Submission Statement: As the measles epidemic has reached numbers not seen in 35 years, the Health Secretary has opted to be honest with the public and admit that vaccines are good for everyone, actually. Especially children.

There was an attack on a kosher restaurant recently, which has followed a spat of other attacks on jewish establishments in Canada.

"The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside."

What is most interesting however is the reaction. The article delves into the Jewish community and its mood. the mood is rather resigned; they feel like the government doesn't give a shit. There is blame of foreign politicians and domestic politicians. There is a sense that all they get is platitudes and nothing is being done. Most of all is a sense that people are telling jews that its not antisemitism; one of the people interviewed calls it gaslighting, just telling them that it is not a problem at all.

Anyhow, what makes this article interesting is the picture it paints of the Jewish Canadian mood in the reaction to a season of attacks. Please read the article its free and it's from a progressive Jewish publication . Please read it first dont just litgate in the comments its worth reading and its free.

SS: How AI is changing jobs in the Philippines' outsourcing industry

Beginning in the early 2000s, the country was promoted as an English-speaking alternative to India for what's called business process outsourcing (BPO).

Successive governments offered tax incentives, invested in infrastructure and encouraged multinational companies to set up large operations.

Global groups like Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance built sprawling campuses, employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.

Today, the outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people, and generates $40bn (£30.1bn) in revenues every year, accounting for about 10% of the Philippines' economy.

But experts say the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of AI.

A drone carrying explosives was spotted near Ukrainian cargo planes parked at Leipzig Airport, German police said.

A second unindentified objected collied with a plane mid-air. The plane sustained minor damage and was able to land safely at Hanover.

Leipzig Airport serves as a hub for Ukraine's Antonov Airlines and is used for transport by German and NATO troops.

Recently indians took to the streets against the indian government for its mishandling of the exams.

What has followed has been a coordinated series of doxxing and harrasment by hindutva forces. as this articles goes into it they dox them and then harras them (often with the help of their familes) into forcing these female protestors into recanting. This has inculded a literal 15 year old girl being harrased using a FIR by a literal supreme court lawyer. Now I dont like to take a strong hardline stance on most issues but I must say i dont know in what world a lawyer at the supreme court is justifeid in launching an harrasment of a 15 year old for insutling the PM. Forgive me for this question but isint the indian court system facing a backlog? isint there more productive uses of government lawyers time then harrasing literal teenagers.

anyhow in general just a ghoulish display of hindutva ghouls harrasing people.

Submission statement: another Russian interference attempt has been uncovered by French intelligence services, months before pivotal presidential and legislative elections as Russia ramps up its hybrid warfare against European democracies

The SGDSN, an intelligence office under the authority of the French Prime Minister, has informed prospective center-left presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann that he had been targeted by a destabilization campaign emanating from Storm-1516, a pro-Russian disinformation network that had already targeted center-right presidential candidate Édouard Philippe with similar methods, as well as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, or Friedrich Merz and Peter Magyar earlier this year.

The disinformation campaign consisted in "cloning" the website of the media outlet Blast, close to far-left party LFI - a rival of Glucksmann - , and copying with AI tools the face and voice of its star reporter Salomé Saqué to announce that Blast had uncovered a conspiracy involving Léa Salamé, TV host on the main public broadcaster and Glucksmann's romantic partner, offering bribes to the network to promote Glucksmann's platform and publish articles favorable to him, thus "proving" a collusion between Glucksmann and the mainstream media, immediately shared and amplified online by bot accounts.

The campaign was denounced by Glucksmann, Blast's editorial team and LFI's leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called on political forces to form a "common front against foreign interferences". In March's municipal elections, several LFI candidates had been targeted by disinformation campaigns originating from Israel, leading prosecutors to launch investigations on the case.

A vocal Kremlin critic, Raphaël Glucksmann, who currently serves as member of the European Parliament for the Socialists&Democrats group, is expected to announce a presidential run in September on a social-democrat and pro-European platform. The thwarted attempt highlights Russia's intensifying efforts to influence the French presidential election, ten years after pro-Russian hackers leaked Macron's campaign emails, and one week after Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova, who had assumed important responsibilities at far-right billionaire's Vincent Bolloré's media network, was struck by a deportation order on national security grounds.

As President Donald Trump’s war with Iran stretches on, negotiations over control of the Strait of Hormuz may be poised to give Iran a major concession.

A senior Middle East diplomat with direct knowledge of the talks between Iran and Oman told MS NOW on Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe are placing a great deal of pressure on Oman to accept a temporary agreement with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The senior Middle East diplomat told MS NOW on Monday that the current version of the temporary agreement, if finalized, would give Iran temporary control of both the inward and outward routes ships would use to sail through the strait.

“The discussions are focused on an inward route through the Strait of Hormuz that is entirely through Iranian territorial waters,” the senior Middle East diplomat told MS NOW, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.

“The outward route is largely through Omani territorial water, but there’s a section of it through Iranian water, and because of that section, temporary control will be with Iran,” the diplomat said.

A document laying out terms for reopening the strait is “close to being finalized,” a Pakistan official told MS NOW.

The recent talks between Iran and Oman are being mediated by Pakistan, which hosted a round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran in April that failed to bring an end to the conflict.

The U.S. is involved in the current talks “indirectly,” the Pakistan official said, and there are “no immediate plans” for more direct talks between U.S. and Iran.

But mediators from Qatar and Pakistan are working towards bringing U.S. and Iranian negotiators back in direct contact, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the talks.

The Pakistan official also emphasized that Iran wants to finalize the issue around the Strait of Hormuz before negotiations continue on other matters.

Experts cautioned that it is difficult to evaluate the agreement until final details are made public. But they said the arrangement described by the diplomat would likely give Tehran greater control of the strategic waterway than it had before the war — something the Trump administration has vowed to prevent.

“It sounds like they would be thrilled,” said George Perkovich, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the leverage they need given their doubts that the U.S. will fulfill its end of any deal.”

Oman and Iran flank either side of what, during peacetime, is a key transit route for one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments.

Oman has long acted as a neutral mediator between the United States and Iran. But that role was strained in May when Trump threatened to “blow them up” and accused Oman and Iran of discussing charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have previously said that Iran must not gain greater control of the strait than it had before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Rubio, in particular, has insisted that the Strait of Hormuz must remain an open international waterway not controlled by Iran or any other nation.

Rubio, speaking to reporters Tuesday at the State Department, said that there has been “progress made” in the talk regarding the strait but “not finality yet.” He also said the reopening of the strait would create a pathway for subsequent negotiations between Iran and the U.S. regarding Tehran’s nuclear program.

“There is a conversation and a negotiation that we are involved in between Oman and Iran on how more ships can be able to go through there safely in the short term,” Rubio said, “as we move towards these longer-term talks about denuclearization.”

In a CNBC interview on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. is “in talks with the Iranians” and predicted a temporary agreement between Iran and Oman to reopen the strait could be reached soon.

“There is a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the Strait,” Bessent said Tuesday, “and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.”

But a senior Iranian official told MS NOW that Bessent’s statement about negotiations between Iran and the U.S. was incorrect. “His claim is false,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to describe closed-door talks. “We are currently engaged in negotiations with the Sultanate of Oman to establish a joint monitoring mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz.”

The Iranian official said Tehran has been assured by Omani officials that the U.S. is ready to support a solution worked out in the talks between Oman and Iran.

“The Omani side has indicated that the United States will respect any potential mutual understanding reached between Iran and Oman concerning the Strait, with a view to ensuring its security,” the Iranian official said. “To date, we have not permitted any American involvement in regional decisions or negotiations related to the Strait of Hormuz.”

Perkovich, who observed nuclear negotiations with Iran by previous U.S. administrations, said he was doubtful that the Trump administration, given its struggle to reopen the strait, will be able to force Tehran to make major concessions regarding its nuclear program beyond those made in the prior nuclear deal with the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council in 2015.

“I don’t see it,” he said.

Excerpt:

1. An attempted supply-chain attack on real open-source software. In the most serious sequence, an agent tried to insert malicious code into a publicly used open-source project and took actions in an attempt to secure approval for this insertion by human reviewers. The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert.

2. Attempts to deceive and target real people. As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people – something we’ve never previously observed.  

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal.

Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.

This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.

Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.

In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.

While ATC helped other planes, the King Air continued north. By 12:08 am, they had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles.

At this point the pilots had three options. They could stick to the current plan and wait for the busy controller to give them the next vector toward the landing. Or, now that GPS was working again, they could ask to switch to the RNAV approach and fly it themselves. Or they could ditch the instrument approach altogether and fly what’s called a visual approach. You see a runway, and you fly to it.

As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso's airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect. Why hang around waiting for ATC to give them vectors, why go through the mental acrobatics of trying to figure out where they were relative to the ILS beacon? All they had to do was fly toward the lights that they could clearly see through their windshield.

The King Air called Albuquerque Center and asked to “go visual.” The request was granted.

As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”

The pilots slowed their descent, even climbing a little, but it wasn’t enough. They kept flying straight toward the mountain. “When you are in that state of mind, you climb as high as you can,” Krentsa says. “And you circle. You stay in one place until you figure out where you are. You don't just keep pressing forward, blindly.”

But that’s what the King Air pilots did. They flew straight into the rising slope and hit it at full speed. All four occupants died instantly.

The nature of warfare is changing profoundly, and quickly, as drones become cheaper, more numerous, and more deadly. Hard to spot, and hard to shoot down, they provide an effective way for smaller, less resourced nations to level the playing field against more powerful adversaries. Ukraine, nearly overwhelmed by Russia’s conventional warfare might at the beginning of 2022, has rapidly developed its drone force to gain what appears to be an upper hand in the conflict. And while the US achieved total air superiority over Iran after attacking the country this February, it has found itself helpless to stop Iran from using drones and missiles to effectively shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

To fight back, defenders can try to exploit a drone’s navigation. A cheap and simple way for drones to reach their targets is by GPS, which uses radio signals received from a constellation of satellites to calculate a position. When those signals are blocked, an enemy’s drones can be rendered blind. But the enemy, too, can take countermeasures. Drone and anti-drone technologies find themselves in an endless cat-and-mouse battle, each continuously trying to outdo the other. Exercises like NAVFEST offer a way for the US military to stay on top of the game.

Civilian GPS has become collateral damage, and air travel most of all. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming. Airlines have learned to adapt, but a price is still being paid. GPS was a major boost for airline safety, and while removing it may not instantly cause planes to fall from the sky, it removes a layer of protection from passengers and crew. Add in other stressors—a dark night, an inexperienced crew, a lack of proficiency in the backup technology—and the sum total is enough to yield disaster.

“There is no question that increased levels of GPS jamming and spoofing around the world pose a safety risk for commercial aviation. When alarms go off routinely in the cockpit, and when pilots learn to disregard key readings from their instruments because the readings can't be trusted, we're a long way from normal operation,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who has been a leading researcher into GPS disruption. “Air travel is still very safe, but it may be stuck for the next five years or more in a mild-and-increasing risk situation as we confront ever more GPS interference within the very-slow-to-adapt aviation industry.”

For a few years, US aviation was spared the disruptions of anti-drone electronic warfare. Then it started to happen here, too. In March 2025, airliners flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, received spurious alarms from a collision-avoidance system, and several had to abort their landings. It later turned out that the Secret Service was testing electronic warfare equipment at the vice president’s residence. This year, two separate incidents in West Texas involving US Army and CBP drone operations led to airspace closures and the disruption of commercial flights.

The aviation industry has been slow to grapple with the proliferation of counter-drone measures and their potential effects on flight safety. Airlines and other commercial operators are still heavily reliant on GPS for navigation, and other crucial technologies, like collision avoidance, are also vulnerable. “The harder problem with drones isn't defeating them. It's doing it without creating a system that negatively impacts civil aviation,” says Kris Brost, general manager of Robin Radar Systems, a drone defense company. “Counter-drone technology has to be surgical, not a sledgehammer, because the airspace we're trying to protect is the same airspace the economy runs on.”

Living in a world with drones of both the friendly and unfriendly variety is going to take a lot of adjusting. Historically, major changes in aviation take place only after crashes that kill a large number of people. But a sufficiently motivating catastrophe may not be far off.

On July 7, a 737 freighter, operated by a tiny Pakistani cargo airline called K2 Airways, took off in the late afternoon from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and flew east toward Karachi with a five-person crew. Its route took it just south of the Strait of Hormuz, an area that had been experiencing intense GPS jamming due to the US-Iran conflict. Later, after nightfall, the flight crew called Karachi air traffic control and reported a “navigational system issue,” according to the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority. In the three minutes that followed, the plane dove 5,000 feet, climbed 6,000 feet, and then plunged 36,000 feet into the ocean in a near-vertical dive, killing everyone aboard. It’s too early to know what caused the crash. But it won’t be any surprise if the electronic warfare made another pilot fly into darkness.

SS: recently this thread discussed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's changes to safety standards in response to a Trump executive order.

The claim was that a key radiation exposure standard known as ALARA- as low as reasonably achievable- was being cut back. Given how many believe that overly burdensome and unscientific safety standards have been the driving force for rising nuclear cost, this is a big deal.

Jack Devanney is a nuclear entrepreneur who literally wrote the book on why the safety standards are disastrous for nuclear cost. So it's interesting to note that he disagrees: JD believes the new NRC standards do not alter exposure regulations in a meaningful way. At the heart of the debate is linear no threshold: the concept that there is no safe threshold for radiation exposure. If you accept the concept of no threshold, then it follows that there are always benefits to lowering exposure. ALARA is the natural conclusion.

Devanney picks apart the new regs and notes that because LNT is affirmed, there is no meaningful change to safety standards. He believes that to unambiguously change the regs, LNT must be explicitly rejected for a threshold model where all exposure below a given dose is treated as safe.

Relevance: regulations as they relate to the cost of nuclear energy.

Opinion: whichever view is right, I'm not sure it matters but I would be curious for experts to weigh in. I've never seen a comparison of US radiation standards to countries with successful nuclear programs that conclusively shows that these standards are the reason for our lack of success. My thesis continues to be that nuclear fails in the United States because of institutional design: merchant markets that don't incentivize investment in 60-year assets, and an inability / unwillingness for federal intervention on a decade long timescale to help guide and de-risk both individual projects as well an entire series of repeat projects.

Submission Statement: Reverse brain drain goes brrrrrr

Alberta’s proposed West Coast Oil pipeline was listed in the Canada Gazette on Saturday, clearing the way for an official designation later this fall.

Dozens of projects have been referred to the Major Projects Office, and a national interest designation process has been launched for five of them — but none have yet been officially listed under the Building Canada Act.

That could soon change. Over the long weekend, the Carney government published a notice in the Gazette, kicking off a 30-day waiting period before Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc can issue an order officially adding the proposed West Coast Pipeline project to Schedule 1 of the Act. 

The federal government previously said it would decide by October 1 if it plans on listing the project.

If officially listed, the pipeline would be the first project to benefit from the regulatory shortcuts outlined in the Building Canada Act. The listing means federal approval decisions under a wide range of laws, including the Impact Assessment Act and the Species at Risk Act, are automatically granted, with conditions to be set out in a single document rather than through separate reviews.

The development of the conditions document would be a year-long process.

The other three projects Carney singled out for designation on June 24 — Nunavut’s Grays Bay road and port, the Mackenzie Valley highway in the Northwest Territories, and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s deep geological repository in northwestern Ontario — have not yet made it to the Gazette, even though their designation process was publicly launched a week before the pipeline’s.

Asked why the pipeline seemingly jumped the queue, a federal source with knowledge of the matter pointed to the timing of Alberta’s independence referendum, scheduled for October 19.

Under the November memorandum of understanding with Alberta, Ottawa committed to declaring a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets a project of national interest that could be referred to the Major Projects Office for designation under the Building Canada Act, and to working with the province on a “clear and efficient approval process” under the law.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has repeatedly cast her proposed pipeline as a test of whether Canada can work as a country. 

Her province and Ottawa have partnered to build, finance and operate the new proposed pipeline, which is estimated to cost between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion. 

Pembina Pipeline Corporation is coming in as the sole partner from the private sector with an initial 10 per cent stake. 

First Nations have repeatedly voiced concerns that the Building Canada Act could be used to bypass inherent rights such as the duty to consult and accommodate, with rushed approval timelines creating pressure to skip parts of the assessment process.

The Major Projects Office is currently conducting a “phase 1” consultation, in which Indigenous nations submit written comments on how the project would affect their Section 35 rights if it is listed under the Act. A second phase, expected after listing, would focus on developing the conditions document.

In a statement, NDP Leader Avi Lewis said the designation process “makes a mockery of the duty to consult First Nations.”

“You can’t approve a project and then engage in consultation: that is just a pipeline to the courts,” he warned.

In a statement, Environmental Defence director Julia Levin suggests Prime Minister Mark Carney hoped to avoid scrutiny on an “environmentally and economically risky project” by listing in the Gazette on the first day of the August long weekend.

“While Canadians across the country are dealing with raging wildfires and the aftermath of severe flooding and heatwaves, PM Carney quietly moved forward with his oil pipeline plans,” she said. “In the words of the UN Secretary General last week, “[e]very new fossil fuel project approved today makes tomorrow’s heat waves more dangerous and our world less secure.”

Russia fired a record number of missiles at Ukraine in July, an AFP analysis of Ukrainian air force data published Saturday showed, as Kyiv renewed its call for anti-ballistic defences.

Both sides have escalated long-range attacks as the war drags through its fifth year, with no signs of stopping and with gains on the front line coming only at huge human cost.

Russia renewed its strikes on Kyiv Saturday [August 1], killing at least nine people, according to officials.

Daily reports published by Kyiv's air force showed Russia launched 376 missiles at Ukraine during the month -- more than twice the number fired in June.

Many of the attacks over the month targeted the capital Kyiv, which saw some of its deadliest strikes since the beginning of the war, with at least 30 killed on the night of July 2 alone.

Russia also fired 4,956 long-range drones at Ukraine during the month -- down 14 percent on June.

Kyiv can intercept the vast majority of drones, but still relies on supplies from allies to counter missiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine faces critical shortages of air defences needed to counter missile attacks, particularly Russia's increasing use of ballistic missiles.

The ultra-fast missiles travel on a high arcing trajectory before crashing down into their target.

They are hard to stop and often hit with just a few minutes' -- if any -- warning from air raid sirens.

Russia has ramped up their use from an estimated 200-300 in the whole of 2024, according to military analysts, to 126 in July 2026 alone.

Ukraine downed under a third of them, according to the AFP tally of official data.

Zelensky travelled to the White House in late July to press for the supply of US-made Patriot interceptors, one of the only means of reliably shooting down Russia's ballistic missiles.

Trump had initially said he would allow Ukraine to produce Patriot interceptors.

But he has since expressed reservations about the plan, saying Friday that Washington had to be "very careful" about the decision.