Belarus is sending special forces to three areas close to its southern border with war-torn Ukraine, its Ministry of Defense announced Tuesday.

The Russia-aligned nation will also prepare air defense, missile units, and artillery for drills in its northwestern and western regions as Belarusian leaders fret about elevated NATO activity near the country's borders they claim is a growing threat.

"The United States and its allies continue to build up their military presence on the state borders of the Republic of Belarus," Belarus's Ministry of Defense said on Telegram, per a Google translation. "The established grouping has more than doubled in the past six months in quantity and quality."

The New York Times on Wednesday published an op-ed by Tom Stevenson arguing what some of us have been arguing for a while now: the Biden administration is openly — and recklessly — pursuing a policy of escalation in Ukraine that represents a new and very dangerous phase in the war.

Stevenson, a journalist who reported from Ukraine in the opening weeks of the war, argues that initially the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine rather straightforwardly, with supplies of arms to the Ukrainians and economic sanctions on Russia. But things have changed over the past month.

Now, instead of simply helping Ukraine stave off invasion and conquest, U.S. policy seems to have shifted into something else entirely: the permanent weakening of Russia at any cost. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said so explicitly after a clandestine visit to Ukraine with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last month. After her own recent visit to Kyiv, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi characterized the war as a global struggle for democracy.

Open the Books is a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to investigating and disclosing the many ways in which government spends — and wastes — our money.

It has a new report out that should raise eyebrows. According to information garnered from Freedom of Information Act Requests, between 2009-2014, both Anthony Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies. This may present a conflict of interest since they had a great deal of influence in deciding what research the government funds.

From the report:

"Last year, the National Institutes of Health - Anthony Fauci's employer - doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. That largess of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research, and healthcare industries.

"However, in our breaking investigation, we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists.

"We estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists — who are credited as co-inventors.

"Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure."

President Biden's new line of attack on Republicans was apparently the result of liberal-funded research.

Over the past week, Biden has repeatedly referred to his political adversaries as "ultra-MAGA," referring to former President Trump's "Make America Great Again" 2016 slogan.

The label has quickly been embraced by the right from lawmakers to the former president himself.

But according to The Washington Post, the "ultra-MAGA" messaging came from a six-month research project from the liberal group Center for American Progress Action Fund and headed by top Biden aide Anita Dunn.

The polling and focus group research by Hart Research and the Global Strategy Group found that 'MAGA' was already viewed negatively by voters — more negatively than other phrases like 'Trump Republicans,'" the Post reported Friday.

"In battleground areas, more than twice as many voters said they would be less likely to vote for someone called a 'MAGA Republican' than would be more likely. The research also found that the description tapped into the broad agreement among voters that the Republican Party had become more extreme and power-hungry in recent years."

CAP Action Fund president and executive director Navin Nayak told the Post, "All of that extremism gets captured in that brand," adding the "versatile epithet" applies to every political issue including abortion and climate change.

Top House Democrats wrote letters to the chief executives of four major social media platforms on Wednesday, urging them to preserve and archive content related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine that could be potential evidence of war crimes.

The lawmakers asked Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok to preserve and archive posts related to the conflict "that may provide evidence of war crimes or human rights violations," establish a mechanism with human rights-specific organizations to share that content and create a way for content depicting a possible war crime to be flagged by the platforms' users.

The lawmakers wrote in one letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

"Often, images and videos of these despicable acts and their aftermath have been recorded and shared on social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. If verified as authentic, this content could provide the U.S. government and international human rights investigators with a trove of evidence that would help to substantiate allegations of war crimes and other atrocities committed by Russian forces against the people of Ukraine."

The top House Democrats underscored the importance of their request by noting that artificial intelligence-enabled and automated systems, and other means used by social media platforms to take down graphic posts, may be removing content from their platforms that could be used as possible evidence of human rights violations.

Russian nationalism is a mortal threat to the world and the West must do to Moscow what was once done to Nazi Germany, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote in an opinion piece published by Britain's Telegraph newspaper on Tuesday. He left out the part that 'denazification' of Germany came after its military defeat but said "deputinization" of Russia must start "immediately", warning that the Western "soul" would be in peril otherwise.

Morawiecki is one of the most vocal critics of Russia and President Putin, whom he has compared to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on many occasions. The new article made the same equation, but focused on the brand of Russian nationalism that, according to Morawiecki, Moscow uses as the rationale to pursue malign and highly dangerous policies.

The Polish official has a grim view of the Russian worldview. He explained:

"The so-called Russian world is an imperialist ideology, the equivalent of 20th-century communism and Nazism through which Russia justifies invented rights and privileges for its country.

"Russian nationalism is a cancer which is consuming not only the majority of Russian society, but also poses a deadly threat to the whole of Europe. Therefore, it is not enough to support Ukraine in its military struggle with Russia. We must root out this monstrous new ideology entirely."

Aid to Kiev may be disrupted if Congress doesn't pass $40 billion spending package by May 19, Pentagon says

The flow of US weapons to Ukraine might be cut off, at least temporarily, unless Congress quickly approves nearly $40 billion in new spending to help Kiev repel Russia's offensive in the former Soviet republic, the Pentagon has warned.

"May 19 is the day we really, without additional authorities, we begin to not have the ability to send new stuff in . . .," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Friday. "By the 19th of May, it'll start impacting our ability to provide aid uninterrupted."

Weapons shipments to Kiev wouldn't immediately stop on May 20 without new funding because there would still be some supplies in the pipeline purchased under the approximately $100 million in spending authority that the Pentagon currently has remaining for Ukraine aid, Kirby said. However, he added, but by losing its ability to source new cargoes, the Pentagon would face "a period of time with nothing moving" if there's an extended delay in the new funding approval.

Tech executive Rodney Joffe may assert attorney-client privilege for communications he had with employees of Fusion GPS because those communications furthered Joffe and the Clinton campaign's common interest, a federal judge presiding over the criminal case against Michael Sussmann ruled yesterday. Prosecutors will now be greatly limited in the material they may elicit from one of the two witnesses granted immunity in exchange for their testimony against Sussmann.

Sussmann, whose trial in a D.C. federal court on a false statement charge is set to begin on Monday, scored a victory Thursday when presiding judge Christopher Cooper rejected Special Counsel John Durham's attempts to present the jury copies of emails previously withheld by Joffe, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic National Committee as privileged. The ruling came in response to Durham's motion to compel Fusion GPS to provide the court, for in camera review, 38 emails the investigative research firm withheld from the grand jury based on the Clinton campaign's claim of attorney-client privilege and work-product privilege. The latter protects notes, memoranda, and other communications capturing the mental impressions of an attorney, or those helping an attorney prepare for litigation.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to deliver a virtual address before the Davos, Switzerland based World Economic Forum, where the message is expected to be something along the lines of 'send more money, or see the global food crisis worsen' - which is also a theme of US Congressional leaders as they seek to push through the record-breaking $40 billion Ukraine aid package. This as a fresh US forecast expects that wheat production in the war-ravaged country will fall by one-third compared to last year.

Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko unveiled on Thursday that his country has spent $8.3 billion to fight the Russian invasion, according to Reuters. Marchenko described that the funds would have in normal times been used for domestic development, but has now gone toward procuring more weaponry and emergency repairs, as well as handling the refugee crisis of those millions of people displaced within Ukraine.

Vessels loaded with Iranian oil will arrive in Venezuela and Nicaragua in the next 10 days, within the framework of energy contracts signed between the countries.

Javad Owji, Iranian Minister of Oil, accompanied by a delegation of more than a dozen officials, made a trip to Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua in recent weeks to strengthen strategic ties in the energy field between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Latin America.

The secretary of the Energy Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly of Iran (Majles or Parliament), Hossein Hosseinzadeh, referred this Tuesday, May 10, to the results of the visit of the Iranian delegation to the Latin American region, saying that contracts were signed pertaining to maintenance and construction of refineries.