An animal rights group says that it has successfully lobbied the Navy to end a pair of studies that involved subjecting sheep to conditions that simulated surfacing quickly from a great depth, causing them pain and sometimes leaving the animals paralyzed or dead.

Representatives from the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, say that their campaign of letter writing, protests and legal action has put an end to a series of experiments at the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus that were billed as studying ways of rescuing sailors trapped in sunken submarines.

"These tests are scientifically worthless and fall far short of international standards," Shalin Gala, a vice president with the group, told Military.com earlier in January, before adding that both France and the U.K. scrapped their respective naval animal testing programs long before the U.S. Navy.

Lebanon devalued its official exchange rate for the first time in 25 years on Wednesday, weakening it by 90% but still leaving the local currency well below its market value.

The pound has crashed since a financial meltdown in 2019 after decades of corruption, profligate spending and mismanagement by the ruling elite in Lebanon which has left the crisis to fester despite soaring poverty.

The central bank confirmed the new official rate of 15,000 pounds per dollar, scrapping the rate of 1,507.5 pounds at which the currency was pegged for decades before the collapse.

The parents of a 9-year-old Florida girl, who was videoed being mercilessly beaten by two boys aboard a school bus, plan to pursue criminal charges against her attackers, according to reports.

Footage of the stomach-churning assault shows two boys ferociously and repeatedly pummeling the third-grader at Coconut Palm K-8 Academy in Homestead as she desperately tries to fend them off.

No adults intervene during the almost 30 seconds of the attack that was recorded by a classmate.

The mother of the victim told Local 10 she will demand criminal charges against her child's assailants.

It is important to understand that the West's proxy war against Russia is not just another slight bump in the road in our centuries-old relations, but rather a deep, protracted conflict with long-lasting consequences. The old strategy, beginning with Peter the Great, to Europeanize the country and take its place in that world, is no longer relevant.

Which is more important - politics or strategy? Before answering, we need to define the terms. The former is a very broad term. It covers a wide range of meanings - from the political course to the smallest opportunistic steps of a tactical nature. Moreover, politics can refer not only to the activities of a single area, but to an infinite number of topics, such as the domestic politics of Israel, the politics of the great powers in the Pacific, or global politics in the first quarter of the 21st century.

By comparison, the concept of strategy is much narrower and more defined. It has two main components - the goal the subject is aiming for, and the general path it has chosen to reach the goal. Strategy is very sensitive to circumstances and is constantly being adjusted, but the specific details of moving towards the goal belong to tactics. Unlike politics, which has its origins in civil administration and involves interaction with other forces operating in the same field. Strategy, which has its roots in military affairs, involves resistance. That is, the obligatory presence of an adversary.

In the time of the Prussian military theorist Carl Clausewitz, who famously said that war is the continuation of politics by other (namely violent) means, strategy meant military strategy, which was strictly subordinate to politics as the highest category. Subsequently, the use of the word changed. Strategy increasingly came to be understood as higher politics, while politics was often understood as political tactics.

We previously discussed the movement in journalism schools to get rid of principles of objectivity in journalism. Advocacy journalism is the new touchstone in the media even as polls show that trust in the media is plummeting. Now, former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: "Objectivity has got to go."

Notably, while Bob Woodward and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.

We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools. Writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. This movement includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

A district judge vindicated Texas cardiologist and outspoken COVID vaccine critic Dr. Peter McCullough on Wednesday, dismissing a lawsuit filed against him approximately two years ago by his former employer Baylor Scott and White Health system.

McCullough, dubbed a prominent purveyor of COVID misinformation by his detractors, was sued by the health system two years ago for allegedly violating a separation agreement and bringing the Baylor Scott and White Health name into the media. Associate Judge Tahira Khan Merritt of the Judicial District Court Dallas County dismissed the suit with prejudice.

"This is a strong victory for freedom of speech and fair balanced publication and media presentation of clinical data as it has emerged over the course of the pandemic crisis," McCullough told The Daily Wire. "My analyses and conclusions have been accurate, consistent, and have always been my own, not those of any institution."

There are 55 documented cases of performers collapsing, dying, or falling ill in late 2022 through 2023 in this video.

And in almost all of these cases, the media will say: "We don't know what caused this, but it was definitely not the COVID vaccine."

Really? And we saw this happening prior to the roll-outs of the COVID "vaccines"? Did we see this in 2020 during the height of the COVID "virus pandemic" when they said we would see people dropping dead on the streets because the COVID "virus" was so bad?

No, we did not see this. This began later in 2021, and continued throughout 2022 after the shots had been injected into the majority of the population.

A student at Princeton University argued in a Sunday night opinion article that the school's ban on plagiarizing or cheating 'disadvantages' minority students.

The author, Emilly Santos, says that the Ivy League school's Undergraduate Honor Code, which is "tasked with holding students accountable and honest in academic settings, mirrors the criminal justice system in its rules and effects."

"It is harmful to the entirety of the Princeton community: the fear it instills in students fosters an environment of academic hostility. But it is often most damaging for first-generation low-income (FLI) students — students who also often belong to racial minorities."

They're starting to come now - the 'debunkings' of the Pfizer undercover video sting, in which executive Jordon Trishton Walker, "Director of Research and Development - Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning", tells his 'date' that Pfizer is looking to mutate the virus "so we could create preemptively developed new vaccines, right".

Pfizer released a statement on Friday, which notably did not deny that Dr. Walker works for the company (a fact which has anyway been confirmed via internet searches). Now the latest 'debunking' effort comes from Medpage Today.

After making the odd claim that "it is currently unclear if the man in the video is actually an employee of Pfizer, and if that is his real name" (journalism isn't what it used to be), writer Michael DePeau-Wilson notes that Pfizer's statement "summarily debunk[ed] the claims made in the video", as the company stated that it "has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research" related to its "ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine".

Last year I wrote an article for the Daily Sceptic on the draft Vision statement of University College, London. I was not impressed by the level of thought reflected in the document. The Vision statement struck me as possibly the output of some kind of bot.

In the meantime, just such a bot, chatGPT, has become publicly available. So I thought it might be interesting to see what it comes up with when fed with my suggested botwords.

Here is UCL's version:

Vision

Our distinctive approach to research, education and innovation will further inspire our community of staff, students and partners to transform how the world is understood, how knowledge is created and shared and the way that global problems are solved.