#Brazilian president thanks India

[hello-nichya-here]

Genuine question: If the ppl of Brazil are anti-communism, why are they in BRICS with Russia and China, two communist countries?

1 - My God, this question single-handedly took back me back to my school years. Answering this lowkey makes me feel like I'm taking a test XD

2 - Russia has not been communist for over 30 years. Ya know. The USSR ended in 1991? It was kind of a big deal?

3 - China's government is a VERY weird combo of the worst of communism with the worst of capitalism. Obviously a lot about how the country works is a direct result of communism, but they have zero problem playing the capitalist game, and as a result EVERYONE has some kind of economical relation with China - they sell stuff the cheapest (thanks to slavery) and have literal billions of people foreigners can sell their stuff to. If selling/buying stuff with them made anyone communist, the whole world might as well be communist already.

4 - BRICS is not like the EU, or the USSR, or NATO. Brazil's opinions on anything that goes on with our "friends" doesn't matter because the point of it is not for us, Russia, India, China and South Africa to collectively decide anything about each other's politics (border control, currency, economic system, alliances in wartime, etc). It's literally just a group of nations that are struggling to remain/become relevant to the rest the world, while also trying not to go officially broke, that looked at each other and went "If you're about to crash and burn I'll try to help you out if I can, and then you do the same for me. Deal?" It's the possibility economic back up in case of crisis. The one thing we have to decide together is "Who gets to join this group of countries that are desperately trying to not implode?"

5 - Most brazilians are not really anti-communism because most brazilians don't fucking KNOW what communism is. A few might have heard names like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Vladmir Putin, Mao or Fidel Castro, but they don't know shit about them. Lots of us know BRICS exists, but a ton cannot explain what it is. If you ask most brazilians to point to either China or Russia on a map, I'd say over half wouldn't be able to do it. And if you ask us to point to our own country on a map, a shockingly large number of people here will STILL not be able to do it because our educational system is that fucking bad.

You'll find LOTS of people, especially older generations, that think they understand what communism is, but in reality they were just fed the pro-USA propaganda those motherfuckers were spreading through all of latin america during the cold war by literally backing up dictatorships. And me acknowledging that fact and not calling the coup of 1964 "the revolution that was totally necessary and wanted by everybody and totally didn't lead to all kinds of violations of people's basic human rights" would already make half of my relatives yell at me to go to Cuba or Venezuela so I'll "stop" being a communist - because yes, saying "Dictatorship bad" is enough for them to label people communists.

Our president through 2019-2022, Jair Bolsonaro (I still HATE that dude's gut in case anyone is wondering) literally brought all of that old propaganda back to make people scared of the "communist threat inside Brazil" so he would get elected, and then tried to use that again to stage a coup after he lost to Lula in 2022.

Brazil is not "anti-communist." Brazil is a country filled with people that were never taught some pretty basic stuff about the world, and are thus easily manipulated by any politician.

[usafphantom2]

Dassault Aviation receives request for 42 Rafale fighters for the French Air Force

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 12/01/2024 - 18:26in Military

At the end of December 2023, the French Defense Procurement Agency (DGA) granted Dassault Aviation an order for 42 Rafale combat aircraft, known as "lot 5", for the French Air and Space Force.

"On behalf of Dassault Aviation and the 400 companies involved in the Rafale program, I would like to thank the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the DGA and the French Air and Space Force for their renewed confidence. We are ready and determined to use our skills as a main contractor and integrator of complex systems to serve the sovereignty of our nation. This military industrial sovereignty is an exception in Europe. It guarantees the superiority of our combat aviation. It is also an asset for diplomatic influence and an economic force in the export trade," says Éric Trappier, President and CEO of Dassault Aviation.

Rafale is a technical, operational and commercial success that continues to position France on a world-class level in combat aircraft.

Rafale was designed to evolve by successive patterns in order to adapt the latest technologies to the user's needs. Standard 4, especially focusing on connectivity, is under development. Standard 5, which is currently preparing for launch, will bring new capabilities in collaborative combat.

France has ordered 234 so far through orders in 1993, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2023.

Rafale was also sold outside France to the United Arab Emirates (80), Egypt (55), Indonesia (42), Qatar (36), India (36) and Greece (12). Croatia acquired twelve oldest Rafales from the French Air Force.

The order book, in addition to the new "lot 5" contract, guarantees production activity for the next ten years.

Tags: Armée de l'air - French Air Force/French Air ForceMilitary AviationDassault AviationDassault Rafale

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula discusses international agenda with Indian PM Modi

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussed Friday during a telephone conversation the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and other matters of mutual interest, it was reported.

Lula again extended his congratulations for India's success in organizing the G20 Summit and reaffirmed his interest in cooperating with the Asian country during the Brazilian presidency of the bloc. Prime Minister Modi conveyed India's full support for the success of the Brazilian Presidency of the G20.

The Brazilian president also thanked the invitations to participate in the second virtual summit of Global South Voices (on November 17) and in the virtual summit of the G20 (on November 22), and confirmed his participation in both.

The South American leader also expressed his sorrow for the ongoing war between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip and mentioned Brazil's efforts to bring back home some 1,445 people stranded in the area.

Continue reading.

[xtruss]

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva shake hands in Beijing on April 14. Ken Ishii/Pool/AFP Via Getty Images

A BRICS Currency Could Shake the Dollar’s Dominance! De-dollarization’s Moment Might Finally Be Here.

— April 24, 2023 | Foreign Policy | By Joseph W. Sullivan

Talk of de-dollarization is in the air. Last month, in New Delhi, Alexander Babakov, deputy chairman of Russia’s State Duma, said that Russia is now spearheading the development of a new currency. It is to be used for cross-border trade by the BRICS nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Weeks later, in Beijing, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inàcio Lula da Silva, chimed in. “Every night,” he said, he asks himself “why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar.”

These developments complicate the narrative that the dollar’s reign is stable because it is the one-eyed money in a land of blind individual competitors like the euro, yen, and yuan. As one economist put it, “Europe is a museum, Japan is a nursing home, and China is a jail.” He’s not wrong. But a BRICS-issued currency would be different. It’d be like a new union of up-and-coming discontents who, on the scale of GDP, now collectively outweigh not only the reigning hegemon, the United States, but the entire G-7 weight class put together.

Foreign governments wanting to liberate themselves from reliance on the U.S. dollar are anything but new. Murmurs in foreign capitals about a desire to dethrone the dollar have been making headlines since the 1960s. But the talk has yet to turn into results. By one measure, the dollar is now used in 84.3 percent of cross-border trade—compared to just 4.5 percent for the Chinese yuan. And the Kremlin’s habitual use of lies as an instrument of statecraft offers grounds for skepticism about anything Russia says. On a litany of practical questions, like how much the other BRICS nations are on board with Babakov’s proposal, for now, answers remain unclear.

Nevertheless, at least based on the economics, a BRICS-issued currency’s prospects for success are new. However early plans for it are, and however many practical questions remain unanswered, such a currency really could dislodge the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of BRICS members. Unlike competitors proposed in the past, like a digital yuan, this hypothetical currency actually has the potential to usurp, or at least shake, the dollar’s place on the throne.

Let’s call the hypothetical currency the bric.

If the BRICS used only the bric for international trade, they would remove an impediment that now thwarts their efforts to escape dollar hegemony. Those efforts now often take the form of bilateral agreements to denominate trade in non-dollar currencies, like the yuan, now the main currency of trade between China and Russa. The impediment? Russia is unwilling to source the rest of its imports from China. So after bilateral transactions between the two countries, Russia tends to want to park the proceeds in dollar-denominated assets to buy the rest of its imports from the rest of the world, which still uses the dollar for trade,.

If China and Russia each used only the bric for trade, however, Russia would not have any need to park the proceeds of bilateral trade in dollars. After all, Russia would be using brics, not dollars, to buy the rest of its imports. Enter, at last, de-dollarization.

Is it realistic to imagine the BRICS using only the bric for trade? Yes.

For starters, they could fund the entirety of their import bills by themselves. In 2022, as a whole, the BRICS ran a trade surplus, also known as a balance of payments surplus, of $387 billion – mostly thanks to China.

The BRICS would also be poised to achieve a level of self-sufficiency in international trade that has eluded the world’s other currency unions. Because a BRICS currency union—unlike any before it—would not be among countries united by shared territorial borders, its members would likely be able to produce a wider range of goods than any existing monetary union. An artifact of geographic diversity, that is an opening for a degree of self-sufficiency that has painfully eluded currency unions defined by geographic concentration, like the Eurozone, also home to a $476 billion trade deficit in 2022.

But the BRICS would not even need to trade only with each other. Because each member of the BRICS grouping is an economic heavyweight in its own region, countries around the world would likely be willing to do business in the bric. If Thailand felt compelled to use the bric to do business with China, Brazil’s importers could still purchase shrimp from Thai exporters, keeping Thailand’s shrimp on Brazil’s menus. Goods produced in one country can also circumvent trade restrictions between two countries by being exported to, and then re-exported from, a third country. That’s often a consequence of new trade restrictions, like tariffs. If the United States boycotted bilateral trade with China rather than trade in the bric, its children could continue to play with Chinese-made toys that became exports to countries like Vietnam and then exports to the United States.

A preview of something like the absolute worst-case scenario that could befall consumers in BRICS countries if their governments adopted “bric or bust” terms of trade comes from today’s Russia. American and European governments have prioritized Russia’s economic isolation. Nevertheless, some U.S. and European goods continue to flow into Russia. The costs for consumers are real, but not catastrophic. As officials in BRICS countries grow increasingly emphatic about their desire to de-dollarize, with today’s Russia as an upper bound of how bad it could get, the risk-reward tradeoff of de-dollarization will look increasingly attractive.

To displace the dollar as a reserve currency among BRICS, the bric would also need safe assets to be parked in when not in use for trade. Is it realistic to imagine the bric finding these? Yes.

For starters, because the BRICS run a trade and balance of payments surplus, the bric would not necessarily need to attract any foreign money at all. BRICS governments could use some combination of carrots and sticks to get their own households and firms to buy bric assets with their savings and effectively coerce and subsidize the market into existence.

But assets denominated in the bric would actually have characteristics likely to make them unusually attractive to foreign investors. Among the major drawbacks of gold as an asset class for global investors is that, in spite of its risk-reducing value as a diversifier, it does not pay interest. Since the BRICS reportedly plan to back their new currency with gold and other metals with intrinsic value, like rare-earth metals, interest-paying assets denominated in the bric would resemble interest-paying gold. That’s an unusual characteristic. It is one that could make the assets denominated in the bric attractive to investors who want both the interest-bearing property of bonds and the diversifying properties of gold.

Sure, for bric bonds to simply function as an interest-bearing version of gold, they’d need to be perceived as having a relatively low risk of default. And the debt even of sovereign governments in the BRIC countries has non-trivial default risk. But these risks could be mitigated. Issuers of debt denominated in the bric could shorten debt maturities to lower the riskiness. Investors might trust a government in South Africa to pay you back “30 from now” when the unit of time is days but not when it is years. Prices could also simply compensate investors for that risk. If market participants demanded higher yields for buying bric assets, they could likely get them. That’s because BRICS governments would be willing to pay for the viability of the bric.

The bric, to be fair, would raise a litany of thorny practical concerns. Used primarily for international trade rather than domestic circulation within any one country, the bric would complicate the job of national central bankers in BRICS countries. Creating a supranational central bank like the European Central Bank to manage the bric would also take work. These are challenges—but not necessarily insurmountable ones.

The geopolitics among BRICS members is also thorny. But a BRICS currency would represent cooperation in a well-defined area where interests align. Countries like India and China may have security interests at odds with each other. But India and China do share an interest in de-dollarizing. And they can cooperate on shared interests while competing on others.

The bric would not so much snatch the crown off of the dollar’s head as shrink the size of the territory in its domain. Even if the BRICS de-dollarized, much of the world would still use dollars, and the global monetary order would become more multipolar than unipolar.

Many Americans are inclined to lament declines in the dollar’s global role. They should think before they lament. The dollar’s global role has always been a double-edged sword for the United States. Though it does allow Washington to add sanctions to its foreign-policy toolkit, by raising the price of the U.S. dollar, it raises the cost of American goods and services to the rest of the world, decreasing exports and costing the United States jobs. But the side that cuts into America at home has been sharpening, and the side that cuts America’s enemies abroad has been dulling.

Among those who understand that the dollar’s global role comes at the expense of jobs and export competitiveness at home, at least based on comments from 2014, is Jared Bernstein, now head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. But these costs have only grown over time as the U.S. economy shrinks relative to the world’s. Meanwhile, among the traditional benefits of the dollar’s global role is America’s ability to use financial sanctions to try to advance its security interests. But Washington sees the security interests of the United States in the 21st century as increasingly defined by competition with state actors like China and Russia. If that is correct, and if the checkered track record of sanctions on Russia is any indication, sanctions will become an increasingly ineffective tool of U.S. security policy.

If the bric replaces the dollar as the reserve currency of the BRICS, the reactions will be varied and bizarre. Applause seems poised to come loudly from officials in BRICS countries with anti-imperialist dispositions, from certain Republicans in the U.S. Senate, and from U.S. President Joe Biden’s top economist. Boos seem poised to emanate from both former U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.S. national security community that he so often feuds with. Either way, the dollar’s reign isn’t likely to end overnight—but a bric would begin the slow erosion of its dominance.

— Joseph W. Sullivan is a senior advisor at the Lindsey Group and a Former Special Advisor to the Chairman and Staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration.

[hummingzone]

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[ds4techofficial]

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[akshanxbajpai]

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[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula not to travel to St Petersburg for Putin meeting

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has become a major player in South American diplomacy lately, but he has been forced to decline an invitation from his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin to go to St. Petersburg. “I can't go to Russia now,” Lula said days after a frustrated meeting with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in Hiroshima.

”I thanked (Putin) for an invitation to go to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and replied that I cannot go to Russia at this time,“ Lula tweeted regarding the event scheduled for June 14-17.

”But I reiterated Brazil's willingness, along with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk with both sides of the conflict in search of peace,“ the leftist leader added.

Lula proposes Brazil as a mediator in a negotiation to end the war between the neighboring countries, unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in February 2022.

Continue reading.

[aazkanews]

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[ds4techofficial]

Coronavirus live updates | India reports single-day rise of 81,466 cases, highest in six months

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According to Ravi Wankhedkar, member, Indian Medical Association (IMA), rural and tribal areas are facing a grim situation and have increased the incidence of infection due to malnutrition leading to decreased immunity, inappropriate COVID behaviour (gathering at marriages, funerals, religious functions) and lack of proper in-house quarantine facilities. You can track coronavirus cases, deaths…

[ispicynews]

Brazilian President Bolsonaro asks PM Modi to speed up COVID-19 vaccine shipment

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[thetimepress]

Kerala counts past deaths as COVID-19 case graph rises

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State adding 10 to 15 deaths a day to toll; no spikes in Telangana, A.P. data; strike by doctors hits work in Karnataka

Kerala’s COVID-19 case graph continued to rise with the State reporting 3,215 new cases on Tuesday.

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Watch | Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine shows positive results

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[latestbreakingnewsupdates]

Brazil tops 2 million coronavirus cases, with 76,000 deaths

Brazil tops 2 million coronavirus cases, with 76,000 deaths

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Also learn: Number of…

[news24fresh]

Brazil tops 2 million coronavirus cases, with 76,000 deaths

Brazil tops 2 million coronavirus cases, with 76,000 deaths

[ad_1]

A thousand deaths a day. Since late May, three months after Brazil’s first reported case of the coronavirus, it has recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths on average in a gruesome plateau that has yet to tilt downward.

On Thursday evening, the federal Health Ministry reported that the country had passed 2 million confirmed cases of virus infections and 76,000 deaths.

Also read: Number…

[aazkanews]

Coronavirus updates | Recoveries across India continue to outnumber daily new cases for 47th consecutive day

Coronavirus updates | Recoveries across India continue to outnumber daily new cases for 47th consecutive day

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[rnewsworldenglish]

Coronavirus cases surge in U.S., but slow in China, South Korea

Coronavirus cases surge in U.S., but slow in China, South Korea

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Regardless of clear progress in containing the virus in some areas, particularly those who noticed early outbreaks, globally the variety of new virus circumstances has soared in…