From its ancient Silk Road role to China's BRI project, Uzbekistan is set to remain an important geoeconomic hub in Central Asia.
SAMARKAND - The ultimate Silk Road city, set at an unrivaled Eurasian trade crossroads, is the ideal spot from which to examine where the New Silk Roads adventure is heading next. For starters, the upcoming summit of heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will take place in Samarkand in mid-September.

The ancient city dazzled Alexander the Great in 329 BC and made the Tang dynasty crazy for its golden peaches. This was a cosmopolitan hub that embraced Zoroastrian fire-worship and even flirted with Nestorian Christianity, until Arab conquerors under the banner of the Prophet arrived in 712 and changed everything forever.

In the 13th century, the Mongols irrupted on the scene with the proverbial bang. But then Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror who founded the Timurid Dynasty in the late 14th century, set to embellish Samarkand into a resplendent diamond, drawing artists from across his vast empire - Persia, Syria, India - to make it "less a home than a marvelous trophy."

And yet, ever the quintessential nomad, Timur lived in swank tents and gardens on the outskirts of his urban jewel.

The Silk Road trade frenzy died down in the 16th century after the Europeans finally "discovered" their own Maritime Silk Road.

Russia conquered Samarkand in 1868. It was, briefly, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan before the transfer to Tashkent and then, up to 1991, mired into invisibility. Now the city is all set to revive its ancient glory, as a key hub of the Eurasian Century.

What would Timur make of all this?

Unless you're reading this from Belarus or North Korea, safely outside of the WEF clutches (for now), your state is losing its sovereignty right in front of your eyes.

Here's a perfect case study from Sri Lanka.

You might've seen sensationalist coverage of the riots in Western media, but likely none that deeply explores the underlying cancer that's metastasized on the island.

Social unrest is the symptom; technocratic social engineering is the disease.

Not a single ship with Ukrainian grain has reached starving African or Asian countries, the Russian foreign ministry said

Russia's Foreign Ministry has expressed doubt about the sincerity of Western countries' global food security concerns, noting that grain-loaded ships from Ukrainian Black Sea ports are mostly heading to the West, rather than to starving African or Asian countries.

Speaking at a press briefing on Thursday, Ivan Nechaev, the deputy director of the ministry's information and press department, said that "so far not a single ship with grain has reached the shores of the starving countries of Africa or South Asia."

"They go mainly to Western ports, and the range of exported goods is mainly not wheat, but corn grain and sunflower oil, which casts doubt on the sincerity of these voices in the West that world food security depends on the 'grain deal'," Nechaev said, referring to the recent deal between Moscow and Kiev which allowed the resumption of grain exports from Ukrainian ports.

The US and its top allies have destroyed trust in the international organizations created from the ashes of the Second World War

Cross border institutions in Eurasia were previously tasked with diversifying economic connectivity as the emerging multipolar world demanded reduced dependence on Western-centric institutions reluctant to adapt to new realities.

However, the current European crisis has destabilized the world and discredited the West's ability to facilitate economic cooperation. Subsequently, these bodies are now asserting a central role in organizing economic recovery and pragmatic cooperation.

Australia's Reserve Bank is launching a pilot program over the course of the next year in collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank of central banks) to test the "benefits" of a blockchain ledger based digital currency system. The central bank is added to a long list of participants in BIS efforts to introduce CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) with the target goal of launching them globally by 2025-2030.

It's important to note that substantial economic changes would have to occur within the next few years in order to make CBDC a viable option for the general public. Though many people use electronic transactions as a matter of convenience, a large portion of the population still prefers cash. In the US, surveys within the last few years show that at least 37% of Americans still choose cash over other methods of payment like credit and debit cards. In Australia, the number stands at around 32%.

The usage of digital payment systems also does not necessarily denote a societal shift away from the idea of cash, it only shows a preference for convenience. People still like to know that cash exists as an option if they need it or want it, but central banks are working diligently to remove physical cash as a choice within the next 8 years.

Trump got spring grand jury subpoena, gathered documents, turned them over and allowed agents to search storage locker the FBI later raided.

Two months before his Florida home was raided by the FBI, former President Donald Trump secretly received a grand jury subpoena for classified documents belonging to the National Archives, and voluntarily cooperated by turning over responsive evidence, surrendering security surveillance footage and allowing federal agents and a senior Justice Department lawyer to tour his private storage locker, according to a half dozen people familiar with the incident.

While the cooperation was mostly arranged by his lawyers, Trump personally surprised the DOJ National Security Division prosecutor and three FBI agents who came to his Mar-a-Lago compound on June 3, greeting them as they came to pick up a small number of documents compliant with the subpoena, the sources told Just the News, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the visit was covered by grand jury secrecy.

The poorly named Inflation Reduction Act, passed over the weekend by Senate Democrats, is slated to create positions for nearly 87,000 new IRS agents, 70,000 of whom will be armed.

This brings the total to nearly 170,000 under the bureau of tax collection. The cost of this new initiative will be about $80 billion, and it's all part of a bill meant to lower costs to Americans.

This was noted as well by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told The Post Millennial that "The bill is terrible. It's basically Joe Biden Build Back Better agenda, that a lot of Republicans called 'build that broke."

A former Twitter employee has been convicted of failing to register as an agent for Saudi Arabia and other charges after accessing private data on users critical of the kingdom's government in a spy case that spanned from Silicon Valley to the Middle East.

Ahmad Abouammo, a US citizen and former media partnership manager for Twitter's Middle East region, was charged in 2019 with acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia without registering with the US government. A jury found him guilty on six counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The jury acquitted him on another five charges involving wire fraud.

The case marked the first time the kingdom, long linked to the US through its massive oil reserves and regional security arrangements, has been accused of spying in America.

After the 1998 victory of a coalition of parties led by Fidesz, Viktor Orban formed a centre-right government in Hungary. In the same year, he visited Washington on a working visit as prime minister.

However, the further centralisation of power in Hungary, the increasing power of the prime minister in the local political system and the social orientation of politics with a strong right-wing bias deterred President Bill Clinton's government from further contact. American democrats were much more sympathetic to the liberal administrations of Péter Mediész and then Ferenc Gyurcsány. The final rift with the Democrats was the updated Hungarian constitution adopted during Orban's second term in 2011, as it enshrined the dominant role of Christianity in the Hungarian state and banned same-sex marriage.

The Syrian Oil Ministry released a statement on 9 August accusing US forces occupying Syria of being responsible for the theft of most of the country's oil.

"The amount of oil production during the first half of 2022 amounted to some 14.5 million barrels, with an average daily production of 80.3 thousand barrels, of which 14.2 thousand are delivered daily to refineries," the oil ministry's statement said.

The statement went on to say that "US occupation forces and their mercenaries," referring to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), "steal up to 66,000 barrels every single day from the fields occupied in the eastern region," amounting to around 83 percent of Syria's daily oil production.