🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia has become a full member of BRICS, the kingdom's state television reports.

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The Ukrainian defense industry is not capable of producing gunpowder for artillery shells, former deputy minister for the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons of Ukraine, Georgiy Tuka, admitted in an interview with the TV channel Pryamoy.

"Seemingly such a primitive thing as gunpowder turned out to be absolutely super complicated for our [Ukrainian] military-industrial complex," he said.

Tuka said that gunpowder is a basic component of small arms cartridges and artillery shells. The situation in Ukraine with artillery powder is especially sad, the former deputy minister complained.

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Ukraine’s Air Force has no clue when long sought after F-16s will arrive

Kiev has no new information whatsoever on the training of Ukrainian airmen to fly F-16s, and no talk whatsoever about the jets’ transfer to Ukraine, Air Force Command spokesman Yuriy Ignat has said.

“There hasn’t been a single piece of new information on the training of pilots and the transfer or aircraft or anything else. There is no talk of any transfers of F-16 fighters,” Ignat said during an interview with Ukrainian television on Tuesday.

Asked to assess the quality of training for Ukrainian pilots learning to operate the US-made planes, the Air Force spokesman said he has no information on the matter, either, and that this is a question being decided by Ukraine’s NATO “partners.”

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79% of Americans aged 18 to 24 believe that “white people are oppressors” and that this ideology should “be favored today at universities and for employment.”

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Energy generating and supply firm Con Edison told Sputnik that they had not received reports of power outages or any problems with equipment on Roosevelt Island in New York, where explosions were allegedly heard.

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📹 Russia's airborne artillerymen destroy Ukrainian camouflaged positions near Verbovoye

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An Israeli drone struck a Hamas office in the Mushrifiyah area in the southern suburb of Beirut, according to Lebanese news agency.

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Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas politburo, and two other leaders of the Al-Qassam Brigades were killed, according to Lebanese state-run media.

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Is USS Ford's withdrawal a signal to Netanyahu to de-escalate conflict?

"I think it is a message to Israel to go for a de-escalation stage or the theater stage of its aggression over Gaza," Ayman Yousef, professor of political sciences and international relations at the Arab-American University in Palestine, told Sputnik. "Their consideration is a kind of a clear transformation to a political track in the conflict."

The US presently has "different strategic priorities" with regard to Russia, the Ukrainian conflict, the EU and China, Yousef stressed.

The departure of USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group came amid heightened tensions in the Red Sea with Iran's Alborz warship entering the area through the Bab el-Mandeb strait on Monday. The US appears to be uninterested in getting deeply entangled in the simmering Mideast conflict.

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🇱🇧 Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati officially accused Israel of carrying out a drone strike on Beirut, calling it a crime.

He said Israel did this “to drag Lebanon into a new phase of confrontation”

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Russia's Msta-B howitzer destroyed a Ukrainian mortar near Artyomovsk (Bakhmut)

📹 During counter-battery warfare, the artillerymen destroyed an AFU 120-mm mortar positioned in a forest belt near Artyomovsk with a direct hit.

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

▪️Hamas political bureau deputy chief killed in bombing of Hamas office in south Beirut, according to reports;

▪️Palestinian Red Crescent says five people killed, three wounded as result of organization's headquarters and Al-Amal hospital shelling in Khan Younis in Gaza;

▪️Israel rejects Hamas’s hostage deal proposal, according to reports;

▪️IDF says found weapons in kindergarten in Gaza Strip.

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🇮🇷 Iran's Khayyam satellite turns nation into remote sensing heavyweight

In 2022, a Russian carrier rocket launched Iran’s Khayyam remote sensing satellite into orbit. Becoming fully operational last July, the 600 kg spacecraft, named after the great Ancient Persian astronomer and polymath Omar Khayyam, set to work snapping detailed digital images for use in a wide variety of applications.

Iran’s new Khayyam remote sensing satellite has brought the Islamic Republic’s space program into a new era, with its images having a whopping 81 different uses ranging from environmental monitoring and agriculture to water management, meteorology, urban planning, mining and natural disaster response and early warning.

The Tehran-based Iranian Space Research Center recently announced that it had kicked off the process of making the Khayyam available to commercial customers, citing the satellite’s competitiveness and the Center’s engagement with both government and private clients from the Ministry of Agriculture and Iran’s Environmental Protection Organization to the National Copper Company and others.

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🇺🇸💸The Pentagon’s $48.6 billion program to update the US’ aging B-52 bomber fleet is at risk of failure, according to a recent audit.

The audit notes the Air Force relies too heavily on cannibalizing other planes for spare parts, and that there are long wait times for new parts.

The USAF agreed with the assessment that the service perform a code review to ensure spare parts are properly tracked. However, the audit notes the military branch only partially responded to its other recommendations that it create a list of all spare parts needed for the B-52, and that it start tracking manufacturers that still produce those parts and how long they plan to continue.

The program remains open to further audit and review.

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❗Former US President Donald Trump has appealed his disqualification from Maine's presidential primary ballot, a new court filing revealed

China confident in BRICS' bright prospects after expansion

Beijing is fully confident in BRICS’s bright future after expansion, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

"Let me make it very clear that we are fully confident in the BRICS’ future," Wang told a briefing, proceeding to say "You mentioned the fact that BRICS now has 10 member states. That shows exactly its bright prospect."

BRICS's expansion "serves the common aspiration of emerging markets and developing countries, and follows the global trend towards multipolarity," the spokesman said.

He voiced Beijing's intention to work with BRICS members and "strive for new results in greater BRICS cooperation."

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🇺🇸😵‍💫Is another ballot disqualification in the works for Trump in New York?

Council members in the Empire State are said to be reportedly urging New York's Board of Election to boot the former US president from the 2024 primary and general election ballots.

The reported developments come just days after similar efforts were taken in Colorado and Maine, both of which Trump has condemned as a political attack against his reelection efforts.

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Sweden faces bankruptcy avalanche not seen since the 1990s

Swedish insolvencies spiked by 29 percent in 2023 — the highest since 1990s — after the property bubble burst.

Credit rating firm UC said December saw a 23 percent year-on-year rise in bankruptcies, which could indicate deeper economic issues, especially against the backdrop of sustained high inflation and interest rates.

Sweden's central bank has ended its 18-month run of interest rate hikes as the spetcre of recession looms in 2024.

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US national debt has surged over $34 trillion for the first time in history, according to the fiscal data published by the Department of the Treasury.

As of December 29, 2023, the US national debt reached $34,001,493,655,565.48 for the first time in the history of the United States, the data showed on Tuesday.

On December 28, the US national debt stood at $33,911,227,723,170 and the Biden administration took just one day to increase the national debt by almost $100 billion, according to the data.

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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told German media he is confident Sweden will join the bloc by July at the latest.

The next NATO summit will be held in Washington on July 9-11, but Stoltenberg expects Sweden will be a NATO member before the conference kicks off.

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