In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story. The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The story sounded preposterous, I told my source. And yet.

Six months later, I found myself speaking with someone else about the UAE government and their use of mercenaries in conflicts around the Middle East and Africa when I asked, on a whim, whether they knew anything about Kushner and bank transfers from a UAE account. My acquaintance grew quiet. Then they replied, “Yes.”

Huffines will face Democratic nominee Sarah Eckhardt, a state senator from Austin, for the right to a four-year term in November.

The long-standing allegiances between global powers have been tested over the past few years. Wars between Russia and Ukraine, and between the U.S., Israel, and Iran in the Middle East, have pushed governments around the world to signal where their loyalties lie—even when the conflicts are domestically unpopular and far removed from their own borders.

And that’s before you get to President Trump’s tariff agenda and the trade battles that have ensued because of it.

So it is perhaps no wonder that, under the radar, central banks across the world are stocking up on the safe-haven asset of gold, and they don’t want to share where they’re keeping it.

Goldman Sachs wrote in a note earlier this week that it estimates central banks globally purchased 79 tonnes of gold in August, more than four times the amount of the pre-2022 average (the year the Russia-Ukraine war began) of 17 tonnes. On a three-month seasonally adjusted basis, purchases are running at 85 tonnes per month, Goldman noted.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/22/central-bank-stockpiling-gold-china-geopolitics-storage-reserves/?utm_source=reddit/

"Some Williamson County voters say ballot machines registered a different candidate than the one they selected, requiring multiple attempts to correct it."