Coming Up This Week

• Wednesday is International Workers' Day and May Day, which is celebrated as a public holiday in many countries.
• The UK votes in local elections on Thursday.
• Panama holds a general election on Sunday. It's a close race between eight candidates, including a former President and the current Vice President. Incumbent president Laurentino Cortizo can't run again.

Commodity Prices

• Aluminum: $2,570/ton
• Antimony (ingot min. 99.65% fob China): $14,500/ton
• Cobalt: $27,830/ton
• Copper: $9,966/ton
• Gold: $2,335/toz
• Lead: $2,208/ton
• Natural Gas (Nymex): $1.93/MMbtu
• WTI Crude Oil (Nymex): $83.72/barrel
• Zinc: $2,844/ton

China

• China's reaction to the new U.S. law ordering ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban was much more muted than its reaction to U.S. actions against Huawei, which the WSJ said suggests TikTok is of less strategic importance to Beijing than Huawei.
• Chinese officials and ByteDance executives have hinted that they prefer to be banned in the U.S. than to sell the company, so that's probably what will happen.
• Separately, Tesla CEO Elon Musk met China's PM Li in Beijing. Reuters said the meeting was related to Tesla's deal to use Baidu's maps of Chinese public roads in its driving assistance software.
• Six people were charged with spying for China in three separate cases in the UK and Germany last week. The NYT said the arrests "indicated that European countries were toughening their response to Beijing’s meddling."

Gaza

• Israel is hearing pleas from international diplomats to hold off its ground invasion of Rafah, with the hope that doing so could unlock the "urgent and much more important" objective of securing the release of the ~100 remaining hostages in Gaza.
• Diplomats are also encouraging Hamas to accept what SecState Blinken called an "extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous" ceasefire / hostage exchange proposal from Israel that is currently on the table.
• Meanwhile, Israeli officials believe the International Criminal Court is preparing arrest warrants for senior Israeli leaders - including Pres. Netanyahu - over the war in Gaza (specifically for stalling aid deliveries and using heavy-handed tactics against Hamas), and also considering issuing arrest warrants for Hamas leaders.
• The issuance of arrest warrants would be a mostly symbolic rebuke to Israeli and Hamas hardliners - they're unlikely to lead to immediate arrests or eventual trials.

Russia

• According to U.S. officials, U.S. intelligence believes Pres. Putin didn't directly order late dissident Alexey Navalny's murder - though he was certainly indirectly culpable for it for condoning Navalny's detention, conviction, and transfer to a Siberian gulag.
• Analysts noted that the timing of Navalny's demise wasn't what Putin would've picked if he'd indeed planned it: it drew unwanted scrutiny ahead of Putin's carefully-orchestrated re-election.
• Despite the intelligence community's consensus, Navalny's allies maintain that Putin was indeed directly responsible for his death.

Ukraine

• Meanwhile in Ukraine, Russia is making minor advances near the city of Avdiivka in an effort to gain ground before new U.S. weapons reach Ukrainian troops. Outgunned Ukrainian troops are retreating for the moment.

Other News

• Spain's PM Sanchez said he would stay in office "with even more strength." He was considering resigning over a corruption inquiry into his wife's business dealings that he insists was politically motivated.