Trudeau slams Trump for starting a trade war with Canada while appeasing Putin

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Updated 05 March 2025
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Trudeau slams Trump for starting a trade war with Canada while appeasing Putin

  • “I want to speak directly to one specific American, Donald,” Trudeau said
  • Trump has threatened Canada’s sovereignty, provoking anger in the country

TORONTO: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday called American tariffs “very dumb” and said that US President Donald Trump is appeasing Russia while launching a trade war against Canada.
In a blunt news conference during his final days in office, Trudeau said that Canada would plaster retaliatory tariffs on more than $100 billion of American goods in response to Trump’s 25 percent tariffs.
“Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same, they are talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense,” a visibly angry Trudeau said.
Trump imposed tariffs against Washington’s three biggest trading partners, drawing immediate retaliation from Mexico, Canada and China and sending financial markets into a tailspin. Just after midnight, Trump put 25 percent taxes, or tariffs, on Mexican and Canadian imports, though he limited the levy to 10 percent on Canadian energy.
“What he wants to see is a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us,” Trudeau said. “That is never going to happen. We will never be the 51st state.”
Trudeau addressed Trump directly by his first name.
“I want to speak directly to one specific American, Donald,” Trudeau said. “It’s not in my habit to agree with the Wall Street Journal, but Donald, they point out that even though you’re a very smart guy, this is a very dumb thing to do.”
Later Tuesday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the US would likely meet Canada and Mexico “in the middle,” with an announcement coming as soon as Wednesday.
Lutnick told Fox Business News that the tariffs would not be paused, but that Trump would reach a compromise.
“I think he’s going to figure out, you do more, and I’ll meet you in the middle in some way,” Lutnick said.
In a post on Truth Social earlier Tuesday, Trump said: “Please explain to Governor Trudeau, of Canada, that when he puts on a Retaliatory Tariff on the US, our Reciprocal Tariff will immediately increase by a like amount!”
Trump has threatened Canada’s sovereignty, provoking anger in the country. Canadian hockey fans have been booing the American national anthem at recent NHL and NBA games. Trudeau channeled the betrayal that many Canadians are feeling.
“Canadians are hurt. Canadians are angry. We are going to choose to not go on vacation in Florida,” Trudeau said. “We are going to choose to try and buy Canadian products ... and yeah we’re probably going to keep booing the American anthem.”
The premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, said that he would issue a 25 percent export tax on electricity sold to the US and may later cut it off completely if the American tariffs persist. Ontario powered 1.5 million homes in the US in 2023 in Michigan, New York and Minnesota.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford also told The Associated Press that he would stop the sale of nickel and rare minerals to the US
Ontario and other provinces already began removing American liquor brands from government store shelves. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario sells nearly $1 billion Canadian dollars ($687 million) worth of American wine, beer, spirits and seltzers every year.

 


Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections

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Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections

  • Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters

NEW YORK: Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time Thursday after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass barrier.
The visit came ahead of a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained in a Louisiana jail since March 8.
Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters and is one of the few who has remained in custody as his case winds its way through both immigration and federal court.
Federal authorities have not accused Khalil of a crime, but they have sought to deport him on the basis that his prominent role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza may have undermined US foreign policy interests.
His request to attend his son’s April 21 birth was denied last month by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The question of whether Khalil would be permitted to hold his newborn child or forced to meet him through a barrier had sparked days of legal fighting, triggering claims by Khalil’s attorneys that he is being subject to political retaliation by the government.
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in New Jersey, Michael Farbiarz, intervened, allowing the meeting to go forward Thursday morning, according to Khalil’s attorneys.
The judge’s order came after federal officials said this week they would oppose his attorney’s effort to secure what’s known as a “contact visit” between Khalil, his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their son Deen.
Instead, they said Khalil could be allowed a “non-contact” visit, meaning he would be separated from his wife and son by a plastic divider and not allowed to touch them.
“Granting Khalil this relief of family visitation would effectively grant him a privilege that no other detainee receives,” Justice Department officials wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Allowing Dr. Abdalla and a newborn to attend a legal meeting would turn a legal visitation into a family one.”
Brian Acuna, acting director of the ICE field office in New Orleans, said in an accompanying affidavit that it would be “unsafe to allow Mr. Khalil’s wife and newborn child into a secured part of the facility.”
In their own legal filings, Khalil’s attorneys described the government’s refusal to grant the visit as “further evidence of the retaliatory motive behind Mr. Khalil’s arrest and faraway detention,” adding that his wife and son were “the farthest thing from a security risk.”
They noted that Abdalla had traveled nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to the remote detention center in hopes of introducing their son to his father.
“This is not just heartless,” Abdalla said of the government’s position. “It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”
Farbiarz is currently considering Khalil’s petition for release as he appeals a Louisiana immigration judge’s ruling that he can be deported from the country.
On Thursday, Khalil appeared before that immigration judge, Jamee Comans, as his attorneys presented testimony about the risks he would face if he were to be deported to Syria, where he grew up in a refugee camp, or Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative.
His attorneys submitted testimony from Columbia University faculty and students attesting to Khalil’s character.
In one declaration, Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, said he had first introduced Khalil to a university administrator to serve as a spokesperson on behalf of campus protesters, describing him as a “upstanding, principled, and well-respected member of our community.’
“I have never known Mahmoud to espouse any anti-Jewish sentiments or prejudices, and have heard him forcefully reject antisemitism on multiple occasions,” Howley wrote.
No ruling regarding the appeal was made on Thursday. Comans gave lawyers in the case until 5 p.m. June 2 to submit written closing arguments.
Columbia’s interim president, Claire Shipman, acknowledged Mahmoud’s absence from Wednesday’s commencement ceremony and said many students were “mourning” that he couldn’t be present. Her speech drew loud boos from some graduates, along with chants of “free Mahmoud.”


US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell

Updated 9 min 59 sec ago
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US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell

  • Supreme Court opinion says decision would not necessarily apply to Fed

A US Supreme Court ruling Thursday in a legal battle over President Donald Trump’s firing of two federal labor board members contained a line that eased, for now, worries that the cases could open the door for Trump to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at will. The court’s order allows Trump to keep the two Democratic labor board members sidelined while they challenge the legality of their removal. Lawyers for Gwynne Wilcox, who was removed from the National Labor Relations Board, and for Cathy Harris, who was dismissed from the Merit Systems Protection Board, had argued that a ruling in favor of the Trump administration could undermine legal protections for Fed policymakers long seen as being insulated from presidential dismissal for reasons other than malfeasance or misconduct. “We disagree,” a majority of justices said in the court’s brief, unsigned ruling. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks.”
The two cases have been closely watched as proxies for whether Trump has the authority to fire officials at the Fed. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that created the nation’s third and still existing central bank stipulates that Fed officials may be dismissed only “for cause,” not for political or policy disagreements.
“This view of the Supreme Court really does ease my worries about their inclination to extrapolate from the NLRB cases to the Fed so I breathed a sigh of relief,” said LH Meyer analyst Derek Tang, who has followed the cases closely.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Powell, whom he nominated to the post during his first term and who was renominated to a second term by Democratic President Joe Biden, and said he wants to see him gone from the central bank. Though Trump, who has attacked Powell over the Fed’s decision to not lower interest rates, recently said he has no intention of trying to fire Powell, the possibility has unsettled financial markets that bank on an independent Fed’s ability to do its job without political interference.
Powell has said he believes his firing would not be permitted under the law.
The Fed system’s seven governors, including the system chair, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Powell’s term ends in May 2026, and Trump is expected to nominate a successor in the coming months.
Krishna Guha, a vice chair at Evercore ISI, said the Supreme Court’s opinion was encouraging but not definitive. “It strictly only addresses whether a ruling on Wilcox would ‘necessarily’ implicate the Fed,” he said
A Fed spokeswoman did not have a comment. 


UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders

Updated 23 May 2025
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UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders

LONDON: The British government will roll out the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Thursday that so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.
“Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, like asserting power and control,” she said in a statement to Parliament following the release of an independent sentencing review,
Though the review highlighted the treatment wouldn’t be relevant for some sex offenders such as rapists driven by power and control, rather than sexual preoccupation, Mahmood said that studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60 percent reduction in reoffending.
It’s been used in Germany and Denmark on a voluntary basis, and in Poland as mandatory for some offenders.
The recommendation was part of a wide-ranging review led by former Justice Secretary David Gauke. As well as looking at ways to cut reoffending, Gauke recommended reforms to overhaul the prisons system, which is running at near capacity.
One of the first things Mahmood did as justice minister after Labour returned to power after 14 years last July was sanction an early-release program for prisoners to free up space. She says she inherited a judicial system that had been neglected for years by the previous Conservative government and set up the review as a means to stabilize it.
“If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials,” she said. “The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country.”
The review recommended that criminals could be released from prison earlier than they are now for good behavior, while judges could be given more flexibility to impose punishments such as driving bans. It also recommended that sentences of less than 12 months would also be scrapped for tougher community sentences. It also called for the immediate deportation for foreign nationals handed a three-year sentence or less.
The review called for higher investment in the probation service to allow officers to spend more time with offenders for their rehabilitation and extra funding for the many more who are monitored with electronic tags in the community.
Mahmood responded by giving a 700 million-pound  a year for probation within years.
“If the government doesn’t put the resources into probation that is necessary, then the risk here is that we won’t make progress on rehabilitation that we need, and there will be a public backlash against it,” Gauke said.
The prison population in England and Wales has doubled over the past three decades or so to nearly 90,000. That’s despite a fall in crime rates and is driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.
Robert Jenrick, the justice spokesman for the Conservatives, warned that scrapping short sentences would be effectively “decriminalizing” offenses like burglary, theft and assault. And monitoring tags, he said, are as useful as “smoke alarms putting out bonfires” in stopping reoffending.
In response, Mahmood said that she was clearing up the mess left by the Conservatives and that the government has also embarked on the largest expansion of prisons since Victorian times in the 19th century.


Trump to sign orders to boost nuclear power as soon as Friday, sources say

Updated 23 May 2025
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Trump to sign orders to boost nuclear power as soon as Friday, sources say

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump will sign executive orders as soon as Friday that aim to jumpstart the nuclear energy industry by easing the regulatory process on approvals for new reactors and strengthening fuel supply chains, four sources familiar said.
Facing the first rise in power demand in two decades from the boom in artificial intelligence, Trump declared an energy emergency on his first day in office.
Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has said the race to develop power sources and data centers needed for AI is “Manhattan Project 2,” referring to the massive US program during World War II to develop atomic bombs.
A draft summary of the orders said Trump will invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to declare a national emergency over US dependence on Russia and China for enriched uranium, nuclear fuel processing and advanced reactor inputs.
The summary also directs agencies to permit and site new nuclear facilities and directs the Departments of Energy and Defense to identify federal lands and facilities for nuclear deployment and to streamline processes to get them built.
It also encourages the Energy Department to use loan guarantees and direct loans to increase the build out of reactors. Trump only used the Loan Programs Office in his first administration to support a large nuclear plant in Georgia.
The LPO has now has hundreds of billions of dollars in financing thanks to legislation passed during former President Joe Biden’s administration, but has been hit hard by job cuts during Trump’s second administration.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The exact text and wording of draft executive orders is subject to frequent changes and there is no guarantee elements of the EOs will not be excised or modified during the final stages of the review process.
The United States was the first developer of nuclear power and has the most nuclear power capacity in the world, but the energy source is now growing the fastest in China.
One of the sources said officials from the industry including the Nuclear Energy Institute and Constellation , a utility with the biggest US reactor capacity, were invited to attend a signing ceremony Friday afternoon. Constellation and NEI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration has been debating four draft executive orders to boost nuclear power that sought ways to give the administration more power to approve reactors and reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the body of five panelists that approves reactors.
Nuclear is popular with Democrats for being virtually free in carbon emissions and with Republicans for providing reliable electricity compared to wind and solar power which can be intermittent, a problem that can be managed with battery storage.
Nuclear power produces radioactive waste which for which there is no permanent repository in the United States. 


Several dead in fiery plane crash on California neighborhood

Updated 23 May 2025
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Several dead in fiery plane crash on California neighborhood

SAN DIEGO: Several people were killed when a small plane crashed onto a California neighborhood before dawn Thursday, destroying a home and setting more than a dozen cars on fire.
At least 10 houses were hit by debris and vehicles on both sides of one street went up in flames when the Cessna 550 slammed into the ground, spewing burning jet fuel in a part of San Diego that is home to military families.
San Diego Fire Department Assistant Chief Dan Eddy told reporters one house had been badly damaged, but that no one on the ground had been seriously hurt.
“When (the plane) hit the street, as the jet fuel went down, it took out every single car that was on both sides of the street,” he said.
“We have jet fuel all over the place.”
One of the dead was named as Dave Shapiro, a music agent who founded San Diego-based Sound Talent Group (STG).
The company said two other members of staff who were aboard the plane had also died.
“We are devastated by the loss of our co-founder, colleagues and friends,” an STG spokesperson told US media.
“Our hearts go out to their families and to everyone impacted by today’s tragedy.”
There was no official confirmation of the death toll, but first responders at the scene said the plane — versions of which can carry up to 10 people, including the pilots — had been totally destroyed and they expected the toll to rise.
Yasmine Sierra told AFP how she had helped her neighbors escape their burning house in the middle of the night after being awakened by what she initially thought was an earthquake.
“It looked like all the homes were on fire because I could see the smoke and the flames, it looked like the trees were on fire,” she said.
Moments later she heard screams from her neighbors who were trapped in their back garden.
“Me and my son grabbed the ladder, we jumped on our trampoline, and we tried to bounce as much as we possibly could, to throw that ladder over so that they can climb onto the ladder into our backyard,” said Sierra, 35.
A woman, two children and two small dogs climbed to safety over the ladder.
“She was very distraught when she came over. I brought her to the front of the house, and I told her that, you know, we needed to leave.”
Jeremy Serna, 31, who is in the Navy, said he and his wife had been awoken by a loud bang.
“We looked outside, and the sky was orange. And then I came running outside to see what it was, and everything was on fire over here,” he told AFP.
“I saw the corner house was just engulfed in flames. And then came back over here and told my wife, hey, we have to get out of here.”
Investigators were combing the scene Thursday, picking through the scattered debris of the plane, which appeared to have broken into hundreds of pieces.
Bits of fiberglass were scattered among the twisted and charred remains of cars, and the smell of fuel hung in the air.
The accident happened in thick fog when the plane, which had come via Kansas, was nearing the Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport.
It was not immediately clear what had happened, but the fire department’s Eddy said a nearby power line appeared to have been clipped.
The plane went down around 3:45 am (1045 GMT), according to the Federal Aviation Administration, striking the Murphy Canyon neighborhood.
The residential area is largely military housing. San Diego is home to US Navy facilities, Marine Corps bases and Coast Guard stations.
The accident came at a time of heightened tension in the skies above America.
Air traffic control outages have struck the busy Newark airport on the East Coast at least twice in recent weeks, and in January there was a mid-air collision over Washington between a passenger plane and a military helicopter.
This month two people died when their small plane crashed into a residential neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles.