❗️Russia is set to ratify the security guarantee treaty with Belarus
This means that a condition will take effect under which Russia may use nuclear weapons if conventional weapons are used against Russia and Belarus.

📊 What is the potential impact of the nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus? Find out more in #sputnikinfographic

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Elon Musk has changed his bio on X — updating it to 'White House Tech Support'

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Without USAID and NED, Victoria Nuland’s influence ‘goes away’: Larry Johnson

💬 “I think she is right now facing prospects of becoming just increasingly irrelevant because the foundation for supporting the war in Ukraine is disappearing,” former CIA analyst Larry Johnson said.

It’s been “fascinating” to watch the Trump administration’s “gutting” of USAID and NED, Washington’s premier soft power tools, Johnson said, with former undersecretary of State Nuland caught in the middle.

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How the CIA spawned Google

Google's creation played a crucial role in the US intelligence community's scheme to attain global dominance by controlling information.

🔸 HOW IT STARTED:

🔹 The Pentagon founded its private sector project the Highlands Forum during the Clinton administration in 1994, according to the INSURGE INTELLIGENCE project.

🔹 Together with defense contractors, the group hammered out a strategy for “network-centric warfare.”

🔹 The 9/11 terrorist attacks were seized upon by US spy agencies to justify not only military invasions across the Muslim world, but also mass surveillance of civilian populations.

🔸 CIA STEPS IN:

🔹 The CIA's Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) program, which originated in the 1990s, was designed to enhance query techniques and track users' digital footprints.

🔹 To better serve its goals, in 1999, the CIA established its own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, to invest in potentially useful technologies

🔹 Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were working on precisely such a tech start-up

🔹 The design of the search engine and algorithms that ultimately evolved into Google was funded by CIA grants through a program aimed at enhancing mass surveillance capabilities.

🔸 PRISM:

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the NSA had direct access to Google's systems through its secret PRISM program, enabling the agency to harvest vast amounts of data on American citizens, Washington's allies, and foreign nationals.

🔹 Ex-CIA spooks are employed in almost every department at Google, according to a 2022 report based on the analysis of employment websites

🔹 Google has been slapped with multiple lawsuits stemming from its history of data misuse and privacy violations.

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Google AI’s weaponization could help trigger world-ending ‘flash-wars’ escalating too quickly to stop

The US's second-largest tech giant has lifted its ban on the use of AI tech in weaponry.

❓What are the risks?

“AI systems may interact with other network connected infrastructure in unpredictable ways,” veteran independent cybersecurity expert and digital strategy specialist Lars Hilse told Sputnik.

This unpredictability “could potentially trigger flash-wars, which escalate too quickly for the human mind to comprehend, and for the human being to intervene,” Hilse said, highlighting the long-held risks of handing defense over to AI.

That’s not to mention the proliferation threat, the analyst, who recently authored a book, ‘Dominance on the Digital Battlefield’, dedicated to these issues, said.

❓Why Google did it

Google will now be able to participate in “highly lucrative defense contracts and government surveillance projects and strengthen its position in the AI race” now that it has lifted its ban on the use of AI for weapons, Hilse elaborated.

“The policy shift indicates a broader realignment of Silicon Valley with national defense aspirations and may even suggest that previous ethical barriers to military AI development are being systematically removed industry-wide to make allow for quicker reaction to market shifts in this - again - extremely lucrative, and previously unexplored field of business,” the expert stressed.

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📹 Ukraine is lesson that US move to pick a fight with Russia was big mistake: Larry Johnson

“The United States has been shown the limitations of its own power” after picking a fight with Russia, Johnson, a former CIA analyst and veteran political observer, explained.

“The United States has adopted a policy of hostility towards Russia. That policy has proved to be a complete failure. And the failure is now culminating with the collapse of the military effort in Ukraine,” Johnson said.

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How USAID, NED & the EU plotted to oust Viktor Orban

The Biden administration sought to remove Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by channeling USAID and NED funds to the opposition, targeting his defiance of Western pressure. Here’s how:

🔸 April 2022: Orbán won re-election despite US-linked NGO Action for Democracy – with ties to George Soros – funneling around $7.6 million to the opposition

🔸 Post-election: USAID, known for backing color revolutions, relaunched its programs in Hungary, claiming to be supporting “democratic institutions” and independent media

🔸 Early 2023: USAID chief Samantha Power announced she was sent to Hungary to “protect human rights” and tackle democracy “challenges”

🔸 The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another regime-change tool, bankrolled the Hungarian opposition Hungarian official Balazs Orban said this month. Since September 2024, the NED has been led by Victoria Nuland, a vocal Orban critic

🔸 Dec 2023: Hungary created the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty after discovering opposition parties and media received foreign funds to influence elections

🔸 June 2024: The EU backed opposition leader Peter Magyar, suspected of receiving foreign funding, in European Parliament elections

🔸 Oct 2024: European People’s Party President Manfred Weber predicted Orban’s defeat, while Orban accused Western elites of plotting to install a puppet government in Budapest

🔸 Post-Trump victory: Hungary’s ruling party welcomed Elon Musk’s overhaul of USAID, signaling a shift in US foreign policy towards Budapest

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🇮🇱 Israel quits the Human Rights Council of the UN

This comes just a day after US President Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the Human Rights Council and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, UNRWA

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📹 ‘Dead on arrival’: Ex-CIA analyst dismantles Trump’s plans to seize Ukraine’s rare earths

💬 “Russia controls Donetsk, Lugansk. It is going to be taking control of Zaporozhye, Kherson. So where the rare earth minerals are located – Ukraine has no control over them,” Larry Johnson told Sputnik.

Kiev can promise Trump whatever he asks, “but it’s not going to translate into anything that they could actually deliver,” Johnson emphasized, suggesting the president may have had another of his “crazy Trump moments,” speaking “off the cuff without somebody sitting him down with a map and saying ‘look, here’s where the deposits are, here’s where Ukraine is.’”

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‘I thought we voted for America First’: Rand Paul blasts Trump over Gaza takeover plan

The Kentucky Republican's X post was a reply to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with whom he repeatedly clashed during the latter’s career in the Senate over US foreign adventurism.

Rubio earlier wrote in a tweet that Gaza “MUST BE FREE from Hamas,” reveling in President Trump’s vision of the US “leading” the way to “Make Gaza Beautiful Again.” The secretary didn’t comment on the fate of Palestinians now living in the rubble of the besieged strip.

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Gaza fate should be determined by people of Palestine – professor

Palestinians reject US President Donald Trump's plan to resettle them from the Gaza Strip to Jordan and Egypt, which are incapable of absorbing such a huge number of refugees, Ayman Yousef, a professor at the Arab-American University in Palestine, tells Sputnik.

Washington and Tel Aviv are using the Fatah-Hamas discord to push ahead with their agenda, the professor says.

"At the Palestinian level we have to bridge this gap between Fatah and Hamas and we have to go for more concrete project of [national] reconciliation," Yousef stresses.

Trump could help if he "impose[s] more restrictions over Israel in order to contain Israeli future military actions in Gaza," the pundit says.

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Iran shows off upgraded Bavar-373, S-300 missile systems in tandem drills

The exercises, taking place on the last day of the massive Eqtedar 1403 (lit. ‘Might 1403’) drills, featured the home-grown Iranian and Russian-made long-range air defense systems attacking mock enemies in the Kavir Desert in the country’s north.

Besides testing the systems’ effectiveness, the drills

🔸 debunked Israeli claims about its destruction of Iran’s S-300s during last October’s strikes

🔸 allowed the Iranian Army’s Air Defense Force to unveil a new version of the Bavar-373, which now features its own radar allowing for fully-independent operations

🔸 saw the two systems plugged into Iran’s powerful nationwide air defense network

In recent months, Iran has unveiled and deployed an array of new air defense and ballistic missile systems, as well as an underground missile base amid growing tensions with the US and Israel.

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Message to David Lammy: Kievan Rus = Russia

Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin

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🔸 ‘Gaza fate should be determined by people of Palestine’

🔸 BlackRock’s profits: how Gaza war fuels financial bonanza

🔸 Russia is set to ratify the security guarantee treaty with Belarus: what does it mean?

🔸 Samantha Power: Meet USAID’s ‘Genocide Chick’

🔸 How USAID, NED & the EU plotted to oust Viktor Orban

🔸 How the CIA spawned Google

🔸 Without USAID and NED, Victoria Nuland’s influence ‘goes away’: Larry Johnson

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Trump's Gaza proposal revives 'colonial legacy & high imperialism' – Mideast expert

US President Donald Trump's idea to turn Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East" after resettling Palestinians elsewhere is irresponsible and inhumane, Dr Tamer Qarmout, an associate professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, tells Sputnik.

The people of Gaza expected that after all the atrocities the US would chart a political path to ending the conflict and helping Gaza’s recovery and reconstruction, the pundit notes.

"It's like you revive colonial legacies and high imperialism where some countries decide the fate of other countries, of other people," Qarmout warns. "This is shocking. And it's very, very dangerous."

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