BRICS is Expanding Against USA

The origins of BRICS — a bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and, as of 2024, new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — can be traced back to a 2001 publication by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill titled ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’. O’Neill argued that Brazil, Russia, India and China were poised to play an increasingly significant role in the global economy.

His prediction was that by 2050, these countries would collectively account for 40 per cent of the world’s economic output. In reality, from 2012 to 2022 China alone has accounted for around a quarter of global GDP growth, and the BRICS countries together contributed over 45 per cent.

BRIC was officially launched in 2009 and was renamed BRICS in 2010 when South Africa joined the group. Since then, trade relations have clearly grown, but in a very unbalanced manner.

Most of the growth in trade has been China-centric, with the contribution from the rest of BRICS remaining quite flat until recently. The recent increase is mostly explained by India, which has experienced an acceleration in economic growth. BRICS members are increasingly intertwined with China as far as trade is concerned, but the remaining members have very few ties among themselves. Bilateral trade between BRICS members other than China remains extremely low.  READ MORE...

Russia's Nuclear Influence Expands

Russia is continuing to build its nuclear arsenal as a deterrence method against potential adversaries, according to U.S. intelligence.

In its annual threat assessment released to the public on Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) stated that Moscow still holds "the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile" and that Russia views its atomic weapons as "necessary for maintaining deterrence and achieving its goals in a potential conflict against the United States and NATO."


The report comes as tensions between the West and Russia continue to rise amid the war in Ukraine, and as concerns swirl over Moscow's potential to use nuclear weapons against Kyiv or its neighboring NATO member states. Russia President Vladimir Putin has warned that Ukraine's allies risk starting a nuclear conflict if they expand their involvement in the Russian-Ukraine war.  READ MORE...

Russia & China to put Nuclear Plant on Moon

MOSCOW, March 5 (Reuters) - Russia and China are considering putting a nuclear power plant on the moon from 2033-35, Yuri Borisov, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday, something he said could one day allow lunar settlements to be built.

Borisov, a former deputy defence minister, said that Russia and China had been jointly working on a lunar programme and that Moscow was able to contribute with its expertise on "nuclear space energy".

"Today we are seriously considering a project - somewhere at the turn of 2033-2035 - to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues," Borisov said.

Solar panels would not be able to provide enough electricity to power future lunar settlements, he said, while nuclear power could.

"This is a very serious challenge...it should be done in automatic mode, without the presence of humans," he said of the possible plan.  READ MORE...

NATO Countries Not Going Into Ukraine

France’s suggestion that Ukraine’s allies could potentially send ground troops into Ukraine has caused indignation and outrage in Russia, with officials warning it could provoke a direct conflict between Russia and NATO member states.

Eyebrows were raised Monday when French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that European heads of state and Western officials, who met in Paris on Monday, had talked about the possibility of sending ground troops into Ukraine.


“There is no consensus today to officially, openly, and with endorsement, send troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing should be ruled out. We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” Macron said at a news conference Monday evening. READ MORE...

Offensive Cyber Attacks Via Generative AI

Microsoft said Wednesday it had detected and disrupted instances of U.S. adversaries — chiefly Iran and North Korea and to a lesser extent Russia and China — using or attempting to exploit generative artificial intelligence developed by the company and its business partner to mount or research offensive cyber operations.


The techniques Microsoft observed, in collaboration with its partner OpenAI, represent an emerging threat and were neither “particularly novel or unique,” the Redmond, Washington, company said in a blog post.  READ MORE...

Russia's Elite Paratroopers Refusing Orders

Russian marines and paratroopers are refusing to launch certain types of assaults due to concerns over the huge losses other troops are suffering, a Ukrainian official said, the Kyiv Post reported.

Nataliya Humenyuk, a press secretary for the Armed Forces of Ukraine's Joint Command South, said that the soldiers considered "themselves 'elite troops'" and did not "want to go into frontal assaults" that former felons and reservists typically carry out, the outlet reported.

Throughout the Russian invasion, Russia has become increasingly reliant on high-risk frontal assaults involving waves of attacks that probe Ukrainian positions and seize small portions of territory at the cost of substantial casualties.

The leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash last August after leading a failed mutiny in June, described the tactic as a "meat grinder."  READ MORE...

Nuclear Energy Competition with Russia and China

As the USA and many world leaders continue the pursuit of “unreliable electricity”, from wind turbines and solar panels, that can only generate intermittent electricity at best from available breezes and sunshine, Russia, China, France, and Finland have emerged as the leaders in nuclear power generation to achieve continuous uninterruptible, affordable, and zero emission electricity.

According to recent reports, Russia and China are currently leading the world in nuclear electricity generation which also happens to be continuous uninterruptable zero-emissions electricity.

About 60 nuclear power reactors are currently being constructed in 15 countries, notably China, India, and Russia. Together, China and Russia account for 70 percent of new nuclear plants.

The United States, which once led the way in nuclear energy, now lags with only a handful of new reactors under construction. The dominance of Russia and China is likely to continue for the foreseeable future as they invest heavily in new technology and expand their nuclear power programs.

Many of the next generation nuclear plants will require a new form of enriched uranium – called High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). Russia is currently the only country to produce HALEU which may not be comfortable for America’s national security.    READ MORE...

Russia and China successfully test quantum communication over satellite

Following recent demos of quantum communication using undersea fiber optics, scientists from Russia and China have successfully demonstrated quantum communication over satellite, using China's quantum satellite (dubbed "Mozi"), as the two countries lay the groundwork for advanced encrypted communication networks that are safe from prying Western eyes — possibly for BRICS-aligned countries. The test was conducted using the satellite from a ground station close to Moscow, Russia, to another station based near Urumqi, China, over 3,800 kilometers, according to the South China Morning Post.  READ MORE...

Russia BANS LGBTQ+ Movement

Russia's Supreme Court yesterday declared the international LGBTQ+ rights movement an extremist organization in the latest and most severe legal move against LGBTQ+ activism in the country.

Russia Against LGBT Movement

Russia's justice ministry has filed a motion with the country's Supreme Court to ban the activities of what it calls the "international LGBT public movement" as extremist.

It is unclear whether the ministry's statement refers to the LGBT community as a whole or specific organisations.

It said the movement had shown signs of "extremist activity", including inciting "social and religious strife".

The ban could leave any LGBT activist vulnerable to criminal prosecution.  The extremist label has been used in the past by Russian authorities against rights organizations and opposition groups such as Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.  READ MORE...

China's Vision to Reshape the WORLD

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

Xi Jinping has a plan for how the world should work, and one year into his norm-shattering third term as Chinese leader, he’s escalating his push to challenge America’s global leadership — and put his vision front and center.

That bid was in the spotlight like never before last month in Beijing, when Xi, flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and some two dozen top dignitaries from around the world, hailed China as the only country capable of navigating the challenges of the 21st century.  READ MORE...

War Continues in Ukraine

The latest developments from the Ukraine war.

Zelenskyy rules out wartime elections

“Now is not the time for elections,” Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday, trying to put to rest a growing debate amid Russia's grinding invasion.

"Now is the time for defence, for battle, on which the fate of the state and people depends, and not for farce, which only Russia expects from Ukraine," Zelenskyy said in a speech. "I think this is not the time for elections.

“We must come together, not divide ourselves, not disperse ourselves in quarrels or other priorities,” he added.   READ MORE...

Russia Loses 1000 Troops a day in Ukraine

The Ukrainian military on Sunday claimed to have killed nearly 1,000 more Russian soldiers as the conflict in the war-torn country continues.

Russian President Vladimir Putin first began his "special military operation" on Ukraine in February 2022 based on dubious claims of mistreatment of ethnic Russian residents and that the Ukrainian government was being run by Nazis, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a native Russian speaker of Jewish heritage. 

The Eastern European country responded, however, with a stronger-than-expected defense effort, bolstered by Western aid, that has blunted Russian military gains.  READ MORE...

Russia Recruits Women for Mercenary Group in Ukraine

Women have rarely taken frontline fighting roles within the Ukraine war until now.

A Russian mercenary group is attempting to recruit women for combat roles in Ukraine, according to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD).

In its daily intelligence briefing for Monday, the MoD said that Redut - a state-backed private military company - is appealing for women to work as snipers and drone operators in its Borz Battalion.

Redut - formerly known as Shield - has links to the GRU, Russia's foreign intelligence agency.  READ MORE...

Reshaping The Global Order

At the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg on August 24, 2023, the bloc’s five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — announced the invitation of six new countries — Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Effective January 1, 2024, BRICS countries will represent almost half the world’s population.

While BRICS has struggled to make concrete achievements, the momentum may now be shifting. This expansion would have the BRICS overtake the G7 in total gross domestic product, with BRICS economies growing at higher demographic and economic rates than G7 members.

The BRICS expansion could help reduce tensions among the BRICS’s Middle Eastern countries, but could also provoke the United States and NATO, given the admission of Iran and the current membership of Russia and China.

A growing number of countries have expressed interest in joining the BRICS group. Yet there are internal disagreements about how the group should move forward. China and Russia have pushed for a quick expansion of BRICS to strengthen their geopolitical influence, while India has expressed concern about admitting many new members too quickly.

India’s concern has much to do with its historic, bitter border disputes with China, as well as the current strength of India’s bilateral relationship with the United States. India’s contribution in keeping BRICS from becoming outwardly anti-Western only strengthens the country’s geopolitical importance for the United States – US President Joe Biden quite literally pulled out the red carpet for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his June 2023 visit to the White House.  READ MORE...

Ukrainian Calls Russian Tank Tech Support for Help

In the 20 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Ukrainian army has captured around 200 of Russia’s T-72B3 tanks.

The T-72B3, a product of Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, is one of Russia’s newer tanks. And unlike, say, the T-64BV, the T-80U or the T-72AMT, Ukrainian industry doesn’t have much experience with the type.

So when a Ukrainian tanker with the callsign “Kochevnik” ran into problems with his captured Russian T-72B3—problems local expertise couldn’t immediately solve—he called Uralvagonzavod tech support. And incredibly, the help line actually helped.

Militarnyi captured Kochevnik’s calls on video.

Kochevnik serves in the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade, which fights around Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine and operates mostly Soviet-vintage equipment including T-64 tanks and BMP fighting vehicles. It also owns some of Ukraine’s ex-Russian T-72B3s.

Kochevnik was trolling the Russians, mostly. But his gripes with his 45-ton, three-person tank were real. The tank had been spewing oil. Its compressors weren’t working. The electrical turret-rotation mechanism kept failing, forcing the crew to rotate the turret with a hand crank.  READ MORE...

The Mystery of Planet Formation

Until the 1950s, ideas about planet formation were mosly dismissed as fanciful and few astronomers took the question seriously. (Image credit: Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images)



We've only got to grips with how the planets in our solar system formed in the last 100 years. In the extract below from "What's Gotten Into You" (HarperCollins, 2023), Dan Levitt looks at the Soviet mathematician who spent a decade working on a problem that most astronomers had given up on, and — when he finally solved it — was met with disinterest and skepticism.

Over 4.8 billion years ago, the atoms that would create us sailed in great clouds of gas and dust, toward… well, nothing. There was no solar system, no planets, no Earth. In fact, for a long time, scientists could not explain how our solid planet, not to mention one so hospitable to life, appeared at all. 

How was our now-rocky planet conjured, like magic, out of an ethereal cloud of gas and dust? How and when did Earth become so welcoming to life? And what travails were our molecules forced to brave until life could evolve?

Scientists would learn that our atoms could finally create life only after they endured wrenching collisions, meltdowns, and bombardments — catastrophes that beggar any destruction ever witnessed by humankind.  READ MORE...

Wanting to Join BRICS

WHAT IS BRICS?

The acronym BRIC, which did not initially include South Africa, was coined in 2001 by then Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill in a research paper that underlined the growth potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The bloc was founded as an informal club in 2009 to provide a platform for its members to challenge a world order dominated by the United States and its Western allies.

Its creation was initiated by Russia.

The group is not a formal multilateral organisation like the United Nations, World Bank or the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

The heads of state and government of the member nations convene annually with each nation taking up a one-year rotating chairmanship of the group.

WHO ARE THE MEMBERS?

Brazil, Russia, India and China are the founding members.

South Africa, the smallest member in terms of economic clout and population, was the first beneficiary of an expansion of the bloc in 2010 when the grouping became known as BRICS.

Together the countries account for more than 40% of the world population and a quarter of the global economy.

Apart from geopolitics, the group's focus includes economic cooperation and increasing multilateral trade and development.

The bloc operates by consensus. All the BRICS countries are part of the Group of 20 (G20) of major economies.

WHICH NATIONS WANT TO JOIN BRICS AND WHY?
Over 40 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Algeria, Bolivia, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan have expressed interest in joining the forum, according to 2023 summit chair South Africa.

They view BRICS as an alternative to global bodies viewed as dominated by the traditional Western powers and hope membership will unlock benefits including development finance, and increased trade and investment.

Dissatisfaction with the global order among developing nations was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic when life-saving vaccines were hoarded by the rich countries.

Iran, home to around a quarter of the Middle East's oil reserves, has said it hopes the mechanism for new membership would be decided "at the earliest."

Oil heavyweight Saudi Arabia was among more than a dozen countries that participated in "Friends of BRICS" talks in Cape Town in June. It has received backing from Russia and Brazil to join the BRICS.

Argentina said in July 2022 it had received China's formal support in its bid to join the group.  READ MORE...

Hypersonic Missiles on Russian Submarines

Alexei Rakhmanov, President of the United Shipbuilding Corporation, delivers a speech during a farewell ceremony as Russia's floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov leaves the service base of Rosatomflot company for a journey along the Northern Sea Route to Chukotka from Murmansk, Russia August 23, 2019. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Acquire Licensing Rights 

Aug 14 (Reuters) - Russia is in the process of equipping its new nuclear submarines with hypersonic Zircon missiles, the head of Russia's largest shipbuilder told the RIA state news agency in an interview published on Monday.

"Multi-purpose nuclear submarines of the Yasen-M project will ... be equipped with the Zircon missile system on a regular basis," , Alexei Rakhmanov, chief executive officer of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), told RIA. "Work in this direction is already underway."

Yasen-class submarines, also known as Project 885M, are nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines, built to replace Soviet-era nuclear attack submarines as part of a programme to modernise the army and fleet.

The sea-based Zircon hypersonic missiles have a range of 900 km (560 miles), and can travel at several times the speed of sound, making it difficult to defend against them.

President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that Russia would start mass supplies of Zircon missiles as part of the country's efforts to boost its nuclear forces.

The Russian multi-purposes frigate Admiral Gorshkov, which has tested its strike capabilities in the western Atlantic Ocean earlier this year, has been already equipped with Zircon missiles.

Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore

Drone Attacks on Russia

Dwindling military resources and a dearth of new targets have left Russian President Vladimir Putin struggling to respond to a rise of troubling drone attacks on Moscow.

Several analysts have noted in recent days that Putin has attempted to downplay dramatic attacks on the Russian capital – for which Ukraine has explicitly denied any responsibility, at least publicly. 

The attacks have gained widespread attention on social media, particularly in Russia, with some observers suggesting that they were the result of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the Kremlin to force national support for a new round of military conscriptions it likely needs.

Yet Putin’s response appears to discount that theory.

Instead of maximizing the attacks for propaganda purposes, the Russian leader’s reaction appears to be an attempt “to avoid exposing the limited options he has to retaliate against Ukraine,” the independent Institute for the Study of War concludes in a new analysis note.

The analysis points to Putin’s explanation earlier this week that Russian forces struck the Ukrainian military intelligence headquarters two or three days previously.  READ MORE...