Argentina has formally applied to NATO to become a global member of the organization. NATO said it "welcomed" the country's request for integration.

Me after another day where decades happen

The Swiss ambassador was summoned to the IRGC instead of the Foreign Ministry

Advisor to the Minister of Interior: At 3 a.m. on April 26, after the end of the operation, the Swiss ambassador was summoned to the IRGC instead of the Foreign Ministry for the first time. They gave him the necessary warnings that if America takes the slightest action, we will destroy the entire region on their heads.

https://x.com/SaraMassoumi/status/1780304767920521708

The president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, has recently signed into law major restrictions on imperial NGOs (ratified last month). Some here might recall similar events in Georgia around a year ago sparking an attempted colour revolution. Hopefully Kyrgyzstan's better economic integration with China and Eurasia (and the absence of any delusions about ) will lead to a cleaner expulsion of imperial influences.

Relatedly, Georgia's government has not given up on their efforts to ratify an anti-NGO bill. (Although the western-sponsored riots in Tbilisi around a year ago successfully intimidated the plurality Georgian Dream party into withdrawing the bill, it failed to remove the government.) Now a resurrected bill is back in the news after the parliament voted on and passed a first reading. The president has declared intentions to veto, while the plurality party continues to back it with the potential of recruiting supermajority support.

Palestine Action fucking up a bank by shattering all of its windows:
https://nitter.poast.org/Pal_action/status/1781015741233299730

On this auspicious day my people burn an effigy called the Böögg the time it takes for it to explode usually tells us how good the summer will be considering that last year was the longest time in recorded history (57mins) and horrible shit happened I will carefully monitor the event and report the actual time.

Also it's customary to guess how long it'll take so. Ima go with under 10 minutes, weeks where decades and all that.

Years and times in case anyone wants to guess as well.

At this rate the news mega is going to explode again very soon.

Brazil vs. Elon Musk

Twitter's defense in Brazil tells the Brazilian Supreme Court that the network will continue to comply with court orders

The protest comes days after billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network, attacked Moraes and said he would not comply with orders to block accounts issued by the magistrate.

In the document, X's Brazilian subsidiary also informs the Brazilian Supreme Court that X Corp, from the USA, was subpoenaed by the US House Judiciary Committee to provide information on the Brazilian Supreme Court's orders regarding content moderation, and undertook to keep Moraes informed of any information it received on the subject "in compliance with its duty of transparency and procedural loyalty".

The latest statement from Twitter do Brasil's defense differs from the position initially adopted by the platform in the case.

The defense of the X platform (formerly Twitter) in Brazil has informed Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that the social network will continue to fully comply with any orders issued by the court and also by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).

The statement from the platform's lawyers in Brazil comes days after the owner of the social network, billionaire Elon Musk, attacked Moraes and said he would not comply with orders to block accounts issued by the magistrate.

"Finally, as already communicated to the Federal Police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this egregious Federal Supreme Court and egregious Superior Electoral Court remain and will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp," X's defense in Brazil told the Supreme Court on Monday (15).

On Friday (12), the Brazilian government suspended new advertising contracts with X, a network where it invested BRL:5.4 million in advertising, according to data from the Transparency Portal. Between 2023 and 2024, they amounted to BRL: 654,152.85 (USD: 124,455.94). In recent days, without mentioning Musk, Lula has made some statements that have been interpreted as indirect towards the owner of X.

Michael Shellenberger, the American who lived in Brazil and claimed to have been harassed by the Brazilian Supreme Court, fled to the US. All because he was called to Congress to testify and, as he couldn't lie, because that would mean he would be arrested, he fled.

The funny thing is that it was an extreme right-wing politician who called him to testify there. Probably to use him to promote and push the far-right agenda and the talking points that Brazil is a socialist dictatorship. Shellenberger was investigated by the state court, not the Brazilian Supreme Court. They investigated him because he had/has links to an infamous Brazilian drug cartel.

Before leaving Brazil, Shellenberger said, only in Portuguese, that he lied about everything and that he was very sorry. He said nothing to his English-speaking audience. Elon Musk did all this shit because Lula da Silva signed a big deal with China to import electric cars and granted lithium mining rights to China.

Musk was probably angry because he bribed Bolsonaro to get the mining rights and got nothing out of it. Since it's a municipal election year in Brazil, Elon decided to pull this shit as some kind of stupid revenge. But it actually had the effect of pushing for regulation of the Brazilian Internet.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions in the coming days against the Israel Defense Forces' "Netzah Yehuda" battalion for human rights violations in the West Bank.

It would be the first time that the US has imposed sanctions on an Israeli military unit. The sanctions will prohibit the battalion and its members from receiving any kind of military assistance or training from the US.

What will happen?

or

Edit:

Meanwhile near the Mali-Burkina Faso border:
https://nitter.poast.org/marcus_herve/status/1779815902122266760#m

While the terrorists were taking a break before continuing their journey, the Burkinabè fleet sharpened its drones and other flying aircraft. Violent and precise strikes were aimed at them very quickly. Pickups and their loads were wiped.

The clip shows pickups getting owned by the drones.

https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1780850610864267756

The US Army cancelled the XM1299 Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system last month. ... The only way I can describe it at this point is total organizational failure. We're now on our third failed program to replace the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and as usual for the US Army the interim solution - the M109A7, basically dropping the existing M109A6 Paladin turret onto a Bradley chassis - is going to end up as the permanent fix.

Let's walk through the history of this generational procurement failure. The M109 has been the US Army's 155mm self-propelled howitzer since before Vietnam, with the original short-barreled version (rather resembling a Russian 2S3) upgraded to sport what was then a very modern 39-caliber* cannon shortly after that war with the M109A1. Further upgrades followed, culminating in the M109A6, a modern weapon of the late Cold War era that was in some way groundbreaking but in some other ways quite dated. It had a lot of new electronics... and a manually-loaded cannon from the 1970s. When the Paladin entered service in the early 1990s the then-Soviet Union had already introduced the 2S19 in 1989 (featuring an autoloading 47-caliber 152mm cannon), and the Germans were hard at work on the PzH 2000 (with a semi-autoloading 52-caliber 155mm cannon). Both of these competing systems could fire three times the rounds of the Paladin at considerably longer ranges.

It wouldn't be an issue because the Army was working on a replacement already - the XM2001 Crusader, a thoroughly modern self-propelled gun with a 52-caliber 155mm cannon and an automatic transloader vehicle. It was the ultimate cannon to defend the Fulda Gap against the Red Tide... which was problematic at the time because that threat didn't exist any more and doubly so after 9/11. So like many Cold War legacy programs it was cancelled by Donald Rumsfeld during his apocalyptic tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.

Not to worry, the Army had a backup plan! Enter Future Combat Systems, a program that happened because the Army brass saw the Air Force make the F-35 too big to fail and thought that was a good procurement model. The XM1203 Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), developed as one of the FCS "family" of tracked combat vehicles, sporting a lightweight 39-caliber 155mm cannon with a high-speed autoloader and minimal crew requirements. It would have been the ideal cannon for the lightweight expeditionary Army of the post-Cold War era... and then Iraq happened. The bad part of Iraq where we were losing a hundred guys killed every month with no end in sight. After the Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections and Rumsfeld shown the door his successor, Robert Gates, axed the entire program as yet another Rumsfeld-era boondoggle with no value to win the War on Terror.

This left the Army's fleet of increasingly-worn out M109A6s soldiering on into the 2010s, and replacement vehicles were needed. Enter the M109A7 - basically a program to drop the existing M109A6 turret onto a suitably adapted Bradley chassis to ease maintenance and recapitalize the fleet. The M109A7 didn't offer any actual new capability, but it would keep the Field Artillery in business until a new cannon could be brought into service, because it was now the late 2010s and most serious armies on the planet had moved on to autoloading long-barrel systems.

Enter ERCA, the US Army's plan to leapfrog the competition with a fantastically long 58-caliber 155mm cannon... mounted on the same Bradley-derived chassis of the M109A7. If you take a short survey of modern tracked, armored, long-barrel SPGs - 2S19, 2S35, K9, PzH 2000, etc. - you'll notice that they're all quite heavy, with most of them built on a tank chassis or a specialized heavy artillery chassis. That capability isn't free. The Army was trying to stuff an even longer autoloading cannon onto an IFV chassis, and ran into easily-predictable issues with weight and then - once they cut capability to fix it - into equally predictable issues with bore wear given the extreme ranges they were trying to drive this cannon to (70+ kilometers for a gun about 10% longer than cannons maxxing out at half that). So that program got cancelled last month for what were basically technical feasibility issues.

In any event the US Army's current plan seems to be to go to war with the M109A7 and, if the performance of similar 39-caliber systems in Ukraine is any indication, lose the counter-battery fight and get a lot of artillerymen killed manning obsolescent guns.

AJ reporting explosions in Syria and Iraq

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/4/19/live-israel-launches-missile-attack-in-response-to-iran-assault

I'm deeply confused. Wtf is happening.

MR SPAGHETTI

~~Dimona or bust~~

gonna be honest, I don't think anything actually happened

https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1c4tfwq/ru_pov_several_proukrainian_channelspersonalities/

Ukrainian accounts are vagueposting about "bad news from the front".

Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1c4uu6p/ua_pov_pasha_petrychenko_was_killed_today/

Apparently it was the death of a well-known sergeant.

Going through different social media pages, numerous people in or near Isfahan say they heard 3 or 4 explosions at 3.50 am local time.

Others say they didn't hear an explosion but their house shook.

And there are others who say they didn't hear anything at all.

No video out yet that I see. Nothing from official sources confirming or denying. Even the Telegram pages are silent. The internet does not appear cut.

https://x.com/websterkaroon/status/1781130461403898300

rumors about a potential israhelli attack on Iran, idk what's going on

"I thought he only blocks drones headed for Israel."

https://nitter.poast.org/ShaykhAzhar/status/1779947317186953587