Second BRICS meeting in a row collapses without joint position because of disagreements over the US-Israeli war on Iran.

A two-day meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in New Delhi ended on Friday without a common position on the war on Iran, with the bloc's outcome document acknowledging only that "differing views" remained among members.

It was the second consecutive BRICS gathering in India to fail to produce a consensus on the conflict involving the United States and Israel.

The meeting opened on Thursday at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi under the chairship of Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. It marked the first major ministerial engagement under India's 2026 BRICS presidency.

The 10-member grouping of emerging economies coordinates on economic and security issues while seeking a greater voice for the Global South in institutions long dominated by Western powers. A leaders' summit is scheduled for September in India.

The meeting unfolded against the backdrop of the US-Israel war on Iran, now in its 77th day.

The Middle East is not being remade; it is being contested widely and publicly. The emerging alignment between Israel and the United Arab Emirates appears, at first glance, to signal a decisive geopolitical shift.

Yet beneath the optics of normalization and wartime cooperation lies a more complex struggle: not over whether the region will change, but over who will control the terms of that change. At the center of this contest stands Saudi Arabia — not as a bystander but as a strategic counterweight.

The Emergence of a Networked Security-Economic Axis

The deepening alignment between Israel and the UAE is best understood not as a symbolic extension of the Abraham Accords but as a functional transformation driven by security imperatives and geoeconomic ambition. The 2026 Iran war has accelerated this shift, collapsing the distance between diplomatic normalization and operational military coordination.

Washington for years rejected Russian allegations of the existence of the secret program, before finally admitting it.

Russia's allegations that the US-funded clandestine biological laboratories near its borders - claims denied until recently by Washington - have remained a persistent flashpoint in the steadily deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West for nearly a decade.

The biolabs affair was revealed in a 2017 exposé by RT that questioned a shady US military tender seeking the genetic material of living Russians. Over the years, Moscow has raised allegations against Washington of conducting clandestine bio-research, including potential WMD development and illicit human testing, in a network of labs located across multiple nations, the bulk of which operated in Ukraine. The claims were met with a blanket denial in the West, which repeatedly dismissed them as "Russian propaganda."

This abruptly changed the past week when US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that her department had identified more than 120 US-funded biological laboratories in 30 countries, with over a third of them located in Ukraine.

President Trump's earlier previewed controversial troop cuts for the European continent may already be in progress, and could happen more rapidly than previously thought.

The US Army has canceled the deployment of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division to Poland, NBC reports this week. The deployment would have involved over 4,000 soldiers as well as military equipment.

Various reports say that top Pentagon staff were 'blindsided' by what is being characterized as War Secretary Pete Hegseth's sudden U-turn on the plan to send troops to Poland, amid Trump anger at Europe.

Politico says that troops and equipment had actually started arriving in the country:

The decision was even more surprising because troops and equipment had already started to arrive in the country. It sent fresh waves of anxiety through European capitals and inside the Pentagon on Thursday about whether such moves could embolden Russia — and which ally might turn into the next target.

"We had no idea this was coming," said one of the U.S. officials, adding that European and American officials have spent the last 24 hours on the phone trying to understand the decision and figure out if more surprises are coming.

U.S. President Donald Trump's state visit to China this week was a landmark event in more than one way. He was warmly received by Chinese President Xi Jinping amid much ceremony and splendour provided by the People's Republic.

The last time an American president set foot on Chinese soil was in 2017, when Trump visited during his first administration. In the nine years since, much has changed in the bilateral relations. It is clear now that the United States has lost power significantly.

Gone is the braggadocio that Trump previously projected towards China. His tough talk about making demands on China's trade with the U.S. has been ditched. When Trump previously threatened to hammer China with crushing trade tariffs, Beijing responded by putting Washington in its place with more consequential countermeasures. Today, the American president does not talk big or tough. China is emerging as the global economic superpower, and the U.S. is carefully toeing the line.

During the two-day visit this week, Trump was accompanied by a string of CEOs eager for new business opportunities. While the Chinese counterparts acted with magnanimity and decorum, it was conspicuous that the American side was on a mission to gain economic favors from the new global power.

Even the U.S. and Western media noted the apparent change in status. "America has lost leverage over China," headlined Foreign Affairs magazine.

While Trump was claiming to have made "fantastic deals", the Chinese side was not confirming any details. The White House said that China had agreed to buy 200 Boeing airliners, but the Chinese foreign ministry indicated that no such purchase had been made. Other U.S. media reports noted that Trump left China with "few economic gains."

Even the body language was telling. President Xi was reserved and dignified, as usual, while Trump had the demeanour of a supplicant, overly shaking his counterpart's hand and repeatedly praising him as a "great leader." Amusingly, the American visitor's keenness for hawking business concessions was reminiscent of how Ukraine's Zelensky has a pushy knack of touting for handouts during his overseas travels.

Recall how in the past, Trump used to reprimand China for "raping" the American economy and "dumping on" U.S. industries. There was no such uncouth bravado now. The American president had acquired some manners and was deferential as befitting the new geopolitical reality of China's economic power overshadowing the U.S. in every sector.

An ex-aide lays bare the corruption, lies and coercion in Ukraine's leadership - while Western backing keeps the system alive.
Rudyard Kipling, a modern classic of the Western literary canon, was both a champion of British imperialism and too honest not to know its very sordid underpinnings of greed, lies, and sheer selfishness.

That's why the same man who extolled the "white man's burden" also wrote 'The Man Who Would Be King,' a story of two lowlife, ambitious adventurers who manage to swindle their way to becoming kings as well as rich in a remote country on the fringes of the empire, then at its late-nineteenth-century zenith of global primacy. Until, that is, one of them makes the mistake of messing with the wrong woman, who ends up biting him in public. Seeing him bleed, his subjects realize he is a mere mortal and mercilessly dispense with the two imposters.

Ukraine's ruler - and de facto king (of the old-fashioned, non-constitutional kind) - Vladimir Zelensky is a social climber, too. In his formative years, his native Krivoy Rog was a provincial post-Soviet rustbelt town with a lively gangster scene, a "bandit city" in his own words. Zelensky is also an expert in make-believe by profession, a cynically profane showman of the 'give-them-whatever-they-want-as-long-as-it-pays' variety, the cruder and smuttier the better.

Indeed, Zelensky even has a sidekick, who, as in Kipling's dark story, has shared in the scheme of power-grabbing and plunder: Andrey Yermak, his former chief of staff and very intimate friend, making headlines (again) for being so corrupt and sinister that he stands out, even in Kiev.

And now Zelensky, the man who, it seems, would be Ukraine's president forever, has just been bitten in public by a woman. Judging by the fierce, clearly orchestrated reaction of his media propagandists in Ukraine and the fact that the Western mainstream media are largely pretending not to have noticed, he must be bleeding, too.

The woman is his former press secretary Yulia Mendel. And she has been able to draw (metaphorical) blood because Tucker Carlson, American alternative-media heavyweight and conservative dissident from Trumpism, has interviewed her for his show.

That has made it a very public bloodletting indeed. What Mendel has had to say is one thing, her ability to reach breathtaking numbers of Americans and other inhabitants of the West is at least as important and, from Kiev's point of view, frustrating: Across various platforms, shows of the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) are watched by, on average, over 55 million viewers, dwarfing, for instance, Fox News (Carlson's former employer) with its prime time rating of 3.2 million.

Latvia's Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned on May 14 after a key party in her coalition withdrew support in a row over Ukrainian drones that strayed into the Baltic nation.

The drones were on an attack mission across the border in Russia, and Ukraine said they crashed into Latvian territory on May 7 after being electronically diverted by the Russian military.

One caused a fire at a disused oil storage site in eastern Latvia.

Ms Silina on May 10 sacked her Defence Minister Andris Spruds over the affair.

She said Latvia's anti-drone systems had not been deployed quickly enough to counter the drone intrusions.

The American and Chinese presidents talked Iran, Taiwan, and trade, but found little to agree on.

US President Donald Trump's meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, was heavy on pomp, praise, and promises. But what did both leaders walk away with after the superpower summit in Beijing?

Trump left Beijing on Friday, two days after becoming the first US president to visit the Chinese capital in almost a decade. The trip took place amid two paused conflicts - Trump's trade war with Beijing and his real war against Iran - which directly affect China, and although both leaders hailed positive developments in their relationship, differing statements from the two sides suggest that these issues and others remain unresolved.

Xi gives Trump a royal welcome

From the military honors and red carpet that greeted Trump on Wednesday, to the garden tour of Xi's Zhongnanhai compound on Friday morning, the Chinese president was a gracious host throughout. At a lavish banquet on Thursday, Xi declared that "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand."

Trump returned the favor, telling Xi that the welcome ceremony was "an honor like few I've ever seen before," and that the roses in the gardens of Zhongnanhai were "the most beautiful roses anyone has ever seen." A lifelong teetotaler, Trump went as far as taking a sip of wine when Xi proposed a toast at the banquet.

Ahead of bilateral talks on Friday, Trump claimed that he and Xi had "settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn't have been able to settle, and the relationship is a very strong one."

Supposed monetary hawk Kevin Warsh, who was officially sworn in as the 17th Fed Chair earlier this week, will now face the dilemma of staying true to his hawkish roots or caving to his unabashed high-rate hating President. That is, of course, unless there's a deeper plan at play...

Last night, Cornell professor Dave Collum hosted Michael Lebowitz and Stephanie Pomboy for a deep dived into 'How F***ed Markets Are' where Dave posited the theory that Warsh man be a demolition man for a managed crash.

Collum and co. also talked about the insane disconnect between the economy and financial markets... and why Pomboy has increasingly abandoned financial assets altogether in favor of gold and hard assets.

Dave's Fed truther theory and other highlights from last night below:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick exploded during an interview with congressional investigators when asked whether a mask in Jeffrey Epstein's house was of his face.

He also repeatedly insisted he was merely "speculating" when he told The Post's "Pod Force One" podcast that the now-deceased sex offender was "the greatest blackmailer ever," according to a newly released transcript of his closed-door interview with Congress.

Lutnick appeared voluntarily earlier this month for the transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about his interactions with Epstein — who was his next-door neighbor in Manhattan for more than a decade — after being threatened with a subpoena compelling his testimony.

The Cabinet official told The Post's Miranda Devine in a podcast interview released Oct. 1, 2025, that he told his wife after the financier invited them over for coffee 20 years before — and gave them a tour of his Upper East Side mansion — that he would "never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again."