North Korea continues to pursue covert biological weapons program: US report

North Korea continues to maintain a covert biological weapons program in violation of international treaties, according to a newly released U.S. government report.

Biological weapons use pathogens such as bacteria or viruses to sicken or kill. Their invisible nature and devastating potential make them one of the most insidious forms of weaponry.

“The United States assesses that the DPRK has a dedicated, national-level offensive [biological weapons] program,” the State Department said in its 2025 report on global compliance with arms control and disarmament agreements.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK – North Korea’s official name – has long drawn suspicion for its clandestine research including nuclear weapons.

According to the report, the regime possesses “the technical capability to produce bacteria, viruses, and toxins that could be used as BW [biological weapons] agents” and is also capable of genetically engineering biological materials.

Even more concerning, it said, is Pyongyang’s potential capacity to deploy these weapons using unconventional and covert delivery systems.

“Pyongyang probably is capable of weaponizing BW agents with unconventional systems such as sprayers and poison pen injection devices, which have been deployed by the DPRK for delivery of chemical weapons and could be used to covertly deliver BW agents,” the report said.

Despite being a State Party to the Biological Weapons Convention, or BWC, since 1987 – a treaty that bans the development, production, and stockpiling of such weapons – North Korea has shown little intention of abiding by its commitments.

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South Korea to launch fourth military spy satellite this week

South Korea plans to launch its fourth military reconnaissance satellite from a U.S. space base this week, the Ministry of National Defense said Monday, as the country seeks to better monitor North Korean threats with independent surveillance capabilities.
 
The military plans to launch the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 8:48 p.m. on Monday, according to the ministry.
 
The launch will be part of South Korea’s plan to deploy five satellites by the end of this year to enhance surveillance of North Korean military activities and help reduce its reliance on U.S. satellite imagery.

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China’s Defense Budget Is Bigger than You Think

During the Cold War, the United States never trusted its adversaries’ claims about their capabilities. Instead, it always sought to verify them through intelligence analysis. Today, China’s impressive and aggressive military expansion, allegedly achieved on a shoestring budget, should raise eyebrows, even from typically credulous consumers of official CCP reports. Specifically, China reported at the National People’s Congress (NPC) earlier this month that its defense budget included total expenditures of only $245 billion.

Historically, these reports are intentionally vague and conveniently oversimplified. This year’s announcement is no different. It’s hard to know what the real numbers are. Still, it’s even harder to believe China’s officially reported military budget of $245 billion, which would equate to an implausibly low 1.5 percent of GDP.

The U.S. Defense Department’s 2024 China Military Power Report estimated that China’s 2024 military budget was publicly understated by at least 40–90 percent. The DOD has not yet released its 2025 China Military Power Report, but we can infer from perennial experience that the same is true again this year; China’s real military expenditure, accounting for all (or at least some) “off-budget spending,” probably amounts to between $330 and $450 billion. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) has estimated the real Chinese defense budget is as high as $700 billion—and that was last year.

The CCP has expanded its military budget by at least 7.2 percent for two consecutive years. However, that figure itself also comes from official CCP reports and should be regarded with skepticism.

Consider the People’s Liberation Army’s substantial gains in hypersonic missile technology, stealth fighters, and ballistic missile submarines, as well as its exponential increase in nuclear weapons production. Most—if not all—of these involve close relationships between state-run and private enterprise, making military-industrial investments all the harder to ascertain. After all, this sort of fusionism often assumes subtle forms (such as talent and logistics pooling between public and private sectors).

More obvious examples of this include Chinese companies providing the PLA with drones, AI companies (like Baidu) possibly working with CCP defense corporations in shared laboratories, and Chinese shipping companies participating in “cross-sea transport drills” that would be executed in an invasion of Taiwan.

The Defense Department warns that the PRC “has mobilized vast resources for…espionage activities” and to “acquire dual-use military grade-equipment,” and that it has “substantially reorganized its defense-industrial sector to improve weapon system research, development, acquisition, testing, evaluation, and production.” To what extent China’s development, testing, and production is obscured by its civil-military fusion, and what percentage of China’s GDP is dedicated to military spending, our own spy agencies will have to reveal.

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Over 1,300 Easter truce violations by Ukraine – MOD

The Russian military has been targeted more than 1,300 times by Ukrainian forces in the less than 24 hours since the declaration of an Easter truce by both sides, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier that the pause in hostilities would be in effect from 6:00pm Moscow time on Saturday, and last until midnight on Monday. He instructed the country’s military to stay on high alert and be ready “to respond to any violations or provocations.” Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky answered a few hours later that Kiev’s forces “will act in a reciprocal way.”

The Defense Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that “despite the announcement of the Easter truce,” Ukrainian forces attempted to assault the positions of the Russian military in the areas of the settlements of Sukhaya Balka and Bogatyr in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic overnight. The attacks were repelled, it added.

Kiev’s troops also used 48 plane-type UAVs against the Russian military, including one in Crimea, the statement read. 

“The Ukrainian units fired 444 times from cannons and mortars at the positions of our troops, [and] carried out 900 strikes with quadcopter drones,” the ministry said.

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Island dripping with GOLD could be Trump’s next win if he seizes chance for ‘deal of the century’

Trump’s love of gold is no secret. From the gilded splendor of Trump Tower to Mar-a-lago’s gleaming ballroom, the president is known to revel in all that glitters. 

But has a golden opportunity just arisen for Trump to take control of a tropical island complete with its own gold mine? 

Bougainville, which is currently part of Papua New Guinea, voted overwhelmingly for independence in 2019, but the poll wasn’t binding. Now a local leader says he is open to a deal for it to become part of the United States. 

Given the island’s strategic significance in any future war with China, it could be well worth its weight! 

Bougainville’s president, former rebel commander Ishmael Toroama, says: ‘If the US comes and says, “Yes, we support Bougainville independence,” then, I can say, “Well, the Panguna mine is here. It’s up to you.”‘

‘Bougainville is for independence. It is only a matter of time,’ he told The World in October, setting 2027 as the target for full statehood. 

At the center of the battle for independence lies Bougainville’s immense natural wealth — particularly the dormant Panguna mine, once one of the world’s biggest sources of copper and gold. 

It’s estimated to still hold 5.84 million tons of copper and nearly 20 million ounces of gold — worth around $60 billion today.

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Judges are now controlling the military: Congress can stop it

Former Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer recently admitted that he is responsible for confirming 235 “progressive” judges who are “ruling against Trump time after time.”  Activist judges are Schumer’s Plan B.

Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to make policy for the military. But as things stand now, unelected, unaccountable federal judges are overruling President Trump’s Executive Orders and arrogating to themselves power to run the armed forces.

Unless the 119th Congress intervenes, President Joe Biden’s radical policies regarding transgender people in the military will continue indefinitely.

Self-Appointed “Supreme Judicial Commanders” Take Charge

President Donald Trump’s January 27 Executive Order #14183, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” is one of several calling for an undistracted focus on military warrior ethos, not “political agendas or other ideologies harmful to unit cohesion.”

Executive #14168 (January 20) defined biological reality – differentiating “sex” from subjective “gender identity” and proclaiming the existence of two immutable sexes, male and female. This EO also prohibited male access to women’s sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities and discontinued use of inaccurate invented pronouns and bureaucratic markers that reflect subjective gender identity instead of biological sex.

The reality-based principles stated above, applied to DoD policies regarding persons having a history of gender dysphoria or identifying as transgender, logically justified orders to revoke President Joe Biden’s Executive Orders and Directives accommodating persons with gender dysphoria or identifying as transgender in the military.

Trump’s EOs and directives restored gender dysphoria to the DoD list of physical and psychological conditions that affect eligibility to serve, and ended Biden-era mandates and subsidies for irreversible treatments and surgeries for “transitioning” purposes that attempt to change sex.

Trump’s Executive Orders also mandated respectful treatment for persons separating with generous benefits due to gender dysphoria, and protected vulnerable children from chemical and surgical mutilation based on “junk science” recommended by discredited “experts” like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

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Israel considers ‘limited strike’ on Iran – Reuters

Israel is considering a “limited strike” on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming months, despite Washington’s refusal to support military action, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The deliberations come as the second round of US-Iran negotiations have concluded in Rome, with expert-level talks expected to continue on April 26 in Oman.

According to Reuters, Israeli officials are weighing a “limited strike” that would require minimal US support – unlike the larger and prolonged bombing campaign previously under consideration.

West Jerusalem reportedly presented Washington with several strike options, “including some with late spring and summer timelines.” A senior Israeli official told the outlet that no final decision had been made.

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that US President Donald Trump had rejected an Israeli proposal for “extensive” strikes, opting instead to pursue diplomacy.

“I’m not in a rush to do it, because I think that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death, and I’d like to see that. That’s my first option,” Trump told reporters on Thursday.

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Zionist Supremicism and Murder of the Innocents

The brutal murder of eight Red Cross paramedics and five aid workers in Southern Gaza on March 23rd 2025 – each shot more than twenty times and then buried in a sandpit along with their vehicles – should be ‘an event too far’ for Israeli soldiers. The brave precedent for saying ‘no’ already having been set by colleagues refusing to follow the commands of the Israeli war cabinet.

This vile atrocity must have crossed the red line for these recruits, as well as seasoned soldiers of the Israeli army, if they are still to be considered human beings.

It has already been reported that a small but growing number of Israeli military have refused to engage against Palestinians in Gaza, demanding that Netanyahu stands by the terms of the hostage exchange negotiated with Hamas.

But this hostage exchange ‘quid pro quo’, as vital as it obviously is, is now joined by another critically important concern that must be addressed: are the soldiers carrying out these executions under the influence of a mind control program similar to that developed by MK Ultra in the USA in the 1950’ and 60’s?

This is possible. Israel has a sophisticated A.I. development program and Mossad is no doubt fully prepared to exercise its controls over its own people.

Juval Noah Harari, the Israeli professor of history and top advisor to the Word Economic Forum cabal, has made a point of stating how human beings are now “hackable”, and how this will enable 

the reengineering of the human into a gene edited version in which ‘all the faults have been removed’. With the result that this entity will then become ‘superior to God’.

“We will do better than God” in Harari’s words.

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The Persecution of Nigeria’s Christians by Muslims is Medieval in its Horror

The persecution of Nigeria’s Christians by Islamising Muslims is medieval in its horror, says Tom Goodenough in the Spectator. “Villages are surrounded in the dead of night by bandits who rape and kill the inhabitants. No one is spared: women and children are among those butchered.” Here’s an excerpt.

The Makurdi Diocese, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Benue state, has been hit badly by this savage violence. In 2024, 549 locals in this diocese alone were murdered and dozens more kidnapped. Over 3,700 people in Makurdi have been killed since 2015. Villages have been effectively wiped off the map. Over a million Nigerians, terrified of what might await them, have chosen instead to live in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps.

Wilfred Anagbe, the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Makurdi, home to about a million people, says the massacres are a systematic attempt to kill Christians and Islamise the region – and that the authorities are turning a blind eye to the killing of Christians:

The quest to Islamise the land is high on the agenda of some of the most powerful and influential Muslims in Nigeria. There is a campaign to take land to spread Islam. Militant Fulani herdsmen are destroying society. They steal and vandalise. They kill and boast about it. They kidnap and rape – and they enjoy total impunity from the elected authorities.

The militiamen responsible for these attacks often target non-Muslims in isolated communities who are far from help. Anagbe says that these jihadists are, as with Isis, motivated by the spoils of war, and use their religion as an excuse. The rewards are certainly rich: Benue is Nigeria’s bread basket. The farms are fertile and well-tended. For years, Christian farmers have looked after these lands. But many now face an impossible choice: stay put and risk their lives, or flee – abandoning their farmland to the herdsmen.

“When they attack, they destroy churches and burn houses and schools,” Anagbe tells the Spectator. Several of the priests he is responsible for have been gunned down – so, too, have dozens of worshippers at churches in his diocese. …

“The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under sustained Islamic emasculation and persecution,” [Anagbe] told a reception in [the UK] Parliament last month. ‘We must mobilise to ensure that we roll back this dark cloud of rabid religious intolerance and accompanying violence by radical Islam in Nigeria.”

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Russia announces Easter ceasefire

Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced a temporary Easter pause in hostilities with Ukraine, which is slated to begin at 18:00 Moscow time on Saturday and last until midnight on April 21.

The announcement came during his meeting with Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in Moscow. Putin expressed hope that Kiev would demonstrate goodwill and adhere to the ceasefire.

”At the same time, our troops must be prepared to respond to any violations or provocations by the adversary, to any aggressive actions,” he said.

Putin stated that Ukraine’s reaction to the ceasefire would be a clear indicator of whether Kiev is sincerely willing to engage in negotiations to end the conflict.

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