- Donald Trump has issued pardons for over 1,500 rioters who participated in the Jan 6 coup attempt, as well as commuting the sentences of several leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were imprisoned for their part in the putsch.
- European leaders are not giving up on the Paris agreement despite the US withdrawal. This is reassuring, but it should be noted that Europe is not immune to the kind of madness that has swept the US (some may recall that they had problems of that kind before). And those problems just keep threatening to come back. Austria's centre-left, centrist, and centre-right parties just failed to piece together a coalition following last September's election, meaning that the far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) will have a crack at forming government. There are fears that Germany could be at risk of a similar takeover.
- French President Emmanuel Macron is concerned at the possibility of the US withdrawing forces from Europe, perhaps to focus on China, and called for EU countries to increase their defense spending. That in itself would be fair enough; more worrisome is the fact that Macron, who is in command of the world's third largest combat-ready nuclear arsenal, is talking about possibly sending troops to Ukraine, which while easy to sympathize with would pose unacceptable escalation risks. Evidently too many people have forgotten the lessons of Cold War era war simulations like Proud Prophet, which among other things concluded that "relying on escalation as a means of conflict resolution" would likely lead to all-out nuclear war.
- Another of Trump's executive orders blocks the leasing of any federal land for wind farms, and could potentially even lead to the removal of existing ones by not renewing their leases.
- For all you can say about Joe Biden's handling of the Israel-Palestine situation, he did at least impose sanctions on far-right settler leaders in the West Bank. Yet another of Trump's executive orders has lifted those sanctions, though.
- The Manitoba RCMP has deployed a Black Hawk helicopter to the Canada-US border to monitor the smuggling of people and other commodities across the border, perhaps in an attempt to placate the US.
- A Winnipeg man has pleaded guilty to several offenses, including dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, mischief over $5,000, and assaulting a police officer following a crack- and meth-fuelled rampage with an excavator at a water treatment plant, which caused damage to 5 buildings, as well as several vehicles and pieces of heavy equipment.
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