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🇷🇺🚀 Russia launches Progress cargo spacecraft to ISS
Russia’s Soyuz-2.1a rocket successfully delivered the Progress MS-34 cargo spacecraft into orbit after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Roscosmos said.
📦 The spacecraft is carrying over 2.5 tons of supplies to the International Space Station, including fuel, food, water, oxygen and equipment for scientific research.
🛰 The mission also delivers a new Orlan-MKS spacesuit and materials for experiments studying human health in microgravity and advanced life-support systems.
📅 Docking with the ISS is scheduled for April 28.
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🇨🇳🌌 China rejects space rivalry & seeks global 'friend circle' for shared exploration of outer space - China’s FM
🟠 Beijing is firmly committed to fair, mutually-beneficial, peaceful, and inclusive international collaboration in space, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.
🟠 After seven decades of determined, self-driven effort, China has built a space sector from scratch and is now actively cooperating on the world stage, from launching satellites and crewed missions to reaching deep space, he added.
🟠 China cooperates with Russia as a strategic space partner, jointly building the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), while Russia contributes scientific payloads to China's Chang'e-7 mission planning joint astronaut training from 2027.
🟠 The country has also signed space cooperation agreements with several African and South American nations. In Asia, Pakistani astronauts have been selected and will soon join Chinese crews aboard the space station.
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🗣 ‘When they want, they can call me’ — Trump
US President Donald Trump said US representatives are not planning to visit Islamabad for possible talks with Iran, despite earlier American media reports that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were travelling to Pakistan.
💬 “We’re not going to be traveling 15-16 hours to have a meeting with people that nobody ever heard of before,” Trump said, adding that “we knocked out two levels of leaders.”
💬 “They offered a lot, but not enough,” he claimed.
🚨🇮🇱🇱🇧Ceasefire, what ceasefire?
Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the IDF to launch a major strike on alleged Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, according to the prime minister’s office.
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📈 While G20 fades into a photo-op club, BRICS builds banks and payment rails
🗣 The G20 Summit, which Donald Trump would like Vladimir Putin to attend, is merely another forum where a few non-Western countries could voice their opinion, but which lacks any 🗣 enforcement mechanism, Dr. Alexis Habiyaremye, a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, tells Sputnik.
🔶 While this format was ostensibly launched to promote cooperation between the world’s largest economies, the US has been doing the exact opposite: launching trade wars, imposing tariffs, threatening to invade other countries and even waging war.
💬 “The G20 has not uttered any single word on any of these unilateral moves. It does not take a rocket scientist to draw a conclusion on its irrelevance,” Dr. Habiyaremye remarks.
💬 “BRICS is coming to the forefront as it is the forum of countries with the strongest economic dynamism, often perceived as a counterweight to Western hegemony and unilateralism,” Dr. Habiyaremye says.
🇺🇸 US bases in Middle East hit far harder than Pentagon admitted
👉 Fixing damage caused by Iranian retaliatory strikes against the US military installations in the Persian Gulf region will cost billions of dollars, NBC News reports, citing sources.
Earlier, the Pentagon told private satellite imagery companies to restrict access to photos of the US bases in the Gulf, so that the public could not gauge the extent of the damage for themselves.
Following the launch of the US-Israeli aggression on February 28, Iran promptly retaliated with drone and missile strikes against US military assets in the region, including airstrips, radar facilities, military communication nodes and depots.
So far, the damage incurred by these attacks, as reported by media, includes:
🟠 Satellite communications infrastructure and an AN/FPS-132 long-range ballistic missile radar severely damaged at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which serves as a forward HQ for CENTCOM
🟠 An AN/TPY-2 radar system for the THAAD missile defense battery destroyed at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan
🟠 Several satellite communication radomes severely damaged at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait
🟠 Radomes, communication terminals and storage facility damaged at the US Fifth Fleet HQ in Bahrain
🟠 One E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft destroyed and multiple KC-135 aerial refueling tankers destroyed at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia
Over the course of the conflict, the Pentagon desperately tried to downplay or even outright conceal these losses and portray the war as a major success for the United States.
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🇵🇰🛰 Pakistan launches EO-3 satellite in major space leap
The new spacecraft has reached orbit from China’s Taiyuan launch center, adding fresh momentum to Islamabad’s technological and strategic ambitions.
What it delivers:
🔶 Detailed surface imagery for mapping land, infrastructure, and environmental changes
🔶 AI-driven onboard analysis that handles information in orbit and speeds decisions below
🔶 Multi-angle capture for higher precision and stronger object identification
🔶 Rapid relay systems for quicker delivery to civilian institutions and state agencies
🔶 Emergency response tools for floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and crisis planning
🔶 Agriculture and water oversight through crop assessment, drought tracking, and land-use studies
🔶 Reconnaissance value with broader awareness and stronger monitoring reach
The mission also reinforces cooperation with Beijing in an increasingly important sector.
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🇺🇸🌎 How the US locked-in Latin America's economic dependency
Modern debt mechanisms serve as instruments of neocolonialism in Latin America, bringing regional countries into the US sphere of influence, Alejandro Olmos Gaona, an Argentine expert on external debt and former member of Ecuador’s government commission for auditing bilateral agreements, tells Sputnik.
📍 The turning point came when the US changed its legislation in the mid 1970s as loans began flowing into Latin America:
🔶 New norms allowed states to be sued under US jurisdiction through the so called Sovereign Immunities Act
🔶 Argentina, under its military dictatorship, was the first country to reform its laws to permit the transfer of jurisdiction to foreign courts
💬 From that moment on, virtually all Latin American countries began contracting loans and issuing bonds under conditions dictated by Washington, he states.
💬 "The IMF has one critical feature: it can inflict damage on any country through its operations. It not only dictates economic policy and monitors state actions but also cannot be brought to court anywhere in the world."
💬 "The system is fully engineered," he adds.
🇦🇫 NATO & US invaded Afghanistan under false pretext of combating terrorism and narcotics manufacturing
💬 "In reality, their goal was not to protect women and children or to save Afghanistan," Afghan political scientist Mohammad Hakim Tursun told Sputnik. "Their goal was to expand their influence in Central Asia, and to create a threat to Russia and to contain Iran.”
🇺🇸$61 billion and rising: US war on Iran burns cash fast
👉The cost of the US operation against Iran has now exceeded $61 billion, according to the Iran War Cost Tracker.
➖The tracker uses real-time updates covering troop deployments, naval forces in the region, logistics and related military expenses. Its model is based on a Pentagon report to Congress stating the first six days alone cost $11.3 billion, with ongoing costs estimated at $1 billion per day.
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🇨🇳 China pushes back against new US chip export clampdown
China has warned it will take “all necessary measures” to defend its companies after a US congressional panel advanced new export control legislation targeting critical technologies, including semiconductor equipment.
💬 "If enacted, the relevant legislation will seriously undermine the international economic and trade order and severely disrupt the stability of global semiconductor industrial and supply chains," stated China’s Ministry of Commerce.
🇷🇺💉 Russia developing eternal youth vax
Russian scientists are working on world’s first anti-aging vaccine.
The novel therapy aims to target the RAGE receptor, whose activation launches the aging of a cell.
Blocking this gene can prolong youth, Denis Sekirinsky, Russia’s deputy science and higher education minister, told a nationwide longevity conference.
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🔸 US pressure backfired: American aggression pushed Iran to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz
🔸 Iran rules out US meeting in Islamabad, rejects media reports
🔸 The US is blocking China’s tech rise — but the real counterattack hasn’t even begun
🔸 Reign of Western powers’ mafia in global financial needs to end
🔸 Iran outplaying US Navy in Strait of Hormuz with sea mines
🔸 Who can challenge the West’s blackmail and global finance control?
🔸 US to return $159 billion in tariffs — Trump
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🇪🇬 Egyptian party leader blows open the neocolonial formula to loot developing nations
Major powers seize the resources of developing countries, using that leverage to force them into borrowing from international institutions — which then impose crippling economic policies, head of Egypt’s National Conciliation Party Mohamed Mahmoud Rifaat tells Sputnik.
The scheme works like this:
🔸 Key world powers use various tools to strangle the development of others and disrupt their progress, aiming to turn them into debtor states
🔸 This drives them to turn to global entities like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — these institutions provide money but simultaneously seize control over the economies of those seeking help
🔸 Another way of gaining control is freezing sovereign assets, a key foundation upon which any economy is built. This not only leads to economic collapse but also sparks tensions and even military conflicts
🔸 Such measures allow neocolonial powers to appropriate the resources of others and use that to force other states follow their lead
This sort of policy "constitutes an act of aggression against states and peoples, requiring active measures to restore their rights," the expert says.
Another problem he points out is the United Nations, which is not viable today, as it can’t represent the world, apart from via the General Assembly.
That said, some countries do help developing nations, Mahmoud Rifaat notes — with Russia serving as an example.
💬 "Russia provides support to the world through participation in construction and development processes, as well as through training personnel in partner countries, which contributes to building the capacity for independent development and achieving sustainable growth," he explains.
💣 US kills two in strike on alleged narco-trafficking vessel in the Pacific
US Southern Command said on April 24 that Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out what it described as a “lethal kinetic strike” on a vessel it claimed was operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations” in the Eastern Pacific.
Two male “narco-terrorists” were killed, SOUTHCOM said, adding that no US forces were harmed.
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🇮🇷🇷🇺 Decades-old Iranian jet breached US defenses, struck Gulf base in early phase of war — reports
Iran’s early retaliatory strikes in the US-Israeli aggression caused significantly more damage to US military infrastructure than publicly acknowledged, with over 100 targets hit across bases in multiple Gulf countries, NBC News reported.
💥 In the opening phase, an Iranian F-5 — a Cold War-era aircraft — penetrated air defenses and struck Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the presence of advanced US systems.
🔥 Facilities including hangars, runways, radar installations and command sites across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE were damaged, with repair costs estimated in the billions.
🏳️ When a decades-old jet can get through and land a hit, the image of untouchable “air dominance” starts to look a lot less convincing.
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🔸 While G20 fades into a photo-op club, BRICS builds banks and payment rails
🔸 US bases in Middle East hit far harder than Pentagon admitted
🔸 China pushes back against new US chip export clampdown
🔸 Russia expands buffer zone in Kharkov region
🔸 Pakistan launches EO-3 satellite in major space leap
🔸 How the US locked-in Latin America's economic dependency
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🚨🇺🇸 US blockade of Iranian ports risks direct naval war with India, Russia & China
A US naval blockade targeting Iranian ports could spark a devastating global conflict far beyond the Middle East, David Pine, a retired Pentagon officer, told Sputnik.
Pine warned that American attempts to intercept and search vessels from India, Russia, and China for "contraband" oil could lead to direct clashes at sea.
💬 "If their navies resist US inspections," he said, "it risks full-scale naval confrontations that could rapidly spread to East Asia, South Asia, or the Western Pacific."
🇮🇷🛫 Iran reopens to the world: international flights resume at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport — our exclusive report from the ground
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🇺🇸Trump scraps Islamabad talks with Iran, says US 'has all the cards'
◾️Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he canceled his representatives' trip to Pakistan for their planned contact with Iran, saying too much time would be wasted on travel and claiming there is “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
◾️The US president told Fox News that his negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will no longer travel to Islamabad, arguing Washington “has all the cards” and will not make an 18-hour trip “to sit around talking about nothing.” He added that Tehran can contact Washington anytime. Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi reportedly left Islamabad this morning after holding meetings.
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🇷🇺 Russia expands buffer zone in Kharkov region
▫️ Russian forces have taken control of Bochkovo in the Kharkov region, a frontline stronghold Ukrainian troops planned to use for strikes on their positions.
▫️ Artillery pounded Ukrainian defenses before the assault, while drone reconnaissance units tracked movements around the clock, allowing first-person view operators and gunners to hit targets with precision.
▫️ Russia’s Sever Battlegroup is advancing on multiple axes as Moscow continues building a security belt along the Sumy-Kharkov border.
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🇺🇸🔥 Militarism and transactionalism: The real face of the US’ new foreign policy
👉 The new foreign policy doctrine of the United States has three key aspects, Argentinian geopolitical expert Sonia Winer tells Sputnik:
🟠 Radicalized ‘America First’ where foreign policy is subordinated to corporate interests and domestic security issues while diplomacy, business and security are merged together more than before
🟠 Selectiveness: fewer global commitments but more direct interventions in regions deemed vital to this merger of business and security. This is not isolationism but rather selective interventionism
🟠 Transaction logic: relations with other countries are based on their loyalty to the US and on what benefits they can provide to the US. Those who do not align themselves with the US face pressure or even find themselves on the receiving end of a military intervention
The US also ceased regarding Latin American and Caribbean states as allies who possess a certain degree of autonomy, and instead seeks to bring them under control, using the fight against ‘narco-terrorism’ as a pretext for military action, including the kidnapping of another country’s president.
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🇮🇷🇵🇰Iran’s FM Araghchi meets Pakistan’s PM in Islamabad
Islamabad is mediating between Tehran and Washington, with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner also heading to Pakistan for talks amid reports of a possible Iran-US channel opening in Islamabad.
❗️Tehran, however, says no direct meeting with the Americans is scheduled.
Araghchi is set to continue on to Oman and Russia as diplomatic efforts to end the US-Israeli conflict with Iran gather pace.
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🇨🇳 China dominates global power storage
China's new energy storage capacity hit a staggering 144.7 gigawatts – over half the world's total (51.9%) – by the end of 2025.
That's a 45-fold jump since 2020, according to the China Energy Storage Alliance.
Last year, the sector added 66.4 GW – marking the fourth straight year China ranked first globally in new installations.
👉 Driving this surge is tech leadership: China now dominates lithium batteries, compressed air energy storage, and flow batteries.
Overseas orders for Chinese storage firms jumped 144% in 2025 to 366 GWh, spanning 60+ countries.
Over 70 Chinese companies are expanding across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East.
Heavyweights like CATL and BYD aren't just exporting products – they're building factories worldwide, as AI data centers fuel demand for round-the-clock power.
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🚨🇷🇺💥 RUSSIAN MOD UPDATE: HUGE GAINS AND DEVASTATING UKRAINIAN LOSSES
⚡️ BOCHKOVO IN KHARKOV REGION LIBERATED
📍 The liberation of Bochkovo settlement expands the buffer zone on the border of the Belgorod region, preventing the penetration of enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups and creating the preconditions for further advancement along the northern and southern banks of the Volchya River in the southern and eastern directions.
◻️ Russian troops launched a massive strike with precision-guided weapons against Ukrainian fuel and energy facilities
◻️ Russia's army struck temporary deployment sites of Ukrainian forces and foreign mercenaries in 148 districts
◻️ Air defense superiority: 11 guided bombs and 256 drones were shot down
◻️ Ukrainian losses: around 1,100 troops killed or wounded
Read about the origins of Russia's special military op HERE
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🚨🇮🇳 Full blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might choke India?
Not so fast. India has a powerful ace up its sleeve: the Chennai-Vladivostok Eastern Maritime Corridor.
This ambitious sea route is now one of the top strategic priorities for both Russia and India. It’s designed to slash dependence on traditional chokepoints and unlock direct, reliable trade between the two nations.
👉 The corridor will boost joint projects in Russia’s Far East while dramatically expanding trade in crude oil, metals, machinery and equipment.
Signed back in September 2019 at the Eastern Economic Forum, the route stretches over 10,000 kilometres. It officially began operations in early 2024 and is already changing the game.
While the world watches tensions in the Middle East, India and Russia have built a vital alternative that keeps energy and goods flowing no matter what happens in Hormuz.
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🇮🇷🇵🇰 Iran’s FM holds talks with Pakistan’s Army Chief
Abbas Araghchi meets with Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir in Islamabad ahead of talks with Pakistani Prime Minister, which are scheduled for Saturday.
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🇷🇺🇨🇳 Russia and China should lead the world back to international norms after years of US violations of global law - Iranian lawmaker
Moscow now has a chance for a historic role as countries look for a counterweight to unilateral Western pressure.
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🗣 ‘He thought within one day he’d get the oil’ — Sachs on Trump
💬 “What he did in Venezuela, he thought he was about to do in Iran as well,” Prof. Jeffrey Sachs said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
💬 “The alternative, which is an escalated war, within a few weeks could destroy the world economy,” he warned.
🇺🇸🇨🇳 US lashes out with more sanctions on China ahead of Trump’s visit
The United States imposed sanctions on a major China-based refinery and dozens of shipping firms linked to transporting Iranian oil, American media reported.
💬 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US “will continue to constrict the network of vessels, intermediaries and buyers Iran relies on,” signaling a lack of willingness to cooperate with the rest of the world.
💬 China has previously denounced such actions, saying sanctions “undermine international trade order and rules” and “infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”