❗️Biden signs US government funding bill that does not include additional aid to Israel and Ukraine

The US Navy has entered an official request to raise the number of whales that it is permitted to injure in accidents during Pacific training, US media reported.

The request followed collisions in the ocean with several whales in the sea off the Southern California coast in recent years, it said. At present, the allowable number of such actions is three through 2025; however, officials are looking to spike the incident counts to five.

“The Navy’s main response to hitting and killing whales is to ask for permission to harm more whales," Kristen Monsell, an lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, told media. "It’s nonsensical and extremely disappointing."

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🇷🇺 Russia's Borei-class nuclear-powered submarines are equipped with sonar systems that surpass US analogues in terms of sensitivity, according to Russian military experts Vitaly Bychkov and Vladimir Semiletov.

In an article for the magazine Arsenal Otechestva (Arsenal of the Motherland), the two explained that the systems can detect enemy ships at a distance 1.5 times greater than similar complexes on the fourth-generation US Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines.

Viktor Murakhovsky, the editor-in-chief of Arsenal Otechestva, previously told Sputnik that the sonar systems of the Borei-class submarines exceed those of US submarines by about 100 kilometers in terms of detection range.

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🇮🇱🇵🇸 Latest updates on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

▪️IDF reports body of Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas found near Shifa hospital in Gaza Strip

▪️IDF reported taking control of the stronghold of the commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement's northern command in the Gaza Strip.

▪️ "Israel's plans will fail and the Israeli hostages will be released according to the movement's conditions," said the politburo chief of the Palestinian Hamas movement, Ismail Haniyeh.

▪️The US opposes Israeli air strikes on hospitals in the Gaza Strip and is concerned about strikes on a Jordanian hospital, Matthew Miller, the director of the US State Department's press office, told a briefing.

▪️The Israeli military found an underground tunnel and a vehicle with weapons belonging to the Palestinian movement Hamas in the Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip, the IDF reported.

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📹 Combat work of the Russian Iskander mobile short-range ballistic missile system carrying out an attack on Ukrainian military objects in the zone of the special military operation

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🇨🇳 Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said that the Asia-Pacific region should not become an arena for geopolitical rivalry and should not be drawn into a new cold war either.

He added that the APEC member countries have to "follow the right norms for state-to-state relations to maintain Asia-Pacific prosperity and stability through dialogue and partnership rather than confrontation and alliance."

The Chinese leader said that development could only be achieved with cooperation, and called on the countries in the region to "remain committed to open regionalism, and steadfastly advance the building of a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific."

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❗️Hamas has stopped negotiations with Israel on the release of hostages, the Israeli ambassador to Moscow said

Foreign mercenaries from the Ukrainian Second International Legion are stationed in Slavyansk. They live in rented apartments, fearing Russian missile attacks, a captive Georgian mercenary told Sputnik.

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🇬🇧 UK media has revealed that Major-General Gwyn Jenkins, then a colonel in the Special Boat Service, received reports in 2011 indicating that Special Air Service (SAS) members were involved in extrajudicial killings of Taliban fighters. These reports described incidents where SAS troops targeted all males over 15 during night raids on Afghan villages.

Jenkins, after becoming aware of these serious allegations, informed his superior, General Jonathan Page. However, instead of taking immediate action, Jenkins stored the evidence in a classified dossier, securing it in a safe in April 2011. This critical information remained hidden for four years until a whistle-blower from the SAS brought it to the attention of the Royal Military Police.

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❗️Russian stormtroopers from the Ural Battalion took a prisoner dressed in the jacket of an American mercenary. As the new owner of the jacket later said, this is all that is left of the mercenary himself.

The video from social media

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📹 The crews of Russian warplanes carried out missile airstrikes on military targets and equipment of Ukrainian units in the direction of south Donetsk

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🚀 At the Russian Vostochny Cosmodrome, a model of the Angara-NZH heavy-class launch vehicle Angara-A5 was installed on the launch pad

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🇺🇸 The Pentagon failing its sixth audit in a row testifies to “how unruly and chaotic a bureaucratic department gets when it does nothing over the decades but grow,” Matthew Crosston, professor of national security and director of academic transformation at Bowie State University, told Sputnik.

He added that although the DoD repeatedly seeks to improve its financial system, “the size of the reform needed is beyond the scope and capability” of the Pentagon.

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🗣 The Image of The West is Destroyed

"The Americans have tried to delegitimize Iran, by creating misery and through media campaigns and propaganda. But what have they done in Gaza? They've destroyed their image in the eyes of that segment of the Iranian society that has been whether sympathetic to the West or pro-West or hoping to come to terms with the West," Seyed Mohammad Marandi, University of Tehran professor, told Sputnik.

👉 Watch the full episode of our show on Rumble

🎧 Listen to more of Marandi’s analysis in our podcast New Rules

📹 Russian fighters destroyed another Ukrainian armored vehicle near the settlement of Sporny in the DPR

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🇷🇺🪖 Key points of Russian MoD briefing on progress of special military op in Ukraine

▪️ In Krasny Liman, 23 attacks by Ukrainian assault groups were repelled. Ukrainian losses for a week amounted to more than 1,100 soldiers;

▪️In the Donetsk region, Russian troops occupied more advantageous lines and positions, and repelled two attacks from Ukrainian assault groups in the areas of Novomikhailovka and Nikolsky. Ukrainian losses amounted to more than 1,810 soldiers, two tanks, and 15 armored vehicles this week;

▪️ In the Kupyansk area, the Russian forces repelled 26 attacks by Ukrainian troops during the week. Ukrainian losses amounted to over 575;

▪️ In Zaporozhye, the weekly Ukrainian losses exceeded 425 soldiers, two tanks, nine armored vehicles, all attacks were repelled;

▪️In the Kherson region, the enemy on the right bank of the Dnepr River and during attempts to land on the islands lost more than 460 soldiers;

▪️In a week, three Ukrainian MiG-29s were shot down, 198 drones and 22 HIMARS projectiles were destroyed.

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🇷🇺🇨🇳 A "new level” of Moscow-Beijing dialogue was demonstrated during the Russian-Chinese scientific conference that wrapped up in Shanghai, Professor Timofei Bordachev, program director of the Valdai International Discussion Club, told Sputnik.

He also noted that the event became the first major scientific Chinese-Russian conference that has been held since the PRC reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The two-day Shanghai gathering was noscriptd “Crisis and Global Transformation: China and Russia Facing the Challenges of a Changing."

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🇺🇸 The US is “confident” in its intelligence assessment that Hamas was allegedly using the Al-Shifa Hospital as a command post and possibly as a storage facility, White House spokesman John Kirby announced. Earlier the spokesman claimed that US intelligence believes that Hamas is using medical facilities in Gaza to facilitate their military activities and hold hostages.

The Israeli military stormed the Al-Shifa Hospital on Wednesday. While the IDF alleges that Hamas operates an extensive underground complex allegedly hidden beneath the medical facility, Hamas has rejected Israeli allegations and condemned the raid on the hospital.

Israel routinely claims that Hamas hides its facilities underneath elements of civilian infrastructure in Gaza in an alleged bid to use civilians as “human shields” against IDF strikes.

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🇷🇺 Seventy-eight percent of Russians trust President Vladimir Putin, and 80% approve of his work, a poll by Russia's Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) showed on Friday.

Asked whether Putin was doing a good or bad job as president, 80% of respondents said he was doing a good job, while 10% expressed the opposite view, with the rest refraining from responding.

Meanwhile, 78% of Russians polled said they trusted the Russian president, 14% said they did not, and 8% did not respond.

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