Beijing and Moscow have arrived at the conclusion that President-elect Donald Trump is not an ideologue in the neocon sense of the term; he's a pragmatist. Therefore, resets are inevitable, as well as surprises.

In yet another spectacular chapter of his running Marco Polo in reverse saga, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a strategic stop in Sardinia, Italy, on his way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru.

Why beautiful Sardinia? Certainly not for a yacht cruise in the Costa Esmeralda. This is all about, once again, the Chinese-driven New Silk Roads.

Huawei is building its largest European HQ in Sardinia. The Chinese want to buy the port of Cagliari, together with its fabulous pecorino sardo - serious contender for best goat cheese on the planet. In powder form, it is already feeding millions of Chinese babies.

Vietnam has decided not to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the trade deal's future uncertain under incoming US President Donald Trump.

"The United States has announced it is suspending the submission of TPP to the parliament so there are not sufficient conditions for Vietnam to submit its proposal for ratification," Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc told the National Assembly, according to Reuters.

The TPP deal is a project of incumbent US President Barack Obama aimed at increasing American exports. The future of the trade deal is highly uncertain in the Republican-dominated Congress and with President-elect Trump calling the project a "disaster".

"TPP is now in the history dustbin for sure," Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Politico last week.

The more I think about the US media's claim that Hillary won the popular vote, the more I think it's bogus, that the numbers were fudged. I mean, you have a male candidate who is lambasted primarily for being a sleaze, misogynist and all-round disreputable character for the entire campaign, and his opponent is a woman whose worst sin (as far as the media reported) was some missing emails, and yet - according to exit poll data - a majority of women still voted for him?

From that I don't conclude that the women vote numbers were fudged in favor of Trump (after all, if anyone was gonna rig this election, it was gonna be the Hillary camp, or the 'deep state' behind her) but that the Hispanic and African American votes were likely fudged against Trump.

It's been a recurring pattern in recent major elections and referenda. We've now had more or less 50-50 split votes in the Scottish independence referendum, the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. How is it that in these major-issue-votes, a country is almost always divided down the middle? Is a large majority of the people never on the same page on any major issue? That 50-50 split is pretty useful for perpetuating the worn-out 'left-right' paradigm we've lived under for decades. When one party gets 51% in an election, it's always plausible to have the other party get elected 4 or 5 years later because the last election was 'so close'.

In this way, these bogus left/right parties can maintain control and pursue their identical policies forever. If an outsider President or PM were ever elected in a Western nation with, say, 80% of the vote and if he/she performed decently enough, it would be pretty hard to justify why, in an election 4 years later, his/her support had plummeted and he/she was kicked out.

That's why 'they' never want a truly populist and decent leader to get into power; with his or her 'left' or 'right' track record, they'd never be able to get him/her out, short of assassination. Russia is an interesting contemporary example of this, where Putin has been in power in some capacity for the last 16 years, and there's no sign of his popularity waning. And guess who really, really hates Putin and Russia...

Europe is at risk of collapse, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has stated during a trip to Berlin, warning that "Europe could die."

Speaking at an event organized by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper during an economic forum, Valls spoke abundantly about Europe, but also of the political situation in France. Asked if, after the victory of Donald Trump in the United States, Marine Le Pen could win the next presidential in France, the PM replied "It is possible."

"There is a danger," he added, urging "to hear the anger of the people," Le Parisien reported.

Built to endure a nuclear attack, a New York City skyscraper known as the AT&T Long Lines Building is actually among the most essential assets of the NSA, which runs mass surveillance programs inside the windowless tower, according to the Intercept.

The brutalist structure located at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan is made up of 29 floors and three underground levels. Built between 1969 and 1974 by John Carl Warnecke & Associates, it was simply referred to as Project X during the planning phase, the Intercept reports.

The 550-foot high-rise was purportedly designed to house enough food and supplies to sustain a "self-contained city" of 1,500 people for two weeks in case a worst-case Cold War scenario involving atomic weaponry arose.

Less than a week after India's surprise move to scrap its highest denomination cash notes, another front in the War on Cash has intensified down under in Australia.

Yesterday, banking giant UBS proposed that eliminating Australia's $100 and $50 bills would be "good for the economy and good for the banks."

(How convenient that a bank would propose something that's good for banks!)

This isn't the first time that the financial establishment has pushed for a cashless society in Australia (or anywhere else).

In September 2015, Australian bank Westpac published its "Cash Free Report", suggesting that the country would become cashless by 2022. In July 2016, Australian payments firm Tyro published an enormously self-serving blog post touting the benefits of a cashless society and saying, "it's only a matter of time."

Most notably, two days ago, Citibank (yes, THAT Citibank) announced that it was going cashless at some of its Australian branches.

One month ago, when we last looked at the Fed's update of Treasuries held in custody, we noted something troubling: the number had dropped sharply, declining by over $22 billion in one week, one of the the biggest weekly declines since January 2015, pushing the total amount of custodial paper to $2.805 trillion, the lowest since 2012. One month later, we refresh this chart and find that in last week's update, foreign central banks continued their relentless liquidation of US paper held in the Fed's custody account, which tumbled by another $14 billion over the course of a week, pushing the total amount of custodial paper to $2.788 trillion, a new post-2012 low.

Today, to corroborate the disturbing weekly slide in the Fed's custody data, we also got the latest monthly Treasury International Capital data for the month of September, which showed that the troubling trend presented one month ago, has accelerated to an unprecedented degree.

Recall that a month ago, we reported that in the latest 12 months we have observed a not so stealthy, actually make that a massive $343 billion in Treasury selling by foreign central banks in the period July 2015- August 2016, something unprecedented in size.

Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, recognized as terrorist organization by the US, has been allegedly spotted parading a vast number of US-made military vehicles in Syria, triggering questions about how they ended up in the militants' hands.

The photos of Hezbollah's military parade allegedly featuring US-made armored vehicles in the Syrian city of Qusayr published by media close to the organization raised questions the US State Department had to confront during a daily press briefing on Tuesday.

"Our embassy in Beirut is working with the Lebanese armed forces to investigate the images circulating on social media purporting to show Hezbollah displaying US military equipment in Syria," State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said.

Three "well-known" commanders of Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate formerly known as Al-Nusra Front, including one who planned attacks on Aleppo, were killed in Russian strikes launched from aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

"As a result of strikes delivered by Su-33 carrier-based fighter jets and air group of the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, a large gang of the Jabhat al-Nusra group was destroyed in the province of Idlib," Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Thursday.

At least 30 terrorists were killed, including three field commanders, Konashenkov said, adding that the operation resulted in a "major blow" against Al-Nusra, which now goes by the name of Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is heading a controversial campaign against crime, embodied in his "war on drugs" which has led to violence spanning the nation's troubled urban centers. President Duterte's comments have ranged from reasonable, to utterly indifferent regarding fears of extrajudicial executions, vigilantism, and very real human rights abuses - opening a door of opportunity for his political opponents both at home and abroad.

President Duterte's inability to clearly condemn extrajudicial executions and vigilante violence, along with his inflammatory, provocative, even dangerously demagogic statements both invites further abuses, as well as both legitimate and opportunistic criticism of him, his administration, and his policies.

While legitimate criticism is both necessary and justified, it is undermined by disingenuous political opportunism, wielded by hypocrites who only stand to compound the Philippines' current crisis, not solve it. America the Humane? Among President Duterte's more opportunistic political opponents is the United States.