BRICS

Special Report on 9th BRICS Summit in Xiamen, China
Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei (C), Shanghai Mayor Yang Xiong (R) and President of the New Development Bank (NDB) of BRICS K.V. Kamath attend the launching ceremony of the bank in Shanghai, east China, July 21, 2015 [Xinhua]
The BRICS New Development Bank is hoping to increase the size of its loans in 2017, a Chinese Ministry of Finance official said on Thursday.
The statements by Zhou Qiangwu reiterate remarks made last year by the NDB Vice-President Zhu Xian.

There are very few inventions which are perfect at the moment of their creation, or which cannot be improved over time. The League of Nations was a new invention when it was first created after the First World War. It was the first attempt to form a global organisation whose main purpose was to prevent war through achieving disarmament and settling disputes through negotiation and arbitration. Like most new inventions, it wasn’t perfect. It failed, and World War Two followed.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry and Indian Ministry of External Affairs have both confirmed that Indian troops have been withdrawn from Doklam/Donglang, an area which China claims as its sovereign territory while India maintains it is part of its effective protectorate of Bhutan.

Despite reports of a rift with China in US media, tensions between Pyongyang and Washington appear to have subsided
The war of words between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have subsided this week as South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced he was seeking improved relations with Pyongyang.
During a political rally in Arkansas earlier in the week, Trump claimed that Kim was “starting to respect us” even as the North Korean leader continued to inspect weapons facilities in his country.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying has held a press conference where she discussed recent events while taking questions from journalists. The overall weight of her remarks speak to the fact that China is getting increasingly fed up with India’s failure to engage in dialogue with China over the Doklam/Donglang border dispute as well as other areas of the China-India frontier whose demarcations are not universally recognised.

August 22, 2017 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - The battle between the established unipolar "international order" dominated by Wall Street, Washington, and London and an emerging multipolar order appears fixated on Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and across the entirety of Asia.

Originally appeared at RussiaFeed.com
Nikolai Patrushev:

“We invite all BRICS nations to join the international data bank for countering terrorism created by the FSB in Russia. Thanks to the participation of 33 foreign special services and a number of relevant international organizations, we have created a consolidated array of information on persons complicit in terrorist activities and also on extremist and terrorist groups.”

Many tourists flock to South Africa to take in its natural beauty, such as these flowers of the Jacaranda blossom in Pretoria [Xinhua]
The release of the Tourism 2016 report by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) this week showed that although there was a strong rebound in last year due to the weak rand, which made a holiday in South Africa very cheap for an overseas tourist, the country was still suffering from the imposition of more stringent visa requirements.

As The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris explains, America’s vainglorious and ultimately foolhardy attempt to create a divide between China and Russia has failed spectacularly.
Any remaining hopes that the US could cause a rift between Moscow and Beijing ultimately failed to understand that whereas the Nixon administration exploited an existing, substantial split between the two communist super-powers, Russia and China are now allies and no amount of sweet-talking (however patronising) from Washington could create a new Sino-Russian split in 2017.

(ANTIMEDIA) — The United States’ ability to maintain its influence over the rest of the world has been slowly diminishing. Since the petrodollar was established in 1971, U.S.