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Trump pledges 25 per cent tariffs on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico

2024-11-25 /

Reuters »

Trump on Monday pledged a 25% tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada from his first day in office, and an additional 10% tariff on goods from China, citing illegal immigration and the trade of illicit drugs.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump said the tariffs would remain in place until the two countries clamp down on drugs, particularly fentanyl, and migrants crossing the border illegally.

Also » The Guardian / The Guardian / CBC / Brandon Sun / Japan Times / BBC / Le Monde / France 24 / Deutsche Welle / Channel News Asia / Al Jazeera / Axios / The Hill

Video » CBC The National’s Adrienne Arsenault asks former Conservative industry minister James Moore about the potential economic impact of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s threat to slap a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods. ⤵️

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One woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their intimate partner or family member

2024-11-25 /

UN Press Release »

On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 25 November, the report Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides by UN Women and UNODC reveals that femicide—the most extreme form of violence against women and girls—remains pervasive globally.

Globally, 85,000 women and girls were killed intentionally in 2023. 60 per cent of these homicides –51,100- were committed by an intimate partner or a family member. The data shows that 140 women and girls die every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative, which means one woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes.

In 2023, Africa recorded the highest rates of intimate partner and family-related femicide, followed by the Americas, and then by Oceania. In Europe and the Americas, most women killed in the domestic sphere (64 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively) were victims of intimate partners, while elsewhere, family members were the primary perpetrators.
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How to survive the post-truth world of Donald Trump

2024-11-25 /

Carole Cadwalladr, of The Guardian has 20 suggestions on how to survive in the broligarchy. The article is worth reading. Here are a few of her suggestions »

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

…

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

Read the whole article »

Madeleine Riffaud, hero of the French Resistance, has died at the age of 100

2024-11-23 /

 The essential was not to give in. When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.

— Madeleine Riffaud

Yves Bordenave, writing in Le Monde »

Madeleine Riffaud was 18 in 1942. Involved in the Resistance as part of a Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) group founded by communists, her alias was Rainer. Riffaud died on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, in her Paris apartment, aged 100, Le Monde learned from her entourage, confirming a report in L’Humanité. Before becoming a journalist, a war correspondent in Vietnam and Algeria and a renowned poet, she was an emblematic figure of the resistance to the Nazi occupiers.

Sam Roberts, writing in The New York Times »

She was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.

“That moment,” Ms. Riffaud said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”

“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”

She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”

Elsewhere » Wikipedia /

Canada’s top military commander calls out US senator for questioning a woman’s role in combat

2024-11-23 /

Gen. Jennie Carignan, Canada’s chief of defense staff »

“After 39 years of career as a combat arms officer and risking my life in many operations across the world, I can’t believe that in 2024, we still have to justify the contribution of women to their defence and to their service, in their country. I wouldn’t want anyone to leave this forum with this idea that this is that it is some kind of social experiment.”

More » Canadian Press / Politico / The Hill

 

Good cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is associated with better cognitive function and decreased Alzheimer’s and dementia risk

2024-11-23 /

People with a genetic predisposition to dementia can reduce their risk by up to 35 percent by increasing their fitness, according to the published study. High levels of fitness are also linked to better cognitive ability, according to the study by researchers from Karolinska Institutet.

Cardiorespiratory fitness is the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to the muscles and declines with age as skeletal muscle is lost. Fitness declines by about three to six percent per decade when people are in their 20s and 30s, but this accelerates to more than 20 percent per decade when people reach their 70s.

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