Ecuador’s election wasn’t free — and its people will pay the price under President Noboa
Is the Caribbean even ready for Brics?
These rich islands still have close political and economic relationships with the nations that enslaved them — is it any wonder truly independent nations in Africa are considered for Brics first, asks ROGER McKENZIE

THE expansion of the Brics bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia has rightly received a lot of column inches.
It has given the millions of people in the global South who are fed up with the bullying behaviour of the US and the other former colonial powers some reasons to be optimistic and, indeed, to be just a little bit cheerful.
Those of us in the belly of the beast who work as dissidents against the behaviours of the neocolonialists also have much to organise in support of the resistance and fightback from the global South.
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