🇩🇪📈 Germany's right-wing AfD party has surged to 23%, while the leftist SPD and Green parties have seen their polling numbers plunge, following the horrific knife attack on children in Aschaffenburg.

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Why DeepSeek highlights ‘pivotal moment in global AI landscape’

Assumptions about China lagging 10 years behind the US in AI development were obliterated with the release of DeepSeek V3, Zach Vorhies, a former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google turned whistleblower, tells Sputnik.

🌐«DeepSeek V3 features a “model distillation”, a groundbreaking innovation technique that allows the Chinese AI chatbot to create "mini" versions of itself that are “small and efficient enough to run on devices like iPhones or even Raspberry Pi»

🌐The chatbot “drastically reduced the memory footprint of its neural networks by quantizing model weights to just 4 bits and partitioning active memory during training»

🌐This reduction “slashed processing requirements and allowed the [DeepSeek] model to be trained on mid-tier Nvidia H100-class processors," something that helped sidestep hardware constraints.

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Tax on nothing: Estonia proposes fee to enter Baltic Sea

The funds generated from shipping firms will be used to protect underwater cables, Estonian Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur has said. According to the military chief, apart from funding patrols of the territory, tax spoils will also go to installing sensors to detect anchors that may be dragged across the seabed and to erecting additional defenses around the cables.

The West's recent obsession with cable sabotage is nothing more than a pretext for turning the Baltic Sea into a “NATO lake”, retired Russian Navy Captain First Rank Vasily Dandykin earlier explained.

Around 150 underwater cables are damaged across the globe annually. The Baltic Sea is one of the busiest shipping routes.

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🇦🇿🇦🇲 Azeri-Armenian ties escalate amid trial of ex-head of breakaway territory

The case of Armenian businessman and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan is politically motivated as there is no criminal offense against him, Russian journalist and rights activist Eva Merkacheva says. She also points out that:

▪️Vardanyan's trial is, in fact, the trial of the Armenian people.

▪️Azerbaijan persistently tries to link Vardanyan to combatants of the Karabakh war despite the fact that he is a civilian and was not involved in hostilities on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

▪️Vardanyan has repeatedly called for close cooperation between Russia and Armenia.

▪️He was one of the few who understood the importance of Russian peacekeepers’ presence in the conflict zone.

The trial of former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, including Vardanyan, is currently underway in Azerbaijan, where they are accused of committing war crimes. They were detained while trying to enter the country in September 2023.

At the time, the latest elected leader of Nagorno-Karabakh Samvel Shahramanyan officially dropped all claims to independence from Azerbaijan, announcing that the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh will officially cease to exist on January 1, 2024.

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Who funds a lab in Congo where danger of virus LEAKAGE was reported?

The laboratory in Congo, where risks of virus leakage were earlier announced by the Red Cross, is being funded by the US and France, Russian consumer safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said.

The activities of this laboratory are funded by the United States Agency for International Development and the French Merrier Foundation, the report read.

“This demonstrates once again the irresponsibility of the collective West when dealing with dangerous infections in third countries,” Rospotrebnadzor said in a statement.

In the 21st century, 7 out of 16 of all known cases of pathogen leaks from biological laboratories occurred on American territory, the watchdog emphasized.

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🔥 Fast & Furious: IDF edition

An Israeli Merkava tank chases a car and a motorcycle in the village of Marwahin in southern Lebanon.

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🤖 Beyond DeepSeek? China strikes again in AI model race

Just days after a triumphant release of DeepSeek AI assistance, which caused a tremor at the stock market, China has come up with another AI model – the Qwen 2.5.

Alibaba, a Chinese tech company, claims that “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek V3 in benchmarks such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond (standardized tests for AI models).

Here’s what makes Qwen 2.5 so special (according to its developer):

🔸Diverse model range: from 0.5B to 72B parameters, catering to various computational needs.

🔸Multilingual support: proficiency in over 29 languages, enabling global applications.

🔸Specialized variants: includes models optimized for general language tasks, coding, and mathematics.

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📹 JFK posed EXISTENTIAL THREAT to ISRAEL – CIA veteran

Israel might have had an actual motive to murder JFK who was seen as a threat to Tel Aviv's nuclear program and the Zionist Organization of America's efforts to influence US politics.

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📹 THROWBACK: Putin keeps it clean, Trump thinks he’s being cursed at

Putin stated that negotiations should be based on facts during a press conference in Helsinki back in 2019.

Trump, who mistook the Russian word "facts" for the English expletive "f***", was visibly surprised.

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🔎 Is the EU trying to enlist Jordan’s help to tackle migrant crisis?

The European Union and Jordan signed a strategic and comprehensive partnership pact on January 29.

What is it about?👇

During 2025-2027, Brussels will provide about €3 billion of financial assistance to Jordan, including:

▪️€1 billion in concessional loans
▪️About €1.4 billion in “additional investments”
▪️€640 million in grants

What could be behind this move?👇

▪️The agreement contains mention of “promoting water, energy and green transition for a resource-efficient green economy,” which may imply that Brussels seeks to force its “green agenda” upon Jordan.

▪️The section on dealing with migration mentions “working on durable solutions for refugees (including complementary pathways for protection and safe voluntary and dignified returns).” This clause might suggest that the EU wants to enlist Jordan’s help in tackling Europe’s migrant crisis.

▪️The mention of “strengthening cooperation on border management, fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings” may also mean that Europe hopes Jordan would become a bulwark against the flow of migrants.

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🇮🇳🚀 India successfully launches new satellite

On January 29, the Indian Space Research Organisation marked its 100th launch from Sriharikota island. The satellite will enhance navigation services across India and up to 1,500 km beyond its borders.

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