Belgium would run out of ammunition after “just a few hours” of modern combat, former army commander Marc Thys has claimed
EU state will have to fight with stones – retired general
Ammunition shortages mean the Belgian military “will have to start throwing stones” if war breaks out, retired General Marc Thys warned on Tuesday. According to Thys, Belgium would need to boost its ammo budget by at least 33 times to be able to fight for a month.
Speaking to VRT TV about a hypothetical Russian attack on Western Europe, Thys explained that the threadbare Belgian army would be in no position to resist such an opponent.
“If war breaks out here today, the Belgian army will have to start throwing stones after just a few hours, because we will have run out of ammunition,” Thys told VRT TV. Thys, who commanded Belgium’s ground forces between 2017 and 2019 and served as a lieutenant general until November, said that he “had 15 million euros [$16 million] a year with which to buy ammunition.”....more
https://www.rt.com/news/588623-belgium-army-ammunition-shortage/
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
