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- Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has praised the sniper who shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy shooting fireworks amid clashes with Israeli police, Haaretz reported on 13 March. On Tuesday, a sniper in an undercover combat unit of the Border Police opened fire on the young boy, Rami Hamdan al-Halhouli, after he shot a firework high in the air during confrontations in the narrow streets of the Shuafat refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem. Ben Gvir saluted the officer who killed the boy. “This is exactly how you should act against terrorists – with determination and precision,” he said. In a statement, Israeli Border Police claimed violent riots broke out in the camp and that during the unrest, a single shot was fired by an officer towards a suspect “who endangered the forces while firing aerial fireworks in their direction.”
- Supporters of US presidential hopeful Donald Trump would be voting for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has claimed. Clinton’s remark followed a meeting between the presumed Republican nominee and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Florida on Friday. After the talks, dscribed by CNN sources as “friendly”, Orban told the media that Trump had a “detailed plan” to end the conflict in Ukraine, which involved stopping US aid to Kiev.
- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told lawmakers in the Bundestag on Wednesday that he will not approve arming Ukraine with Berlin’s long-range Taurus cruise missiles. Kiev has been increasingly vocal about its lack of weaponry and ammunition on the front lines, and has long been requesting the German-made missiles in particular. Scholz has been reluctant, warning that Kiev could avail of the weapons long range to strike targets deep inside Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, exacerbating the conflict. During a plenary session, Scholz reaffirmed his stance to lawmakers, saying the delivery of Taurus missiles was “a line that I don’t want to cross as chancellor.” He added that it would be “irresponsible” to supply the missiles without the participation of German soldiers, who are trained to know “where to aim, shoot and hit.”
- The EU Parliament on Wednesday approved a regulation called the Artificial Intelligence Act aimed at ensuring the fast-changing technology remains safe and in compliance with fundamental human rights but also boosts innovation. According to the report, the legislation divides the technology into categories of risk, ranging from “unacceptable” — which would see the certain applications banned — to high, medium, and low hazard. The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten the rights of citizens, such as biometric categorization systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition at workplaces and in schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behavior or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.
- A massive steel monolith nearly the height of a semi truck has popped up in Wales, according to local reports – and nobody knows where it came from. WalesOnline reported on Tuesday that locals have come across the 10-foot-tall object on a hill in Hay-on-Wye, an area known worldwide for its books and bookshops. One local resident, Richard Haynes, told the outlet that he came across while out running on Hay Bluff, which he does regularly. “I thought it looked a bit bizarre and might be a scientific media research thing collecting rainwater,” he told WalesOnline. “But then I realized it was way too tall and strange for that.” Haynes said the object was at least 10 feet tall and “triangular, definitely stainless steel.” “It was hollow and I imagine pretty light,” he said. “Light enough for two people to carry it up and plant it in the ground.”
- A lightning strike killed a Peruvian tour guide and injured six French citizens during a hike on the multi-colored Vinicunca mountain, a tourist hotspot in the heart of the Andes, police said Monday. The mountain, one of Peru’s most iconic sites along with Machu Picchu, has become a major attraction in the last decade, as warming temperatures have melted its glacier caps and revealed its colors. Vinicunca mountain, also known as the rainbow mountain or mountain of seven colors, has distinct hues striped across its slopes, the result of an accumulation of sediment over millions of years. It rises to over 5,200 meters (17,000 feet) above sea level.
- Often called the father of mathematics, Archimedes was one of the most famous inventors in ancient Greece, with some of his ideas and principles still in use today. But one fabled device has left scientists speculating on its existence for hundreds of years — the death ray. Now, a middle schooler may have some answers. Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.
- A US man who tried to breed enormous hybrid sheep using genetic material from endangered animals so he could sell them to trophy hunting ranches faces jail time after pleading guilty to wildlife crimes on Tuesday. Arthur Schubarth, 80, illegally imported parts of the world’s largest species of sheep from Kyrgyzstan, which he used to create cloned embryos in the United States. The resulting fetuses were then implanted in ewes on his Montana ranch, resulting in the birth of a genetically pure Marco Polo argali, an endangered species that can weigh more than 300 pounds (135 kilograms) and has horns more than five feet (1.5 meters) wide. Schubarth hoped to sell the resulting animals to “canned” hunting ranches, facilities where customers pay to shoot captive animals, and where bigger animals can command higher prices.
- Just ahead of Russia’s March 15 presidential elections, Vladimir Putin has reiterated Wednesday that his country stands ready to use nuclear weapons should the state’s existence be threatened, but so far “there has never been such a need.” The new warning of Russia’s nuclear ‘readiness’ accompanied with acknowledgement that nuclear war is not imminent appeared further reaction to the West taking up the question of sending troops to Ukraine, after France’s Macron raised the issue last month. “Apart from (US President Joe) Biden, there are enough other experts in the sphere of Russian-American relations and strategic restraint. So I don’t think that everything is going to go head-on here, but we are ready for it,” Putin said in the fresh remarks given to Rossiya-1.
- I’d be remiss this morning if I didn’t put down some of my quick thoughts from watching Special Counsel Robert Hur’s testimony in front of Congress yesterday. For those who missed it, Hur provided testimony yesterday on his inquiry into President Joe Biden’s improper handling of confidential documents. Serving as the special counsel, he addressed the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, he clearly stated that his investigation “did not exonerate” the president. For the record, I’m mostly in the same camp as Representative Matt Gaetz, who said yesterday during the hearing that he wasn’t interested in seeing President Biden nor President Trump charged for mishandling classified documents. The left’s justification for the August 8, 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago and the recovery of classified documents from President Trump’s estate hasn’t so much revolved around the idea that Trump committed a crime by taking them, but rather that he lied when he was asked about them and refused when he was given several opportunities to turn the documents over. ~ QTR’s Fringe Finance
- The Pentagon has confirmed it is urgently deploying an elite counter-terror task force to bolster the American embassy in Haiti after armed gangs have taken over much of the capital of Port-au-Prince and the long-simmering situation is now boiling over, with violence spreading, also in the wake of embattled Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation Tuesday. Further there’s a threat of a “mass migration” wave potentially inundating US coastal communities in places like Florida as a result. US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced Wednesday that at the request of the State Department the elite Marine Fleet-Anti-terrorism Security Team (FAST) has been deployed to the destabilized country to assist in embassy security.
- Burundi has launched operations at a specialist infectious disease research laboratory fully outfitted with Russian equipment, Moscow’s ambassador to Burundi, Valery Mikhailov, told TASS on Wednesday. Specialists in Burundi now have the opportunity to recognize and identify infectious diseases, even those that are “highly dangerous,” Mikhailov added. According to the envoy, Moscow has supplied laboratory reagents that can be used to treat various forms of hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and other dangerous infectious diseases.
- Trends in the way that exoplanets are depicted in science fiction (sf) have changed since the first real exoplanet around a sun-like star was discovered in 1995, says a new study from researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Before it was known for sure that there were planets orbiting other stars, we had been exploring such worlds through sf, whether it was with the Enterprise going boldly, following the Rebels in the original “Star Wars” trilogy or in the pages of novels written by the likes of Asimov, Le Guin and Frank Herbert. These stories featured florid world-building, with great galactic empires, bizarre alien creatures and many a planet that was habitable just like our Earth. Then, in 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory found 51 Pegasi b, the first known exoplanet around a sun-like star. (Three planets orbiting pulsars had been detected a few years earlier, but 1995 is considered the more historic moment.) Suddenly, we didn’t have to rely on sf to imagine other planetary systems; we had access to real data that over the past 29 years has poured in at an accelerating rate. As of March 12, 2024, NASA’s exoplanet count stands at 5,595 worlds across 4,160 planetary systems, with over 10,000 more planetary candidates awaiting confirmation.
- A nova outburst visible to the naked eye is expected to decorate the night sky this year, offering a rare skywatching opportunity. The star system offering us this opportunity is known as T Coronae Borealis (T CrB). It’s located some 3,000 light-years away from Earth and consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf that orbit each other. When the white dwarf steals enough stellar material from its red giant companion, it ignites a brief flash of nuclear fusion on its surface, triggering what is known as a nova outburst. The outburst will be visible in the constellation Corona Borealis, also known as the Northern Crown, which forms a semicircle of stars. The outburst is expected to occur between February and September 2024 and appear as bright as the North Star in our night sky for no longer than a week before fading again, NASA officials said in a statement.
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Rose Rambles... 