Benjamin Netanyahu Ousted as Israeli PM

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Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving Israeli leader, was ousted as prime minister on Sunday after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted to form a new government made up of a coalition of opposition groups pledging to heal caustic divisions caused by Netanyahu’s 12-year rule.

Netanyahu had failed to form a government after a March 23 election — the fourth in two years — and could not block the power-sharing agreement between the groups, headed by his former defense minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid.

Bennett and Lapid will each serve two years as prime minister on a rotating basis. (Read more from “Benjamin Netanyahu Ousted as Israeli PM” HERE)

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Putin: Trump Is an Extraordinary, Talented, Colorful Individual

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an exclusive interview Friday with NBC News, called former President Donald Trump a “colorful individual” and said he can work with President Joe Biden.

Putin compared the two presidents at a time when relations between Russia and the United States are at a historic low and ahead of the Russian leader’s upcoming summit with Biden.

“Well even now, I believe that former U.S. president Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual, otherwise he would not have become U.S. president,” Putin told NBC’s Keir Simmons during a wide-ranging and, at times, contentious interview. “He is a colorful individual. You may like him or not. And, but he didn’t come from the U.S. establishment. He had not been part of big-time politics before, and some like it, some don’t like it but that is a fact.”

As for Biden, Putin said the current White House occupant “is radically different from Trump because President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics.”

“That’s a different kind of person, and it is my great hope that, yes, there are some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements on behalf of the sitting U.S. president,” he said. (Read more from “Putin: Trump Is an Extraordinary, Talented, Colorful Individual” HERE)

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Defecting Officer: China Uses Genital Torture on Uyghurs, Breaks Limbs With Hammers

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A witness at this week’s Uyghur Tribunal in London, identifying himself as a former Chinese law enforcement officer, testified that his colleagues regularly used torture devices and severely brutalized victims in the nation’s Uyghur concentration camps, the human rights magazine Bitter Winter reported on Thursday.

The tribunal concluded on Monday, featuring over 30 witnesses, both former officers and former inmates in the concentration camps, detailing their experiences under the Chinese Communist Party. China is believed to be running over 1,000 concentration camps in Xinjiang, its westernmost region and home to the majority of the nation’s Uyghur ethnic minority. In addition to Uyghurs, who are majority Sunni Muslim, individuals belonging to other Muslim ethnic minorities, primarily Kazakhs and Kyrgyz people, have also disappeared into the camps.

In 2019, the Pentagon estimated that as many as 3 million people were trapped in Chinese concentration camps. Since then, China has moved thousands of Uyghurs into factories throughout the country to engage in slave labor and moved some into Xinjiang’s cotton fields to pick cotton by force. China has also implemented a massive forced sterilization campaign to prevent the growth of the Uyghur ethnic group. Both the administrations of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have deemed the evidence regarding the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to constitute the international crime of genocide.

The former police witness at the Uyghur tribunal used the pseudonym “Wang Keizhan” and said he worked in the camps in 2019. He has since fled the country for Germany, from which he testified. He stated he believed that he was among 150,000 rookie law enforcement officers Beijing flooded Xinjiang with to staff the prisons.

While there, he said, superiors encouraged the recruits to use as many types of egregious torture on those in the camps as possible. Among the types of torture described were a form of pseudo-drowning in which “their limbs were tied, and waterpipes were inserted in their mouth to force water into their lungs.” Some had their limbs hammered into pieces. The officer also confirmed the use of electric devices on men’s genitals to torture them, corresponding to testimonies from women trapped in the camps who have previously said that officers raped them with electric batons. Similar to the water torture, some victims had a plastic bag tied around their heads to suffocate them to near-death, he said. (Read more from “Defecting Officer: China Uses Genital Torture on Uyghurs, Breaks Limbs With Hammers” HERE)

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Kim Jong Un’s Apparent Weight Loss Sparks Speculation Over Health

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North Korea watchers are eager to get the skinny on leader Kim Jong Un’s apparent weight loss — which some speculate might be a sign of deteriorating health.

The famously corpulent despot looked noticeably slimmer in photos released by state media Saturday — after not being seen publicly for a month, the Guardian reported.

South Korea-based NK News, which analyzed photos of Kim addressing a ruling party politburo meeting last week, said he appeared to have lost a “significant amount of weight.”

If he lost the weight intentionally for health reasons, that “likely improves his position at home,” Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, told the outlet Tuesday.

Being more secure at home “in turn provides more predictability perhaps for regional actors like Japan, the ROK and the US who may have greater confidence that he will be running the show,” Narang said. (Read more from “Kim Jong Un’s Apparent Weight Loss Sparks Speculation Over Health” HERE)

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Guatemalans Protest VP Visit: ‘Kamala GO HOME’

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A group of Guatemalans protested Sunday as Vice President Kamala Harris arrived for a visit to their country.

Signs reading “Kamala Mind Your Own Business” “Kamala Go Home” and even, “Kamala, Trump Won” were displayed outside the airport. . .

“We’re against their agenda of imposing the LGBTQ, pro-abortion ideology,” a member told El Faro. “In Guatemala we’re pro-life,” (Read more from “Guatemalans Protest VP Visit: ‘Kamala GO HOME'” HERE)

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Google Pushes Chinese Propaganda About South China Sea – With Wikipedia’s Help

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A discussion at the Wikipedia Reddit community yesterday noted that Google searches asking if China owns the disputed South China Sea prominently featured a result from the online encyclopedia parroting the Chinese government position that it “enjoys indisputable sovereignty” over the sea. Reddit users noted the line appeared to be taken from a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement quoted in the article, a fact not included in the Google snippet. The line was removed after the Reddit discussion brought it to attention.

This is only the latest case where Google’s prioritizing of Wikipedia for prominently displayed information has spread propaganda or falsehoods.

Numerous territorial disputes exist regarding the South China Sea, most significantly the dispute over the Spratly Islands. Several Southeast Asian countries as well as the communist Chinese government and the government on Taiwan (who each officially claim the islands as governments representing China) dispute control over some or all of the islands. China’s claims in the sea incorporate other islands and together are cited by the government as the basis for its “nine-dash line” territorial claim, which asserts nearly the entire sea is under Chinese sovereignty. Other countries have criticized the claim as overly broad and vague.

The opening post of the discussion on the Wikipedia Reddit community showed a screen-cap of a Google search asking “Does the South China Sea belong to China?” where the “featured snippet” from Wikipedia’s article on “territorial disputes in the South China Sea” seemed to uncritically recite the mainland government’s stance by stating: “China enjoys indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea and the island. China’s stand is based on historical facts and international law. China’s sovereign rights and positions are formed in the course of history and this position has been held by Chinese Government for long.” Other searches for variations of the question displayed the same snippet.

Such “featured snippets” are reportedly produced by Google’s search engine based on its algorithm determining what “will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking” with the search. Users noted the Google snippet matched a quote on the Wikipedia page from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, who was responding to an oil exploration deal India’s oil exploration company had signed with Vietnam’s state oil firm, a deal involving parts of the South China Sea. (Read more from “Google Pushes Chinese Propaganda About South China Sea – With Wikipedia’s Help” HERE)

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Soldier Charged With Mutiny for Anti-Vaccine Speech

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A military officer who gave a speech at a anti-mask rally and urged his fellow soldiers to not distribute COVID-19 vaccines is now facing mutiny charges from the Canadian military.

In December, Officer Cadet Ladislas Kenderesi was introduced to a large anti-mask crowd in Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas Square. Lamont Daigle, one of the rally’s organizers and an influential Canadian anti-masker, gave the man an introduction fit for an action hero. . .

Kenderesi, introduced under his real name, strolled on stage wearing his military greens—complete with a knife sheathed in a shoulder holster—to the applause of hundreds.

“I’m asking the military, right now serving, truck drivers, medical, engineers, whatever you are, do not take this unlawful order in distribution of this vaccine,” he says to a cheering crowd. “My job is to protect you, not just from foreign (threats) but also from domestic.”

“I might get in a lot of s**t for doing this. But I don’t care any more.” (Read more from “Soldier Charged With Mutiny for Anti-Vaccine Speech” HERE)

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China Debuts Three-Child Policy To Fight Dramatic Decline in Births

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The Communist Party of China announced on Monday it would allow couples to have a maximum of three children, an expansion of the recently imposed “two-child” policy and apparent response to its dismal, and worsening, national birth rates.

China published its 2020 national census this month, finding a modest increase in the population but an extremely low number of annual births. Since 1979, the Communist Party banned married couples from having more than one child, a law that resulted in mass infanticide, forced abortions, and a disproportionately high number of men in the population due to families’ preferences for baby boys.

Dictator Xi Jinping first eased the policy in 2016 to allow two children, but a lack of interest in having children on the part of young couples and a shortage of women of child-bearing age resulted in declining birth rates even after this modification. The policy applies only to ethnic Han women, the majority of the population, but China has implemented a widespread campaign of forced sterilizations of ethnic minority women, particularly Uyghurs, that undercuts its de jure looser permissions for minority families. . .

The “one-child policy” resulted in the killing of 400 million children, or, in Communist Party terminology, it “averted an estimated 400 million births.” (Read more from “China Debuts Three-Child Policy To Fight Dramatic Decline in Births” HERE)

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Warning Sounded: China Soon Could Patrol U.S. East Coast

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China’s military soon could be patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, not far from some of America’s major population centers, warns China expert Gordon Chang, a Gatestone institute distinguished senior fellow.

The Communist regime “is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa,” he explained in a column at Gatestone.

“In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America’s East Coast.”

He cited recent testimony from Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command.

He revealed that right now, China’s only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Read more from “Warning Sounded: China Soon Could Patrol U.S. East Coast” HERE)

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Netanyahu’s Opposition Rivals Warn of Civil War in Israel

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Israeli opposition leaders said they have received death threats in response to their plan to form a government that would oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a backlash that has raised the specter of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“This is the time for all public leaders to come out in an unequivocal call against every threat, whatever the democratic decisions are,” said Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, per the Times of Israel. “We all need to respect them and avoid sparking a dispute — let alone, God forbid, a civil war.”

Right-wing politician Naftali Bennett’s announcement Sunday that he planned to deliver the necessary votes to form a government with center-left opposition leader Yair Lapid sparked an uproar in Israel. Netanyahu accused him of making a self-interested play for the prime minister’s office at the expense of Israeli security, but the opposition leaders denounced Netanyahu with thinly veiled references to allegations that he was responsible for Rabin’s death at the hands of a right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.

“That fact that elected officials are being threatened over taking part in democratic processes raises a great concern that we have not learned the lesson, neither from the Jewish history of baseless hatred nor from the murder of Rabin,” Gantz said. (Read more from “Netanyahu’s Opposition Rivals Warn of Civil War in Israel” HERE)

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