| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a lese-majeste digest of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. The Prince and the Pauper | The only real reason to feel sorry for Andrew, formerly known as prince, is that mouthful of a surname we must now use to refer to him, Mountbatten Windsor. He may still be receiving a military pension, but much of his income was curtailed in 2019 when he ceased being a working royal. Now he's a family outcast, a pariah, not a prince, not even a duke. Perhaps not ever employable. Rosa Prince is merciless in her column on his precipitous fall from grace (and the grace-and-favor freebie home he's enjoyed as a royal) over allegations that he continues to deny, despite having paid his accuser Virginia Giuffre a reported £12 million ($15.8 million) and photographic evidence to the contrary. Giuffre's suicide earlier this year — before the publication of her damning memoir Nobody's Girl — only deepens the tragedy of the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile sex-trafficking saga. Rosa says King Charles III's dramatic move against his own brother must now inspire action on the other side of the Atlantic to bring other alleged abusers in the Epstein circle to justice by releasing "the hundreds of gigabytes of data plus other material held by the FBI relating to Epstein and associates, including his jailed girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell." She writes: "According to his own accounts of his sometime friendship with Epstein, Donald Trump has nothing to fear from a full release of the files. Giuffre said the president didn't abuse or mistreat her, and she never saw him at Epstein's properties. The legislative and executive branches of the US government should take their cue from the UK's non-executive chairman, King Charles. This scandal won't go away until the rot has been removed." "I've got one word for you: Aluminum" | Ours is a complicated world. In the UK and most other countries, the 13th element of the periodic table is spelled "aluminium"; Americans prefer it without the second "i." Meanwhile, the entire word vanishes in "tinfoil" — which is really almost entirely aluminum. But no matter how you parse it, the metal is getting, if not more expensive, then more critical. Could aluminum be as investable as gold — or, to twist that famous Graduate line, the new "plastics"? "I just want to say one word to you… Aluminum." The metal, Javier Blas says in his column, is "key to modern life and everywhere in the global economy." The crux, however, is "it's entering a make-or-break phase: Either the world is sleepwalking into a supply crisis or further into the hands of China. Or, more worryingly, both."  Aluminum — I will use the spelling preferred in the US since I work for an American company — isn't rare; but it is crucial to the way the world works. As Javier explains: "Planes and iPhones, window frames and soda cans, electric cars and appliances all depend on it. One can hardly imagine any further electrification without the greyish metal. With an annual consumption value of nearly $300 billion, it's the largest of all non-ferrous metals. Only steel, a ferrous metal, is more widely used." Demand for aluminum is only growing even as the electricity required to process it gets more expensive in most of the world. Javier says, "To produce a ton of aluminum, smelters require the same amount of electricity that five German homes would consume in a year." Right now, some of the cheapest electricity in the world is generated in, yes, China, thanks to its multiplicity of coal-fired power stations. But even Beijing believes in being greener and will soon reach its cap on coal-fed smelters. And so China's aluminum companies — the most productive in the world — are off-shoring their capacity to Indonesia, which has plentiful coal, though the expense of building new smelters will add to the cost. Meanwhile, China will generate more cheap electricity via hydropower and alternative sources like solar and wind farms. And that is likely to give it a leg up in the other big, energy-hungry global contest: building AI data centers, as Tobin Harshaw summarized earlier this month. It's Beijing's kind of strategic hoarding, recycling and developing of natural resources from scratch to scrap — rare earths to helium to iron — that David Fickling labels "scrapitalism." As David says: "China's leaders have long urged the country to 'hide your strength and bide your time' — exhorting players not to throw their weight around until they're powerful enough to use it decisively." There must be someone to blame for all this — and I will pin some of it on the British. In the early 19th century, the Cornish scientist Humphry Davy discovered the element by isolating it via alum salts. His first name for it was "alumium" but then changed his mind and labeled it "aluminum." His compatriots, however, wanted the metal to rhyme with the rest of their new discoveries, potassium, sodium etc… and so it was registered in English dictionaries as "aluminium." And so, I've got three words for you… "London cabbies' have long complained that 'the game's dead' thanks to the threat of past innovations including private-hire vehicles, airport express trains and, the biggest threat of them all, Uber Technologies Inc. Now they're facing a landmark disruption from Waymo LLC, the driverless Silicon Valley taxi service featuring comfortable, sterile interiors that look the same in every city and portend a slow, cultural flattening. The company's executives are seeking licenses to test their self-driving vehicles on London's streets to launch in the city next year in a European debut, when Uber plans to roll out driverless taxis too." — Parmy Olson in "London's Black Cabs Face a Driverless Threat."  "Beijing is already seeing its automation push reshape industries. There were more than 2 million factory robots working in China last year, the largest of any country, according to data last month from the International Federation of Robotics. The People's Republic installed more industrial robots in 2024 (295,000 units) than the rest of the world combined — and more than eight times the installations in the US. The implications for the global labor market are profound, and the threat is already causing consternation stateside. China, which has less protections for organized labor, is doubling down on automation as a demographic necessity." — Catherine Thorbecke in "How China Trains Your Robot Dog." Europe needs a united front on Russia's hybrid war. — The Editorial Board Is China overselling its AI adoption? — Catherine Thorbecke Hong Kong's universities outshine Beijing's. — Shuli Ren The British Labour Party's lame blame game. — Rosa Prince A trade war without fighting? Advantage China. — Karishma Vaswani Will UBS bid farewell to Switzerland? — Paul J. Davies VIDEO BONUS: The big buzz as quiet luxury ends — Andrea Felsted Walk of the Town: Among the English Dead in Spain | Spain holds a special place in my psyche — and visits to the country only serve to highlight its complex appeal. My grandmother's family — Chinese immigrants to the Spanish-ruled Philippines in the mid-19th century — adopted the surname Velasco, which traces its origins to the Basque region. The chief conquistadors who subjected the archipelago in the 16th century were Basque: Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, Spain's first governor-general, and Martin Goiti, who subdued Manila and turned it into a "distinguished and ever loyal city" to the faraway throne in Madrid. I attended a school named for the Basque saint Francis Xavier, who was one of the earliest Jesuits, a Catholic religious order founded by another sainted Basque, Ignatius of Loyola — or Eneko Oinaz eta Loiolakoa in Euskara, the language of the region.  The ruined cemetery for British soldiers who died in Spain's Carlist wars Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg On a recent culinary visit to San Sebastian (Donostia in Euskara), I took a walking side trip and discovered links to the UK, where I now reside. Among the ruined fortifications of Mount Urgull is a cemetery of tumbled tombstones and moss-covered memorials. These were raised to honor British soldiers who died fighting in the civil war that ravaged Spain in the 1830s. Nowadays, very few people in the UK remember those multiple roils, collectively called the Carlist wars. They were — in general terms — a contest between supporters of constitutional democracy and religious autocracy (Britain took the side of the constitutionalists). But they plagued Spain for more than a hundred years. Indeed, the last of the Carlist conflicts was arguably the ferocious 1936-1939 civil war that established the dictator Francisco Franco's four-decade-long regime. The English who died in San Sebastian in the 1830s may be mostly forgotten, but the echoes of what they fought for still haunt us today. I will keep them in my thoughts on Nov. 11, Remembrance Day, when the UK calls to mind those who served the country in war. "Boo!" to all who celebrate (or are just scared, as Steven Mihm observes).  "All I said was 'Trick or treat?' You don't have to jump out of your skin." Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send feedback and things that go bump in the night to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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