- Mark Carney has acknowledged something many of us have long believed - that it is highly unlikely that Canada will be able to satisfy Donald Trump sufficiently to avoid having to put up with tariffs. This is a good thing; how he handles the situation remains to be seen (and there may be no truly good way of doing so). It seems that other world leaders are thinking the same thing, though; hopefully our people are talking to their people to find some mutually beneficial ways to avoid dealing with the US any more than necessary. Couple that with the fact that fewer people than ever even want to visit the place now, and they're going to find themselves very lonely on the international stage, probably for a long time to come.
- Brampton, Ontario mayor Patrick Brown is under police protection following reports of threats to him and his family. According to the CBC article, the police are withholding details so as not to jeopardize the investigation; the Toronto Sun has filled the void by juxtaposing the threats to Brown with a news conference about organized crime to let readers connect the dots, whether justifiably or not.
- Immigration judges are allowing the names of lawyers representing ICE to be suppressed in the public record, possibly to make it more difficult for bar associations to take action against them in the event that they do anything unethical in the course of their work (like, I dunno, collaborate with a fascist regime maybe).
- Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of Congress from California, attempted to introduce a motion that would have allowed the House of Representatives to vote on whether to make the Epstein files public. Republicans on the House Rules Committee voted all but unanimously to stop the motion from being debated by the House; presumably this is to protect Republican members of the House from the impossible choice of having to either be seen as defending child abuse or going against the wishes of their Dear Leader.
- Gas powered motorcycles, scooters and mopeds are certainly more fuel efficient than cars, but their emissions other than CO2 are far worse due to their being exempt from a lot of the regulations on cars. Vietnam, which has rather a lot of these vehicles, is doing something about it - they're banning them from central Hanoi as of a year from now. Hopefully e-bikes and e-scooters are going to replace them.
- The two men who cut down the famous Sycamore Gap tree have been sentenced to four years and three months in prison on two counts of criminal damage - one for the tree and the other for damage caused to Hadrian's Wall itself.
- Chinese researchers have created a chip that can be implanted in a bee so as to turn it into a cyborg. The biggest barrier to making this practical is having a power supply that is both long-lived enough to carry out a mission and light enough that the bee would still be able to fly.
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