Puppet Masters
The yuan's share in the countries' bilateral trade rose from 3.1% in 2014 to 17.5% in 2020, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui told news agency Interfax.
According to Zhang, Russia has been steadily following a policy of de-dollarization of foreign trade, expanding the use of Chinese currency for buying financial products denominated in the renminbi and using it as a reserve currency over recent years. He added that the yuan has been gaining recognition from the Russian government, enterprises, and investors.

Protest against the Hungarian government for using Pegasus spyware to monitor journalists, opposition leaders and activists in Budapest.
The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state's actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.
"I think it's going to happen," Biden said of a military vaccine mandate during remarks at the White House.
He said it was only a question of when.
The news comes as Biden also announced that all federal employees will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face weekly or twice weekly testing as well as mask mandates and distancing rules in the workplace.
"After months and months of cases going down, we're seeing a spike in COVID cases," Biden said in remarks at the White House. "Why? Because of this new form, this new variant called the delta variant."
The new rules for federal employees will affect more than 4 million Americans.
GOP senators request subpoenas for CDC and HHS for documents regarding school reopening coordination

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) • Senator Gary Peters (D-MI)
The letter comes after the group sent two previous letters to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health requesting the information.
The first letter was dated May 19, 2021, in which Sens. Rand Paul, James Lankford, and Josh Hawley requested all documents related to coordination between the CDC, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association regarding the drafting of federal school reopening guidance.
The senators alleged that the documents provided to them were only "a small subset of records that it had already made public through the Freedom of Information Act," stating that "these records contained the exact same FOIA markings as the public documents."
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy said:
"President Biden says that we are not returning to lockdowns, shutdowns, and school closures, but he also once said that we didn't have to wear masks anymore once we were vaccinated. So why should Americans trust him now?"Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded:
"Well, because we listen to the scientists, we listened to the expert[s]. This is a public health situation. This is not about politics at all. This is about saving lives. And this is what the president is all about. He wants to make sure that we are saving lives. If you look at ... the last six months, that's what he's done, every day. And you see that in the numbers. Now we're at a point where we have to double down and make it very, very clear to people that we can't, we can't let the pandemic win, we have to continue to fight."
Comment: Blinding...isn't it? No thought whatsoever.
Spot gold was up 0.1% at $1,829.10 per ounce at 09:17 GMT, before dropping back to $1,827.74 an ounce. On Thursday, the precious metal reached the highest price since July 15, at $1,832.40. Meanwhile, US gold futures eased 0.16% to $1,832.80.
Comment: Those countries with leadership that correctly perceive the outcome of the Fed policy have been preparing:
- Why are Russia and China buying gold at a fever pace?
- Gold is always shiny but US dollar is a 'hyperinflated bubble' ready to pop - RT's Keiser Report
- Peter Schiff: Russia prudently boosts gold reserves with eye on impending US dollar crisis
- China buying gold & dumping dollar assets as trade war with US intensifies
- India reducing its US Treasury securities and buying gold instead
- Turks heeding Erdogan's call to get rid of dollars & buy gold
Texas gives Wall Street bankers gold finger, moves to extract its gold from FED

Deputy Service Bailiff Michael Taylor signs a writ of eviction in the unincorporated community of Galloway, west of Columbus, Ohio, March 3, 2021.
The new statement comes as the country grapples with a COVID-19 surge fueled by the highly contagious delta variant.
The moratorium, essentially a nationwide ban on evictions, was put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September. In June, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow the eviction ban to continue through the end of July but signaled in its ruling that it would block any further extensions unless there was "clear and specific congressional authorization."
Comment: RT reports:
What began in March as a limited ban on evicting tenants who received federal assistance soon snowballed into a total ban on evictions, with a realtors' group telling Biden back in January that 40 million Americans were already in arrears on rent, to the tune of $70 billion in missed payments.Meanwhile over in the UK housing market: UK house prices now 30% higher than pre-2008 crisis peak
Biden had already exhausted his own options by declaring a month-long extension of the benefits in June, at a time when 14% of American adult renters were behind on paying their landlords.
Many states have disbursed less than 5% of their share of the $45 billion Congress earmarked for such aid.
At least 3.6 million Americans were facing eviction within the next two months as of July 5, the US Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey showed. Eviction proceedings often take time to initiate, however, meaning many more may face a similar fate before the end of the year.
While federal Covid-19 assistance for those who kept their jobs - perhaps taking a pay cut or reducing to part-time - has topped out at only a few thousand dollars over the past 18 months, unemployment payments were for some time so lucrative that many gave up looking for work entirely, realizing they could make more money sitting at home collecting checks. These payments have doubtless saved millions more from potential eviction, but they're also starting to dry up as many states face worker shortages, meaning those jobless masses have to find work again.
Though the moratorium has failed to help some renters, it has succeeded in starving out the mom-and-pop landlords who couldn't afford to lose a year's worth of rent from their tenants, forcing them to sell their properties to their much larger institutional brethren, who increasingly control housing policy.
Only a third of these small landlords qualified for what little mortgage relief has been doled out, and none were spared the yearly expense of property taxes. But private equity firms such as Blackstone, with trillions of dollars in assets to absorb deadbeat tenants, have happily moved in to snap up entire neighborhoods, further driving up rents in a vicious cycle that invariably leaves the average American worse off.
Indeed, the private equity firms have apparently gotten greedy, buying up houses across the US for thousands of dollars more than they're worth. So much so, in fact, that, in an already hugely inflated market, home sales actually dropped unexpectedly for the month of June everywhere except the northeastern states.
This shocking halt to ever-increasing housing costs suggested to observers that the market might - at least temporarily - have bitten off more than it could chew. Biden may simply be trying to calm things down, but with Congress knee-deep in virtue-signaling hearings, it's unlikely it'll have time to actually stop what it's doing and save Americans' lives.
This past April as the US vaccination program was in high gear, the Biden chief covid adviser, 80-year-old Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) since 1984, announced that the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had decided to order a "pause" on giving the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine in order to examine reports of blood clots. It turned out that there were six reported blood clot cases of some seven million who then had had the J&J covid jab. Fauci in his press remarks declared, "one of the things that's, I think, such a good thing about our system here, is that we're ruled by the science, not by any other consideration." There is good reason to question Fauci.
That was supposed to reassure people that the authorities were being ultra-careful with the experimental covid medications which, after all, never have been mass-tested on humans before and have only gotten "emergency use authorization," provisional FDA approval. The FDA quickly lifted the pause as J&J agreed to print that its vaccine could cause blood clots.
Yet at the same time, rival vaccine makers, Pfizer and Moderna, both using a hyper-experimental genetic treatment known as mRNA, were not being paused by "the science" despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of alarming vaccine-related severe reactions, including official data of several thousand deaths from both, had been recorded by CDC data base, VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System).
"we condemn the mass arrests and detentions of protestors in Cuba and call on the government to respect the universal rights and freedoms of the Cuban people, including the free flow of information to all Cubans..... On July 11, tens of thousands of Cuban citizens participated in peaceful demonstrations across the country to protest deteriorating living conditions and to demand change. They exercised universal freedoms of expression and assembly, rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights..."
Comment: If Pakistan's vaccine coercion has been anywhere near as extensive as India's, it's likely that the low figure, in large part, represents people's refusal of the jab, not a lack of availability: 200 villagers in India flee homes to avoid Covid vaccination - some jump into nearby river
On Thursday, Asad Umar, chief of the National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC), a military-run body in charge of the country's pandemic response, told a news conference that people in Pakistan will need to get vaccinated or be prepared for some tough restrictions on their daily lives.
Speaking alongside Health Minister Faisal Sultan, Umar announced that from August 1, all unvaccinated citizens will no longer be able to enter government offices, schools, restaurants, and shopping malls. Proof of vaccination will also be required for air travel, following a similar move outlined by the Saudi government.












Comment: Israel is allowed to continue and expand its spy operation unabated. It defies logic - unless we consider its infiltration into the decision-making power structures within many governments. What we 'know' is merely the tip of the problem. And, that is its hedge.
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