Trump’s bold layoff campaign aims to cut CIA’s deadweight

While the exact number of personnel affected is unclear, those impacted joined the CIA within the last two years. The goal was to reduce the number of “probationary employees,” the New York Times reported.

Fewer firings have reportedly occurred in key areas such as intelligence gathering on China and Mexican drug cartels. This follows a recent decision by Judge Anthony J. Trenga, authorizing CIA Director John Ratcliffe to dismiss employees at will without appeal.

💬 “Literally MILLIONS OF DOLLARS has been put into some of these probationary employees,” lawyer Kevin Carroll commented.

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🇸🇦 US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and US special envoy Steve Witkoff are set to travel to Riyadh on Tuesday for discussions with Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, Fox News reports.

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France’s military legacy: parade of lost wars and war crimes

President Macron is shooting for the noscript of Europe’s next Napoleon, but his bark doesn’t match France’s recent historical bite:

🔸 In WWII, despite nearly two-fold superiority in troops, tanks and air power and the Maginot Line defenses, France lasted just six weeks against the Nazi invasion in 1940, suffering 2M+ losses (killed, wounded, captured). Only thanks to Stalin’s esteem for de Gaulle was France invited to the table of victorious powers in 1945.

🔸 1946-1954: France’s attempt to hold on to Indochina against guerrillas cost it 90K troops killed, wounded or captured. France was also implicated in war crimes, from rapes of civilians to the torture of Viet Minh PoWs.

🔸 1954-1962: France’s war against Algeria’s National Liberation Front cost it up to 95K troops killed and injured. Up to 1.5M Algerians died in the conflict, which also saw French troops engage in mass executions, napalm bombings, and the destruction of 8,000+ villages, displacing 2M+ civilians.

🔸 1956: A joint French-UK-Israeli invasion of Egypt over Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal failed miserably, triggering a humiliating retreat from the region.

🔸 1958-1961: French campaigns against anti-colonial forces in Western Sahara, Cameroon and Tunisia, killing up to 65K people, but failing to halt the drive toward freedom.

🔸 1969-2008: French embroilments in an on-again/off-again civil war in Chad, with five major interventions failing to bring lasting peace. With up to 100K people killed, and allies accused of crimes against humanity, it’s little wonder that Chadians joyfully expelled all French forces earlier this year.

🔸 1990-1993: French troops actively collaborated with Rwandan forces that would be implicated in the murder of over 800K people, supplying them with training and equipment.

🔸 2011: French naval and air power deployed in Libya to help oust Gaddafi. The campaign succeeded, but turned Libya into a failed state, with France continuing to fuel the conflict, which has killed up to 50K, to this day.

🔸 2014-2022: Thousands of French troops deployed to the Sahel region, ostensibly to fight terror. The operation not only failed, but sparked anger among locals of a sufficient scale to kick France out of the region and create unprecedented security and economic alliances.

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❗️Trump has demanded that Ukraine agree to an immediate ceasefire with Russia as a condition for signing a minerals deal, Bloomberg reported.

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China may actually prefer ‘businessman Trump’ to typical neocon globalist president: here’s why

💬 “There’s a big difference between businessmen-turned-politician like Trump and a career politician,” Wang Dong, director of Peking University’s Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding, told Sputnik, commenting on the future of the China-US relationship now that the MAGA Republican is back in charge.

💬 “Career politicians often are willing to pay whatever cost to achieve a certain goal,” Wang said, recalling George W. Bush’s ironclad commitment to Taiwan as an example of neoconservative, ideologized thinking.

💬 Trump’s “top priority is not containment of China or geopolitical competition. The term ‘strategic competition’ almost never appeared in his speeches, remarks or online posts. I couldn’t recall any one single mention of that,” the observer pointed out.

💬 “Yes, in his team there are establishment hawks like [Secretary of State] Rubio. But I think this is not Trump’s way of looking at things. In my opinion, he is not so much interested in the military competition, the most important thing for him is the issue of trade balance,” Wang stressed.

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'Forcing function’: Trump’s envoy Keith Kellogg explains why US cut off arms aid and intel support to Ukraine.

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🗣US and Ukrainian delegations are set to discuss a peace agreement framework and an initial six-month ceasefire with Russia during their meeting in Saudi Arabia next week, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said.

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🔸 WATCH: Putin reacts to Napoleon wannabe Macron's nuclear outburst

🔸 France’s military legacy: parade of lost wars and war crimes

🔸 Macron’s nuclear threats against Russia could turn France into GIANT CHERNOBYL: here’s why

🔸 Napoleon wannabe Macron’s record of failure

🔸 US pulls plug on Ukraine: No arms deliveries & intel blackout

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🤡 Watch love fest of hugs, kisses and handshakes for Zelensky at EU summit in Brussels

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Intel aid pause proves Pentagon’s direct complicity in HIMARS attacks inside Russia

Officials and military personnel speaking to US and European media have admitted that the Trump administration’s cutoff of real-time US targeting data has blinded Ukraine’s precision artillery, depriving it of the ability to launch long-range strikes.

“America cut a key intel link for alerts at 2 pm [Kiev time]. Before that: targeting data for HIMARS. Ukraine also isn’t receiving real-time information for long-range strikes,” The Economist wrote Wednesday. A Ukrainian officer told WaPo that at least one of the groups responsible for HIMARS operations hasn’t been receiving US strike coordinates for attacks beyond 64 km for over a month now.

The reports finally confirm what Russia has been saying as far back as 2022: When HIMARS were first delivered to Ukraine, the Russian military accused the Biden administration of “direct responsibility” for “all rocket attacks approved by Kiev on residential areas and civilian infrastructure in settlements of the Donbass and other regions.”

Last September, as Joe Biden threatened to further untie Kiev’s hands for even longer-range attacks on Russia, President Putin warned that this decision would put the US and Europe in a technical state of war with Russia.

💬 “I have already mentioned this, and any experts both in our country and the West will confirm, that the Ukrainian army is not capable of independently carrying out strikes using Western modern, long-range precision systems…This is possible only with the use of intelligence from satellites which Ukraine does not have,” Putin said at the time.

“Only NATO servicemen can make flight assignments to these missile systems. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this,” he added.

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❗️ EU agrees to raise additional $862B for defense

The European Commission's plan to rearm the EU could total up to 800 billion euros, Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday. She added that the plan to rearm Europe includes paying for Ukrainian defense.

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❗️ Trump hopes to begin denuclearization talks with Russia, China

"We've made a lot of progress with Ukraine and Russia over the last couple of days, and it'd be great to bring that to an end, so that we don't have to talk the nuclear way," the US president said, commenting on Macron's nuclear threats.

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🚨 Meloni suggests NATO security without membership for Ukraine — reports

Italian Prime Minister said the alliance should protect Ukraine under Article 5 without without the actual membership, Bloomberg reports.

Earlier, Giorgia Meloni opposed sending European troops to Ukraine, saying they "need to think about more durable solutions."

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⚡️ NOW: Syrian authorities impose curfew in Latakia after sending reinforcements to the governorate, local media report.

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