🚨Five people, including an off-duty police officer, were killed, and two were injured in a shooting spree that unfolded Thursday night in Raleigh, North Carolina. Police have identified the suspect as a 15-year-old male. The suspect is in critical condition in the hospital.

The shooting occurred in a residential neighborhood near the Neuse River Greenway, a popular trail on the outskirts of the state capital. A motive is yet to be established, but Raleigh Police Chief Estella Patterson said the investigation remains ongoing.

"My heart is heavy because we don't have answers as to why this tragedy occurred," Chief Patterson said at a Friday morning news conference. More than 34,000 people have died in shootings in the US in 2022, more than half of which were from suicide, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.

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“Winter is coming.” 🥶🥶🥶

The famous Silicon Valley venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya has some strong opinions about the energy crisis in Europe. While speaking on the popular Apple podcast “ALL–IN,” Chamath says Europe is in an energy crisis because they listened to Greta Thunberg instead of Donald Trump.

"An entire continent essentially allowed a 16-year-old girl to dictate their energy policy. And when Greta Thunberg was able to shame an entire continent into walking away from nuclear and not really evaluating how you can have energy independence. What they did was they put Europe in an incredibly fragile position...

[President Trump's] language turned people off even though the message that he was delivering was 100% right. When Trump went to the United Nations, he was clear, he was precise, and in hindsight, and I'm saying this as a Democrat, he was right about the German reliance on Russian gas and the European reliance"...

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🇬🇧British Prime Minister Liz Truss has fired her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng and scrapped parts of their unpopular economic package in a desperate bid for political survival, less than 40 days into her premiership.

With financial markets in turmoil, a chastened Truss said on Friday that she accepted her government’s plans for unfunded tax cuts had gone “further and faster” than investors were expecting.

Truss, 47, promised to act quickly to tackle the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, saying that within a week, she would devise a plan to tackle rising energy bills and secure future fuel supplies.

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🪨🧨At least 25 people have died, and dozens remain trapped underground after an explosion in a coal mine in northern Turkey's Bartin province. Around 110 people were working in the mine at the time of the blast, almost half at over 300 meters deep.

Turkey's health minister Fahrettin Koca said 11 people had been rescued and were being treated. As night fell, emergency workers were digging through rocks to try to reach more survivors.

The explosion is believed to have occurred at around 300m deep. Some 49 people were working in the "risky" zone between 300 and 350m (985 to 1,150ft) underground, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said. The cause of the blast is not yet known, and the local prosecutor's office has begun an investigation.

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🔹Media Debunks GOP ‘Hoax’ Claiming Schools Keep Litter Boxes for ‘Students Who Identify as Cats’

As part of their drive to roll back LGBTQ rights in states across the US, conservative figures have repeatedly claimed that school districts are being forced to keep litter boxes used by students who supposedly identify as animals. There’s just one problem: it’s never happened.

According to a Friday article by NBC News, at least 20 Republican candidates and elected officials have claimed in 2022 that public school districts in the US are being forced to place litter boxes, usually used by indoor cats or other pets, to instead be used by students who identify as cats instead of regular bathroom facilities.

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🔭♊Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole. The burst of gamma rays -- the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation -- was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists worldwide.

Astrophysicist Brendan O'Connor told AFP that gamma-ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as occurred on Sunday, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our Sun.

"It's really breaking records, both in the amount of photons, and the energy of the photons that are reaching us," said O'Connor, who used infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile to take fresh observations early Friday.

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👩‍🚀Four astronauts returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule Friday, ending their nearly six-month space station mission with a splashdown in the Atlantic off Florida. Wet and windy weather across Florida delayed their homecoming. SpaceX and NASA finally gave the all-clear on Friday, and the three Americans and one Italian departed the International Space Station, their residence since April.

The capsule parachuted into the ocean, just off Jacksonville, Florida, about five hours later. It carried NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins, the first Black woman to complete a long-term spaceflight, and the European Space Agency’s Samantha Cristoforetti. SpaceX delivered their replacements last week.

Before checking out, the astronauts said they couldn’t wait to have a cold drink with ice, eat some pizza and ice cream, take a shower, revel in nature, and, of course, reunite with their families.

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⚡️ Air raid alert declared in Kiev, local administration says

⚡️Warnings also issued in regions of Volyn, Rovno, Ternopol, Odessa, Nikolaev, Poltava, Sumy

❗️Air defense activated in Novaya Kakhovka, sounds of two blasts heard — regional administration

🛡New Russia's gas pipeline to Turkey will be safe and protected from foreign interference, according to Boris Martsinkevich, the chief editor of Geoenergetica Info analytic magazine.

"Basically, it is safe. There are two territorial zones of Russia and Turkey, exclusive economic zones of both countries... The underwater route has already been prepared for the construction of the TurkStream [pipeline], all the studies have been conducted, it has been checked for the presence of munitions of the [Second World] War," Martsinkevich told Sputnik.

🧐Since Turkey is a NATO member state, a conflict within the alliance would be inevitable if the pipeline is attacked, the expert added.

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❗️There was a missile strike in Kiev on Saturday, the head of the regional military administration Oleksiy Kuleba said.

"Kiev region! There was a missile strike on one of the communities of the region. All services are working, rescuers are on the site. Preliminary, there are no victims," Kuleba said on Telegram.

🐋😞Since September 24, 30 dead whales have been discovered in different areas of Argentine's Nuevo Gulf, with researchers still guessing what killed the animals.

After 18 dead whales were discovered in the region in late September, the Southern Right Whale Health Monitoring Program has announced that 12 new cases have been added to the gloomy number.

🔺According to the scientists, the so-called "red tide" of harmful algal blooms could be behind the whale mortality in the region. However, the investigation into the matter is still underway, with the official cause to be determined.

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🇬🇧 Britain's PM Liz Truss might be heading into a new market turmoil after sacking Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday, Bloomberg reports.

By announcing yet another U-turn on her plan to freeze corporation tax and leaving her other tax cuts in place, Truss actually “laid the ground” for more market tumult on Monday, the outlet estimated.

Meanwhile, Tories appear to be increasingly discontent with her performance in office. One unnamed Tory MP was quoted as saying that Truss “has days left in the job”, while another suggested she will resign before Christmas.

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⚡️Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his condolences to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan following the deadly incident in a coal mine in northern Turkey.

So far, the Turkish Health Ministry has confirmed at least 28 deaths caused by the mine explosion.

❗️Death toll from coal mine explosion in Turkey rises to 40, the country's Interior Ministry says

🥣💷UK consumers have embarked on a new strategy of buying frozen food in a bid to save cash amid ever-increasing energy and grocery price tags, according to Bloomberg.

The developments come after Britain was hit by the highest grocery price inflation in four decades, according to estimates by the international company Kantar Worldpanel.

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Previously undetected by experts, the Prestige virus attacked Ukraine and Poland's transport companies, Microsoft reported the cyberattack.

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❗️Kiev authorities have announced an air alert.

⚡️China does not rule out the use of force in resolving the Taiwan issue, but only against supporters of independence and outside interference – Communist Party of China representative

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❗️Exclusive: Russia must be in the forefront in Africa because relying on the West is tantamount to recolonization, Zolani Mkiva, manager of the Mkiva Foundation and delegate to the South African National Council of Provinces, tells Sputnik

💬"Russia, being a major player in BRICS, but also in the international arena, must come in Africa. It must be in the forefront. We can't rely on the West because the West represents those who once colonized us. They want to maintain that trajectory of colonization so that we only remain consumers and not the players...We don't want to go to the IMF and the World Bank to borrow money because that will be tantamount to recolonization. We will forever be doomed in that way. We will never find ourselves raising our head again."

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