BRICS - The addition of six new member states will propel the BRICS group of countries far ahead of its major rival, the G7, in economic terms, several Russian media outlets reported this week, citing calculations based on global data. BRICS currently consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but next January it will admit Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. According to reports from the news outlets RBK and TASS, the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the expanded BRICS in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) will be roughly $65 trillion. This would see the bloc’s share of global GDP rise from the current 31.5% to 37%. In comparison, the share of the G7 group of advanced economies is currently around 29.9%.

GERMANY - After a six-month expansion at the start of the year, Germany’s most prominent leading indicator – which indicates firms’ projections for the next six months – has now dropped for the fourth consecutive month, coming in at 85.7 in August, from 87.3 in July, and is now back down at levels last seen in autumn last year. The ongoing weakness in the Chinese economy, ongoing monetary policy tightening, and policy uncertainty regarding the energy transition and energy prices seem to be weighing on German company sentiment.

USA - Diesel futures surged to a seven-month high in New York after Marathon Petroleum Corp said it was shutting the third largest US oil refinery following a blaze at a storage tank. Diesel rose 5% while gasoline futures jumped about 4%. The outage threatens to deplete already below-average distillates stockpiles at a time when US demand for the fuel is set to rise going into the harvest and heating seasons. Garyville, located on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, produces about 265,000 barrels a day of gasoline, or about 3% total US consumption. It also makes about 230,000 barrels per day of diesel, according to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston. The refinery has a crude processing capacity of 596,000 barrels a day.

INDIA - Before they can safely usher in a new, prosperous multipolar world that they envision with their expanded BRICS, nuclear-armed China and India will have to resolve their border tensions that left two dozen soldiers dead in a 2020 clash. In the run-up to the Johannesburg summit, the 19th round of military-level talks between the two Asian giants failed to yield a breakthrough on the border deadlock. So, on the sidelines of the main event, an impromptu meeting between the parties took place, reportedly at the request of India’s PM Modi, in which he highlighted India’s concerns about their unresolved border issues. While that does not appear to be much, it’s an improvement over their last personal meeting in 2022, in Indonesia, for the G20. There, Xi and Modi exchanged pleasantries, but no real dialogue took place.

SOUTH AFRICA - The most important outcome of the BRICS summit in South Africa is the decision to expand the group. Six new members will join it on January 1, 2024: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, and Ethiopia, which more than doubles the original membership. It is a transformative outcome.

SOUTH AFRICA - We reaffirm the importance of the G20 to continue playing the role of the premier multilateral forum in the field of international economic and financial cooperation that comprises both developed and emerging markets and developing countries where major economies jointly seek solutions to global challenges. We look forward to the successful hosting of the 18th G20 Summit in New Delhi under the Indian G20 Presidency. We note the opportunities to build sustained momentum for change by India, Brazil and South Africa presiding over the G20 from 2023 to 2025 and expressed support for continuity and collaboration in their G20 presidencies and wish them all success in their endeavours. Therefore, we are committed to a balanced approach by continuing to amplify and further integrate the voice of the global South in the G20 agenda as under the Indian Presidency in 2023 and the Brazilian and South African presidencies in 2024 and 2025.

GERMANY - The acronym began as a somewhat optimistic term to describe what were the world's fastest-growing economies at the time. But now the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — are setting themselves up as an alternative to existing international financial and political forums. "The founding myth of the emerging economies has faded," confirmed Günther Maihold, deputy director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP. "The BRICS countries are experiencing their geopolitical moment."

SOUTH AFRICA - This week it was announced that Iran and Argentina had applied to join the BRICS. The BRICS — which until recently has been made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is a forum that allows countries outside of Western developed economies to forge alliances on economic issues. As it gets larger, its influence and economic importance grows. Last week at one of the BRICS forums President Putin announced that Russia, alongside China and other BRICS nations, was getting ready to launch a new global reserve currency made up of a basket of BRICS currencies. If successful, such a reserve currency would be a direct threat to the currently dominant US dollar.

SOUTH AFRICA - Leaders of the BRICS group have decided to invite six more countries to join their alliance. Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all been invited to become members of BRICS, said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who hosted a three-day summit of the emerging markets group in Johannesburg this week. Their membership will take effect January 1, 2024. “We value the interest of other countries in building a partnership with BRICS,” Ramaphosa said. “We have tasked our Foreign Ministers to further develop the BRICS partner country model and a list of prospective partner countries and report by the next Summit.”

JAPAN - Japan has begun its controversial discharge of treated waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, sparking protests in the region and retaliation from Beijing.

FRANCE - The West should stop talking about sending arms to Kiev and engage diplomatically with Moscow, the ex-French president has said. The Western push to incorporate Ukraine into NATO can only lead to an escalation of the conflict with Russia, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said, expressing doubt that the opposing parties in the stand-off have used all the tools at their disposal to achieve peace. "My analysis is that the world and Europe are dancing on the edge of a volcano. It can get out of hand at any moment. There have been enough deaths, and it seems to me that the path of diplomacy and discussion has not been used to the end and that it is now appropriate to use it."

USA - In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.

NETHERLANDS - The Netherlands and Denmark said on Sunday that they would give Ukraine long-demanded F-16 fighter jets. The move was announced during a meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, as the leaders toured an airbase in Eindhoven. Both the Netherlands and Denmark are in the process of phasing out older US-made F-16 fighter jets and replacing them with modern F-35s. Denmark has around 40 aircraft of the older type in its inventory. Kiev has long demanded combat aircraft from its Western backers, arguing that F-16s – and, potentially, planes of other types – would help turn the tide in the conflict with Russia. Moscow has repeatedly urged the West to stop “pumping” Ukraine with sophisticated weaponry, arguing that it will only prolong the hostilities without changing the outcome.

USA - Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former head of the Vatican’s highest court, warns in a new book that a move toward “synodality” is causing “evident and grave harm” to the Church. In his foreword for The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, Cardinal Burke notes that the synodal path already put into practice in the Church in Germany has spread “confusion and error and their fruit, division – indeed schism” and with the imminent Synod on Synodality in Rome, “it is rightly to be feared that the same confusion and error and division will be visited upon the universal Church.”

VATICAN - The term is often used to describe the process of fraternal collaboration and discernment that bodies like the synod were created to express. But some critics have suggested that the term is vaguely defined, and could be used in a move toward a more democratic or parliamentary way of governing the Church and teaching doctrine.