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    Canada finally faces a basic question: how do we defend ourselves? | Stephen Marche

    The second Trump administration has been worse than Canada’s worst nightmare. The largest military force in the history of the world, across a largely undefended border, is suddenly under the command of a president who has called for our annexation. Canada could not be less prepared. The possibility of American aggression has been so remote, for so long, that the idea has not been seriously considered in living memory. Donald Trump has focused on economic rather than military pressure, but the new tone in Washington is finally forcing Canada to ask itself the most basic question: how do we defend ourselves?For most other countries in the world, self-defence is the key to national identity. Canada’s immense good fortune has been that we haven’t really needed a strong military to build our country. In the war of 1812, we were British, and the British kept us alive because we were British. There hasn’t been an attack on our homeland since. Confederation, the founding of the country, was the result of a political negotiation rather than a conquest or a violent independence movement. Our military was based on a fundamental assumption about our place in the world, and the nature of the world itself. Our place in the world was to contribute to the global order. The global order shared our fundamental values. Peacekeeping was more our style than defense.Recently, I’ve been working on Gloves Off, a podcast about how Canada can protect itself from any threat emanating from the US, and from every other country in the world now that the US is no longer our protector and guardian. The consensus from military and security experts is that we would be “a snack”.It is far from unusual for countries sliding toward authoritarianism, such as the the United States, to use foreign engagements to justify the suspension of their own laws. Trump has already started trumping up crazy excuses for anti-Canadian sentiment – a supposed flow of fentanyl over the border and other nonsense. His ambassador says Trump thinks our boycotts make us “nasty” to deal with.So what does Canada need to do to develop the capacity to defend itself?The good news is that Canada’s new reality is far from unique. In fact, it’s the historical norm. Finland is a potential model for us. It has lived its entire existence next to a belligerent country that is either expanding imperially or collapsing dangerously. The Finns do not have nuclear weapons. They are only 5.5 million people, next to Russia’s 143 million.Finland’s strategy is whole society defence. Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and a reserve commander of an armoured personnel carrier, explained that whole society defence does not pretend to be able to overcome a potential Russian onslaught. “Power asymmetry is an absolutely essential factor in the Finnish security thinking,” he told me. “Given how much bigger Russia is, in order to thwart that potential threat, we need to mobilize broadly the resources available in society.”Because Finland is geared, throughout its national institutions, towards self-defence, its resistance to Russia is credible. The idea is not to match Russian military capacity, but to make the conquest of Finland not worth the trouble. “Full societal resources of a smaller nation can actually be enough to thwart the potential threat from a larger power because the costs for the larger power to invade could actually be much higher than the potential benefits it would gain from such an invasion,” Pesu explains. The more capable a country is of causing pain to occupiers, the less likely the occupation happens in the first place.Conscription is essential. The Finns can put a million soldiers in the field within 72 hours. But every facet of Finnish government, from the healthcare system to the national broadcaster, has a role in the security system, and knows its role in a possible military conflict. “A preparedness mindset permeates the whole society,” Pesu says. “From the state level all the way to an individual living somewhere in the country.”To rise to Finland’s level, Canada would need to reorchestrate its entire frame of reference. The prime minister, Mark Carney, has recently announced serious boosts to national military spending: 2% by the end of this year, rising to 5% at some point in the future. But the government has pushed its readiness targets back to 2032. And those are targets that align with our typical military practices: meeting our commitments to our alliances. That money sounds good on a theoretical level. But the Canadian military situation has not fundamentally altered. We have not reset our position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe period we are entering is a period of deep chaos, of the weakening of international institutions, of multiple, interlocked collapses. Any reliance on international institutions and their restoration is a false hope. If Canada is to remain a stable democracy, we will have to find the stability in ourselves. A whole society defence would bolster us against the chaos that threatens us from every side and from within. In an era of splintering society, conscription is a force of unification, what Pesu calls “a strong democratic linkage”. Canada is a big country, with huge geographical and demographic diversity. We are as vulnerable as any other society to the informational chaos that is overtaking the world, to the incipient breakdown. A whole society defence would be a massive force for unification. It would establish, to Canadians at least, that there are crises we are going to face and we need to face them collectively. The thing about a whole society defence is that it determines that you are living in a whole society, a society that needs defending.Canada has no history of needing to defend itself. In fact, not needing a military is baked into our national identity – and that creates a psychological bind. To preserve who we are, we have to overcome one of our oldest tendencies, one of our best tendencies: our peace-loving nature, our idea of our country as an escape from history rather than its perpetrator or victim.And that leads to a very scary question: what will be the crisis that makes us realize that we need whole society defence? Let us hope it won’t be Canada’s last.

    Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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    Federal judge orders closure of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail

    A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.The ruling is a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and a native American tribe that sued the state of Florida and the federal government. Williams agreed that the hasty, eight-day construction of the jail at a disused airfield in late June damaged the sensitive wetlands of a national preserve and further imperiled federally protected species.“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government, and there are consequences for ignoring them.”The alliance plans to hold a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the ruling in detail.Conversely, the ruling is a blow to the detention and deportation agenda of the Trump administration. The president touted the camp, which recently held as many as 1,400 detainees, as a jail for “some of the most vicious people on the planet”, although hundreds of those held there have no criminal record or active criminal proceedings against them.There was no immediate reaction to Williams’s ruling from the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), or from the Department of Homeland Security.But lawyers for the state told Williams in court last week that they would appeal any adversarial ruling, the Miami Herald reported.In addition, hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities at the weekend in anticipation that Williams would order its closure, the outlet said.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, announced earlier this month that the state will soon open a second immigration jail at a disused prison near Gainesville to increase capacity. More

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    Supreme court allows Trump officials to cut research millions in anti-DEI push

    The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the supreme court decided on Thursday.The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783m worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Donald Trump’s priorities.The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who would not have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three liberal justices. The high court did keep the Trump administration anti-DEI guidance on future funding blocked with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.The decision marks the latest supreme court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life”.The justice department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination”.The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12bn of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.Solicitor general D John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier supreme court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and could not be sent to claims court.They said that defunding studies midway though halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.In June, US district judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing.He later added: “Have we no shame?”An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place. More

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    Trump news at a glance: 55m US visa holders in potential limbo in fresh immigration crackdown

    The Trump administration is reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.The state department said that all of the foreigners who now hold valid US visas are subject to “continuous vetting” for any indication that they could be ineligible for the document, including those already admitted into the country. Should such evidence come to light, the visa would be revoked and, if the visa holder were in the United States, they would be subject to deportation.Here are the key stories at a glance.Trump administration to review 55m US visa holders for potential rule violationsTrump officials will review records of more than 55 million US visa holders in the latest expansion on the US president’s immigration crackdown.It follows an announcement by the Trump administration on Tuesday that it will look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States.“The state department revokes visas any time there are indications of a potential ineligibility, which includes things like any indicators of overstays, criminal activity, threats to public safety, engaging in any form of terrorist activity, or providing support to a terrorist organization,” a department spokesperson said.Read the full storyCourt throws out $500m civil fraud penalty against Donald TrumpA New York appeals court has thrown out the massive civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump, ruling on Thursday in the state’s lawsuit accusing him of exaggerating his wealth.The decision, which was not unanimous, came seven months after the Republican returned to the White House. A panel of five judges in New York’s mid-level appellate division said the verdict, which stood to cost Trump more than $515m and rock his real estate empire, was “excessive”.Read the full storyPentagon asks civilian employees to aid Ice deportationsThe Pentagon is recruiting civilian employees to join Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and asking staff to sign up for deployments to immigration enforcement facilities across the United States.Read the full storyCalifornia moves closer to gerrymandered maps after key measures passCalifornia lawmakers on Thursday approved a sweeping redistricting proposal aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries and creating five potential new Democratic US House seats – a retaliatory strike against the gerrymandered maps Republicans in Texas are working to pass at the behest of Donald Trump.Read the full storyJD Vance previews defense of Trump’s bill for midterms in GeorgiaThe US vice-president, JD Vance, previewed in Georgia on Thursday the lines of attack candidates will use to defend the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the midterms next year, calling it “the biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen”.Read the full storyNew details emerge on Trump tariffs for EUWashington will not lower steep tariffs on European cars until Brussels has introduced legislation to reduce its own tariffs on US exports, maintaining pressure on the EU’s automotive industry.While the Trump administration has agreed to lower the current 27.5% US tariffs on European cars and car parts to 15%, details of a framework trade deal published on Thursday revealed the terms and conditions.Read the full storyTrump officials urge Fed to remove governor The Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on the Federal Reserve to remove governor Lisa Cook, after the economist declared she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.Read the full storyJudge rules ex-Trump lawyer unlawfully serving as US attorney in New JerseyA federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote: “The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Donald Trump gave a speech to law enforcement at a park police HQ in Washington DC after announcing he would join federal officers and the military on the city’s streets as part of the forced takeover of the local police force.

    Trump intends to leave Russia and Ukraine to organize a meeting between their leaders without directly playing a role for now, according to administration officials familiar with the situation, taking a step back from the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    The president again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she was not let out of prison.

    With Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set to alter how families and students finance higher education starting in July 2026, a new survey suggests the majority of college students expect to be affected by the bill.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 August 2025. More

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    Judge rules ex-Trump lawyer unlawfully serving as US attorney in New Jersey

    A federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote: “The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves.“Along the way, it has disagreed with the Judges of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey and criminal defendants in that District about who should or may lead the office. Faced with the question of whether Ms Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not.”The judge found that Habba’s term as the interim US attorney ended in July, and the Trump administration’s maneuvers to keep her in the role without getting confirmation from the US Senate did not follow procedures required by federal law.Brann said he is putting his order on hold pending an appeal.Habba, who unsuccessfully defended Trump in his New York fraud trial, also served as a frequent campaign surrogate for him in 2024.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter being appointed to the interim role in March, she said the state could “turn red”, a rare overt political expression from a prosecutor, and said she planned to investigate the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general.She then brought a trespassing charge, which was eventually dropped, against Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, stemming from a confrontation with federal agents during his visit to an immigration detention center. Habba later charged a Democratic representative, LaMonica McIver, with assault for resisting the detention of the mayor in the same incident, a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress other than for corruption. McIver denies the charges and has pleaded not guilty.In late July, when Habba’s four-month temporary appointment was coming to a close, it became clear that she would not get support from home state senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, meaning her chances of Senate approval were nil.Trump then withdrew her nomination, and federal judges in New Jersey exercised their power under the law to replace Habba with a career prosecutor when Habba’s temporary appointment lapsed. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, retaliated by firing that prosecutor and moved to re-install Habba as acting US attorney.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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    California legislature approves first of three redistricting bills in response to Texas gerrymandering

    The California legislature on Thursday began advancing a series of three bills designed to redraw congressional boundaries and create five potential new Democratic US House seats.The effort in California is an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump and aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor before next year’s midterm elections.The nation’s two most populous – and ideologically opposed – states were racing on parallel tracks toward consequential redistricting votes, potentially within hours of each other. As Democrats in Sacramento worked to advance a legislative package that would put their “election rigging response act” before voters in a special election this fall, Republicans in Austin were nearing a final vote on their own gerrymandering pursuit.Democratic state lawmakers erupted in applause, when the assembly passed the constitutional amendment to allow the redrawing in a 57-20 vote, sending it next to the state senate. On the other side of the capitol, the state senate passed a bill on a 30-9 party-line vote laying out the proposed congressional maps Democrats hope voters will accept in the November special election.The chambers were debating the legislative package simultaneously, with Democrats up against a Friday deadline to give the secretary of states’s office enough time to get the measure on the November ballot.The state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who has led the redistricting push, intends to sign the bill as soon as it arrives on his desk.“We will not let our political system be hijacked by authoritarianism. And today, we give every Californian the power to say no,” said the Democratic assembly speaker Robert Rivas, in floor remarks before the vote. “To say no to Donald Trump’s power grab and yes to our people, to our state and to our democracy.”Approval by the Texas senate, which is expected as early as Thursday, would conclude a dramatic showdown with the state’s outnumbered Democratic lawmakers whose two-week boycott captured national attention and set in motion a coast-to-coast redistricting battle.The California plan is designed to flip as many as five Republican-held seats in California – the exact number of additional GOP seats Trump has said he is “entitled to” in Texas.“This is a new Democratic party, this is a new day, this is new energy out there all across this country,” Newsom said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. “And we’re going to fight fire with fire.”The redistricting tit-for-tat is an extraordinary deviation from the norm. Traditionally, states redraw congressional maps once a decade based on census data, with both the Texas and California maps originally intended to last through 2030.The California state legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority, is expected to easily approve new congressional maps despite sharp Republican objections. Newsom’s signature would send the measure to the ballot in a special election this November.Before Thursday’s vote, California Republicans pleaded with their Democratic colleagues to oppose what they derisively called a “Gavinmander”.“The problem when you fight fire with fire is you burn it all down,” James Gallagher, the state assembly Republican leader, said at a news conference.Initially, Democratic lawmakers said the changes would only take effect in response to a gerrymander by a Republican state – a condition that would be met when the Texas legislatures sends the maps to the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, for his promised signature. But they amended the language on Thursday to remove any reference to a trigger, arguing it was no longer necessary now Texas has moved ahead.A Texas senate committee approved the GOP plan on Thursday morning, setting up a vote on final passage in the chamber, which was scheduled to reconvene that evening.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCalifornia was acting after a dramatic showdown in Austin, where Democratic lawmakers left the state earlier this month to delay a GOP redistricting plan pushed by the president. They returned only after California moved forward with its counterproposal. When they returned, some were assigned police minders and forced to sign permission slips before leaving the capitol. Several spent the night in the chamber in protest before Wednesday’s session, where Republicans pushed through a map designed explicitly to boost their party’s chances in 2026.California Democrats are moving ahead after days of contentious debate over the cost – and consequences – of a referendum to temporarily toss out the maps drawn by the state’s voter-approved independent redistricting commission. Republicans estimated that a special election could cost more than $230m – money they said would be better spent on other issues like healthcare.On Wednesday night, the state supreme court declined an emergency request by Republican lawmakers seeking to block the Democratic plan from moving forward.The redistricting push has also caused angst among some Democrats and independents who have fought for years to combat gerrymandering.Testifying in favor of the changes during a hearing earlier this week, Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor who served as a Democratic member of the state’s independent redistricting commission in 2020, said the map-drawing tit-for-tat presented California voters with a “moral conflict”. But she argued that Democrats had to push back on the president’s power grab.“It brings me no joy to see the maps that we passed fairly by the commission to be tossed aside,” she said. “I do believe this is a necessary step in a much bigger battle to shore up free and fair elections in our nation.”The plan also drew the backing of former president Barack Obama and other champions of fair redistricting, such as his former attorney general, Eric Holder.But Newsom’s redistricting plan – a high-stakes gambit for the term-limited governor who has made no secret of his 2028 presidential ambitions – is not assured to succeed. It faces mounting opposition from high-profile Republicans, including the state’s former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has vowed to “terminate gerrymandering”.Early polling has been mixed. But a new survey conducted by Newsom’s longtime pollster David Binder found strong support for the measure in the heavily Democratic state, with 57% of voters backing it while 35% opposed it.In a memo, Binder noted that support for the redistricting measure varies depending on how it is presented to voters. When framed as eliminating the state’s independent redistricting commission designed to prevent partisan gerrymandering, support drops. However, when voters hear that the initiative would allow temporary map changes only in response to partisan actions in other states, like Texas, while retaining the commission, the measure enjoys a double-digit margin of support. More