The US dollar’s value depends on whether central banks, corporations, and individuals are content to hold their assets or wealth in dollars. If they are, it does not matter what currency is used to transact oil. If they are not, it does not matter if all oil is transacted in dollars. Why? Because if they don’t want to hold dollars, they will dump the dollars as soon as the transaction is completed and move into other currencies or gold. What China is doing is creating a currency that might be a more attractive currency to hold.

It is possible that the gold-backed Chinese currency is a move against US power, but I see it differently. I see it as a protection against US power. China and Russia are disassociating from the dollar system, because Washington, in its abuse of the world currency role, uses the dollar payments mechanism to impose sanctions on other countries and to threaten them with exclusion from the payments clearing system.

In other words, Washington, instead of operating a fair system, uses its world currency role to dominate other countries. Russia and China are too strong to be dominated, and, thus, are throwing off the dollar system. If other countries follow, the dollar will cease to be an instrument of US control over the rest of the world.

To put it in different words, Bretton Woods gave Washington the responsibility for the world financial system. Washington abused the power entrusted to it by using the dollar system to destabilize other countries, such as Venezuela currently. Washington’s abuse of the world currency role in order to advance American financial and business interests and Washington’s power over the foreign and domestic policies of other countries has set in motion forces that will eliminate the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The hubris and arrogance of Washington are destroying American power.

Despite the country's economic success, analysts say many Czechs who are heavily in debt or working long hours for low wages feel they have been left behind and are turning to populist, eurosceptic and far-right anti-EU parties to vent their ire. Far-right and far-left anti-EU parties made gains in the fragmented vote that put nine parties into the 200-seat Czech parliament with few obvious coalition allies among them, something analysts warned could trigger instability, even chaos.

A 63-year-old Slovak-born chemicals, food and media tycoon, Babis has vowed to steer clear of the eurozone and echoes other eastern EU leaders who accuse Brussels of attempting to limit national sovereignty by imposing rules like migrant quotas. He favours a united Europe and balks at talk of a "Czexit".

Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now believe it is not necessary to believe in God to have good morals, a study from Pew Research Center released Wednesday found.

Meanwhile, more than half of young adults in the US believe astrology is a science. compared to less than 8% of the Chinese public. The psychic services industry — which includes astrology, aura reading, mediumship, tarot-card reading and palmistry, among other metaphysical services — grew 2% between 2011 and 2016. It is now worth $2 billion annually, according to industry analysis firm IBIS World.

But “there is immense unrest in Germany,” notes Stephan Grünewald from the Rheingold Institute in Cologne, who specializes in conducting psychological in-depth interviews with voters: “In our interviews, all the talk was about: refugee crisis, refugee crisis, refugee crisis. The psychological mood of the voters is wobbly, I have never before experienced such rage and so much hate among the test persons.”

At times when I think of Germany today, an image comes to my mind that is familiar to many older Germans who experienced the air raids in the last war. I see a group of people huddled together in a bomb shelter who hear the detonations come closer and closer. And they keep ducking their heads, hoping the war will soon end by itself.

“I think the settlements are part of Israel,” Friedman said, comments that seem at odds with decades of US foreign policy. “I think that was always the expectation when resolution 242 was adopted in 1967,” he said, referring to the UN security council resolution made at the end of the six-day war, when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Friedman, a former personal lawyer of Donald Trump who had no experience in diplomacy before his appointment, was regarded as being a strong supporter of Jewish settlement before he was named as ambassador. “The idea was that Israel would be entitled to secure borders,” he told Israeli Walla. “The existing borders, the 1967 borders, were viewed by everybody as not secure, so Israel would retain a meaningful portion of the West Bank, and it would return that which it didn’t need for peace and security.

With a handful of US technology giants growing more powerful and dominant, debate is intensifying on whether big tech’s growth is healthy or not. Over the past few years, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon have become among the world’s most valuable companies. Along with stalwarts like Microsoft and rising stars like Netflix, the tech firms exercise enormous control over what people see and how they live.

Increasingly, policymakers and others have begun to consider breaking up or regulating the biggest technology companies, although imminent action appears unlikely. While many consumers welcome innovation from the tech sector, critics have complained about the power of “gatekeepers” of information and other content.

Google holds around 90 percent of the internet search market in the United States and Europe. Facebook and Google scoop up some 60 percent of digital ad revenues and are eating up 90 percent of new ad growth in the United States. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS power the overwhelming majority of mobile devices. Amazon accounts for nearly half of US online sales and is expanding into new sectors.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, said three firms — Google, Facebook and Amazon — “have more power than any previous monopolies we’ve dealt with in the past century.” “We have to be incredibly concerned about the power of Facebook, Google and Amazon,” said Lynn, who launched his research center last month after his team was ousted from the Google-funded New America Foundation. “They have their hands on the flow of news, the flow of books and they are manipulating that flow in a conscious way to promote their interests.”

The Government responded by warning that Boeing’s behaviour “could jeopardise” future Ministry of Defence contracts for its aircraft such as Apache helicopters. The Prime Minister has appealed directly to President Donald Trump to intervene in the dispute, which has dented her hopes of signing a post-Brexit free trade deal with the US.

She said that Boeing's long-term partnership with the Government is being "undermined by this behaviour." "We are very clear about the importance of Bombardier and the importance of those jobs in Northern Ireland and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that we can see those jobs being guaranteed in future," she added.

Both sides claim the other has benefited from state aid at some point - given the high cost of producing aircraft, state subsidies have been an inevitable part of the aerospace sector for a long time. Unsurprisingly, some have accused Boeing of hypocrisy in taking on Bombardier, a much smaller rival, over the issue.

What's more, Berlin’s uber stable political system has splintered which means we now enter territory unchartered for a lifetime. Because the swing to the Free Democrats (FDP) and AfD is over fourteen percentage points and almost all these gains are at the expense of the outgoing “grand coalition” of the centrist CDU/CSU and SPD parties. Both of whom have dominated Germany’s democratic parliaments since the Second World War.

For instance, in 1980, the pair controlled 87 percent of the vote in the old Federal Republic, and now they can barely manage a majority, between them, with only 53 percent of preferences. Furthermore, for the first time since 1924, six parties have achieved more than five percent of the vote. And this serves to highlight just how fragmented German politics has become.

Of course, it hardly signals a return to the Weimar days, but the relative chaos exposes how a large number of Germans have become disillusioned with the status quo. The grievances range from growing inequality and rising levels of immigration to a feeling that the political class is out of touch. The latter two concerns are often combined when voters react to Merkel’s unilateral decision to open Germany’s borders to large numbers of migrants in 2015.