The claim that Major General Qassem Soleimani was a "terrorist" on a mission to carry out an "imminent" attack that would kill hundreds of Americans turned out to be a lie, so why should one believe anything else relating to recent developments in Iran and Iraq? To be sure, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 departing from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on the morning of January 8^th with 176 passengers and crew on board was shot down by Iranian air defenses, something which the government of the Islamic Republic has admitted, but there just might be considerably more to the story involving cyberwarfare carried out by the U.S. and possibly Israeli governments.

To be sure, the Iranian air defenses were on high alert fearing an American attack in the wake of the U.S. government's assassination of Soleimani on January 3^rd followed by a missile strike from Iran directed against two U.S. bases in Iraq. In spite of the tension and the escalation, the Iranian government did not shut down the country's airspace. Civilian passenger flights were still departing and arriving in Tehran, almost certainly an error in judgment on the part of the airport authorities. Inexplicably, civilian aircraft continued to take off and land even after Flight 752 was shot down.

It's almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that's what happened to the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall as editors were about to post several studies showing that the evidence linking red meat consumption with cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it.

Annals Editor-in-Chief Christine Laine, MD, MPH, saw her inbox flooded with roughly 2000 emails — most bore the same message, apparently generated by a bot — in a half hour. Laine's inbox had to be shut down, she said. Not only was the volume unprecedented in her decade at the helm of the respected journal, the tone of the emails was particularly caustic.

"We've published a lot on firearm injury prevention," Laine said. "The response from the NRA (National Rifle Association) was less vitriolic than the response from the True Health Initiative."

The proposal had been one of the nation's broadest, but it came under intense criticism from vaccine skeptics.

It began as one of the nation's broadest proposed bans on religious exemptions to childhood vaccines.

But after weeks of sustained and boisterous protests by vaccine skeptics, as well as a last-minute effort to amend the proposed bill to win the support of key lawmakers, the effort collapsed on Monday in the New Jersey State Senate.

The Senate president, Stephen M. Sweeney, maintained that science, not protesters, would eventually emerge victorious.

They say life comes at you fast. A seemingly routine 'state-of-the-nation' address by Vladimir Putin unexpectedly turned into one of the most memorable afternoons in recent Russian political history.

On Wednesday, Russia's government resigned. Dmitry Medvedev departed the political frontline, Vladimir Putin effectively confirmed he will leave the presidency at the end of his present term, and Mikhail Mishustin became the new Russian prime minister. As Van Morrison once crooned, there will be days like this.

And it's only the 15th of January. A week after Russians observed Orthodox Christmas, and a fortnight since they celebrated New Year, it didn't take long for real business to resume.

In the morning, Mishustin was so unknown outside of Russia that he didn't even have an English language Wikipedia page. And his profile inside the country was minor, beyond the world of political and administrative wonks.

There remain a lot of unanswered questions and implausible explanations in the story of the Ukrainian airliner shot down near Tehran on January 8th, 2020. And while the Iranians have publicly and officially taken responsibility, there may be other reasons for them taking responsibility besides their actually having done it. I can think of several, and I will propose a few. But one thing I am certain of, with good reason - the "accident" story is bullshit, no matter who is telling it, and no matter why. They may have a good reason for telling it, but it's a lie. There may be a good reason for telling it, but there's no good reason for believing it, at all.

The first thing to understand about the SA-15 system is that it DOES have an IFF interrogator built into its radar system. The interrogator sends out a pulse that detects and interprets the IFF civilian airliner transponder signal automatically, every few seconds. Boeing 737 aircraft are equipped with two IFF transponders, which are set and activated prior to take off. Planes can be allowed to take off with only one operational transponder, and it is possible that the single transponder can fail or a pilot (and co-pilot, and even ATC) can forget to make sure it's on before take off. My friend, a professional airline pilot, explains that if the plane is preparing for take off and the ATC does not see the transponder on his radar screen, he will remind the pilot, who will turn it on before take off. My friend has also told me that it does happen that the pilot, co-pilot and ATC can and sometimes do all forget and/or fail to notice the transponder is not on before take off. So, it could be possible for a plane to take off without an IFF transponder operating. On a flight across several international borders, into combat skies, where the IFF would be THE most important single safety system on the plane on this flight. Even flight PS-752.

Yes, it would be possible that they all overlooked it, except for one thing - we KNOW that they did not. That the flight was recorded on FLIGHTRADAR24.COM, proves that the transponder was on and working. The transponder was on and working, and the SA-15 radar, would have seen the unique flight info code for the regularly scheduled civilian flight on the radar screen, as would all ADA radars and all other civilian and military radars within range.

Even without an IFF transponder response, the SA-15/TOR M-1 radar provides the following data - location, bearing, speed and size (amplitude). That means, even if there was no IFF signal, (though, again, we KNOW there was) just from the radar blip on the screen, the operator gets the above info, location, bearing, speed and size, stating the object is going 180 degrees away from Aria military airbase, 90 degrees away from Tehran, (PS-752 did not turn right until after the first missile hit) going about half the speed of a Tomahawk cruise missile (275 knots vs 480 knots) and the amplitude of its return radar signal is exactly that of the profile of a Boeing 737, many times bigger and different from that of a cruise missile or enemy military aircraft of any kind.

A Thursday evening software update at Facebook accidentally allowed anyone to view exactly who is posting under the accounts of public figures, businesses and other entities, according to Wired.

The result? For starters, some 3 million followers of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg have been reading posts written by her father, Svante Thunberg, and a climate activist in India who serves as a delegate at the UN's Climate Change organization, Adarsh Prathap. Thunberg, Inc. claims Greta is still the one writing the content.

The most important conservative thinker of his generation, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, has died. He was 75 and suffering from cancer. In his life he published scores of books on a dizzying number of topics, ranging through politics, art, music, the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, religion, and fox hunting. He also wrote fiction, including the novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared and the collection Souls in the Twilight. He composed an opera (The Minister) and a handful of songs. He is survived by his wife Sophie, a historian, and two children, Sam and Lucy.

There are three stories that Roger Scruton shared about his life, frequently. The first involved drawing the character of his father, a working-class man and avid conservationist, who disliked the idea of his son going to a Royal Grammar School (a "public school," in English phraseology) and rising above his station. Of his father, he recently wrote affectionately:

He believed that his country was ruled by a conspiracy of public school boys, and that there would not be social justice in Britain until the privileges that enabled such undeserving and treacherous characters to advance were finally abolished. He saw in the House of Lords, in the established Church and in the Monarchy, branches of this long-standing conspiracy and he understood all of our history in terms of it — as a never-ending confiscation of England from its rightful owners by a class of privileged usurpers.

Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century. US interventionism has contributed to the destruction of Haiti's national economy and the impoverishment of its population.

The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country's predicament.

A country has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Its people precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair.

Haiti's history, its colonial past have been erased.

The US military has come to the rescue of an impoverished Nation. What is its Mandate?

Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?

Latest round of leaks suggest Russia gave Israel codes to access Iran's Tor- M1 air-defense systems.

Russia provided Israel security codes to access Iran's Tor- M1 air-defense systems in exchange for an Israeli handover of codes to "hack" drones sold to Georgia, according to a leaked email from a private American intelligence company.

An employee for Stratfor wrote the report, dated February 2009, and cited a "Mexican source," described as a former police officer and a current military analyst.

WikiLeaks published the email and announced this week that it was targeting Stratfor by releasing over 5 million emails stolen from its servers.

Commendably, Iran has apologized for shooting down the passenger jet and killing all 176 people on board. It shows integrity to take responsibility for the disastrous loss of life at a time of intense adversity.

Now will other parties also show similar humility in admitting their role for creating precarious conditions where death seems an inevitable outcome? Specifically, can US President Donald Trump recognize that his administration's policy of hellbent hostility towards Iran is driving up conflict and, ultimately, the loss of innocent lives?

The shoot-down of Flight 752 was a heartrending tragedy for countless families of several nationalities. Most of the dead were Iranians, which must add to the pain felt by that nation. But at least by owning up to the truth, the Iranian authorities have spared grieving victims from prolonged anguish of not knowing what happened.