Our Making Wales Work plan champions employee buyouts, community-led co-operatives and social enterprises, and reversing managed decline. As 26 years of Labour in power comes to an end, we are the alternative, argues LUKE FLETCHER
Latest editorial
How lithium became a new global flashpoint
Lithium is crucial for batteries — but because deposits form only under rare geological conditions, its extraction is a geopolitical flashpoint between the imperial West and the rest of the world, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
OUSTED: A man holds a sign that reads in Spanish: ‘Evo [Morales], your people need you,’ as supporters of the toppled Movement for Socialism government march against the coup in Bolivia, November 2019
Socialist historian KEITH FLETT looks at the pronounced hostility the labour movement has had to giving the state the power to pry and identify dissidents, going back to the era of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ and Captain Swing
The Renters Reform Bill is a big step in the right direction, but it won’t apply to Wales — we desperately need our own legislation to protect and respect tenants, to give them dignity and security, free from fear of eviction, writes SIAN GWENLLIAN MS, Plaid Cymru’s shadow cabinet secretary for housing and planning
ROBERT GRIFFITHS reports on talks with Raid Jahid Fahmi, general secretary of the Communist Party in Iraq, where sectarian power-sharing makes wielding state apparatus the ‘main domain of conflict’ and the struggling nation’s oil revenues are still held in US banks
One of the major criticisms of China’s breakneck development in recent decades has been the impact on nature — returning after 15 years away, BEN CHACKO assessed whether the government’s recent turn to environmentalism has yielded results
HANK KENNEDY contends that US military attacks in the Caribbean amount to modern piracy driven by Venezuela’s oil wealth
LITHIUM has been around for a very long time. Along with hydrogen and helium, it was one of the three elements synthesised in the Big Bang.
In its elemental form, it is a chalky white alkali metal, soft enough to be cut with a knife. Lithium is unstable due to its high reactivity, and does not naturally occur in elemental form on Earth.
It is typically found in mineral form (combined with other elements) within igneous rocks — formed by the cooling and solidification of molten lava from deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
A type of rock called granitic pegmatite hosts the largest concentrations of lithium-containing minerals. Lithium can be directly mined from these rocks, like in Australia at Greenbushes, the world’s largest lithium mine.
More from this author
High pressures squeeze and crush, but low pressures damage too. Losing the atom-level buzz that keeps us held safe in the balance of internal and external pressure releases dangerous storms, disorientation and pain, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
