🇷🇺 When Russia's strategic deterrent forces underwent training, practical launches of ballistic and cruise missiles took place, the Kremlin said.

▪️The Yars ICBM was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome at the Kura training ground in Kamchatka;

▪️The Sineva ballistic missile was launched from the Barents Sea from the Tula nuclear-powered strategic missile submarine cruiser;

▪️Tu-95MS long-range aviation aircraft, which were involved in the training, unleashed air-launched missiles;

▪️In order to improve the abilities of the strategic deterrence forces, an assessment was conducted to measure the level of training among military command and control bodies, leadership skills, and operational personnel in organizing the control of subordinate troops;

▪️The tasks set out during the training were completed in full.

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🇺🇸 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the Qatari prime minister to request that the Al-Jazeera TV channel “soften its rhetoric” about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, according to media reports.

Blinken asked to “reduce the volume of the reports,” since they are allegedly full of incitement against Israel.

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📹 Watch a video showcasing the combat tasks performed by crews, along with missile launches, during a strategic nuclear forces training session, supervised by President Putin.

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📹 The drone operator crews of the Novorossiysk air assault formation effectively neutralize Ukrainian personnel and equipment in the Zaporozhye direction.

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⚡️ Israel has “killed thousands of terrorists” and is preparing to enter the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said

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⚡️ Netanyahu vowed not disclose the timing, features and scale of the looming ground operation in the Gaza Strip.

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❗️Putin says there are attempts to drag other countries into Middle East conflict, unleash wave of chaos and hatred

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Israeli PM Netanyahu: "We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness."

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President Vladimir Putin's statements on current MidEast escalation at a meeting with representatives of religious associations of Russia:

▪️Current escalation is a humanitarian catastrophe;

▪️Ideas voiced in the West about new world order are hypocrisy, double standards, claims to exclusivity;

▪️Putin also offered condolences to families of Israelis, citizens of other countries killed during October 7 attack.

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🇺🇸 US Congressman Mike Johnson gains enough votes to become new House Speaker, voting continues

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🇺🇸 The United States is "navigating" an overlap between the defense demands of Ukraine's and Israel’s respective conflicts, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Development and International Engagement Justin McFarlin said on Wednesday.

"I think the good news is that there isn’t a 100% overlap between the kind of requirements of those two conflicts," McFarlin stated at the ComDef conference in Virginia. "There is some and we're navigating that."

According to McFarlin, the other good piece of news is that Israel has a very robust industrial base and production capabilities.

Despite its production capacity challenges, McFarlin concluded that the United States "did not have an option" to support one conflict and not the other.

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🇺🇸 Mike Johnson has been elected as US Speaker of the House.

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'We could hear the sound of gunfire and people screaming': recounting Hamas' hostage horror

In the early morning of October 7, some people were chilling at the Supernova music festival near kibbutzim Re’im and Be’eri, while the others were sleeping soundly in their beds inside their homes near the Gaza border. That frightful early morning, Hamas breached the Israeli border from the Gaza Strip, attacking these people, abducting 222 and killing hundreds.

Sputnik reached out to the families and friends of those who still remain in Hamas captivity.

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🗣️ On the possibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine:

“Neither side shows any side of being willing to negotiate. They both have couched it as an existential threat and are going to fight it to the death... I think Israel's choosing a course of action that's going to make it more difficult for it to survive intact as a nation, because we're seeing right now a level of unity between the Arab and Muslim world and not just the Arab and Muslim world, outside of that as well that no longer supports Israel. That is becoming very strident in their support of Hamas and the Palestinian people,” Larry Johnson, Writer and Former CIA Analyst, told Sputnik.

🎧 Listen to more of Johnson’s analysis in our podcast The Backstory

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Joe Biden: "I want to thank the Israelis and the Palestinian, excuse me…"

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🗣 ”The truth will prevail”

Sheikh, a commander for Akhmat Spetsnaz in Mariupol, told Sputnik’s Russell Bentley (@TXDPR) that Russia is fighting to defend traditional values against Western encroachment.

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🇨🇦 Nearly two million Canadians visited food banks across the country in March, setting another record and marking a 32% increase over a year, Food Banks Canada (FBC) stated on Wednesday.

"In March 2023, there were almost 2 million visits to food banks across Canada, representing a 32 per cent increase compared to March 2022, and a 78.5 per cent increase compared to March 2019, which is the highest year-over-year increase in usage ever reported," FBC said in a report.

Children made up one-third of food bank clients.

The report also showed that 43.8% of those relying on food banks are from single adult households, although those only represent around one-third, or 29.3%, of the Canadian population.

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🗣️ On the long history of destabilization of the Middle East by the Western states:

“The whole region has long been destabilized by Israel, by the interventions of the UK, Great Britain and its long colonial history, other European powers, and then obviously more recent decades, the United States from propping up regimes in Iran before the Iranian revolution to the war on terror, following on from the first Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq War, you name it.… And now we're reaching a situation where it's going to become really, really difficult to contain this, almost impossible,” Phil Kelly, political commentator and socialist activist, told Sputnik.

🎧 Listen to more of Kelly’s analysis in our podcast Political Misfits

👉 Watch the full episode of our show on Rumble

📻 Catch us at 105.5FM, 1390AM (Washington DC) and 104.7FM, 102.9FM, 1140АМ (Kansas City)

Don't miss AfroVerdict's new podcast dedicated to International Artist's Day to hear how they manage to immortalise moments of history as well as moments of emotion on canvas.

https://news.1rj.ru/str/sputnik_africa/9961

🇺🇸 Who is Newly-Elected US House Speaker Mike Johnson?

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives broke weeks of deadlock and elected a new speaker, enabling the chamber to continue with its essential business, the most important of which is passing a 2024 budget.

The man selected by the narrow Republican majority was US Rep. Mike Johnson, who has represented Louisiana’s 4th congressional district since 2017. Having only been in Congress for six years, he has the shortest House tenure of any speaker in 140 years.

Johnson isn’t exactly a household name in the United States, unlike several other GOP stalwarts who failed to gather the votes to become speaker. So, who is House Speaker Mike Johnson? Sputnik explains.

📹 A Yars intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from the Plesetsk state testing cosmodrome to hit the Kura training ground in Kamchatka during training with the ground, sea, and air components of Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces

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