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NOT SO long ago, asylum seekers turned to the United States, seeking refuge from repressive states. Now the United States is one of those repressive states.

That’s the gist of a Canadian federal court ruling, which would scrap a 16-year-old bilateral treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States each recognize the other as a safe place to seek refuge. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that Canada’s practice of turning back third-country refugees who try to cross at official points of entry along the U.S.-Canada frontier — on the theory that they have already reached a safe harbor in the United States — no longer makes sense given the atrocious treatment to which they are subjected south of the border. Canada, she wrote, can no longer turn a blind eye to the reality that the United States denies decent and dignified treatment to asylum seekers.

The judge found that the “accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” in the United States.

Trucks and cargo planes packed with the first of nearly three million doses of coronavirus vaccine fanned out across the country on Sunday as hospitals in all 50 states rushed to set up injection sites and their anxious workers tracked each shipment hour by hour.

A majority of the first injections are expected to be given on Monday to high-risk health care workers.

Five of the first vaccinations will take place at what the Department of Health and Human Services is calling a national ceremonial “kickoff event,” scheduled for Monday afternoon at George Washington University Hospital.

It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with

No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.

“They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

Ontario’s premier declared a state of emergency Friday in reaction to the truck blockades in Ottawa and at the U.S. border and said he will urgently press for new legislation cracking down on those who interfere with the free flow of goods and people.

Since Monday, scores of truck drivers protesting Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions and railing against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have bottled up the Ambassador Bridge connecting Windsor to Detroit. And hundreds of others have paralyzed downtown Ottawa over the past two weeks.

it is illegal to block critical infrastructure.