New Silk Road infrastructure projects could bring back a peaceful and prosperous Eurasia

The geopolitical focus of the still young 21^st century spans the Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf all the way to the South China Sea alongside the spectrum from Southwest Asia to Central Asia and China.

That happens to configure the prime playing ground, overland and maritime, of the New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The epicenter of global power shifting East is ruffling feathers in some US political circles - with a proliferation of parochial analyses ranging from Chinese "imperial overstretch" to Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream provoking "nightmares."

The basic argument is that Emperor Xi is aiming for a global power grab by mythologizing the New Silk Roads.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has asked the CIA to declassify documents related to Deputy Director Gina Haspel's reported involvement in the agency's post-September 11 torture program.

Trump has tapped Haspel to take over as the agency's next director after current director Mike Pompeo leaves to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

"As we move forward with the nomination process for Ms. Haspel, my fellow senators and I must have the complete picture of Ms. Haspel's involvement in the program in order to fully and fairly review her record and qualifications,"Feinstein wrote in a letter to Pompeo and Haspel.

Haspel was reportedly intimately involved with the Bush-era torture program, overseeing a secret US "black site" in Thailand where prisoners were abused and waterboarded. She also participated in the destruction of videotapes of the torture sessions.

Update 2: President Trump has responded (in ALL CAPS!)

Update 1: Rep. Schiff has responded to the Intel Committee report (via @ChadPergram) :

"The House Majority has announced it is terminating the Russia investigation, leaving to others the important work of determining the full extent of Russian interference in our election."

"By ending its oversight role in the only authorized investigation in the House, the Majority has placed the interests of protecting the President over protecting the country, and history will judge its actions harshly."

"The Majority was not willing to pursue the facts wherever they would lead, would prove afraid to compel witnesses like Steve Bannon, Hope Hicks, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump Jr, Corey Lewandowski... to answer questions relevant to our investigation."

"Ironically, even while they close down the Russia investigation, they plan to continue trying to put our own government on trial: this is a great service to the President, and a profound disservice to the country."

"It is not Mueller's job to tell the American people what happened, that is our job, and the Majority has walked away from it."

"If the Russians do have leverage over the President..the Majority has simply decided it would rather not know."

For a man who has been in the public limelight for more than 30 years, it is remarkable how little Donald Trump is properly understood, simply because he is now the president of the United States and no longer a real-estate magnate and media celebrity.

When I was in the White House, and even today, if ever I am asked to help explain the way President Trump thinks and acts, I always start with the same advice: Read The Art of the Deal. For diplomats, journalists or simply the unconvinced, this is the quickest and most accurate way of understanding just how much America changed when we chose the iconoclastic non-politician for the highest office in the land.

Recent decisions from the Oval Office, especially on steel and aluminum tariffs, as well as the developments out of the Korean peninsula, underscore the enormity of the shift in the American politics and our role in the world as a nation which shapes geopolitics as opposed to just riding along its wavetops and being buffeted by events.

One of the earliest declarative statements from The Art of the Deal is the advice Donald Trump gives that you should never ever be so invested in a yet-to-be-sealed deal that you cannot walk away from it at any juncture. This attitude informed President Trump for nigh on half a century in the private sector, and it still informs his decisions today as president, from the Paris Accord to NAFTA.

The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.

FAIR's study, MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen, documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:

● "An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen."

● "Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation's colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history."

● "All of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling many billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing intelligence and military assistance to the Saudi air force."

Some officials in Washington are aiming to maintain a foothold in Syria for a long time, "if not forever," using chemical weapons provocations to achieve this objective, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

There are no grounds "to doubt the willingness of some US officials to keep a foothold [in Syria] for a long time, if not forever, and contribute to the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic," Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

"Various methods" are being used, including "information revealed via [Russia's] Defense and Foreign Ministries, which says that other provocations involving chemical weapons are being prepared," the foreign minister said, noting that one such "staging" might take place in Eastern Ghouta.

On March 5, Lavrov said Russia had evidence that the US involvement in Syria had nothing to do with combatting terrorism. Speaking during a visit to Namibia, the foreign minister asserted that Washington is willing to keep the Al-Nusra Front terrorist group as a "plan B" to change the leadership in Damascus, according to Interfax. Some policymakers in the American capital, he said, are "harboring plans to disintegrate the Syrian state."

While the media focuses on Trump's lack of support for an increase in age requirements for gun owners, his support for a bill that would put every American's Second Amendment rights in jeopardy has been ignored.

The Trump Administration has announced its support for a number of measures involving gun control, and not surprisingly, the mainstream media has chosen to highlight the measure that would have little effect, while ignoring the administration's support for a bill that would have a devastating impact on the Second Amendment.

CNBC's headline said, "Trump gun proposal skips age limits, focuses on teaching educators how to use guns instead," and BBC News went with "Trump drops calls to raise guns age limit." The media's coverage has relied heavily on the idea that if the legal minimum age requirement for gun purchases was raised from 18 to 21, then it may have an effect on stopping mass shootings-without taking any other legitimate factors into consideration.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russia will "definitely" expel UK diplomats as a reciprocal measure in the standoff over ex-spy Sergei Skripal's poisoning. Moscow would act "soon," he added.

"You do understand that we, as polite people, will first deliver our response to our British counterparts," Lavrov said, replying to a question from RIA Novosti. He noted Moscow prefers not to speak publicly of some "doubts or suspicions"before they are discussed through the proper channels. "This is, in my view, is being polite, this is how gentlemen behave."

Accusing Russia of being "culpable" in the Skripals' poisoning, UK Prime Minister Theresa May earlier said the UK will expel 23 Russian diplomats, calling them "undeclared intelligence officers."

The speaker of the Russian lower house has said the West's sanctions policy has been a response to Moscow's increased competitiveness, and had crashed Western plans to put a "tame and obedient" president in the Kremlin.

"It is completely obvious that Russia is a very inconvenient competitor for them in many spheres, and they try to remove it from the field, often using unfair moves," Vyacheslav Volodin said on Wednesday, according to TASS.

The Duma speaker suggested that the authorities in the United States and European countries had wanted to impose their own president in Russia - "a tame and obedient one, like they have in Ukraine" - but all such plans had failed.

Having more women on boards has done little to benefit 99 percent of women in the workforce.

The country of Norway has many American admirers, from President Trump to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Progressives like Sanders consider Norway a progressive paradise, because it has implemented almost every progressive policy under the sun, from universal health care to government mandated gender equality policy in the work place. But have these policies achieved the desired outcome that the progressives are seeking? The latest data on gender quotas in the work place from Norway and some other European countries shows a policy with a good intention doesn't necessarily translate to a good outcome.

We've all heard the argument, especially in these days, that women are well represented in the educational system and the labor force, but at the top of the power hierarchy they are still surprisingly poorly represented.

UK Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman repeatedly said "only seven women run the FTSE 100 companies" in a recent interview of Jordan Peterson, to back up her view that male dominance in the workplace prevents women from reaching the top.