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Bullseye

Best of the Web: China tells ICJ Palestinians have 'inalienable right to use armed force' against Israeli occupation

Zhang Jun
FILE PHOTO: Chinese ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun Beijing’s UN ambassador has blasted arbitrary seizures of countries’ assets
China has backed the right of the Palestinian people to use armed force to combat Israel's occupation of their land, calling it an "an inalienable right well founded in international law".

The comments on Thursday were made by the Chinese ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun, during the fourth day of public hearings held by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands.

Representatives of 52 countries are addressing the ICJ on Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.

Beijing's envoy said there were "various people (who) freed themselves from colonial rule" and they could use "all available means, including armed struggle".

Comment: It seems that the multipolar world are, increasingly, calling out the warmongers and genociders for who they are. And one wonders whether they'll, ultimately, follow up these statements with effective responses, considering that, increasingly, they are the drivers of the global economy:


Putin

Best of the Web: 'Live as you want, just don't touch the kids,' Putin tells gays

putin
© Sputnik/Kristina Kormilitsyna
Russia is actually tolerant of people with non-traditional sexual orientations, so long as they don't target children or flaunt their preferences, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.

The president made the remarks while addressing visitors to the 'Strong Ideas for a New Time' forum, a yearly event organized by Russia's state-backed Agency of Strategic Initiatives.

"We are quite tolerant towards people with non-traditional sexual orientations. We just don't flaunt it, and we don't believe it's right to flaunt it. Let everyone live - the adults - as they want. Nobody limits them in anything," Putin stated, explaining that, basically, there are only a handful of rules which limit the LGBTQ community in the country.
As for children, I have already said many times: 'Don't touch the children.' That's it. This is the first one. And the second one is, we are, first and foremost, a state that is guided by traditional values.

Comment: It's pretty simple for Putin and most rational-minded people around the world: Keep your sexual preferences to yourself and keep the acts private. Don't throw any of that into the public's face.


Cassiopaea

Best of the Web: Earth's glaciation periods may be triggered by large asteroid impacts - Yale

ice age earth glaciation
© NASA
A Yale-led research team has picked a side in the "Snowball Earth" debate over the possible cause of planet-wide deep freeze events that occurred in the distant past.

According to a new study, these so-called "Snowball" Earth periods, in which the planet's surface was covered in ice for thousands or even millions of years, could have been triggered abruptly by large asteroids that slammed into the Earth.

The findings, detailed in the journal Science Advances, may answer a question that has stumped scientists for decades about some of the most dramatic known climate shifts in Earth's history. In addition to Yale, the study included researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Vienna.

Comment: As is increasingly the case, mainstream science is finally coming to conclusions that have long been put forth by authors and articles here on SOTT, but their finding has much more profound implications than they have yet to acknowledge: Also check out SOTT radio's:



People 2

Best of the Web: Distinctly different brain organization patterns in women and men - Stanford Medicine

spain lockdown party
© Reuters / Nacho DoceFILE:
A new study by Stanford Medicine investigators unveils a new artificial intelligence model that was more than 90% successful at determining whether scans of brain activity came from a woman or a man.

The findings, to be published Feb. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, help resolve a long-term controversy about whether reliable sex differences exist in the human brain and suggest that understanding these differences may be critical to addressing neuropsychiatric conditions that affect women and men differently.

"A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders," said Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. "Identifying consistent and replicable sex differences in the healthy adult brain is a critical step toward a deeper understanding of sex-specific vulnerabilities in psychiatric and neurological disorders."

Comment: Other research has shown that understanding the differences between the sexes, as well as between races, is crucial in order to be able to provide the best possible healthcare.

And research highlighting these differences isn't new, as this 2018 article notes: How genetics is proving that race is not necessarily a social construct:
The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material - a Y chromosome that males have and that females don't, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don't.

Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)



Headphones

Best of the Web: Caitlin Johnstone: Nobody who gets Gaza wrong is worth listening to

gaza protest
I saw a comment from an Israel defender saying "You just lack the intellect to comprehend the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!"

Just in the last few days we learned that Israeli snipers have been deliberately picking off children in Gaza by shooting them in the head, that Israeli troops summarily executed a prisoner in handcuffs after sending him into a hospital to deliver a message to evacuate, and that Egypt has begun constructing refugee camps in the Sinai Desert to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gazans.

"Complexities". This isn't complex.

Comment: Also, anyone who doesn't at least understand why the Houthis of Yemen are attacking American, British and Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, probably isn't worth listening to. Sure, it's destructive, but there's apparently no other way to apply counter-pressure to stop the genocide in Gaza.

See also:


Star of David

Best of the Web: UN says that allegations of Israeli rape of Palestinian women and girls in prisons must be investigated

Reem Alsalem
© UN Photo/Rick BajornasReem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was among the human rights experts who issued the statement.
Alleged rights violations against Palestinian women and girls in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank must be investigated, a group of experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Monday.

Palestinian women and girls have reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children, according to information they have received.

Killed while fleeing

Comment: Yet again, Israel has been accusing Hamas of crimes of which they are guilty of.

And, considering some of the sadistic and unfathomable imaginings Israel has concocted up in its propaganda against Hamas, one shudders to think of what other crimes against humanity Israel has committed, that it instead projected onto others, that has yet to come to light:





Snowflake Cold

Best of the Web: Temperatures plummet to all-time record lows in China's Xinjiang

Police officers help a car stuck in the snow in Fuyun county, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China February 18, 2024.
Police officers help a car stuck in the snow in Fuyun county, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China February 18, 2024.
Temperatures broke a 64-year-old record in China's far western region of Xinjiang, plunging to a bone-chilling minus 52.3 degrees Celsius (minus 63.4 degrees Farenheit) amid a cold spell and traffic disruptions following the Lunar New Year holiday.

Several parts of China are battling another deep freeze as people return from week-long celebrations of the year's biggest holiday. Just before it started, blizzards and icy rain had stranded travellers on railways and roads.

State media said Sunday's milestone in the Tuerhong township of Fuyun county was the lowest since records began in Xinjiang, surpassing a temperature of minus 51.5 C (minus 60.7 F) set on Jan. 21, 1960.

The figure was just shy of the lowest national temperature of minus 53 C (minus 63.4 F) in Mohe, a city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang on Jan. 22 last year.


Comment: Two record cold winters in succession then. "Global boiling!"



Biohazard

Best of the Web: British NHS - Trans 'milk' as good as the real thing


Comment: Demented.


The makers of a drug used off-label to induce lactation in men warn it could adversely affect a baby's heart.
Breast Feeding

The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers' breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.

The healthcare trust's medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was "similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born."

"The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby," James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.

Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.

Comment:
apocalypse now sheen



Propaganda

Best of the Web: In blow to Trump, judge disallows potentially damning text messages about Fani Willis-Nathan Wade affair as evidence


Comment: This particular development might be a 'blow to Trump', but he need not fear the overall direction this showtrial is taking: The Fulton County DA is self-owning her own case against him...


Fani Willis trial Trump prosecutor Georgia
© Associated PressDistrict Attorney Fani Willis launches into one of several tirades during her trial.
Potentially damning text messages detailing when Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' affair with Nathan Wade began won't be considered by a judge when he rules on whether the top prosecutor should be thrown off the Trump election fraud case — in a blow to former president's case.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said Friday text messages between Wade's former divorce attorney Terrence Bradley and another defense lawyer couldn't be admitted as evidence because Bradley spilled information that was covered under attorney-client privilege.

Ashleigh Merchant — representing Trump co-defendant Mike Roman who's been spearheading the effort to oust Willis from the case — tried to bring her texts with Bradley into evidence as he testified Friday.

Comment: Clips from the clown show:






Explosion

Best of the Web: New York Times: Israel behind attacks on Iranian gas pipelines


Comment: Cyber-attacks, industrial sabotage, assassinations and outright terrorist attacks against civilians, Israel has committed them all against Iran, dozens of times each, over the years. The rationale for it is 'national security', which essentially amounts to preventing Iran from developing economically and becoming a strong regional power. The same reason the US blew up the Russian Nord Stream gas pipelines...


Gas pipeline sabotage in Iran
Israel conducted clandestine strikes against two key natural gas pipelines in Iran this week, marking an escalation in the years-long standoff between the two states, the New York Times has reported.

"Israel has long targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran," but this week's attacks on the energy infrastructure "marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier," the NYT wrote, citing Western officials.

The newspaper's anonymous sources also attributed a separate incident to Israeli sabotage - an explosion that rocked a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran on Thursday, which local officials ruled an accident.

The two gas pipelines run for more than 1,000 kilometers and carry around 2 billion cubic feet (57 million cubic meters). The blasts temporarily took out around a sixth of Iran's daily natural gas production, causing local outages.


Comment: The attack occurred in the middle of winter in Iran, so the sabotage could potentially have severe consequences for millions of Iranians.


Comment: So Israel within a few months committed acts of war against, Syria, Lebanon and Iran on top of the genocide against the Palestinian population. Does Israel have a death wish or are they getting desperate as if time is of essence in all this?

At the same time, the US has bombed Yemen, Syria and Iraq while providing all the bombs for Israel's genocidal war. Does anyone really believe they are interested in peace?

See also: