Dr. Jane McGill is in heaven.
She’s got a great job at a VA Hospital, an adorable daughter, and a loving husband. Granted, it would be wonderful if her preschooler wouldn’t wake her up at three in the morning, and it would be a miracle if her husband would change the toilet paper roll once every millennium. Still, in most ways, she has the ideal life she’d always imagined.
Then Jane discovers that Dr. Ryan Reilly is the VA’s newest vascular surgeon. Dr. Ryan Reilly, a.k.a. Sexy Surgeon, a.k.a. the biggest jerk she ever loved.
A decade ago, Jane broke up with the Sexy Surgeon to marry the Nice Software Engineer, but as cracks and crevices appear in her marriage, she can’t help but wonder what life would have been like if she’d made a different choice. Or if it isn’t too late to change her mind. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
Just because the Western press does not report on China’s impressive response to the US abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro and his wife does not mean it did not happen. I find the following article posted on RT (i.e., Russia Today) shocking: — China’s Silent Tough Response To Washington’s Kidnapping Of The Maduros by Larry C. Johnson
China strongly condemned the kidnapping and violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty. Without large-scale gestures in the style of Trump or Macron, the country has taken steps because it has come to the conclusion that the U.S. is making control of Venezuelan oil a tool to curb China’s presence in South America and hinder its rapid, irreversible development. . . .
Just hours after the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro became known, Xi Jinping convened an urgent meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, which lasted exactly 120 minutes. There were no communiqués or diplomatic threats, but only the silence before the storm, because this meeting activated what Chinese strategists call an “integrated asymmetric response” to respond to aggression against the partners in the Western Hemisphere, with Venezuela being the landing head for Latin America in the “backyard of the US.”
The first phase of the Chinese reaction set at 9:15 a.m. on the 4th. January, when the People’s Bank of China discreetly announced the temporary suspension of all transactions in US dollars with companies that have ties to the US defense sector. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics awoke with the news that all their transactions with China had been frozen without notice.
At 11:43 a.m. the same day, the State Grid Corporation of China, which controls the world’s largest power grid, announced the technical review of all of its contracts with U.S. suppliers of electrical equipment, implying that China is disconnecting from American technology.
At 2:17 p.m., China National Petroleum Corporation, the world’s largest state-owned oil company, announced the strategic reorganization of its global supply routes. That means the energy weapon has been re-activated, which in turn means the lifting of oil supply contracts with US refineries worth 47 billion dollars a year. This oil, previously delivered to the east coast of the US, has now been diverted to India, Brazil, South Africa and other partners in the Global South. This caused oil prices to skyrocket by 23 percent in a single trading session. . . .
In another train, the China Ocean Shipping Company, which controls about 40 percent of global maritime transport capabilities, conducted a so-called optimization of operational routes, meaning Chinese cargo ships have begun to avoid the use of American ports: Long Beach, Los Angeles, New York and Miami, which relies on Chinese maritime logistics for their supply chains, suddenly lost 35 percent of their normal container traffic – a disaster for Walmart, Amazon, Target, and others. These companies, which rely on Chinese ships for the import of products manufactured in China into American ports, saw their supply chains partially collapse within a few hours.
The coronation came on 5. January, when Beijing activated the financial weapon: The Chinese cross-border interbank payment system (CIPS) announced that it would expand its operational capacity to include any global transaction that the Washington-controlled SWIFT system wants to circumvent. That means China has provided a fully functional alternative to the Western financial system for the world. . . . The reaction was immediate and massive: in the first 48 hours after commissioning, transactions worth 89 billion dollars were settled. Central banks from 34 countries opened operational accounts in the Chinese system, which means an accelerated de-dollarization of one of the most important sources of funding in the US.