Headlines:

• BRIC Nations Set to Challenge the West
• The Total Iraq and Afghanistan Pricetag: over $4 Trillion
• Drones Killing Innocent Pakistanis, U.N. Official says
• Sri Lanka Crowd Attacks Muslim Warehouse In Colombo
• North Korea Rockets 'Ready To Hit US Bases

Details:

BRIC Nations Set to Challenge the West:

The BRICS nations are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank at their fifth annual summit. The proposed BRICS bank will help tackle under-development and currency volatility in the member countries. It is also supposed to replace the roles of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the member countries. The countries will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises. They have combined foreign-currency reserves of $4.4tn (£2.9tn, €3.4tn). The group of emerging powers had been critical of the practice of selecting the presidents of the World Bank and the IMF from the US and Europe, respectively, and had sought for an overhaul of management of the global lenders. "The deepest rationale for the BRICS is almost certainly the creation of new Bretton Woods-type institutions that are inclined toward the developing world," Bloomberg quoted Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, as saying. "There's a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world. There is a lot of geo-political concern about this shift in the western world." The BRICS nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - represent 25.9 percent of the world's land mass, 43 percent of the population and 17 percent of global trade. The group accounts for 25 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of purchasing power parity. Coined by Goldman Sachs Asset Management Chairman Jim O'Neill in 2011, the term 'BRIC' represented the four emerging economies that could equal the US economy in combined output by 2010. The four nations held their first summit four years ago and invited South Africa to share the rank in December 2010. Following a number of deals within the group, trade between the member nations surged to $282bn in 2012 from $27bn in 2002. The trade size is expected to reach $500bn by 2015, according to data from Brazil's government.

The Total Iraq and Afghanistan Pricetag: Over $4 Trillion:

The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been declared officially over, but America has barely begun to pay the bill, says a new study. That could make defending the nation and paying the government's bills even tougher to do in the future. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars will together cost $4 to $6 trillion, according a new study from Harvard University's Kennedy School. A large share of those bills has yet to be paid: the study finds that the U.S. has spent around $2 trillion thus far on the two controversial wars, and that growing commitments to spending on military personnel and veterans will drive much of the spending in the decades to come. The study notes that the Veterans' Affairs budget has tripled since the start of the wars. "Assuming this pattern continues, there will be a much smaller amount of an already-shrinking defense budget available for core military functions," writes Linda Bilmes, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard and the study's author. Bilmes has been studying the costs of the two wars for years, and she says that the estimates of the total cost continue to climb as the cost of continuing care for veterans mounts.  "What has happened is the number of injuries and the number of claims and the complexity of claims...in these conflicts has been much higher than in previous wars," she says. She notes that after Vietnam, veterans averaged around two and a half to three conditions per claim, whereas veterans now have over eight conditions per claim.

Drones Killing Innocent Pakistanis, U.N. Official says:

Farmers are on their way to tend their crops when a missile slams into their midst, thrusting shrapnel in all directions. A CIA drone, flying so high that the farmers can't see it, has killed most of them. None of them were militants. Such attacks by U.S. drones are common, the United Nations' special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights said Friday in a statement on strikes in Pakistan's tribal region of North Waziristan. The rapporteur, Ben Emmerson, told CNN the actions are of dubious international legality, despite the United States' assertions. "I'm not aware of any state in the world that currently shares the United States' expansive legal perspective that it is engaged in a global war -- that is to say a non-international armed conflict with al Qaeda and any group associated with al Qaeda, wherever they are to be found, that would therefore lawfully entitle the United States to take action involving targeted killing wherever an individual is found," Emmerson said. The American Civil Liberties Union and other U.S. groups are questioning the legitimacy of the President Obama-approved drone program, and they're looking for evidence for a legal battle. On March 15, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled the CIA must acknowledge the existence of any records related to military unmanned drone strikes targeting individuals, such as overseas terror suspects.

Sri Lanka Crowd Attacks Muslim Warehouse in Colombo:

Several people have been injured in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, when Buddhist monks led hundreds in an assault on a Muslim-owned clothing warehouse. Buddhist monks were filmed throwing stones at the storage centre of popular garment chain Fashion Bug in a suburb of the capital on Thursday night. Police told AFP news agency that forces had been deployed to guard the area. The attack comes as hard-line Buddhist groups step up a campaign against the lifestyles of Muslims. The development comes four years after the army in the mainly Sinhalese Buddhist country defeated Tamil separatists. During Sri Lanka's bitter civil war the Muslims - a small Tamil-speaking minority, about 9% of the population - kept a low profile, but many now fear that ethnic majority hard-liners are trying to target them. The BBC's Charles Haviland in Colombo said the monks led a crowd which quickly swelled to about 500, yelling insults against the shop's Muslim owners and rounding on journalists seeking to cover the events.Five or six were injured, including a cameraman who needed stitches.Eyewitnesses said the police stood and watched although after the trouble spread they brought it under control. "We have deployed extra units of STR (Special Task Force commandos) and police to guard the area," police spokesman Buddhika Siriwardena told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

North Korea Rockets 'Ready To Hit US Bases:

North Korea's leader has told rocket units to be on standby for an attack on US bases, according to state media. The country's KCNA news agency said Kim Jong-Un had signed off on the order to train sights on American bases in South Korea and the Pacific after a midnight meeting with top generals. The move was followed by reports of increased activity at North Korea's mid to long-range missile sites, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.It comes after two American stealth bombers flew over South Korea in a show of force to Pyongyang, following an escalation of rhetoric from the North's young leader.The two nuclear-capable B-2 planes flew a 13,000-mile round trip from an air base in Missouri, dropping a dummy bomb on a target range in the South. The planes were taking part in a joint South Korea-US military exercise that has inflamed tensions with Pyongyang, which earlier this month threatened to unleash an "all-out war" backed by nuclear weapons.  "This .... demonstrates the United States' ability to conduct long range, precision strikes quickly and at will," the US military said in a statement.  "The B-2 bomber is an important element of America's enduring and robust extended deterrence capability in the Asia-Pacific region."  KCNA reported that Mr Kim had "judged the time has come to settle accounts with the US imperialists in view of the prevailing situation".  The agency said: "He finally signed the plan on technical preparations of strategic rockets of the KPA, ordering them to be on standby for fire so that they may strike any time the US mainland, its military bases in the operational theatres in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in South Korea."