During the 15th BRICS Summit, 22-24 August 2023, in Johannesburg, South Africa, chaired by South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, six new countries were admitted to the bloc. The BRICS are now called the BRICS-11 and include the five original nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. The new members invited to join the bloc as of 1 January 2024 are Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The summit took place with big fanfare and expectations. Some 40 countries were invited, all wanted to become members of the BRICS, but just six new ones made it. Another group…

Canada is investigating allegations that India was involved in the assassination of a Sikh activist, a Canadian citizen, on Canadian soil.  The victim, Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was gunned down outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia on June 18.  Nijjar was a strong supporter of an independent Sikh homeland known as Khalistan. The movement is banned in India as officials see it as a national security threat. But the movement still has some support in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, where sizable Sikh communities live.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadian intelligence agencies are investigating allegations that the…

As Middle East adviser to President Obama, I saw first-hand why it’s much easier to get rid of a bad regime than to put a good one in place. his article has been adapted from Philip H. Gordon’s new book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East. You could never accuse President Nicolas Sarkozy of France of lacking a flair for the dramatic, but informing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that French fighter jets were already in the air and about to launch airstrikes in Libya was extraordinary even by his standards. In…

Sure, one person can make a great difference, specially if he is a leader, in this case people need his leadership more than ever.

Protesters in New York City loudly demonstrated at a press conference in which New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared to address the migrant surge to the Big Apple, with many repetitively demanding the repatriation of the new arrivals. New York City, a sanctuary city, has struggled to contend with the arrival of tens of thousands of illegal migrants, some of whom Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbot has bussed there to highlight the Biden administration's lax approach to border enforcement. More than 110,000 migrants have arrived in the city over the past year. Of those, Texas has only directly sent…