- Mark Carney is remaining tight-lipped about whether he is willing to lower or eliminate the prohibitive tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in return for China dropping the equally prohibitive tariffs on canola and other Canadian exports. Doug Ford, not surprisingly, is vehemently opposed, and I suspect that he'll get what he wants. As I've remarked before, the beneficiaries from such a move are mostly farmers who aren't going to vote Liberal no matter what, while the places dependent on the auto industry are more in play in an election. In addition to that, Carney seems to be clinging to the hope that it will be possible to make a deal with Trump, and going against Trump's wishes on the China file would be another nail in the coffin of that hope.
- Canadians continue to boycott the US in significant numbers. CNN has come out with a hand-wringing headline about how the boycott is harming "innocent bystanders", but as folks in this Reddit thread point out, the sort of small businesspeople that are affected by this voted for Trump in large numbers, so it's a bit of a stretch to call them "innocent".
- The Chinese government has expelled nine top generals from its military. The government says that they were expelled for corruption; others suspect the motivation to be political. Either or both of these things could be true, of course.
- A man who planned to visit his native South Sudan had brought along supplies for people in his hometown. Among the supplies were a few sets of walkie-talkies that he'd bought off of Amazon. Unfortunately, he was hoping to access the country via Ethiopia, and walkie-talkies are considered "military equipment" in that country and illegal for civilians to import. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
- An actor who was fired by a Disney subsidiary for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 has had his lawsuit for unfair dismissal thrown out by a court. Rockmond Dunbar had claimed that he needed an accommodation for religions reasons due to his membership in a church called the "Congregation of Universal Wisdom"; among his arguments he said that "Man created the COVID-19 vaccine to separate you from God" (though for some strange reason he felt the compulsion to also say that he is "not an anti-vaxxer" notwithstanding all the anti-vax things he said). In any case, he came out looking rather foolish when it was shown that he'd been taking synthetic testosterone and other drugs of which the church disapproves; he was forced to acknowledge on the witness stand that he is "not perfect".
No comments:
Post a Comment