Euro area countries face an 80% chance of a recession in the next 12 months due to soaring energy prices along with a severe power-supply crunch, according to economists polled by Bloomberg.

The projection, which is up from 60% in a previous survey, puts the risk of recession in the single-currency zone at the highest level since July 2020, the agency reported on Monday.

Germany, the bloc's biggest economy, is reportedly among the most exposed to gas supply reductions, and is forecast to begin shrinking as soon as this quarter.

The massive wave of retail thefts in the United States over the past two years have become a major challenge for both the retail industry and law enforcement.

Weakened law enforcement policies and lesser penalties for these criminal bandit gangs have hit a critical juncture, as crime in the United States has hit proportions not seen in three decades.

The number of increasingly professional organized retail crime (ORC) rings and their frequent attacks have reached crisis scale, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF) in a Sept. 14 report.

These crimes have hurt thousands of businesses and have contributed to higher prices for consumers and loss of key retailers in many communities, as countless stores have closed to due to lack of security.

"The factors contributing to retail shrink have multiplied in recent years, and organized retail crime is a burgeoning threat within the retail industry," said Mark Meadows, NRF vice president for research development and industry analysis.

The pandemic is essentially over, right?

For some, yes. For others, not so much.

It was only June when unvaccinated Canadians were finally allowed to leave the country, for reasons unclear to anyone. The vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, so how did it make sense to keep the unvaccinated behind the frozen curtain? It didn't.

A district court judge in Bozeman this week permanently barred the state from enforcing a 2021 prohibition on transgender athletes participating on collegiate women's sports teams, ruling that the Republican-led Legislature infringed on the constitutional authority of the Montana Board of Regents when it passed the new law.

The court order, issued Wednesday by Gallatin County District Court Judge Rienne McElyea, came one week after oral arguments in a legal challenge brought by the Montana Federation of Public Employees, the Montana Public Interest Research Group and multiple individuals and university faculty associations.

In addition to the transgender athlete ban enacted by House Bill 112, the plaintiffs also argued that lawmakers overextended their authority in passing two other laws affecting college campuses: House Bill 349, which prohibited campuses from limiting support for student groups based on the groups' activities or beliefs, and Senate Bill 319, which imposed new restrictions on campus political activity.

McElyea struck down all three laws, writing that each "attempts to directly control internal university affairs and inject legislative policy judgments into [Montana University System] administration, contrary to the letter and intent of the Montana Constitution."

French farmers are collecting their smallest corn crop in more than three decades, highlighting the massive toll that summer drought has wrought on Europe's food supplies.

Heat and dryness gripped much of the continent throughout summer, in what may be its worst drought in at least 500 years. That's been particularly brutal for farmers, who are already dipping into winter forage reserves to feed cattle as pastures wither and who face shrinking output of everything from potatoes to sugar.

"No region is spared from the drop in yield," the French ministry said of corn.

A law proposed by the government in Kiev on Friday would see some Ukrainians who obtain Russian passports punished with lengthy prison terms. Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk insisted the measure is not aimed at ordinary Ukrainians, but officials who work with the "enemy state."

The draft calls for a sentence of 10-15 years for any local or regional government employees who accept an "enemy" passport. Engaging in "propaganda for an enemy state" would carry a sentence of 5-8 years, while "compelling" Ukrainian citizens to accept an "enemy" passport would be punishable by 8-12 years behind bars.

Any Russian citizens engaging in "illegal passportization on the territory of Ukraine" would also be subject to these penalties, said Vereshchuk, whose portfolio is "reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories."

A plea for more interesting alt-realities than the Moon Landing Hoax, Flat Earth, and No Virus.

The post-truth world, in which our collective perception of reality has been smashed into fragments like a shattered funhouse mirror, contains a plethora of alternative reality structures. I get frustrated with some of the more popular species, not because their champions are aggressive assholes (looking at you, no virusers¹), and not even because their pet narratives rest on misconceptions of well-understood scientific principles.

No, my beef is that so many of them are boring. They lack imagination.

Take the Moon Landing Hoax people. Their basic thing is that the Apollo missions never happened. Mankind never set foot on the lunar regolith; it was just actors hopping around on Stanley Kubrick's sound stage. The Saturn V rockets were simply elaborate set pieces, built at vast trouble and expense to provide verisimilitude for Kubrick's cinematic masterpiece. I guess when you're trying to fake something on the scale of Apollo, it makes sense to go to the trouble of spending all the time and effort necessary to design, test, and build the fantastically complicated and expensive multi-stage rockets, orbiters, and landers necessary for the enterprise, without actually going. Sort of like Borges' 1:1 scale map in The Exactitude of Science: if your fake Moon landing is so close to the real thing that you actually go to the Moon, no one will ever know the difference and you'll fool them all! The hoax was necessary because actually going to the Moon is, you see, impossible: the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the cells of the astronauts². Besides which, obviously if we'd actually gone to the Moon, we'd still be there ... right? To a generation raised on CGI all but indistinguishable from real life, it's fairly easy to believe that simulating the Apollo voyages would have been trivially easy in comparison to actually undertaking the journey (and never mind that that level of FX sophistication didn't exist in the 60s).

'You guys just wanna take me down because I'm a public official'

A Las Vegas official charged with the murder of investigative reporter Jeff German for exposing his affair, told police during a 2020 arrest: 'You guys just wanna take me down because I'm a public official.'

Newly-released bodycam footage shows Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, 45, slurring during his arrest on March 1, 2020.

The Democrat lawmaker was nabbed after police received a call from Mae Ismael, his wife, alleging he drunkenly grabbed her by the neck and hit her arm as they returned from the Bellagio casino. He allegedly also screamed, 'kill me.'

The footage shows Telles slurring his words as officers walk him outside his suburban home in handcuffs and shove him in the backseat of a police car.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk sat down with author, mathematician and cultural critic Dr. James Lindsay for a conversation on Saturday at TPUSA's Defeating the Great Reset event where they talked about how the mind virus of wokeism has exploded since 2020 and has tried to seize as many cultural institutions as it can in its quest for absolute control.

Kirk described how, in the past, conservatives were not "taking seriously this takeover of every major institution of our children, of education, of finance, of sports, of language" by wokeism, "and then 2020 happens."

Comedian Bill Maher bashed what he calls the "unified theory of wokeness" on Friday's episode of his HBO show, garnering both criticism and accusations of racism as well as praise from viewers.

"New rule. You can get creative with a novel, a TV show, or a movie, but history books? That's not supposed to be fanfiction," Maher said to his audience. "How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past, and sometimes that's true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present."