China

Originally posted at ChinaDaily.com,

Recently, the Chinese currency fell to its lowest level since late 2008. The renminbi has been trading around 6.92 to the US dollar. The plunge is typically explained with the anticipated US Federal Reserve rate increase in December and president-elect Donald Trump's threat to label China a currency manipulator and slap tariffs on Chinese exports.

In reality, there is much more to the story.

Authored by Alastair Crooke, via Raul Ilargi Meijer's Automatic Earth blog,

We are plainly at a pivotal moment. President-Elect Trump wants to make dramatic changes in his nation’s course. His battle cry of wanting to make “America Great Again” evokes – and almost certainly is intended to evoke – the epic American economic expansions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.

Submitted by Peter Korzun via Strategic-Culture.org,

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on November 20 that Turkey did not need to join the European Union «at all costs». Instead, it could become part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), or Shanghai Pact. The Turkish leader said he had already discussed the idea with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev.

In what is surely a mere coincidence, at the same time as Facebook has been embroiled in a scandal involving the dissemination of "election tipping" stories, which prompted Zuckerberg to release a 7-point plan to eradicate "fake news" and which many conservatives believe is a preamble toward wholesale banning of so-called "fake news" websites (as arbitrarily defined by an ultra-liberal,  Trump-bashing "professor") by the social networks (when ironically, Wikileaks revealed that Google was actively engaged in developing a "strategic plan" to help the Democrats win the election and t

China has welcomed the news that internet giants are clamping down on ‘fake news’, and have offered advice on how to implement internet censorship. Chinese officials claims that the latest fake news crisis is a justification for Western governments to follow China’s lead on punishing publishers online with far more punitive measures that the ones currently being discussed. Theregister.co.uk reports: Ren Xianling, No.2 at the Cyberspace Administration of China, said internet users posting false stories should be punished.