantially reduce the cost. The company acknowledges that metallurgical silicon anodes tend to swell and degrade quickly, but says its technology solves this problem. On its website, Coreshell states its technology acts both as an artificial SEI (solid electrolyte interphase) and as an encapsulant – reinforcing metallurgical silicon anodes during charge and discharge – while preventing surface degradation. “Coreshell has a number of tests underway. They’ve determined how they can now displace 100% of the graphite, [and] introduce silicon. And as a result, the battery charges 30% faster. It goes 20% longer,” Hightower said. Hightower said the process lessens the incident of fire in the battery and new technologies will reduce the cost of electric vehicle ownership. “Our theory is that the market for electric vehicles is kind of a high-priced market, and it’s been fully penetrated. The only way to expand and sell more is to drop the price. A battery is a third of the car’s cost. We have a development agreement and we’re working with auto manufacturers to define the next technology in batteries.” “With the battery technology, with photovoltaic, with chips all being reshored, demand for silicon metal is going to really ratchet up at the end of the decade. And if we don’t build that capacity now, we’re going to find ourselves even more reliant upon imports.” Hightower said Ferroglobe has permitting underway for additional capacity in the US and West Virginia Representative Carol Miller has introduced a task force to look at tax policy along the supply chains. “Certainly, the federal government has a role to play in incentivizing the building of capacity. If we’re not going to have enough capacity in silicon metal, the US can incentivize companies to start that. They can do it by managing the tariffs. They can also do it by offering tax credits and incentives, as they’ve done with the IRA or the bipartisan infrastructure law.” President- elect Trump has indicated his support for US domestic manufacturing, and Hightower believes silicon production in the US will benefit from this policy. “Silicon metals are used in such a broad range of products, any policy which encourages US-based production products in the automotive, medical, electronics, and energy sectors will be a positive for silicon production in the USA,” he said. Hightower notes President Elect Trump will take actions to reduce the cost of energy in the US by investing in lower cost traditional energy sources like oil and natural gas, reopening federal lands for oil and gas, expediting new pipeline and infrastructure projects, incentives for development of clean coal and nuclear power, and EPA action to support fossil/liquid-based fuel producers. “As silicon production requires an enormous amount of energy, any actions to reduce the cost of US domestic energy costs will benefit the industry and the consumer,” Hightower said. “President Elect Trump has indicated that he will use tariffs and trade policy to strategically achieve US domestic goals, and protect the US from countries who compete unfairly. To the degree these actions deal with un-competitive behavior such as dumping in the US, it will help the industry.”