In his first official visit to Russia after being inaugurated on June 8, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi reached deals Tuesday with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to create a free trade zone with Eurasian countries and a Russian industrial zone in Egypt.
The Voice of Russia 27 November 2013 "South Africa's NPP project is estimated at 40 billion dollars to 50 billion dollars. Eight power generating units with more than one GW of power capacity each are due to be built under the project. Rosatom has offered assurances that in South Africa it will use its latest, - "post-Fukushima" – nuclear reactor safety systems. "Rosatom boasts the latest nuclear power plant building technologies, just as several US and European corporations," the Energy Development Fund Director Sergei Pikin said. Russia and South Arica have already reached agreement to that end. Now the agreement should be declared legally valid. The contract is due to be signed on February 15th next year. Rosatom says it is prepared to co-fund the project. Also, Russia has the required resources to supply fuel for nuclear power plants to be built, says an analyst with the Veles Capital investment company Ayrat Khalikov. Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_27/Rosatom-suggests-building-NPP-in-South-Africa-7382/"
Pepe Escobar 20 May 2014: Russia's President Vladimir Putin (L) and China's President Xi Jinping attend an agreement signing ceremony during a bilateral meeting at Xijiao State Guest house ahead of the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit, in Shanghai on May 20, 2014
How a group of often overlooked countries could hold the keys to the future of the global internet
By: Robert Morgus, Jocelyn Woolbright, Justin Sherman
Last updated on October 23rd, 2018
Vijay Prasad: " countries like Brazil, India, China, these countries are fighting to bring their own brands to market, to bring their own designs to market, and they are being held back by a global or international intellectual property regime that prevents many of them from pushing their brands forward. I mean, one of the real tricks in the 1980s that they are most upset by was the shift in intellectual property from where you copyright not the process by which you get to, say, a sneaker but the actual sneaker itself. "
Review: "The Art of Power Maintenance: How Western States Keep the Lead in Global Institutions" by Robert Wade (Challenge, vol. 56, no. 1, January/February 2013, pp. 5-39) by Oliver Stuenkel, Professor of International Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. "the West has succeeded in transforming today's emerging powers into 'useful idiots', who are so proud that they are part of the G20 that they no longer defend developing countries' interests. Seen from this perspective, the rise of the BRICS may have been a positive development for the West, now that the poor have lost powerful defendants in Brasília and Delhi, who are increasingly defending big-power interests. At the same time, emerging powers should not complain: It is natural that the West will do everything do hold on to its power - after all, even China is not fully committed towards permanently including Brazil and India in the UN Security Council."
"This is 1885 all over again," Bond declaimed, accusing the Brics countries of mounting a "second Scramble for Africa" in their haste to extract the continent's natural resources. China's major construction of infrastructure on the continent - much lauded by South Africa and other African governments as well as development economists - became, in Bond's perspective, just an instrument of Beijing's neo-colonialist enterprise.
Patrick Bons on "... the difference between bogus ‘Africa Rising’ rhetoric as GDP increases thanks to raw materials exports, and Africa crashing in terms of fast-shrinking wealth, especially in resource-cursed countries like Nigeria and South Africa. To fail to acknowledge the distinction is to import from malevolent Northern economists what University of Pretoria political economist Lorenzo Fioramonti calls a Gross Domestic Problem. It means ignoring women’s unpaid labour, pollution, social ills and a variety of other variables that should be measured as losses from net income. The biggest of these GDP-blind factors in Africa is the depletion of natural resources, which when mined or drilled out are only counted as GDP credits on the income accounts, but not as debits, as they should be since a source of future income is now gone. "