Via Week In China, a look at what some are calling the ‘Lithium OPEC’: Lithium – known as the ‘white petroleum’ – is a metal commonly used in the making of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). A dozen years ago in August 2010, Tianqi and Ganfeng, China’s leading producers of the metal, both went public […]
Read more »Via Rest of World, an interesting look at how Colombian entrepreneurs have been using WhatsApp and Instagram to build e-commerce businesses: One morning in May, Sebastián Gil got a call at 8 a.m. from a fisherman in Bahía Solano — a small town on Colombia’s Pacific coast, around 200 kilometers from Gil’s home in Medellín — looking […]
Read more »Via Foreign Policy, a report on how the Taliban are strip-mining their mineral wealth to fund factional power grabs: For decades, Afghanistan’s people have been told of the vast riches beneath their feet, untapped mineral resources potentially worth billions of dollars that the world is clamoring to explore, exploit, and export to create jobs in a […]
Read more »Via Rest of World, a look at Tiger Global’s swift and aggressive moves in Pakistan: Despite being the fifth most populous country in the world, Pakistan has long been ignored by international tech companies and investors: PayPal services are unavailable in the country, Amazon’s e-commerce website doesn’t operate here, and Apple didn’t even have an official […]
Read more »Via Quartz, a report on a new corridor for India-Russia trade via Iran that is almost ready: India’s trade with Russia is about to get considerably cheaper and quicker, with Iran set to become a key hub of a new transport corridor. On July 5, in a series of high-level talks, India urged Iran to activate […]
Read more »Via CBS News, an article on a new UN report that the global population will hit 8 billion this year, with more than half of the rise forecast in the world’s population in the coming decades will be concentrated in eight countries – Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania: […]
Read more »