Asia

It was supposed to be China's day of celebrating massive infrastructure spending for the sake of spending (read ghost towns, only now outside China's borders) as Xi Jinping pledged $124 billion on Sunday for his new Silk Road plan to forge "a path of peace, inclusiveness and free trade" while calling for the abandonment of old models based on rivalry and diplomatic power games. However, it did not go quite as smoothly as expected.

Less than 24 hours after it first emerged, it has been called the first global, coordinated ransomware attack using hacking tools developed by the NSA, crippling over a dozen hospitals across the UK, mass transit around Europe, car factories in France and the UK, universitied in China, corporations in the US, banks in Russia and countless other mission-critical infrastructure.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

For the World War II generation there was clarity.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost.

After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided.

The U.S. has recorded a trade deficit in every year since 1975. This is not surprising — America spends more than it saves. So, it must run a trade deficit, and this deficit is financed by means of a virtually unlimited U.S. line of credit with the rest of the world. Economies that save more than they spend and record corresponding trade surpluses ship funds to the U.S. to finance America’s insatiable spending.

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

We should all hope that the current level of antagonism between the US and North Korea eventually passes, as it has many times before. But if it does, North Korea will fade from the news cycle. And with that, most people are going to forget about some of the crazy things that country has done, including the fact that they routinely kidnap foreigners and imprison them years.