In a Bastille Day interview, French President Emmanuel Macron told citizens to "prepare ourselves for a scenario where we have to do without Russian gas entirely." At the same time, Macron accused Moscow of using the fuel as a "weapon of war," echoing the spin emanating from a European Union leadership that obscures the real reason the bloc is facing an energy shortage that's driving up the cost of living.

This crisis is entirely self-inflicted.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accused Russia of energy "blackmail" at the end of April, citing the state-owned Gazprom's announcement of a halt in gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria for failing to pay for in rubles. What von der Leyen - and now Macron - conveniently omitted was that it was the EU's own anti-Russian sanctions, adopted in a knee-jerk and ideologically-driven fashion at the outset of the Ukraine conflict, that represent the root cause of these disruptions.

The West quickly adopted a strategy of targeting and sanctioning various aspects of the Russian financial system, including banks and foreign reserves, cutting it off from the SWIFT global transaction system - and then had the gall to complain that Moscow was asking for payment for its gas exports in its own currency to mitigate the hassle of navigating a system from which it was effectively blocked. "Export your gas but good luck trying to get paid," is hardly a reasonable expectation.

On July 6th, 2022, the court of Florence has approved a sentence annulling the measure taken by the Order of Psychologists of Tuscany against one of its members, the reason being: 'the suspension of the exercise of the profession risks compromising primary individual rights such as the right to a livelihood and the right to work'.

The judge ruled that the psychologist doesn't need to be vaccinated in order to do his job by establishing that:

• these substances don't prevent infection and transmission. Therefore, in front of the Italian law, there can not be an obligation.
• She also recognises that these substances provokes severe adverse events.Therefore, it even less legitimate to force anybody to be injected.
• The judge put the dignity of the human being at the centre and referred twice to the period of Nazism and Fascism. Mandatory vaccination is possible if there is informed consent. For Covid injections, she explained that an informed consent is not possible as we don't know the ingredients and the mechanisms of these substances because of industrial and alleged military secret.

This interim decision is grounded in serious conclusion: there is no right to suspend a citizen from the right to work based of this illegal request of vaccination with these experimental substances.

With this historic court decision, "the Risk to human genome is now legally established" Renate Holzeisen, Italian attorney engaged in the defense of the Human Rights, said in an interview for an Italian radio.

The military conflict in Ukraine, which began on February 24, was preceded by a long war in Donbass. Over the course of eight years, it claimed the lives of at least 14,200 people (according to the OHCHR), over 37,000 were wounded, hundreds of thousands became refugees or had their homes destroyed. A de-escalation was achieved in February 2015, as both sides realized that a bad peace was better than a good war, and attempted to find a political resolution on the basis of the Minsk agreements. That, however, failed to bring peace to Donbass, which instead faced eight long years of economic and legal blockade, compounded by chaotic shelling of areas near the frontlines.

They were eight hard years, which involved rebuilding bombed schools, hospitals, and houses, a rather humiliating dependence of formerly well-to-do people on humanitarian aid, an economic slump due to the economic blockade imposed by the Ukrainian government, restricted access to pensions, and the risk of being wounded or killed for those who lived in urbanized frontline areas. People who voted for the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics in the referendum in May 2014 could never have imagined living in this endless terror.

They were forced to wait for that terror to stop until February 2022, when Russia recognized the independence of Donbass and then deployed its military to, among other things, protect it and liberate territory occupied by Ukrainian forces since 2014. It hasn't exactly been a walk in the park, but the people of Donbass now know that war will soon be over for them. The people's militias of both republics are doing everything in their power to achieve victory as soon as possible.

BlackRock Inc. is used to breaking records. The world's largest asset manager was the first company to exceed $10 trillion of assets under management. But the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And this year BlackRock achieved another record: the most money lost by a single company in a six-month period. In the first half of this year, it lost $1.7 billion of customer money.

BlackRock management was quick to invoke the market carnage of the first half when it revealed the return on investment last week. "2022 ranks as the worst start in 50 years for both stocks and bonds," Chairman and CEO Larry Finck he said on his earnings call.

While few companies can avoid what the market throws at them, some are at least trying to outdo it. BlackRock is giving up more and more: at the end of June, only about a quarter of its assets were actively managed to beat a benchmark, instead of tracking it smoothly as passive strategies are designed to do. That's less than a third when BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors in 2009 to become the leading exchange-traded fund player.

Europe's biggest nuclear power plant has been attacked by three 'kamikadze drones' belonging to the Ukrainian armed forces, Russian media has reported, citing local officials.

According to statements, Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, located in southeastern Ukraine but under the control of Moscow's forces, has not been damaged and its reactor was not impacted by the attack.

The radiation background is normal and it is constantly being monitored, Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Zaporozhye Region military-civil administration, told Tass news agency.

After a video of law enforcement officers acting like utter cowards at the Uvalde school shooting was released, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., claimed that the incident "puts to bed, forever, the question of whether the way to deal with bad guys with guns is to make sure there are more good guys with guns."

Well, "forever" ended this weekend, when a 22-year-old fatally shot a man armed with an AR-15 who had opened fire in a mall food court in Greenwood, Indiana, killing three. We don't know all the specifics — and we'll never know how many lives the Good Samaritan saved — but it is clear Murphy's assertion was incorrect on two counts: Cops who stand around while children are being slaughtered aren't "good guys," but real good guys with guns do exist.

U.K. inflation hit yet another new 40-year high in June as food and energy prices continued to soar, escalating the country's historic cost-of-living crisis.

The consumer price index rose 9.4% annually, according to estimates out Wednesday, slightly above a consensus forecast among economists polled by Reuters and up from 9.1% in May.

This represented a 0.8% monthly incline in consumer prices, exceeding the previous month's 0.7% rise but remaining short of the 2.5% monthly increase in April.

Britain's armed forces have introduced a ban on the use of sex workers abroad for the first time as part of an attempt to stamp out sexual exploitation and abuse across the military.

Personnel found to have engaged in what the Ministry of Defence describes as "transactional sex" face the prospect of dismissal - and they could also be prosecuted if in countries where prostitution is illegal.

It is the first time a consistent prohibition across all three services has been introduced, ending a patchwork of policies and reflecting what the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said on Tuesday was a change in social attitudes.

Speaking at the Farnborough airshow, Wallace said he could not immediately explain why the policy had taken so many years to implement.

The UK government's plan for reaching net zero emissions was unlawful because it provided insufficient detail for how the target would be met, a judge ruled in a high-profile climate case on Monday.

Kwasi Kwarteng, secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, launched the so-called net zero strategy last year. But neither he, nor the minister who approved the strategy on his behalf, knew how each individual policy would contribute to achieving the legally binding target, and therefore could not properly assess the credibility of the plan, Justice David Holgate said.

That was a breach of the government's obligations under the Climate Change Act, the judge said. A detailed and quantified explanation of how the policies would achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 was important for holding ministers to account and for "transparency", the judge said.


He ordered ministers to publish an updated strategy by the end of March 2023. "This decision is a breakthrough moment in the fight against climate delay and inaction.

Activists attempting to tear down the so-called "gender binary" are now coming for archaeology, the scientific study of human history and prehistory through the analysis of artifacts and remains. An essential practice in archaeology is to determine the sex of human remains through measurements of a skeleton's pelvis, skull, and other sexually dimorphic traits. This is important for understanding many cultural and functional ways societies structured themselves according to gendered roles.

Activists now want to disrupt this essential classification process, arguing that since we don't know how these skeletons may have self-identified in life, it is immoral to "assign" them genders in the present. In their imagination, individuals born hundreds of years ago may have "identified" as something other than their biological sex.