- Donald Trump says that he is ending trade talks with Canada over a recent ad campaign launched in the US by the Ontario government. The ad uses a recording of Ronald Reagan speaking about how tariffs are harmful to American interests. Trump has of course declared it to be "FAKE" and accuses Canada of launching the ad specifically to influence the Supreme Court, which is set to decide on the legality of some of his tariffs in the near future. For his part, Mark Carney is vowing to double exports to other trading partners in order to make up for the increasing unreliability of the US in that regard. Will this be enough to convince Carney to lift or reduce tariffs on Chinese cars in order to get China to do the same for our canola? That remains to be seen.
- A bill to formally annex the entire West Bank has passed first reading in Israel's parliament against the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party. Think about that for a moment - there's now a slim majority in the Knesset that's too extreme even for Netanyahu.
- Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder who is running as the Republican candidate for mayor of New York, is being pressured to drop out of the race and endorse centrist candidate Andrew Cuomo in order to keep Zohran Mamdani out of the mayor's office. Sliwa, for his part, says he'd sooner be tortured to death than drop out.
- The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has answered the question of whether it can be ethical to genetically alter wild organisms with a qualified yes. Evidently they figure that genetically altering mosquitoes to reduce their ability to carry diseases, for instance, would do more good than harm (it would mean a lot less pesticide use, for one thing); further down the line, this could include measures to enable organisms to tolerate higher temperatures in anticipation of a warming world. Stuff like that will probably be necessary, but it will definitely have its risks (this is a "Godzilla threshold" sort of thing, not something to be taken lightly) and will raise the question in some people's minds whether it will still be "nature" after it's been tinkered with to such an extent.
- The management committee of the BC Conservative Party is calling on leader John Rustad to resign, citing severe internal divisions in the party. Among other things, five MLAs have either left or been expelled from the party caucus just since the last election. Rustad says he has no plans to resign, having received 70% support in a recent leadership review (albeit with a turnout of only 15% of the party's membership).
- Manitoba is managing to attract badly needed doctors from the US. Several of them are former Manitobans who had accepted positions in the States but now fear the rising hate and political instability in that country.
- Winnipeg Transit is replacing the glass in 30 high use bus shelters with polycarbonate, which is 15% more expensive than safety glass but which is very difficult to break and thus will likely have to be replaced a lot less often. I've thought this to be a good idea for quite some time; the only possible downside I can see is that it could displace aggression onto other potential targets for vandalism.
- A man was arrested in Selkirk, Manitoba after allegedly slashing the tires of 23 vehicles with a knife; the one thing that all the targetted vehicles had in common was that they were red in colour.
