🇮🇳 🇦🇺 📹 Australians came up with a unique and creative way to welcome the Indian PM to the nation: a recreational aircraft was seen spelling out 'Welcome Modi' in contrails ahead of the community event in Sydney, Australia.

Subscribe to @sputniknewsindia

🤔 Interesting photo choice

The New York Times has made a strange choice for a photo, which depicts a coffin, for an article about Zelensky leaving the G7 summit in Hiroshima.

Subscribe @SputnikInt

❗️A criminal case based on six articles, including terrorism, was opened after a Ukrainian saboteur group raided the Belgorod region, which resulted in several civilian casualties, said the press service of the Russian Investigation Committee, which is now establishing the identity of the attackers who trespassed into the border region.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇷🇺📹 Russia's detractors failed to break country's economy, PM Mishustin says

💬 “Not only have we pulled through, but we are also continuing our steady growth.”

Subscribe @SputnikInt

🇺🇸💰 ‘Child with credit card’: Kevin McCarthy explains debt ceiling after his meeting with Biden

Subscribe @SputnikInt

📹 Russian Ka-52 helicopter crews obliterate Ukrainian stronghold

The Ka-52 is equipped with six hardpoints for mounting various armaments. The helicopter has a maximum load capacity at up to 12 9K121 Vikhr ATGMs, which are capable of hitting enemy armour at a 10km distance; up to 80 80mm S-8 unguided rockets or 10 122mm S-13 rockets alongside with various unguided bombs, gunpods, and up to four Igla anti-air missiles.

Subscribe @SputnikInt

📹 Refugee from Artemovsk tells Sputnik about drunken shootout between Ukrainian troops

Subscribe @SputnikInt

❗️Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s latest statements made in Laos:

▪️The more destructive weapons supplied to Kiev, the more likely the scenario of a nuclear apocalypse;

▪️Kiev's allegations that Ukraine has nothing to do with sabotage attacks in Russia is an absolute lie;

▪️Kiev sabotage groups need to be destroyed "like rats" and not even taken prisoner;

▪️ Ultimately, the sponsors of the Kiev regime - the US, EU, and Britain - are responsible for the sabotage attacks.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇷🇺🪖 Ukraine's best response after losing Artemovsk would be to seek peace: ex-US State senator

💬 "Russia has won the biggest battle in Europe since World War II," former Virginia State Senator Richard Black told Sputnik. "Those losses will pressure Zelensky to launch an offensive to prove he still has combat power, though a wiser path might be to seek peace and stop further bloodshed."

On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that the liberation of the city of Artemovsk has been completed.

Subscribe @SputnikInt

❗️Russia’s MoD has published footage showing the elimination of a Ukrainian sabotage group in the Belgorod region

The ministry provided details on the Ukrainian terrorist attack in the Belgorod region:

▪️After the loss of Artemovsk, the Kiev regime has decided to ramp up terrorist acts against civilians

▪️On Monday, after heavy shelling, a Ukrainian sabotage group infiltrated the Belgorod region;

▪️Ukrainian nationalist formations behind the attack were blocked and eliminated;

▪️Remnants of the group were thrown back to Ukraine, where they were shelled until their complete destruction;

▪️Russian forces eliminated more than 70 Ukrainian terrorists and destroyed four armored vehicles and five cars.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇳🇴 Norway's women asked for baby boom as fertility rates hit rock bottom

Norway's Minister for Children and Families, Kjersti Toppe, said that the average birth rate must grow from of the current rate of 1.41 children per woman to 2.1 – a rate unseen since the 1970s.

In order to speed up the birth rate, the minister has put forward the following measures: strengthening the finances of students and others who receive one-off benefits, offering tax relief to families with more than two children, increasing child benefits and expanding the right to a nursery place.

Norwegian fertility rates have seen a decade-long plunge, pushing the Nordic country to increasingly rely on Europe's current demographic fix-it plan - immigration - to make up for the population loss.

If the current trend continues, the nation's population will shrink, unless immigration increases to make up for the loss. As of 2022, immigrants to Norway stood at 18.9% of the populace, up from 4.3% merely three decades ago, in 1992.

Subscribe @SputnikInt

🇺🇸 Driver who rammed White House security barrier charged with attempt to kill US president

A U-Haul driver who rammed his truck into the White House security barrier at Lafayette Square has been charged with threatening to kill or harm the president, vice president, or a family member, the US police say. Investigators told US media that no explosives were found in the truck.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Russian MoD briefing on the progress of the special military operation in Ukraine:

▪️Ukrainian losses in the Kupyansk direction amounted to 110 servicemen and two armored vehicles;

▪️Russian troops eliminated more than 150 Ukrainian servicemen in the South Donetsk and Zaporozhye directions;

▪️The Russian Army destroyed two Ukrainian ammunition depots in the DPR;

▪️Ukrainian losses in the Krasny Liman direction amounted to more than 65 servicemen;

▪️Russian forces eliminated up to 375 Ukrainian servicemen the Donetsk direction;

▪️Russian air defenses intercepted 13 HIMARS and Uragan MLRS rockets and shot down 11 Ukrainian UAVs;

▪️Russian troops eliminated more than 20 Ukrainian servicemen and a Msta-B howitzer in the Kherson direction.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

📹 'Scumbags': Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev slams Ukrainian sabotage group's attack on Belgorod region

Subscribe @SputnikInt

🛰 Maxar Technologies, the satellite imaging and manufacturing company, photographed the border areas of the Belgorod region two days before the Ukrainian sabotage group attacked the region

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

MMA fighter Jeff Monson has given up his American passport and ceased to be a US citizen

Key statements made by Jeff Monson after giving up his American passport:

▪️ In the USA, you are not a patriot if you say something against the USA. You must support everything that the States does, ask no questions, cover your eyes and mouth even to the worst things.

▪️ The USA is a superpower, but the USA is also the main peddler of death in the world right now.

▪️ I think Putin wants the best for Russia.

▪️ The US is the main imperialist right now. They control the world economy at the expense of the dollar and military bases on all continents, they use sanctions. This is the world hegemon that Russia is trying to appease.

In 2018, Monson was granted Russian citizenship.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Chinese yuan may replace the US dollar as the world's reserve and settlement currency in the next 10 years

"China is now the world's second-largest economy and will soon become the first. There is every reason to expect that the Chinese yuan will replace the US dollar as the world's main reserve and settlement currency as early as the next decade. In fact, the Central Bank of Russia is already investing its reserves in yuan, and more than 70 percent of trade turnover between Russia and China is settled in yuan together with the ruble," the chairman of Russia's VTB Bank, Andrei Kostin, said at the Russian-Chinese business forum in Shanghai.

According to him, the monetary and financial system that has predominated for decades ensures the hegemony of the US and its Western allies, and the dollar and the euro account for three-quarters of global settlements. Kostin added that the dollar is the world's main reserve currency, but having announced a course of containment of Russia and China, the collective West, and the US in particular, have been actively using their currency as a weapon.

In March, Russia's President Vladimir Putin said it was necessary to promote the practice of mutual settlements between Russia and China in national currencies.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️ Moscow court extends the arrest of the WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich for three months

What can replace US dollar as world reserve currency?

The NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine has served to hasten a global realignment, demonstrating from its earliest months that the United States no longer has the power to marshal its economic, political and military muscle to bully other countries into submission. This process has included renewed talk about alternatives to the dollar.

Moreover, the ongoing drama in Washington about the debt ceiling and the prospects of the federal government running out of money and defaulting on its obligations has renewed debate about the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency – and whether its position is sustainable.

The question on everyone’s minds is now no longer ‘can the dollar be dethroned, but ‘what could replace it’?

Find out the answer here.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt