President Xi Jinping

China aims to significantly reduce poverty by 2020 [Xinhua]
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday called the campaign against poverty the “toughest of all battles” and that the country should exert all efforts to eradicate it.
His statement comes ahead of the UN earmarked International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17.
Two weeks ago, Beijing upgraded a new mechanism to help local governments and municipalities target poverty reduction through a 100-point assessment system that measures the efficacy of funds allocated to this pursuit.

In 1959, Phoenix, Arizona was growing like a weed.  As its population doubled every few years, I was working my way through the public school system, doing my best to obey most of the rules, or at least not get caught doing otherwise.  The teacher’s dreaded paddle was something to be avoided at all cost.  Dust and asbestos fibers from school construction filled the air as the little city burgeoned into the epicenter of the baby-booming desert Southwest.  As my school’s enrollment grew beyond its limits, boundary lines were redrawn in order to fill the classrooms of a newer school, a mile to

Dear Mr. President Xi Jinping,
Dear Mr. President Vladimir Putin,
The re-emerging specter of nuclear catastrophe is once again haunting the world.
The West is trying to isolate and provoke two great, proud, powerful and sovereign countries; China and Russia. It appears that the pathological desire to gain (or more precisely, re-gain) full control over the entire world is fully restraining all remaining flickers of rationale and humanism inside the brains of the politicians and business ‘elites’ in Washington, London and elsewhere.

In December of last year we published an intriguing article by Dmitry Kalinichenko, “Grandmaster Putin’s Trap,” which has drawn far more attention from readers than we ever expected. It continues to be cited by many international political and economic experts. That article addressed Russia’s latent strategy to get rid of US bonds and use its petrodollars to buy monetary gold.