So long as Washington dirty tricks and Wall Street machinations were able to create a crisis such as they did in the Eurozone in 2010 through Greece, world trading surplus countries like China, Japan and then Russia, had no practical alternative but to buy more US Government debt — Treasury securities — with the bulk of their surplus trade dollars.

Washington and Wall Street could print endless volumes of dollars backed by nothing more valuable than F-16s and Abrams tanks. China, Russia and other dollar bond holders in truth financed the US wars that were aimed at them, by buying US debt. Then they had few viable alternative options.

Now, ironically, two of the foreign economies that allowed the dollar an artificial life extension beyond 1989 — Russia and China — are carefully unveiling that most feared alternative, a viable, gold-backed international currency and potentially, several similar currencies that can displace the unjust hegemonic role of the dollar today.

For several years it’s been known in gold markets that the largest buyers of physical gold were the central banks of China and of Russia. What was not so clear was how deep a strategy they had beyond simply creating trust in the currencies amid increasing economic sanctions and bellicose words of trade war out of Washington.

Now it’s clear why. China and Russia, joined most likely by their major trading partner countries in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), as well as by their Eurasian partner countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are about to complete the working architecture of a new monetary alternative to a dollar world.

Currently, in addition to founding members China and Russia, the SCO full members include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and most recently India and Pakistan. This is a population of well over 3 billion people, some 42% of the entire world population, coming together in a coherent, planned, peaceful economic and political cooperation.

In April 2016 China made a major move to become the new center for gold exchange and the world center of gold trade, physical gold. China today is the world’s largest gold producer, far ahead of fellow BRICS member South Africa, with Russia number two.

Now to add the new oil futures contract traded in China in Yuan with the gold backing will lead to a dramatic shift by key OPEC members, even in the Middle East, to prefer gold-backed Yuan for their oil over inflated US dollars that carry a geopolitical risk as Qatar experienced following the Trump visit to Riyadh some months ago. Notably, Russian state oil giant, Rosneft just announced that Chinese state oil company, CEFC China Energy Company Ltd just bought a 14% share of Rosneft from Qatar. It’s all beginning to fit together into a very coherent strategy.

Israeli officials believe the establishment of the base will send a message to their enemies. “It’s a message that says Israel is better prepared. It’s a message that says Israel is improving the response to threats,” said Brigadier General Zvika Haimovich, the commander of Israel’s aerial defense. In his speech, Major General John Gronski, deputy commander of US Army National Guard in Europe, said the base “symbolizes the strong bond that exists between the United States and Israel.”

Its opening coincides with Israel’s renewed push for the Trump administration to cancel what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the “terrible” nuclear deal with Iran, whom Israel considers its biggest enemy. The deal was negotiated by world powers, including the US, two years ago, to make sure Iran does not build nuclear weapons.

Such accounts underestimate the country. Its culture of remembrance creates a unique sense of historical responsibility and a stark wariness of demagoguery. Its political, media and wider civic life prioritise moderation and consensus: a new study by the Bertelsmann foundation shows that fully 80% of Germans consider themselves “centrist”, compared with 67% of Brits and 51% of French citizens. Germany’s economy is booming; the post-industrial grimness of swathes of Britain, France and America simply does not exist on that scale here. A lower proportion of Germans feel socially insecure than at any point since reunification

So it is with caution that I predict that the country’s federal politics will take a rightward turn at the election on September 24th. Mrs Merkel will be the next German chancellor. The country’s admirably cautious and reflective relationship with its identity and history will live on. It will continue to be a beacon of moderation and stability, the eye of the West’s nativist storm.

But I make the prediction nonetheless. The AfD is doing better than many expected. Its support spiked last year but had fallen again by the time of the party’s chaotic, rightwards-lurching conference in April. When, back then, I concluded that it was too early to write the AfD off, that was still a contentious prediction. But since the spring it has risen from around 7-9% in polls to the 8-12% range. Four of Germany’s six main pollsters have it on track to be the third largest party in the Bundestag. That would shake the political establishment. 

Now Schroder is about to join the board of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, on which the US imposed sanctions this year. It is run by Igor Sechin, a hard-boiled operator said to have strong ties to the security services and to be Putin’s closest ally. Schroder, in other words, is being welcomed into the Kremlin court. The move represents more than jobs for the boys; this very personal axis is supposed to guarantee heightened Russian influence within the EU at a time when Putin is losing faith with the Trump administration.

As for Gazprom, the Russian gas producer, it retains a 34 per cent share in the EU energy market but is facing a hostile European Commission that has made security of supply a priority. Liquefied natural gas from the US, which is just starting to arrive in Poland and The Netherlands, may not displace Russian gas but it will push down Russian prices.

Putin, an admirer of German virtues since his KGB days in Dresden, seems to believe the country can become a special partner after Merkel’s presumed re-election this month and his own re-enthronement next year.

Germany has to show a “determined leadership” of NATO and lead this military alliance of the “West” towards adopting a new strategic concept. This is what the advisers to the German Government and experts in foreign policy are asking for. The context? The reorientation of Germany’s global policy which, following Russia’s recapturing of Crimea, no longer aims exclusively at military interventions throughout the whole world to guarantee strategic or economic interests, but also at fighting “competing conceptual models” of international policy.

It is in the pursuit of this latter objective that the Federal Republic is playing a leading role in establishing NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe — against Russia. In particular, Berlin has the lead role in creating multinational divisions, which are destined to complete the NATO troops stationed in the Baltic States and Poland and aims at being the “spear head” of the Alliance. As the Stiftung für Wissenschaft und Politik (the “Foundation for Science and Politics” referred to herein as SWP) stresses, these can also be sent by the EU at any time and participate in these operations.

It is for this reason that the SWP considers that their “importance and scope stretches beyond the Alliance”.

It comes just hours after the NHC had upgraded Maria to an "extremely dangerous" category 4 hurricane. The NHC latest public advisory issued at 8pm EDT announced that Maria had “become a potentially catastrophic category 5 hurricane” as the storm narrows in on Dominica with winds of up to 160mph (260kmph).

UPDATE: Hurricane Maria: Storm batters Dominica causing 'severe damage' as nation's PM rescued. HURRICANE Maria has made landfall, causing “severe damage” to Dominica as the storm batters the nation with winds of 160mph (260kmph), according to the Trinidad and Tobago weather centre.

He bashed Pyongyang for showing 'its utter contempt for its neighbors and for the entire world community.' 'Nothing inspires more confidence in our friends, or strikes more fear in the hearts of our enemies, than the sight of American war planes on the horizon,' Trump declared.

'Our aviators have given America total dominance of the air and space no matter where we fly. Now when our enemies hear the F-35's engines, when they're roaring overhead, their souls will tremble and they will know the day of reckoning has arrived.'

The warnings came a day after leader Kim Jong Un vowed to continue the weapons programs, saying North Korea is nearing its goal of "equilibrium" in military force with the United States. They also came as world leaders begin arriving in New York for the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly this week, where North Korea will be high on the agenda.

Trump tweeted Sunday that he and South Korean President Moon Jae-in discussed North Korea during their latest telephone conversation on Saturday. Trump spoke with Moon from his New Jersey golf club, where aides said he was spending the weekend preparing for his UN debut.

US National Security Adviser HR McMaster said Kim is "going to have to give up his nuclear weapons because the president has said he's not going to tolerate this regime threatening the United States and our citizens with a nuclear weapon." Asked if that meant Trump would launch a military strike, McMaster said "he's been very clear about that, that all options are on the table."

His fantasy of a federalist European Union with all 27 members remaining after Britain leaves embracing the euro and opening borders per the Schengen agreement was so out of step with reality and with the mood in EU countries that he seemed to be on a different planet. In fact, the German daily Die Welt thought the idea of a Bulgaria or a Romania joining the euro was so absurd that one had to ask “on what distant star the spaceship EU under its Captain Juncker has spent the last few years.”

Sahra Wagenknecht, a leader of the Left party in Germany — who takes advantage of her party’s marginal status to speak more pointedly than mainstream politicians — said “Mr Juncker seems to have taken leave of his senses. The euro is already causing enough damage to the countries that have it, without extending it to the rest of the EU," she said.

Even the liberal Guardian, which has been steadfastly pro-Europe, said “Juncker’s federalist vision for the EU is far from reality.” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described Juncker as a “romantic,” the paper reported, and suggested that people with visions see an eye doctor.

"Mrs Merkel single-handedly opened the borders - we can't ever forget that," he told AFP in the coastal town of Greifswald. "She allowed one million unregistered and unchecked people into the country and that is absolutely unacceptable." Around 890,000 mainly Muslim asylum seekers arrived in 2015 alone in what Holm calls a mistake that changed the course of German, and European, history.

He studiously avoids the kind of fire-breathing rhetoric on Muslims and Germany's wartime guilt that has made the party a pariah among mainstream politicians. "If you have a very critical stance on uncontrolled mass immigration you get stigmatised as a far-right extremist. We have nothing against foreigners as such," he said. "We just need to bring the right ones into the country, the ones we can use," he said, calling Canada and Australia's immigration laws good models.

"We want to remain a sovereign country, not a United States of Europe," he said, blaming a drive for greater European integration pushed by Merkel for tipping the balance for Brexit and alienating many eastern European countries.

When confronting a case with some form of legal obstacle in the way, the former 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge said he would look to circumvent whatever prevented him from reaching his desired result. “When you have a Supreme Court case or something similar, they’re often extremely easy to get around,” Posner said.

When judges make law instead of interpreting law in the light of the Constitution, they do not defend us from tyrants, but rather become tyrants themselves. Posner decided to finally retire at age 78 because he had “lost interest” in the cases he arbitrarily decides.