Caterpillar has launched a High Court challenge against the UK Trade Remedies Authority over an 18.81% anti-dumping duty on its Chinese-built midsized and heavy-duty excavators, imposed for five years following a complaint by JCB. Lawyers for Caterpillar told Mr Justice Richards that the duty is so high the firm has stopped exporting the affected machines from China to the UK and argued the TRA wrongly treated higher UK export prices as dumping by inflating assumed costs and profits. Counsel for the TRA countered that state-subsidised inputs such as cheap steel and electricity create a “particular market situation” justifying the tariff.

Europe’s RESourceEU plan to stockpile critical raw materials risks filling warehouses with concentrates and scrap that EU industry cannot directly use, such as tungsten concentrate instead of ammonium paratungstate or magnet-grade rare earth alloys. Nicholas Vafeas argues that the Critical Raw Materials Act’s 2030 target for 40% EU processing capacity will be undermined if procurement is judged only on tonnes, price and delivery speed, favouring refined imports over domestic plants. He calls for stockpile design that underpins European and partner-country processing (e.g. Zambia, Namibia), integrates recycling flows, and uses EU purchasing power to lock in diversified, end-to-end processing routes rather than just raw material supply.

Frequent closures on the M5 motorway have been challenged in Parliament, with MPs pressing the Department for Transport and National Highways to justify disruption levels and adopt new traffic management measures. Calls centre on reviewing incident response protocols and planned works coordination to keep key junctions and long-distance freight corridors open for longer. For civil and traffic engineers, any policy shift could affect lane closure durations, night‑time possession strategies and design of future maintenance schemes on this strategic route.