EU members face a potential gas shortfall in the event of a cold winter and a further decline in Russian deliveries, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned.

According to a report released on Monday, market fundamentals have eased significantly since the start of 2023 and the EU is well on track to fill storage sites to 95% of working capacity.

However, full storage is still no guarantee against winter volatility, the agency cautioned. "Our simulations show that a cold winter, together with a full halt of Russian piped gas supplies to the European Union starting from 1 October 2023, could easily renew price volatility and market tensions," the IEA stated.

The report highlighted that a steep decline of almost 80 billion cubic meters (bcm) in Russian gas deliveries to the EU - equating to 15% of global LNG trade - placed "unprecedented pressure" on global gas markets in 2022.

Long-time Toronto District School Board principal Richard Bilkszto took on the aggressive anti-black racism bullies at the board and paid the ultimate price for doing so.

Humiliated by a race "expert" hired by the board to preach anti-black racism dogma, left hung to dry by his peers and cancelled by his TDSB superiors, the celebrated principal took his own life last week.


"There is no question that these events and the lack of support from the TDSB caused him intense stress and mental suffering," said his lawyer Lisa Bildy, who called him a "highly accomplished leader in the field of adult education" over a 24-year career.

Bilkszto just filed a $750k lawsuit against the board alleging beach of contract, defamation of character and reprisal by the board's senior administrators after he was repeatedly labelled a "white supremacist," shamed and humiliated at two anti-racism indoctrination sessions run by Kike Ojo Thompson and her KOJO Institute.

The lawsuit has yet to be served on the board, says Bildy, adding that it's up to his family to decide whether to continue.

His crime: He challenged, politely, Ojo-Thompson when she contended at one of her indoctrination sessions that Canada is far more racist than our neighbours south of the border.

The sessions during which Bilkszto became her target occurred on April 26 and May 3, 2021.

Authorities have taken action against Igor Strelkov on suspicion of extremism, his wife claims...

Igor Strelkov, a controversial former Donbass militia commander, was detained in Moscow on Friday amid an investigation into allegations of extremism, according to news outlets and family members. The soldier-turned-blogger is also known by his real name, Igor Girkin.

Citing sources, newspaper RBK reported that the Russian Investigative Committee was executing a search order at Strelkov's home, and that he had been taken into custody.

Strelkov became the focus of international attention in 2014 while serving as defense minister of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), which was then unrecognized.

The role made him the prime suspect in the Dutch investigation into the downing of MH17, which crashed in July 2014, killing all 298 people on board. In November 2022, a Dutch court sentenced Strelkov in absentia to a life term in prison. Moscow rejected the prosecution as politically motivated and claimed it was an attempt to whitewash possible Ukrainian guilt.

Outspoken misogynist and social media sensation Andrew Tate made many bombastic claims before his December 2022 arrest in Romania on human trafficking and rape charges.

One of the most striking was that he was working with unnamed Romanian gambling kingpins to operate casinos in the Eastern European country, where Tate has chosen to base himself because, he has said, it's a place where "corruption is accessible to everybody."

In multiple interviews, Tate claimed to have partnered up with some "brothers, mafia guys," who owned "400 [gambling] locations from Estonia all the way down to the East of Europe," and to have helped his new partners push competitors out of business.

Elon Musk said on Sunday he was looking to change Twitter's logo, tweeting: "And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds."

In a post on the site at 12:06 a.m. ET, the social media platform's billionaire owner added: "If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow."

Musk posted an image of a flickering "X", and later in a Twitter Spaces audio chat replied "Yes" when asked if the Twitter logo will change, adding that "it should have been done a long time ago."

Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013

Ten years after The Washington Post was purchased by Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, the outlet is "on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023," according to a recent New York Times report.

Bezos took over the Post for $250 million in 2013, in one of the most significant media acquisitions of the last decade. The Post's famous saying, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," became the official slogan of the paper in 2017, under Bezos' watch.

But it seems that even Bezos could not turn around The Post's flagging popularity with readers.

"Present-day philosophers developing metaethics try to go further; as they slip and slide along the elastic space leading to an analysis of the language of ethics, they contribute toward eliminating the imperfections and habits of natural conceptual language. However, penetrating this ever-mysterious nucleus is highly tempting to a scientist." — Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology

In Political Ponerology, despite presenting a sweeping historical scope of the issue he intends to illuminate, Andrew Lobaczewski leaves considerable gaps in the relevant literature review supporting his own clinical observations. Moreover, quantitative estimates of the various psychopathology types he introduces and describes are left unsupported by any empirical research. Perhaps paradoxically, this may make it one of the most important books for The Public to read to gain a solid conceptual understanding of the macrosocial psychopathology, aka the cultural revolution, we are living through. It is more a social-ecological presentation of cultural psychological phenomena than a theoretical academic piece. The footnotes provided in this revised expanded edition edited by Harrison Koehli are culled from contemporary sources and thinking and are a welcome addition, somewhat offsetting Lobaczewski's own shortcomings noted above.

As someone trained in both forensic psychology developmental psychopathology and who has read extensively on the topic of psychopathy, including Cleckley's seminal The Mask of Sanity (5th Ed), I found Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology both a promising work, but one that was written without deep expertise or knowledge in these constructs and fields. Indeed, Lobaczewski seems have been unaware that a dedicated field of developmental psychopathology had been formally introduced — with its own flagship journal — at least contemporaneous with the reported completion of the original manuscript in 1984 and well prior to the final official publication in 2006 by Red Pill Press (Lobaczewski died in 2007). Nonetheless, this is an important work. It is written in a style that synthetically blends personal experience and observation with the introduction of descriptive and novel psychological terminology, including conceptual psychopathology taxonomies (described below), without becoming bogged down in excessive and obtuse discourse that often characterizes 'academically-oriented' work. For this reason, I think a wider audience may find it more easily digested and 'connectable' to contemporary phenomenon impacting them.

A French teenager was hospitalized after an attack by a group of youths who had taken issue with her choice of clothing on a night out left her face disfigured.

The attack occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning when the 19-year-old victim, named as Nissan, was on a date with her boyfriend in the southern French city of Toulouse.

At around 3 a.m. on Boulevard Lazare Carnot, the pair were accosted by four youths who accused the teen of being dressed inappropriately. She was wearing a crop top, which the mob claimed to be immoral.

It's not about writing tickets, saving lives or fighting climate change; it's about knowing where every digitally marked human being is at all times

The digitization of transportation is kicking into high gear.

I reported on my Substack recently about a citizen backlash in San Diego over that city's plans to embed mass-surveillance technology along highways, at intersections, light poles, etc.

So-called "smart city" technology includes ultra-high resolution, internet-connected cameras, license-plate readers, facial-recognition scanners and speakers. It will set the framework for digital eyes and ears to spy on citizens 24/7, uploading personal data in real time to be perused and analyzed by law enforcement, financial decision-makers and other third-party stakeholders.

I reported on June 28 on how the Atlanta airport in cooperation with Delta Airlines is offering specialized "hands free" and "card free" services to air passengers who agree to take a biometric digital ID driver's license containing a facial scan. But I also discovered that American citizens are having their faces scanned by facial-recognition software, often without their permission, before they board international flights leaving not just Atlanta but many other U.S. airports.

Shark Week show delves into whether sharks off the coast of Florida are coming into contact with the huge quantities of cocaine that get dumped in these waters.

For decades, huge bundles of cocaine have washed up on Florida beaches, having been smuggled from South and Central America. Hauls are often dumped at sea (both to give to smugglers and evade law enforcement), and currents and tides push them to shore. In June, the U.S. Coast Guard seized over 14,100 pounds (6,400 kilograms) of cocaine in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, with an estimated value of $186 million.

With so much cocaine entering the waters, Tom "The Blowfish" Hird wanted to find out whether the thousands of sharks off Florida were ingesting the dumped narcotics, and — if so — whether the drugs were having any impact on them. In Cocaine Sharks, which is part of Discovery's Shark Week, Hird and University of Florida environmental scientist Tracy Fanara carry out a series of experiments to find out.

Hird told Live Science:

"The deeper story here is the way that chemicals, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are entering our waterways — entering our oceans — and what effect that they then could go on to have on these delicate ocean ecosystems."