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This is much more than the rest of the world combined producing 78% of the world's silk.

Cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Shaoxing are well known for their silk industries.

Silk cloth manufacture was well advanced during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC) era.

The Silk Road was a network of trade routes connecting China and the Far East with the Middle East and Europe.

Trade along the so-called Silk Road economic belt included fruits and vegetables, livestock, grain, leather and hides, tools, religious objects, artwork, precious stones and metals and—perhaps more importantly—language, culture, religious beliefs, philosophy and science.

The Silk Road may have formally opened up trade between the Far East and Europe during the Han Dynasty, which ruled China from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D

refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.

The Silk Road extended approximately 6,437 kilometers (4,000 miles) across some of the world’s most formidable landscapes, including the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains.

With no one government to provide upkeep, the roads were typically in poor condition. Robbers were common. To protect themselves, traders joined together in caravans with camels or other pack animals. Over time, large inns called caravanserais cropped up to house travelling merchants.

it killed an estimated one-third of the European population

started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.

Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.

According to ancient Chinese historical sources, a court eunuch named Ts'ai Lun (or Cai Lun) presented newly-invented paper to the Emperor Hedi of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 105 CE.

The historian Fan Hua (398-445 CE) recorded this version of events, but archaeological finds from western China and Tibet suggest that paper was invented centuries earlier.

proving that ink too was invented much earlier than historians had supposed.

The brisk market for pardons reflects the access peddling that has defined Mr. Trump’s presidency as well as his unorthodox approach to exercising unchecked presidential clemency powers. Pardons and commutations are intended to show mercy to deserving recipients, but Mr. Trump has used many of them to reward personal or political allies.

Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor who has been advising the White House on pardons and commutations, has monetized his clemency work, collecting tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly more, in recent weeks to lobby the White House for clemency for the son of a former Arkansas senator; the founder of the notorious online drug marketplace Silk Road; and a Manhattan socialite who pleaded guilty in a fraud scheme.

Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer John M. Dowd has marketed himself to convicted felons as someone who could secure pardons because of his close relationship with the president, accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a wealthy felon and advising him and other potential clients to leverage Mr. Trump’s grievances about the justice system.

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

“What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?

inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.

I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up

There will be more anonymarts, probably named the Black Hole, the Trading Den, Pirates Cove, the Back Room, and the like. For every Silk Road stealth market that sinks, five more will erupt. Silk Road claims it will not allow "harmful" products to be listed, but other anonymarkets will not be so constrained. They will sell not only drugs, but stolen credit cards, passports, weapons and sex.

Anonymarkets are yet another species of net life in a networked world. Hard to eradicate, they will thrive in the cracks of the global economy. You can buy anything you want at Alice's Stealthy Anonymart. Including Alice. Step right up. But anonymarts won't overthrow capitalism, cause the downfall of the global economy, or bring cheap drugs into every school yard. It is a big ecosystem out there and it is rare for a single new species to alter the dynamics of the ecology. At best it will nudge it. Anonymarts will push at the edges of what is possible and might spark new versions of ebay and craigslist that trade in everyday legal stuff.

Before we were asking the company to keep our data safe from advertisers, we were asking it to keep our democracy safe from foreign interference, and our online communities safe from abuse. At the same time, we were asking it to stay neutral — an almost impossible task.

Now, the focus has shifted to security, and discussion of any regulation to come has centered on users’ ability to control the information they allow Facebook to access in exchange for its free services.

But that means inviting government to involve itself more actively in Internet affairs, and the involvement could stretch beyond rules that protect consumers from privacy violations:

A researcher at a Swedish university says that Viking burial clothes bear the word “Allah”

Inspecting the woman’s silk burial clothes, Larsson noticed small geometric designs. She compared them to similar designs on a silk band found in a 10th-century Viking grave, this one in Birka, Sweden. It was then that she came to the conclusion that the designs were actually Arabic characters—and that they spelled out the name of God in mirror-image.

tendency of white supremacists to appropriate the symbols of Vikings, whom they claim constituted a pure-bred white race; in Charlottesville, for example, neo-Nazis were seen toting banners with Viking runes. The idea that Vikings were influenced by Muslims would likely be anathema to them. “The Vikings are every white supremacist’s favorite white guy.”

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.

A decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Maritime Silk Road, the oceanic component of his flagship Belt and Road Initiative aimed at improving China’s access to world markets by investing in transportation infrastructure

China has already secured a significant stake in a network of global ports that are central to world trade and freedom of navigation. Although the stated goal of the investments was commercial, the United States and its allies have grown increasingly concerned about the potential military implications.

Xi has frequently talked of his ambition to turn China into a “maritime superpower.” The port network offers a glimpse into the reach of those ambitions.

Researchers have created a prototype for a touch screen that can be used to send messages while it’s concealed in a jacket or pants pocket. The stealthy screen works when it is touched through the fabric, whether it is silk, cotton or even thick fleece. In classes or meetings of the future, with your hands tucked beneath the conference table or desk, you may rest a fingertip discreetly on the pocket that holds the touch screen and handle a call by tracing a message like “Running late. In a mtg.” on the fabric above the hidden screen. The touch screen will understand the message — it has a program to decipher handwriting, even of the scrawling sort. So while you’re writing on your pocket, you can maintain polite eye contact with the group, no longer betrayed by those telltale downward gazes necessary to text with a standard screen.

Malek Layouni was not thinking about her Muslim faith, or her head scarf, as she took her excited 9-year-old son to an amusement site near Paris. But, as it turned out, it was all that mattered.

Mrs. Layouni still blushes with humiliation at being turned away in front of friends and neighbors, and at having no answer for her son, who kept asking her, “What did we do wrong?”

10 years after France passed its first anti-veil law restricting young girls from wearing veils in public schools, the head coverings of observant Muslim women, from colorful silk scarves to black chadors, have become one of the most potent flash points in the nation’s tense relations with its vibrant and growing Muslim population.

Byzantium used to call to mind a sterile, bureaucratic and yet violent society, corrupted by fatuous complexities. The worst failings in our own societies would be described as "Byzantine."

a new generation of scholars has emerged, re-evaluating the very idea of Roman decline or Dark Ages and arguing that the barbarian forces that occupied the empire's western provinces adopted, adapted and thus perpetuated many of the Roman methods of administration. The term "Late Antiquity" embodies this long period of transition, which transformed the Roman world while integrating aspects of Latin culture with the Christian hierarchy of bishops and monks, who were themselves often recruited from the senatorial classes. At the same time, the recent emergence of an Islamic challenge to the West has urged our engagement with the Christian power that first withstood Muslim attacks and defended Europe's eastern frontier for centuries.

The excellence of Byzantine administration—hardly Byzantine at all by our usage—is nowhere clearer than in the power of the Byzantine standard gold coin, the solidus (known as the bezant in medieval Europe). First issued by Constantine I in the early fourth century, it retained its 24-carat value and was the coin of choice in international trade for more than 700 years. It took a self-conscious and creative government to manage this extraordinary achievement: one that puts to shame our present devalued currencies and monetary instability.

slam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political institutions.

But religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article). While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak.

Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches. Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew restless because of unemployment.

The question for Silicon Valley is whether we’re heading toward a robot-led coup or a leisure-filled utopia.

nterviews with 2,551 people who make, research and analyze new technology. Most agreed that robotics and artificial intelligence would transform daily life by 2025, but respondents were almost evenly split about what that might mean for the economy and employment.

techno-optimists. They believe that even though machines will displace many jobs in a decade, technology and human ingenuity will produce many more, as happened after the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The meaning of “job” might change, too, if people find themselves with hours of free time because the mundane tasks that fill our days are automated.

saying that some have been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But human

security forces shot and killed six men on Monday after they attacked police officers not far from the Silk Road city of Kashgar, a government website reported.

police opened fire on a man near the commercial center of Shule County who was wielding an ax while trying to set off explosives. It said another five men, described as “mobsters,” were subsequently shot to death as they, too, attacked the police.