I guess filming must have started quite early

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the U.S. that has now spread to neighbouring Maine, saying it’s making people in her province “very, very uncomfortable” to have them at the border.

Holt told reporters in Ottawa that the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the New Brunswick-Maine border was affecting people with cross-border family and business ties that have already been struggling under strained relations due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and attacks on Canada.

“We see what’s happening in the country,” she told reporters. “We see it in New Brunswick right now with ICE agents on the border of New Brunswick and Maine, in Calais. And it makes us all very, very uncomfortable.

“There’s nothing that we recognize in our neighbours right now, with the leadership that they have. We’re eager to support them in a return to the long-standing and strong partnership that Canada and the U.S. have had for generations.”

https://archive.is/RF71l

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday Canada owes its continued existence to the United States while calling out Prime Minister Mark Carney for delivering a speech that condemned coercion by great powers.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, where he made the case for a U.S. acquisition of Greenland, Trump said he needs the Danish territory for his proposed "golden dome," a missile defence system that could cover North America.

Trump said the dome will protect Canada due to geography and the country isn't grateful enough that such a system is in the works. Carney has been non-committal in the past about Canada participating in or paying for what Trump is floating.

I was working on another random side project and wanted to define configs like Pydantic-Settings without actually pulling in all of Pydantic into my project, so I started writing a custom config class which turned out generic enough that I could break it off into its own thing.

One of the main things I wanted is to be able to load a TOML file for settings but to also be able to override each config option with an env var. I also really like Pydantic's use of Annotation[..., ...] type-hinting so I did something similar

I don't really expect it to be used by anyone else but I'm excited about putting out my first PyPi package and figured I'd share it here :)

Any feedback is very welcome!

PyPi link: https://pypi.org/project/pymicroconf/

Also AI disclosure: I got AI to partially write the description but the code itself isn't written by AI

On December 12, 2025, American commentator Tucker Carlson delivered a series of explicit, uninterrupted statements during a live interview with Matt Walsh that collectively amount to an open endorsement of coercive action against Canada. In the span of roughly three minutes, Carlson engaged in an unprecedented narrative assault on Canadian sovereignty and legitimacy, asserting that:

• Canada is “not even a country” – overtly delegitimizing Canada’s status as a sovereign nation.

• The Canadian government is murdering “tens of thousands” of citizens each year – accusing Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program of essentially mass state murder, including of children, and “harvesting the organs” from those killed.

• The U.S. should consider invading and occupying Canada on human rights grounds – explicitly framing a hypothetical military intervention as morally justified, and repeatedly insisting “I’m not joking even a tiny bit” to underline the seriousness of his advocacy.

• Canada is “way worse than Maduro” and even “worse than China” – claiming Canada’s alleged crimes outstrip those of Venezuela’s Maduro regime and the Chinese government, thus positioning Canada among the world’s most egregious human rights violators.

Canada’s proposed Bill S-209, which addresses online age verification, is currently making its way through the Senate, and its passage would be yet another mistake in tech policy.

The bill is intended to restrict young peoples’ access to online pornography and to hold providers to account for making it available to anyone under 18. It may be well-intentioned, but the manner of its proposed enforcement – mandating age verification or what is being called “age-estimation technologies” – is troubling.

Globally, age-verification tools are a popular business, and many companies are in favour of S-209, particularly because it requires that websites and organizations rely on third parties for these tools. However, they bring up long-standing concerns over privacy, especially when you consider potential leaks or hacks of this information, which in some cases include biometrics that can identify us by our faces or fingerprints. [...]

HALIFAX — Republican lawmaker Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina says it’s all good and well that Canada is finally meeting its NATO defense spending commitments, but Canada should make up for two decades of back dues — to the tune of $300 billion.

“Can we do a makeup payment for the 20 years of shortfalls as well?” Tillis told a Saturday panel at the Halifax International Security Forum, a international gathering of defense officials and security professionals.

“It’s fine to say you’re about to catch up, but it’s not fun to look past a $300 billion shortfall,” he said.

https://archive.is/4ksTm

alt: Kenya, a female orange cat looking down menacingly from the railings of a staircase as she prepares to attack those who dare wander upwards