Five days after the downing of the Su-25 aircraft by jihadist rebels in Idlib, the Russian Aerospace Forces have switched to using their advanced Su-30 and Su-35 jets in Syria, a military source told Al-Masdar this afternoon.

According to the military source, due to the small number of Su-30 and Su-35 jets in Syria at the moment, the Russian Aerospace Forces have temporarily halted air operations above some parts of the Idlib Governorate.

The purpose of switching to the Su-30 and Su-35 jets is due to their ability to launch airstrikes from high altitudes, putting them out of range from the jihadist anti-aircraft missiles (MANPAD) in the Idlib and Hama governorates.

Most of the Su-30 and Su-35 jets were withdrawn from Syria after Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Hmaymim Military Airport in December; however, they are preparing to bring them back after the downing of the Su-25.

The United States has provided the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) operating in Syria man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) within the framework of the secret agreement, media reported.

The Al-Masdar News media outlet reported Monday citing own sources that the US had provided the MANPADS to the Kurds earlier in the month under the agreement between Washington and the YPG. According to the news outlet, the MANPADS have been delivered to the Kurds in the northwestern part of Syria near the town of Afrin.

On Saturday, the Defense Post news website published an article, in which the spokesman of the US-led coalition fighting against the Daesh terrorist group said that the coalition was engaged in training of a 30,000-strong force on the territory within Syria currently controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia to maintain security in controlled area along the Syrian border.

The reports about the new US initiative have arisen against the backdrop of a statement made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday. According to Erdogan, the Turkish army may launch an operation in the northwestern Syrian regions of Manbij and Afrin controlled by the Kurdish militias within a week. The Turkish leader also expressed hope that Washington would back Ankara's efforts.

A Russian passenger plane has crashed after leaving Moscow's Domodedovo airport with 71 people on board.

The Saratov Airlines jet vanished minutes after take-off and crashed near the village of Argunovo, about 80km (50 miles) south-east of Moscow.

All those on board are thought to have died, officials told Russian media.

Watching the mainstream press try to interview University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson, one thing becomes exceedingly clear: they literally can't even.

While the above expression makes my inner grammar Nazi cry, it is possibly the best description of the predictable sequence of befuddled expressions, desperate strawmen, and whiffed shots fired at Peterson from a growing list of increasingly cautious media personalities.

Cathy Newman's interrogation of the professor has garnered over five million views, and if one were to judge its contents solely on the consequent collection of memes, pundit reactions, and response/splice videos, one would conclude that Dr. Peterson spent 30 minutes deriding and verbally dominating his interviewer, banging his fists on the table and shouting like right-wing cherry bomb Alex Jones - but that's not Dr. Peterson's style.

Instead, the quiet Canadian spent a half-hour discussing free speech, the gender pay gap, and Pepe the frog in such a calm and reasonable manner that even his use of the occasional swear word sounded as though someone swapped "golly gee" out of his script at the last moment.

The interview became a sort of fulcrum for the broader media narrative surrounding Peterson: articles before the interview tried to cast him as a nerdier Milo Yiannopoulos; those since have been notably cautious about casting him as anything.

People familiar with the New Testament might recall a passage from the book of Matthew that details a series of exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees that concludes with this memorable phrase: "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions."

Peterson, fond of incorporating biblical themes into his teaching, has almost backed the media into such a corner. In fact, the most recent interviews and articles regard him with a strange blend of cautious hostility and grudging respect.

Celebrities criticizing the #MeToo movement have been joined by another big personality from the movie industry. Oscar-winning Austrian film director Michael Haneke called it a "witch hunt" that "poisons" the social climate.

"I regard this hysteria of rash judgments that is spreading at the moment as absolutely disgusting," director and screenwriter Haneke said in an interview with the Austrian daily Kurier.

"People are just being finished off in the media, [their] lives and careers are being ruined," he said. "Any kind of rape or [sexual] coercion should be punished," he stressed, but what bothers him about the ongoing debate around allegations of sexual abuse targeting celebrities is its "totally unperceived malignance, the blind rage that is not based on facts."

Israeli settlers have attempted to abduct two Palestinian children in the village of Madma to the south of the West Bank city of Nablus, Quds Press has reported.

A member of the village council Talaat Ziyadeh said that a group of settlers descended from the illegal settlement of Yitzhar, raided the village and chased two Palestinian children yesterday.

He said that these children are shepherds and they were feeding their goats on the outskirts of the village when the settlers attempted to abduct them.

Just imagine that somebody told you that men and women are biologically different, that people ought to take responsibility for their own lives, and modern life often seems hollow and meaningless.

Imagine that this person went on to say that young men often lack a sense of initiative, too many university courses have fallen victim to trendy dogmas, and free speech sometimes means telling people what they don't want to hear.

Would you shudder in horror? Would you rush onto social media to condemn him as a dangerous lunatic? Or would you, perhaps, nod in agreement at what seemed like plain common-sense?

A court in England has convicted a man of raping a teenager while holding a sharpened piece of wood to her throat. Ahmed Abdoule, 33-year-old Somali national, was sentenced by Hull Crown court to 11 years in prison.

The court heard how the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, cried and pleaded to be spared during her ordeal. Like most rape victims, she knew Abdoule prior to the attack, which took place at his home in east Hull. Abdoule locked her inside, then forced her upstairs using a sharpened piece of wood as a weapon before carrying out the assault. Abdoule reportedly told the victim, "my country would love you."

"Why Are Murders Of Gay And Bi Men Up A Staggering 400 Percent?" asks the headline atop Michelangelo Signorile's new HuffPost column, shared at least 13,000 times so far "Hint: This Alarming Surge Has Taken Place Since Donald Trump Became President," adds HuffPost unsubtly in a tweet promoting the column.

If your response was to wonder first whether such murders are in fact skyrocketing, yours is the right instinct.

We've shown in previous analyses that the media's coverage of Jordan Peterson has been biased. But articles about him this week in Mic and The Guardian illustrate a distinct case of dishonorable journalism. What do we mean by dishonorable? Broadly, this is when a news outlet reports disparaging and unsubstantiated opinions about a person, but presents them as facts. It often includes attacking a person's character rather than his or her arguments or actions.

Specifically, in the case of Mic and The Guardian, dishonorable coverage meant:

• Accusations against Peterson were made without sufficient evidence or well-reasoned arguments to back them up.
• Facts and quotes were cherry-picked and taken out of context.
• His arguments were oversimplified or misrepresented.
• The distortion in the articles mostly supported the point of view that Peterson is a dangerous right-winger who is fighting to preserve old-fashioned social structures.

These distortions are illustrated by our overall integrity ratings of 14 and 17 percent for The Guardian and Mic, respectively (Click here for an in-depth look at our spin, slant and logic ratings). In other words, the articles were not objective, balanced or well-reasoned. Furthermore, they contained factual inaccuracies and misleading data.