Thousands of people have been left without electricity across the Western Balkans after early snowfall brought widespread disruption on Friday.

Heavy, wet snow blanketed hilly and mountainous regions of Serbia and Bosnia this week, felling power distribution lines and trees. Meanwhile, persistent rainfall in lower areas has raised concerns of potential floods and mudslides.

More than half a metre of snow has already accumulated at higher altitudes, with meteorologist Slobodan Sovilj from the state Hydrometeorological Service suggesting it could reach record levels for October.

"We have a number of areas without electricity because of broken trees and branches that fell on power lines," Aleksandar Mitrovic, head of the Ivanjica municipality in central Serbia, said.

The Kronotsky volcano on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula spewed ash to a height of 9.2 kilometres above sea level on Saturday, local authorities said.

The ash ejection occurred at 11:50 a.m. local time (2350 GMT Friday), sending an ash plume stretching about 85 kilometres to the south and southeast of the volcano, the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team said on its Telegram channel.

A red aviation colour code has been issued, indicating a high hazard for both the local and international air traffic, reports Xinhua news agency.

The Kronotsky volcano is located about 225 kilometres from the regional capital of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and 10 kilometres east of Lake Kronotskoye.

In the wake of the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Utah Valley University Police Chief Jeff Long said he had six officers working the event, plus some plainclothes officers in the crowd. Turning Point USA,

However, the identity of Kirk's private security team remained unreported until now. On Saturday, Shaffer Security Group, which worked Turning Point USA events from 2015 to 2022, posted on Twitter/X that the firm guarding Kirk on Sept. 10 was Rockhouse Integrity Group, which does business under the name Integrity Security Solutions.

While there is certainly no shortage of bogus images and false claims surrounding the horrifically violent shooting in Las Vegas this weekend, there are some very serious inconsistencies that need addressing. A major one of those inconsistencies has to do with the myriad of reports of multiple shooters. While some of the claims have been proven false, a video, confirmed to be taken by a Las Vegas cab driver appears to capture and confirm the presence of multiple shooters.

Cori Langdon, taxi driver, and resident of Las Vegas was in the taxi lane at Mandalay Bay when the shooting began. At first, Langdon didn't know what was going on, but when the shots began, she quickly realized and began filming. What she captured could be considered the most important evidence in regards to the reports of multiple shooters.

In the video, shots begin to ring out. At first, the shots are far away and then, all of the sudden, they are right on top of her. This happens several times during the first two minutes of the video.

At first glance, the two shooting distances sound like it could just be an echo. However, as the video progresses, we here the distant shots originate first and with different patterns. As Langdon continues filming, the shooting becomes clear that it is coming from two different spots and Langdon even confirms this by saying, "It is now coming from further away."

Attacks targeting churches in the U.S. have increased significantly in recent years, according to a report, and the recent shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school is the latest example.

In the report, the Family Research Council, an evangelical nonprofit and activist group, identified 1,384 incidents of hostility against U.S. churches between January 2018 and December 2024.

The group recorded 50 incidents in 2018, 83 in 2019, 55 in 2020, and 98 in 2021.

The report then found a dramatic rise in incidents beginning in 2022, when there were 198 recorded instances, followed by 485 in 2023 and 415 in 2024.

Britain's Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety

The reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, and Canada this week is a con - it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.

Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.

That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the PA begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.

Troubling developments have highlighted Europe's continued slide into political turmoil and totalitarianism. As we discussed last time, the EU has no choice but to sharply agitate for war in order to keep its frail political structures intact, because the war drums drown out the organic cries for change and liberation from the EU's despotic rule. It is the age old tactic used by tyrants time and again, most recently by Netanyahu in Israel.

All the while, new undemocratic measures are "slipped in" while the populace is distracted by the hysteria; case in point being the sudden push for national digital ID cards in the UK and other countries. Or the new Chat Control mass surveillance proposed by the EU to acquire the ability to scan all private correspondence for 'problematic' material.

Further case in point, just two weeks ago in a speech to the EU Parliament, Ursula von der Leyen claimed the world was "on the brink" of another "major global health crisis":

Hidden for four years, an after-action report on FBI's involvement in Jan. 6 riot found by Director Patel shows dozens of agents feared that the FBI had become "woke" and "liberally biased."

The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become "pawns in a political war," according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years.

Scores of FBI agents and personnel - many from the bureau's premier Washington field office (WFO) - sent anonymous complaints to the after-action team detailing how agents were sent into an unsafe scenario without proper safety equipment or the ability to identify themselves readily as armed officers to other police agencies, the report obtained by Just the News shows.

The most persistent complaint was that the bureau during the James Comey and Chris Wray era had become infected with political biases and liberal ideology that treated the protesters from the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots far differently than those arrested in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 episode.

Well, Donald Trump did it. He scheduled a news conference on the science of autism, what we know and what we do not, and handled it masterfully. He is profoundly aware that as a parent and the president of the United States that he can make points that his own science advisors cannot make for reasons political, sociological, and scientific.

Trump, however, knows that expecting mothers and families still have to make decisions and those decisions could affect the health and well-being of their children for the rest of their lives. Nothing is more important. Meanwhile, autism is an epidemic. Something is causing this.

There is no such thing as a genetic epidemic. Nor is this traceable to changed definitions of the term else we would see a growing distribution among adults too, which we do not. FDA head Marty Makary, normally very cautious and careful in his statements, said the straightforward thing that no one has stated as clearly: autism is preventable.

Author's note: Why is it that people live in different thought universes that no rational argument can penetrate? In light of recent debates about cancel culture and free speech, I de-paywalled this piece from May of this year. You'll also get a short introduction to Heidegger along the way.

Heidegger has entered the chat

There's little doubt we are living in Babel-land. Discourse seems to produce a set of irreconcilable camps more or less shouting at each other, hearing what they want to hear, supporting their teams no matter what, desperately clinging to some hard belief in an attempt to escape madness as history is reaching a breaking point. A look at some of the recent outrage cycles should be enough to make the point: Darryl Cooper questioning aspects of the WWII narrative, Douglas Murray debating Dave Smith over Israel, James Lindsay calling everybody and their grandma "woke right," someone using the n-word and getting cancelled... All of these dramas have led to rivers of digital ink being spilled on analysis, with little persuasion across the tribes to show for. Clearly, good ol' "facts and logic" don't seem to convince anybody to change their tack about anything.

A recent study brings home the point even more dramatically. Researchers in Zürich let loose an AI to argue people out of their opinions on Reddit, comparing how well it does to human posters doing likewise — with depressing results: the most important of which is how rare it really is that someone's mind is changed, AI or not. Humans were typically able to achieve "conversion" in only 3% of cases. The AI did a better job with a success rate of 9%-18% — still low, but magnitudes higher. What makes this even more depressing is that the AI did not achieve these success rates by brilliantly gathering facts-and-logic and providing sources, but essentially by emotional manipulation: the AI tailored its message to the recipient, pretending to belong to the same group ("as a conservative...") and adapting its narrative framework accordingly. It also boldly stated unproven facts, hitting its human counterpart with dubious but authoritative and emotionally charged statements instead of well-reasoned arguments. Not a good look. It also drives home that short of emotional sophistry, there is little that can bridge the gap between opposed opinion-groups, and even sophistry rarely succeeds, and is probably not sustainable.