◻️ Advance of Ukraine’s army near Russia’s Kursk region stopped: check out the latest updates from the area

◻️ ‘There was nothing to disrupt’: Moscow reacts to media speculation about Ukraine talks

◻️ Netizens in fury over Italian TV interviewing Ukrainian militant wearing a cap with Nazi insignia

◻️ US-Mexico diplomatic row is gaining steam: check out the details

◻️ Illegal border crossing in US suddenly drops – why?

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Israeli hacking attack made Hezbollah’s slain commander 'easy target' – report

Israel breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network and tricked assassinated Fuad Shukr into becoming an easy target, the Wall Street Journal claims.

The senior commander of the Lebanon-based group was in his office on the second floor of a Beirut residential building on the day of the strike that killed him. Shukr, a senior military adviser to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, lived and worked in the same building in the Dahiyeh neighborhood. He got a phone call at 7pm, telling him to head to his apartment on the seventh floor, a Hezbollah official was quoted as saying.

Lebanon is reportedly probing the intelligence failure in conjunction with Iran.

The attack that killed Shukr came just hours before the fatal attack on the Tehran residence of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in July. Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s assassination and have vowed retaliation.

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💶 Cash still king: many Germans uneasy over prospect of looming digital euro

Cash-loving Germans are leading the charge in opposition to the digital euro, with just under half saying they “probably” or “definitely” won’t use the new payment system if or when it arrives.

◻️ A survey by the Forsa Institute for Social Research and Statistical Analysis on behalf of Deutsche Bundesbank found that while 15% of respondents said they “definitely” would use the digital euro, and 35% are ready to give it a whirl, 25% “definitely won’t use” it, and 24% “probably won’t use” it. The representative survey queried 2,012 people.

◻️ Germans are among the leaders in Europe when it comes to the ‘cash-is-king’ mentality, holding onto 500 euro notes long after other EU members’ central banks had dropped them. In 2019, a Bundesbank poll found that 88% of Germans would continue to prefer paying cash even after the 500 euro bill was no longer issued, with the note popular for major purchases.

◻️ In the EU, the share of cash in P2P payments remained above 80% in Germany, Cyprus, Slovenia, Greece, Italy and Austria in 2022. Estonia, Finland and the Netherlands have led the charge in cashless payments. In these countries, cash accounted for less than half of P2P transactions, according to ECB data.

◻️ CBDCs have garnered their share of criticism, particularly amid fears of finance-related censorship, increasing centralization and politicized control over spending and savings. Proponents say the tech can promote innovation in payments, encourage “social responsibility,” including by programming money to be spent only on a list of approved goods or services, ease the doling out of state assistance, and even simplify financial transactions between countries as a workaround to sanctions.

◻️ The ECB is expected to make a decision on whether or not to implement the digital euro scheme by late 2025, although some of the region’s top bankers suggest its implementation may be put off until closer to the end of the decade.

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Hezbollah has $150 bln in Israeli infrastructure in sights, reportedly flies drone over Bibi’s house

Hezbollah reportedly has enough missile and drone firepower to paralyze up to $150 billion of key economic, industrial and food-growing facilities and infrastructure in northern Israel if raging tensions escalate into a full-blown war.

Estimates by Iranian media suggest the Lebanese militia’s capabilities threaten the “economic heart of Israel,” an area in the country’s north accounting for some 80% of its grain production, 70% of its dairy supplies and 40% of its meat supply. A Hezbollah response to Israeli aggression targeting local agribusiness giants Tnuva or Adom may “paralyze” Israel’s food market, the report suggests.

On top of that, over 60% of Israel’s oil refining and fuel production capacity is said to be concentrated around Acre Port, which is about 35 km south of the Lebanese border. That puts those sensitive targets in range of nearly all of Hezbollah’s missiles and drones.

On Sunday, Israeli media reported that the Navy had spotted a possible Hezbollah drone near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Caesarea beach house compound on Friday. A “suspicious aircraft” hovering nearby caused the Israeli Air Force to scramble fighter jets, but they failed to get visual confirmation, prompting the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to suggest that a flock of birds may have been mistaken for a Hezbollah drone by radar.

The IDF did not rule out the possibility that the incident was caused by a small Hezbollah UAV. The PM’s office insisted that the report was a “false alarm,” and that Netanyahu was not at the residence at the time of the suspected incident.

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🇦🇫 Idealism and ideology sealed US failure in Afghanistan – analyst

US policy towards Afghanistan and Afghans was based on unrealistic expectations and a poor understanding of the region – an attitude that resulted in a major foreign policy failure, Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News.

"We were looking at Afghanistan through the lens of idealism and ideology. Here we were building a democracy. From an Afghan point of view, they were looking at it through the lens of survival," he explained, referring to the US invasion and two-decade occupation of the sovereign country.

The US hastily withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 in a manner that triggered memories of Vietnam, with social media overflowing with images of a chopper picking up American personnel from rooftops.

The analyst believes that apart from major intelligence failures about the Taliban’s* capabilities, the US also failed diplomatically, completely misunderstanding local society, as well as the intentions of neighboring countries, who could secretly sympathize with the Islamic movement.

“I would call it a diplomatic failure,” Rubin says.

He laments that the US retreat created a vacuum that is being filled by Russia and other non-Western powers.

Despite US allegations, however, Moscow has made it clear that its priority is security in the region. Since the Taliban maintains “real power” in the country, as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has explained, Russia is considering delisting it as a banned organization and boosting ties with the current government in Kabul.

*Under UN sanctions for terrorist activities

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🎥 Direct hit

Watch how a Lancet loitering munition destroys a Ukrainian engineering vehicle near the Kursk region border

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A strike was carried out on a mercenary deployment location near Kiev, Sergei Lebedev, coordinator of the pro-Russian Nikolayev underground, told Sputnik.

He also noted a strike on a Ukrainian ammunition depot north of Pavlograd in the Dnepropetrovsk region.

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Why has US media become obsessed with inflation ahead of the elections?

The US media is most interested in the issue of inflation and a possible recession ahead of the presidential elections; the top three most frequently mentioned issues are also migrants and abortion rights, while restrictions on the termination of pregnancy are increasingly covered this year, as well as problems in the economy, according to Sputnik calculations.

Inflation and economic problems were mentioned in the media almost 37,000 times before August this year. In previous election years, this topic also interested the US media more than others: in 2016, it was mentioned almost 25,000 times, and in 2020, 19,500 times.

The next most mentioned issues are abortion rights (more than 3,000 materials this year) and the situation with migrants and problems at the border (more than 2,900). In the previous election year, 2020, these issues were mentioned only a few hundred times.

The problem of undocumented immigrants was not as actively covered in the media when Trump's presidential term was ending: in 2020 it was written about about 634 times, but in 2016, when Trump was running for office with Hillary Clinton and Obama's second term was ending, there were 1,637 articles on this issue

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❗️Russia will give a specific and adequate response if Poland tries to intercept Russian missiles over Ukraine, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Third European Department Oleg Tyapkin told Sputnik

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Mercenaries in the Ukrainian Army are being appointed to command mobilized troops, Sergei Lebedev, coordinator of the pro-Russian Nikolayev underground movement, told Sputnik.

Commenting on the strike carried out on a mercenary deployment location near Kiev, he highlighted that it was planned they would be sent to their designated units on Monday.

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Ukrainian info saboteurs used foreign journos to stage filmed interviews with Russian prisoners - report

The Ukrainian propaganda machine recruited foreign journalists to stage filmed interviews with Russian prisoners in the Sumy regional hospital in order to accuse the Russian military of shelling their own civilian population in the Kursk region, an informed source has told Sputnik.

Employees of Ukraine’s notorious Center for Information and Psychological Operations (CIPSO) also sought to portray the prisoners captured in the Kursk border region as supposedly showing “gratitude” to the Ukrainian forces for their “help.” 

"On Saturday, Russian prisoners from among the military and civilians were brought to Sumy regional hospital. They were staged to be distributed among beds and provided assistance in front of foreign journalists' cameras. Afterwards, the prisoners called on the Russian military not to fire on villages in the Sudzha district and on the regional hospital in Sumy," the source said. 

According to the source, the prisoners were required to express gratitude for their "liberation." Some of the prisoners involved in the video production were removed from the hospital after filming.
It was added that the medical facility contains a large number of wounded Ukrainian soldiers. "The regional healthcare system here (in the Sumy region) can no longer handle them, there are many wounded," the source added.

Since the attempted incursion into Russia’s Kursk region launched by Ukraine on August 6, the Russian Armed Forces have been successfully repelling the enemy, quashing its advance and destroying vast amounts of NATO weaponry provided to the Kiev regime.

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"We swear to God, if you want to help us, just open the border between Egypt and Gaza. Our army is ready, once they open the border."

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune vowed to not abandon Palestinians.

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Russian-Chinese de-dollarization in progress

The share of settlements in national currencies between Russia and China is more than 90%, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said.

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🎥 Russian President Vladimir Putin laid a wreath at the grave of Azerbaijan's first President Heydar Aliyev during his visit to Baku

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