ICC Sanctions and Ukraine’s Rare Earth in Trump’s Sights

Andrew Sheves ⚖️ The US has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, levying travel and financial restrictions on senior ICC staff and family members. This follows the court’s charges against Israeli politicians last year in connection with the war in Gaza but at the signing, President Trump said any court member who opened up cases against the US or other allies would be similarly sanctioned. These sanctions originated in Congress last year and the US is not a signatory to the ICC charter but Trump’s move further weakens the Court and reinforces the perception that it is only there to pursue criminals from the Global South. [More - BBC]

🇺🇦 Any peace deal in Ukraine might be contingent on an agreement to pay back US support in the form of rare earth minerals, according to reports of what President Trump thinks a deal should include. This would significantly diversify the US’s supply of these critical minerals but would significantly hamper Ukraine’s reconstruction. Any deal where Ukraine had to pay back US contributions to the war — instead of benefitting from US reconstruction aid — would place significant additional burdens on the EU. [More - AlJazeera]

Self-Serve {API Access} Opens Up Monday

APIs (application programming interface) used to confuse and terrify me, but I’ve come to realize that there are no bad APIs, only bad documentation and confusing connections.

This week, I’ve spent a lot of time simplifying the Decis API so it’s not just a developer-level access point but a much more user-friendly tool.

Now, in addition to being something a developer can use in their code, the API can be integrated with Excel or GoogleSheets. Or maybe added to an RSS feed.

Set up is a snap, and all the documentation, code snippets, and guides are in one place, so you can have a live country data feed inside your system in just a few minutes.

But the technology isn’t important: the outcome is.

Now, you can have the Decis country data fed directly into the tools you use on your desktop so your country risk assessments or FOREX trading portfolio is always up to date. And my aim is that you can do it without being technical at all - in the case of Google Sheets, it only takes half a dozen clicks to set up

(Don’t worry, devs, there’s still a GitHub page and manual setup if you prefer playing on hard mode.)

So if you fancy having dynamic country stability data fed directly into your day-to-day tools, you’ll love what I’m sharing on Monday.

(And with multiple access tiers, you’ll even love the pricing.)

Key Metrics

WTI is $73.52 (Down)

Low |——— < ———-| High

Wheat is $185.794 (Up)

Low |——— > ———-| High

EuroDollar is $1.04 (Down)

Low |—- < —————| High

YuanDollar is $0.14 (Unchanged)

Low |———- < > ———| High

Graphs are illustrative to show comparative price over last 180 days

Metrics via AlphaVantage updated Feb 06 2025 21:16 UTC

Africa Stability Ratings and News Summary

More Unstable

🇩🇿 Algeria, 🇦🇴 Angola, 🇧🇯 Benin, 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso, 🇧🇮 Burundi, 🇨🇲 Cameroon, 🇨🇫 Central Afr

Carpe tomorrow!