Fifteen per cent seems to be the new magic number being bandied about for a U.S. tariff rate after Japan and the Americans announced a trade deal, with the European Union now signed up too and South Korea apparently headed in the same direction.
… If 15 per cent is the “new normal” as Stretch wondered, what does that mean for Canada?
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday he’s looking to reduce the 50-day deadline he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine to just “10 to 12 days” from now.
“I’m going to make a new deadline of about 10 to 12 days from today,” Trump told reporters in Scotland after meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump said he was “generous” to first give 50 days on July 14 before he would levy secondary sanctions on Moscow, but “we just don’t see any progress being made.”
Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system on dairy, poultry and eggs has been screwing citizens for decades with higher food prices, obliterated family farms and disrupted international trade deals. The dairy cartels are deeply entrenched in Canada and have effectively cowed every federal political party (so to speak,) including the Conservatives. No major federal leader will dare question supply management for fear of upsetting Quebec which benefits from the program. The standoff on this terrible policy robs Canadians of billions.
The country is a NATO ally and G7 member. While the U.S.-U.K. relationship is often touted as Washington’s most “special,” the Canadian relationship is arguably the most critical to the future of the U.S. economy and soft power. The projection of U.S. hard power abroad depends in part on positive global public perception of Washington’s leadership. This stems from the United States being a beacon of freedom and arsenal of democracy in World War I, World War II, crises across the Taiwan Strait, the Korean war, and others. If after all of that, we now treat Canada with a lack of foresight for short-term trade interests, we lose at least some of our moral high ground, which negatively affects our soft power, and as well our long-term national interests.
ICE raid at major pot operation clouds picture for legal cannabis in California
Camarillo — Ever since federal immigration agents raided one of the largest licensed cannabis operators in the state this month, the phones of cannabis industry insiders have been blazing with messages of fear, sadness and confusion.
“It sent shock waves through the community,” said Hirsh Jain, the founder of Ananda Strategy, which advises cannabis businesses. “Everyone is on text threads.”
Glass House Brands, whose cannabis operations have helped make Santa Barbara and Ventura counties the new cannabis capitals of California, has long been among the most prominent companies in the state’s wild frontier of legal cannabis. Some call it the “Walmart of Weed” for its streamlined, low-cost production methods, its gargantuan market share and its phalanx of wealthy investors and powerful lobbyists.
President Trump said he reached a trade deal with the European Union late on Sunday, avoiding a trade war with the US’s largest trading partner and marking his biggest deal so far in his attempt to remake the global trading system through higher tariffs for U.S. trading partners.
BREAKING: President Trump lands EU trade deal:
– EU to purchase $750 billion in US and invest $600 billion in US
– EU to purchase a “vast amount” of military equipment
– EU opens up markets to US goods
– 15% reciprocal tariffsMassive!! pic.twitter.com/cheSWDIMSJ
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 27, 2025
h/t DS
TORONTO — In 2024, the grand prize at the Canadian Whisky Awards went to Paradigm Spirits. Its entrant, made with Canadian corn, aged for 19 years in American oak barrels and blended with a splash of Spanish sherry, beat some 200 competitors to be crowned Whisky of the Year. A judge called it “remarkable.”
It was a break for Paradigm, which had opened in an old Kellogg’s factory in London, Ontario, just a few years earlier. The women-owned-and-operated distillery was soon inundated with messages from Canadians across the country eager to buy the award-winning spirit, co-founder Irma Joeveer said.
But there was a problem: Canada’s internal trade barriers. With few exceptions, alcohol producers in one Canadian province are prohibited from selling directly to consumers in another. Vintners in British Columbia, for instance, can often more easily sell their merlots to oenophiles in other countries than within their own.
One thing about Trump – you can never call him all bad.
China is now importing record amounts of Canadian oil after slashing U.S. oil purchases by roughly 90 per cent.
As a result, imports of Canadian crude have surged, reaching a record 7.3 million barrels in March. This massive boon comes as Canadian negotiators are racing against the clock to make a trade deal with the White House.
The expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline has enabled China and other East Asian importers to access Canada’s vast crude reserves, which are relatively cheap and suitable for China’s advanced refineries that process dense, high-sulfur crude.
They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. “Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,” he said.
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.
The Liberal Government recently introduced a path to citizenship for “construction laborers” working illegally in Canada.
What they really did was reward the criminal construction firms that broke the law by knowingly exploiting the illegals at the expense of Canadians.
The Star like the NYTimes pretends these firms are some kind hero: Canada to grant legal status for thousands of undocumented construction workers
U.S. dairy producers insist they’re not looking for Canada to dismantle its supply management system, but they do want Canada to follow the letter and spirit of the existing deal that governs the dairy trade between the two countries.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly blasted Canada as “unfair” and “ripping us off” with massive dairy tariffs, in a way that isn’t fully accurate.
However, senior figures in the U.S. dairy industry are concerned there’s also some misrepresentation happening north of the border, creating a false perception of what U.S. producers are actually seeking in terms of access to the Canadian market.
A lawsuit by vast majority of Dem states shows how bad the problem is.
In the flurry of lawfare aimed at blocking anything and everything that the Trump administration is doing, it’s easy to dismiss any single lawsuit as just more partisan legal obstructionism, but the lawsuit filed by 20 Democrat states against the Trump administration is a major admission.
The Chinese model is disturbingly efficient.
Welcome to 2025, where China’s cyber strategy is no longer espionage. It’s pre-positioning — the digital equivalent of landmines buried deep in our networks, designed not to explode on contact, but to wait in silence until detonation serves strategic purpose.
In June 2025, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers, operating under the codename Salt Typhoon, had spent nine months infiltrating a U.S. state’s Army National Guard network. Not loitering. Not poking. Nesting. They extracted more than 1,400 configuration files, admin credentials, and communication archives tied to secure inter-state systems — a sweep confirmed in the Daily Beast.
Donald Trump says he’s having no luck with Canada on a new trade deal. That won’t be a shock to anyone familiar with how talks between Washington and Ottawa have been going.
On Friday though, Trump let loose on Canada and a whole pile of other topics while speaking with reporters.
Iran’s regime has crossed a line that no sovereign state has ever crossed before: it openly called for the assassination of a sitting president of the United States.
Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, one of the most powerful clerics in Iran’s theocratic system, has issued an official fatwa — a religious decree — calling for the murder of President Donald J. Trump. It did not come from some fringe radical hiding in a cave. It came directly from the top of Iran’s religious and political hierarchy. This is equivalent to a declaration of war. What makes the fatwa even more outrageous is that the regime is not just issuing threats—it has been raising money, publicly — to pay for Trump’s murder. It is not a joke. It is a direct, state-sanctioned call to eliminate America’s leader.
“For a Haitian family in Springfield, Ohio, the house on Chestnut Avenue represented their future in this country. They’re now wondering what can be salvaged,” a recent feature in the Washington Post described. The article — one of several of its kind — attempts to elicit empathy for hard-working, religious Haitian immigrants, trying to grasp their slice of the American dream. In that respect, the WaPo largely achieves its goal. The pro-immigration rhetoric, however, is not only about celebrating diligent émigrés — it’s about maligning the blue-collar Americans they’ve come to replace.
