- Recent polling suggests that Mark Carney winning the leadership of the Liberal Party could dramatically improve the party's fortunes in both Ontario and Quebec. If these results hold, then I really hope the news cameras focus on the faces of Scott Moe and Danielle Smith as they watch the results come in.
- Jim Farley, CEO of the Ford Motor Company, is expressing concerns about the possible impact of Trump's tariffs on his company, and indeed the entire American auto industry. In addition to manufactured auto parts, the 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum could greatly increase costs for the industry. GM CEO Mary Barra is optimistic about her company's ability to adapt, but that could be just an attempt to put on a brave face - especially since Japan and South Korea, home to the US automakers' main competitors, have so far not been hit with the same tariffs as Canada and Mexico.
- The Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, was fired on Friday. The agency she headed is generally considered apolitical, but happens to have played a key role in the legal proceedings against Trump regarding those boxes of classified records that somehow ended up in a washroom at Mar-a-Lago. One hopes that pure spite is the only reason for the dismissal, but it also raises the possibility that her replacement will assist the president in throwing records he doesn't like down the memory hole. Even more alarming, the archivist has a role in verifying the vote count in the Electoral College.
- Two security chiefs at USAID have been put on leave after attempting to stop the Muskrats from accessing classified information. The agency used intelligence reports in planning how to distribute aid; while the use of intelligence for this purpose could be problematic in itself, it's most definitely problematic for a bunch of unvetted teenagers to be going through the data. Oh, and one of them, the 19 year old who has now been appointed as a "senior adviser" at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology as well as FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, was fired a couple of years back from an internship with a cybersecurity firm for leaking company data to a competitor.
- Luigi Mangione has had over $300,000 crowdsourced for his legal defense for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The company, meanwhile, has hired a law firm specializing in defamation to go through social media posts looking for anything someone might say that could be actionable. No mention of any plans to investigate why Mangione might be so popular in the first place, though; that level of self-reflection is uncommon in the corporate world.
- The German Club of Regina is taking heat for renting their facility for a fundraising event for the Buffalo Party of Saskatchewan. Given that the party is a far-right party that advocates secession from Canada, and that the fundraiser itself will see a discussion of whether to join Trump's America, you'd think somebody, somebody at the club would have thought about the optics of a German club renting space to fascist traitors.
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