The skyrocketing energy prices have cost Europe nearly $1 trillion, according to a new report, stating that the current situation as the fallout of the war in Ukraine is just the beginning of the deepest crisis in decades.

Citing its calculations based on market data, a report published in Bloomberg on Sunday said $1 trillion is a broad tally of more expensive energy for consumers and companies in European countries.

That marks just the beginning, according to the report, as high prices are expected to last years and no relief on global gas markets is expected until 2026 when additional production capacity from the US to Qatar becomes available.

Elon Musk's Twitter Files part 7 was released Monday morning by Michael Shellenberger.

Part 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop

Recall, in Twitter files 6, we saw the constant contact the FBI had with Twitter.

Former US President Donald Trump could be locked up for 40 years if he is convicted of four federal charges.

Donald Trump could be jailed for up to 40 years and faces thousands of dollars in fines if he is convicted of four federal charges levelled against him by the January 6th committee on Monday.

Trump will never be able to run for office again if he is prosecuted for inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress, and conspiracy to make a false statement.

Prosecutors investigating accused crypto grifter Sam Bankman-Fried have demanded information from high-level Democrats — including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming House minority leader — to help prove their sprawling case, according to a report.

Top Dem lawyer Marc E. Elias, who represents a long list of political campaigns and super PACs, received an email from the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York asking for details about donations received from Bankman-Fried, sources told the New York Times on Saturday.

Unnamed Republicans and other Democratic campaigns received similar messages, the sources said.

Bankman-Fried, 30, who was arrested in the Bahamas Monday on a raft of felony charges in the wake of the November collapse of his FTX crypto exchange, allegedly siphoned off $1.8 billion dollars of customer cash, using some of it to become the Democrats' second-largest individual donor — behind billionaire businessman George Soros — in the 2022 election cycle.

EU legislators agreed early on Sunday (18 December) to introduce a carbon price on buildings and road transport fuels, with a new €87-billion social climate fund established in parallel to cushion the impact on households and help them invest in green solutions.

The new carbon price will apply to petrol, diesel and heating fuels such as natural gas whose climate warming emissions have continued to rise over the years despite attempts to decarbonise.

This was arguably the most controversial issue in the negotiation to reform the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the biggest carbon market in the world and the bloc's flagship climate policy instrument.

"The biggest challenge was ETS2," said Peter Liese, a German lawmaker who represented the European Parliament in the two-day negotiation which started on Friday and concluded on Sunday morning (18 December).

Any attempts to set a gas price cap are "unacceptable," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday, adding that Russia would provide an appropriate response to such a move. His words came as the EU energy ministers agreed on a gas price ceiling mechanism, according to Reuters.

"This is a violation of the market price discovery process, an infringement upon the market process itself," Peskov told journalists, adding that "any references to the ceiling cannot be accepted."

Russia would "need time to carefully evaluate all pros and cons while working on its [response] measures," he noted, adding that a response to the oil cap had been "somewhat delayed" for similar reasons.

The Kremlin is urgently calling on Washington to avoid further escalation over its support to Ukraine's military, on the same day that President Vladimir Putin made a rare state visit to neighboring Belarus, amid growing fears that Belarusian armed forces could enter the fighting in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Monday that the United States' "dangerous and short-sighted policy" has put it "on the brink of a direct clash" with Moscow, according to state media reports.

"It is the US' desire to maintain American hegemony at all costs... as well as its arrogant unwillingness to engage in a serious dialogue on security guarantees" that led to the current crisis, she continued, in reference to Moscow's last February pre-invasion appeal for "guarantees" that Ukraine would not enter NATO.

State media described the sharp words as a necessary reaction to US State Department Spokesman Ned Price's recently placing sole blame on Moscow for the rapid deterioration in US-Russia relations. Price had characterized the current state of relations as "unstable and unpredictable".

The World Health Organization has published a video claiming that people opposed to the COVID jabs are "anti-science" and a "major killing force."

In a recently published video on the World Health Organization's (WHO) Twitter page, Dr. Peter Hotez said that "anti-vaccine activism" is "anti-science aggression" and links people who refused the COVID injections to the "far right."

Russia seeks arms control agreements to prevent dangerous escalation. But the U.S. seeks only unilateral advantage. This risks all out conflict unless this changes.

December 8 marked the 35th anniversary of the signing of the intermediate nuclear forces (INF) treaty. This landmark arms control event was the byproduct of years of hard-nose negotiations capped off by the political courage of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev who together signed the treaty and oversaw its ratification by their respective legislatures.

The first inspectors went to work on July 1, 1988. I was fortunate to count myself among them.

In August 2019, former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the INF treaty; Russia followed shortly thereafter, and this foundational arms control agreement was no more.

The story of Elon Musk's acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an earnest commitment to preserving open discourse in our modern digital public square; exposes grievous previous company wrongs for the whole world to see in a dramatic unveiling of the eponymous "Twitter Files"; and makes decisive personnel decisions to toss out core leaders of the wretched and corrupt old regime, and begins to chart a promising new path forward.

There has been no equivalent story in my adult lifetime, and there is unlikely to be a similar story again any time soon. This is not the type of corporate development one typically reads about in The Wall Street Journal or sees discussed on CNBC. The story is a unicorn.

The remarkable nature of the Elon Musk/Twitter saga, and the specific revelations about Twitter's blacklisting of the infamous 2020 campaign-era Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship/shadow-banning of myriad other right-leaning content creators, has led many on the Right to fete Musk with praise -- at times, even fawning adoration. To be sure, that praise is wholly warranted: Musk has thus far proven wrong the skeptics who were unsure just how big an impact he might be able to make at Twitter, answering the call of his civic duty as the world's wealthiest man. Indeed, he has gone above and beyond his civic duty.

But as transformative as Musk has been in the nascent stages of his Twitter ownership, it is crucial to not forget the bigger picture.