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April Fool's Day - Be Forewarned, Especially Online

Welcome to the international day of distrust for everything and everyone you know. As we are coming to discover, April Fool's Day was both made for the Internet -- and made for the Internet to eventually destroy.

Here are some of this year's early entries:

1) Google Nose

Pick your smell, get your nose against the screen, and get a whiff of whatever crosses your mind. It totally works!

Characters are expensive, and the microblogging network understood how valuable vowels are. See you on the premium account to fully enjoy wrtng wth yr fvrt lttrs. dffclt t frst bt yll gt th hng f t.

Twyttyr? Why byy vywyls whyn yyy gyt "Y" fyr fryy? Syckyrs! #nvwls

— Joan Rivers (@Joan_Rivers) 1 avril 2013

3) The Daily Mirror goes backward

Select the display you want: drunk, mirrored, x-ray. The only time you'll actually need a mirror to read the Daily Mirror.

4) Youtube goes dark

After eight years of loyal time-wasting services, the video hosting site will no longer accept entries and make a massive selection of what the best Youtube video is! It's a suprising quest for quality. What's your guess?

5) The Gmail Blue revolution

It's Gmail. But it's not regular Gmail. It's Gmail Blue. Step up your game, go blue.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

How Russia's Wartime Manipulation Of Energy Prices Could Doom Its Economy

A complex compensation mechanism for fuel companies, currency devaluation, increased demand due to the war, logistics disruptions, and stuttering production growth have combined to trigger price rises and deepening shortages in the Russian energy market.

Photograph of Novatek's gravity-based structure platform for production of liquefied natural gas, floating on a body of water.

Russia, Murmansk Region - July 21, 2023: A view of Novatek's gravity-based structure platform for production of liquefied natural gas.

TASS/ZUMA
Ekaterina Mereminskaya

In Russia, reports of gasoline and diesel shortages have been making headlines in the country for several months, raising concerns about energy supply. The situation escalated in September when a major diesel shortage hit annexed Crimea. Even before that, farmers in the southern regions of Russia had raised concerns regarding fuel shortages for their combines.

“We’ll have to stop the harvest! It will be a total catastrophe!” agriculture minister Dmitry Patrushev had warned at the time. “We should temporarily halt the export of petroleum products now until we have stabilized the situation on the domestic market.”

Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.

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As the crisis deepens, experts are highlighting the unintended consequences of government intervention in fuel pricing and distribution.

The Russian government has long sought to control the prices of essential commodities, including gasoline and diesel. These commodities are considered "signalling products", according to Sergei Vakulenko, an oil and gas expert and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. Entrepreneurs often interpret rising gasoline prices as a signal to adjust their pricing strategies, reasoning that if even gasoline, a staple, is becoming more expensive, they too should raise their prices.

The specter of the 2018 fuel crisis, where gasoline prices in Russia surged at twice the rate of other commodities, haunts the authorities. As a result, they implemented a mechanism to control these prices and ensure a steady supply. Known as the "fuel damper," this mechanism seeks to balance the profitability of selling fuel in both domestic and foreign markets.

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