France Is Running Out Of Fuel: 16% Of French Gas Stations Are Reporting Outages And Rationing Has Started In Several Other Countries

France Is Running Out Of Fuel: 16% Of French Gas Stations Are Reporting Outages And Rationing Has Started In Several Other Countries

Michael Snyder

It has begun. Hundreds of gas stations all over France are reporting that they are out of at least one type of fuel, and there are quite a few nations in Asia that are now imposing very strict measures in order to conserve energy. I have no idea why this isn’t making more news here in the United States. Maybe the big news outlets don’t think that there is any way that this could ever happen here. Or maybe there is a coordinated effort to keep the public calm. I don’t know. But without a doubt, this is a very big deal.

I knew that Europe was facing a severe energy crunch, but I didn’t realize that things had gotten so bad already.

It is being reported that 16 percent of all gas stations in France are out of at least one type of fuel…

Official French pump data on Monday showed that 16 percent of stations are short of at least one main fuel, diesel or petrol.

That was slightly better than Sunday evening (17 percent) but worse than Friday (13 percent). About 9,900 stations are in the count, according to prix-carburants.gouv.fr.

Shortages were worst this morning in Pays de la Loire (20 percent); Grand Est (19 percent); Île-de-France, Centre-Val de Loire, and Normandy (18 percent); Nouvelle-Aquitaine (17 percent); and Brittany, Hauts-de-France, and Occitanie (16 percent).

We aren’t just talking about a few isolated cases.

We are talking about hundreds upon hundreds of French gas stations that are experiencing outages.

This is serious.

If you can actually find fuel in France, prices are absolutely outrageous.

The average price of a liter of diesel in France is up to €2.406, which is approximately $10.45 a gallon.

Europe is facing its worst energy crisis in history, and there is no end in sight.

In fact, Saudi Arabia has told Europe that there will be no shipments of oil for them for the entire month of October…

The trigger this week was a drone strike on Sept. 10 that closed Saudi Arabia’s East West pipeline, the line carrying crude from the eastern oil fields to Yanbu on the Red Sea without touching Hormuz.

Aramco has now told European refining customers they will receive no crude at all in October under long-term contracts, reported Bloomberg. The decision applies to every European buyer.

What this means is that the shortages that we are witnessing in Europe right now are likely to get even worse.

Meanwhile, several countries in Asia have been forced to institute fuel rationing.

In Pakistan, many types of businesses are being forced to close early in order to save energy…

From September 17, shops and malls across Pakistan must close by 09:00 PM, wedding halls by 10:00 PM, and restaurants by 11:00 PM. This Cabinet Division order runs for the next three months.

Moreover, government vehicles lose 50% of their fuel allocation, with security fleets exempt.

The government banned new vehicle purchases and official foreign travel, and ordered a 5% cut to non-employee spending for fiscal 2026-27.

In Bangladesh, almost all businesses must now shut down by 8 o’clock at the latest…

Shops, markets, and shopping centres must shut by 8 PM, an hour earlier than before, and lit billboards go dark from 7 PM. Only hospitals, pharmacies, food shops, and emergency services are exempt.

Industry is taking the same hit. Garment factories, the country’s main source of foreign currency, face rationing and temporary closures, and one Gazipur plant reported four or five power cuts a day.

In Indonesia, there are now extremely strict rules about when citizens are allowed to fill up their vehicles…

By September 11, queues at Makassar pumps ran as long as one kilometer. Ride-hailing drivers described three-hour waits and called it the worst shortage they had ever seen.

South Sulawesi’s answer was rationing by decree on September 12. Cars can only refuel on days matching their plate number, private vehicles must show a fuel gauge below one bar, and trucks and buses may fill up only between 06:00 PM and 04:00 AM.

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Macron’s UN remark stuns Israel

‘Hamas never operated in the West Bank’: Macron’s UN remark stuns Israel

Danna Avni

French President Emmanuel Macron’s assertion that Hamas has not operated in the West Bank drew strong criticism from Israeli officials on Tuesday, following his address to the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly.

“Just look at what is happening in the West Bank; day after day, we witness violations. And for what? Hamas has never operated in the West Bank,” Macron said. “What we need is to respect the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to exist. This is a necessary condition for the security of the people of Israel, today and in the future.”

Israeli officials rejected Macron’s assertion, pointing to attacks and alleged plots attributed to Hamas operatives in the West Bank.

Their criticism came after Netanel Shukron, a French-Israeli citizen and father of six, was killed near the N’vei Tzuf spring in the Binyamin area. Israeli officials said the attacker was affiliated with Hamas. Earlier in the month, Israeli security forces announced the arrest of a suspected 10-member Hamas cell accused of planning an attack in the northern Jordan Valley.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office described Macron’s remarks as “a grotesque absurdity.”

“On Sunday, the eve of Yom Kippur, just two days ago, Netanel Shukron—a French citizen and father of six—was murdered in his car by a Hamas terrorist in the West Bank,” the statement said. “In his final breaths, he told his son to run away. Hamas terrorists perpetrate attacks against Jews almost every day. They have murdered countless Israeli civilians in the West Bank. Ignorance is no excuse for erasing their blood.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also accused Macron of misrepresenting Hamas’s presence in the territory.

“President Macron is lying,” Smotrich wrote on X. He cited Shukron’s killing as one of “hundreds of attacks” allegedly led by Hamas, adding that the organization plays a significant role in encouraging and carrying out terrorism in the West Bank.

Israeli advocacy activist Yoseph Haddad similarly condemned the French president’s statement, arguing that Hamas has operated in the West Bank for decades. He cited the March 2002 suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, which killed 30 people and wounded more than 140. The attacker was linked to a Hamas cell based in Tulkarm.

During his address, Macron also criticized the international response to the war in the Gaza Strip and questioned the value of recognizing a Palestinian state without taking further action.

“A year ago, in this very hall, several dozen countries recognized Palestine,” Macron said. “You recognized it on paper. Look at the reality on the ground—but what is the value of our credibility if we remain inactive regarding Gaza?”

Macron said claims that peace had been achieved had not resulted in the opening of humanitarian-aid channels, calling the situation “shameful.”

Turning to Lebanon, Macron said only a fully sovereign Lebanese state would be capable of disarming Hezbollah and restoring security for Lebanese citizens and neighboring countries.

Macron was among several world leaders who addressed the Palestinian issue during Tuesday’s General Assembly session.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of committing genocide, saying generations of Palestinians would bear the resulting pain and trauma.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterated his support for an independent Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. He also described Gaza as “the largest children’s graveyard in the world.”

Members of the Israeli delegation walked out of the chamber during Erdoğan’s address in protest.

‘Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true’: Israel releases exposé of UN’s bias before General Assembly

‘Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true’: Israel releases exposé of UN’s bias before General Assembly

ByARIELLA ROITMAN

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism and the National Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister's Office are launching The UN's Lie Industry, an exposé of the “systematic and false bias against Israel” as the United Nations kicks off its first day of the General Assembly. 

The campaign video depicts the UN General Assembly hall populated by parrots representing various countries, the organizations said in a statement. “The parrots repeat the same message one after another: ‘Blame Israel.’”

The call duplicates as the video progresses, with echoes heard throughout the hall until it becomes a choir repeating the same accusation.

The video concludes with the message: “Repeating lies doesn’t make them true.”

‘Even 1,000 repetitions of a lie will not make it true,’ Chikli says

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli said, "Time and again, the UN General Assembly hall has turned into an echo chamber for libels against Israel. The same lies pass from mouth to mouth, report to report, and speech to speech, until an attempt is made to present them as an agreed-upon truth.” 

“The new video sharply underscores this culture of repetition. Even 1,000 repetitions of a lie will not make it true, and we will continue to expose the facts behind the anti-Israel choir,” he concluded.

The Diaspora Ministry also launched a website tied to the campaign and exposing the “lies and biases in UN publications,” according to the statement.

The website was made in cooperation with the National Security Council (NCS), and contains “comprehensive research sources documenting how biased information about Israel has been gathered, given institutional endorsement, and distributed worldwide since the October 7 attacks,” according to the statement.

It addresses topics such as information manipulation, an organized culture based on hostility towards Israel, false claims of starvation in Gaza, Hamas infiltration into UNRWA, and the fabrication of a "genocide" narrative, among others.

“The site also includes testimonies from UN personnel regarding internal silencing and persecution,” the statement added.

"A large portion of the false blood libels against Israel come from the workshop of UN reports,” National Public Diplomacy Directorate Head Tzipi Hotovely alleged.

He also said that the “false starvation campaign in Gaza is just one example of this machinery of lies.”

“Facing this propaganda, we are putting forward the truth and the facts to shatter the industry of lies against Israel.”

The organization described the video as illustrating “one of the central mechanisms exposed on the website: An international system that echoes itself. Claims against Israel pass between bodies, countries, UN agencies, and media outlets, are cited repeatedly, and are given the appearance of an accepted fact, even when their source has not been checked or verified.”

The campaign, which focuses primarily on US and European capitals’ policies on Israel, was produced via the Government Advertising Agency (Lapam).

War with Russia becoming Europe’s Plan A – Rachel Marsden (VIDEO)

War with Russia becoming Europe’s Plan A – Rachel Marsden (VIDEO)

RT

Europe’s accelerated moves to deter conflict with Russia could end up provoking one, RT contributor Rachel Marsden has said.

Russian officials have repeatedly rejected claims that they have aggressive designs against the EU and NATO, saying that they are contrived by Western politicians to scare the population at home and justify growing military spending. Moscow has said a conflict with its European neighbors is only possible if Russia is attacked first.

Speaking to RT on Monday, Marsden said that Europe “is having one of those moments when everyone insists that they’re preparing for peace, which apparently involves a whole lot of paperwork about war.”

“European governments are increasing defense spending, rebuilding military capacity, and discussing what they might do if a confrontation with Russia widens,” she noted.

The RT contributor mentioned last week’s statement by the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, who said that the bloc has developed 4,000 pages of military plans detailing a response to a possible escalation with Moscow.

Europe insists that it’s looking to avoid a conflict with Russia and that a direct clash is only a contingency, but with “an awful lot of detail devoted to Plan B it starts to sound suspiciously like Plan A,” she noted.

“The existence of military plans does not by itself prove that either side intends to start a war with the other, but it does show how thoroughly the possibility of one has really at this point been built into the everyday operating system,” Marsden said.

How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research

How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research

Paul Thacker

On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates’ efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the CV pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, “What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?”

Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world’s largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meetings held on federal property.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation’s mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation’s assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac – this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on vaccines and therapeutics.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency’s own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.

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