hy is Justin Trudeau buying a pipeline? Canada’s government announced yesterday it was planning to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5bn. This pipeline – which transports oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the western coast of British Columbia – is at the centre of a bitter political war that shows no signs of abating.

So what’s going on? The logic to Trudeau’s action may lie in an obscure and often overlooked agreement called the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (Fipa). This agreement, ratified in 2014, was negotiated by the previous Harper government. It was passed without a vote in Parliament. Fipa, which remains in place until 2045, was signed to ensure that China got a pipeline built from Alberta to BC, among other benefits.

Now he has bought that pipeline, and will have to live with the political fallout, which will likely include protesters, court cases and other acts of civil disobedience. In what might be a strategy to avoid lawsuits from Chinese companies that may result in massive secret payouts, Trudeau’s government may find itself arresting Canadians.

ate last summer, the American Civil Liberties Union faced a mounting crisis over its most celebrated cause, which many consider the lifeblood of democracy: freedom of speech. For nearly a century, the ACLU has been the standard-bearer of civil liberties in the US, second only to the government in shaping Americans’ basic rights. Although the organisation has been at the vanguard of many of the country’s most hard-fought legal battles – desegregation, reproductive rights, gay marriage – the argument among its staff last summer, over whether to continue representing white supremacists in free-speech cases, was more intense than anything the organisation had seen before.

Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has helped make the US home to arguably the most freewheeling, unregulated public discourse in the world. And it has done this partly by defending, in the courts of law and public opinion, the speech rights of racists and fascists. The ACLU asserts that laws guaranteeing freedom of speech must embrace everybody (think the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis) if they’re going to protect anybody (think organised labour, anti-war protesters and Black Lives Matter). “The same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you,” its website explains.

Last fall, the ACLU’s president, Susan Herman, told the organisation’s national leadership conference: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims – the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out – still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” She later added: “If we at the ACLU cannot figure out how to bridge our different experiences, and work together and do the critical work we need to do, what hope is there for the rest of the country?”

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions

The United States and its traditional allies are on the brink of a full-scale trade war after European and Canadian leaders reacted swiftly and angrily to Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium producers.

A spokesman for Number 10 said the government was “deeply disappointed” the US had decided to apply the tariffs and that Theresa May would raise the issue with Trump at next week’s meeting of the G7 industrial nations in Canada.

he French president, Emmanuel Macron, called the US tariffs illegal and a mistake, while the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued an immediate like-for-like response – announcing tariffs of up to 25% on US imports worth up to 16.6bn Canadian dollars (£9.6bn), which was the total value of Canadian steel exports to the US last year. The tariffs will cover steel and aluminium as well as orange juice, whiskey and other food products

t was a startling omission, even according to the peculiar moral norms of the Trump era. When Wendy Vitter, one of the US president’s judicial nominees, was asked whether she supported the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to end racial segregation in schools – a near sacred pillar of progress for civil rights in the 20th century – she did not say yes.

With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

“This is stunning,” said Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to Barack Obama, who for more than four years was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees. “Conservatives are using the courts to bring us back to a time when ‘religious liberty’ allowed discrimination. We’re seeing legal arguments we had hoped were consigned to the dustbin of history being dusted off and used again in the hope of turning back the clock on the way we treat all Americans.” Four cases relating to Trump’s ban on transgender personnel in the military are working their way through the courts. Employment and housing protections for LGBT individuals could be at risk. Battles over reproductive rights are also under way at state level. Last month a federal appeals court blocked an Ohio law that would cut taxpayer funding to 28 Planned Parenthood clinics, holding that conditions it imposed that denied funds to abortion providers were unconstitutional. But campaigners against abortion rights are unlikely to be deterred.

Kanye West remained defiant Wednesday amid mounting backlash from fans over the rapper's positive words about President Donald Trump, tweeting a picture of himself wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat and criticizing former President Barack Obama.

Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed

he series of tweets comes after fans lamented a report this week from Hot 97 radio host Ebro Darden that West recently told him, "I love Donald Trump," and defended a previous tweet in which the rapper complimented conservative commentator Candace Owens.

Kanye West's recent praise of President Donald Trump has left some of the rapper's fans aghast, but fellow Chicago rapper Chance the Rapper and West's wife Kim Kardashian have come to his defense.Chance the Rapper, who has been critical of Trump in the past, tweeted, "Black people don't have to be democrats."

Now when he spoke out about Trump... Most people (including myself) have very different feelings & opinions about this. But this is HIS opinion. I believe in people being able to have their own opinions,even if really different from mine. He never said he agrees with his politics

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West famously declared during "A Concert For Hurricane Relief" telethon, criticizing the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Más de 1.000 millones de niños y adolescentes en el mundo enfrentan una vida de miseria y privaciones debido a la pobreza, los conflictos y el VIH/SIDA, denunció este jueves el Fondo de Naciones Unidas para la Infancia, UNICEF.

NICEF señala en el documento que más de 1.000 millones de menores en el mundo no tienen acceso a una de siete necesidades básicas: alojamiento, agua potable, saneamiento, educación, información, servicios de salud y alimentación.

El mensaje de UNICEF es que no basta usar los indicadores habituales, como el ingreso, cuando se trata de detallar el impacto de la pobreza en los menores.

Polls have closed in Colombia's congressional elections that saw former members of the Farc guerilla group take part for the first time.The ex-rebels, now known as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force (also Farc), were given 10 congressional seats as part of a historic peace deal signed in 2016.But opinion polls give the left-wing group little chance of making gains.The vote is being viewed as a test ahead of May's presidential elections.

The BBC's Katy Watson, who is in Bogotá, says that many Colombians feel it is too soon to see former rebels in positions of power and say they should have been punished for their crimes.They have faced hostility on the campaign trial, and the group's leader Rodrigo Londoño was pelted with eggs and tomatoes while out campaigning last month.Farc's candidates have acknowledged that they need to convince voters they have changed, but say their involvement in elections represents a fresh start for the country.

President Juan Manuel Santos won re-election in June 2014, gaining what he presented as an endorsement of his efforts to end the rebel insurgency.He staked his reputation on securing a peace deal with the Farc and launched peace talks with the group two years after taking office in 2010.

The European Commission has denied allegations of cronyism after a protégé of its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, was given one of the most powerful jobs in the EU civil service.Martin Selmayr has been appointed Secretary-General of the Commission, the organisation that monitors whether countries are sticking to EU rules, dreams up new laws and runs the Brexit talks day-to-day.

The 40-something former lawyer and media executive from Germany joined the European Commission as a press officer in 2004.He helped run Jean-Claude Juncker's successful campaign to be selected as president of the commission in 2014 and later became his head of cabinet, Brussels-speak for chief of staff.

Admirers, like his mentor the German MEP Elmar Brok, describe a hard-working strategic genius with political nous, who gets much better results than your average official.Detractors say his take-no-prisoners attitude goes too far. Asked about his fierce reputation, Mr Selmayr himself said: "You can't run the European Commission like a Montessori school," referring to the education system that favours child development over passing exams.

There has been no national debate as to whether a leader should be allowed to stay on for as long as they choose. Quietly but surely Xi Jinping has changed the way his country is governed, with himself well and truly at the core.

Only five years ago Beijing was being ruled by a collective leadership. Under ex-President Hu Jintao you could imagine differing views being expressed in the then nine-member Politburo Standing Committee.

China has approved the removal of term limits for its leader, in a move that effectively allows Xi Jinping to remain as president for life.The constitutional changes were passed by China's annual sitting of the National People's Congress on Sunday.

In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC.

"I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on."

"The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats."

A long-established San Francisco fertility clinic experienced a liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank holding thousands of frozen eggs and embryos for future use, jeopardizing tissue hundreds of women had stored in hopes of having children.

“We can’t say definitively nothing like this has ever happened, but we are certainly not aware of anything,” said Sean Tipton, the association’s chief policy, advocacy and development officer. “Now that we have a second incident, it becomes very important that we learn as much as we can about both, to search for commonalities and see if there are . . . risks that have now come to light that need to be addressed.”

On Saturday night, the half-dozen doctors who work at Pacific Fertility were finally able to begin making phone calls to some 400 patients who had all their eggs or embryos stored in storage tank No. 4.

Porn star Stormy Daniels said in an email on Sunday “we will see what happens” to a taped segment she did with the CBS news show “60 Minutes,” as reports suggested that lawyers for Preisdent Trump are trying to block the broadcast.

Daniels, in a brief email to The Washington Post, declined to comment on any legal discussions. “All I can say is it was never going to air tonight and I guess we will see what happens,” she said.

The specter of a president who has made no secret of his hostility to the media trying to silence the porn star also raises constitutional concerns. Now that Trump is president, the existence of an extramarital relationship becomes a matter of public concern, according to C.J. Peters, dean of the University of Akron School of Law.

The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old.

“We are committed to working quickly because there’s no time to waste,” she said on a conference call with reporters on Sunday evening. Invoking past mass school shootings, she continued, “No student, no family, no teacher and no school should have to live the horror of Parkland or Sandy Hook or Columbine again.”

“This plan is weak on security and an insult to the victims of gun violence,” Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said in a statement. “When it comes to keeping our families safe, it’s clear that President Trump and Congressional Republicans are all talk and no action.”

US steelworkers say Trump tariff plan has appeal – 'but about 40 years too late' Workers in Pennsylvania, once a steel hub, are conflicted about the tariffs proposal and fear Trump could just be playing politics

To say former steelworkers in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley are conflicted about Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on steel imports is not quite to capture the mood.

Here is a man who used foreign steel to build his own buildings, they think. Who hires foreign workers and relies on foreign money. Someone who does not have to worry what a car costs – or a can of soup, for that matter. A politician who is just trying to win the special election next week in Pittsburgh. Who might not even follow up.

A Polish law banning almost all trade on Sundays has taken effect, with large supermarkets and most other retailers closed for the first time since liberal shopping laws were introduced in the 1990s after the collapse of communism.

The new law at first bans trade on two Sundays per month, rising to three Sundays a month from 2019 and finally all Sundays from 2020, except for seven exceptions before the Easter and Christmas holidays.

Anyone infringing the new rules faces a fine of up to 100,000 zlotys (£21,180), while repeat offenders may face a prison sentence. Solidarity appealed to people to report any violators to the National Labour Inspectorate, a state body.

Russia has said it successfully launched a hypersonic missile described by Vladimir Putin as an ideal weapon when he unveiled new armaments earlier this month.

The Kinzhal missile was one of the weapons the Russian president unveiled in his state of the nation address earlier this month, ahead of a presidential election on 18 March that he is all but guaranteed to win.

One of the technologies Putin touted was a robotic torpedo that could hit an US port city, but Mattis said that makes no difference as Russia already can target US port cities with missiles. “It doesn’t change anything other than how much money do they want to spend on something that does not change at all the strategic balance,” he said.

Protesters have taken to the streets of northern Greece demanding the release of two Greek soldiers detained by Turkey, amid rising tensions between the two countries.

Greece’s defence minister, Panos Kammenos, described the pair as “hostages” and ordered border patrols to be stepped up along the heavily defended land frontier the two nations share.

In rallies in Orestiada, the Greek town closest to the border, and Thessaloniki, the country’s northern capital, protesters called for the soldiers to be set free immediately.

Steve Bannon tells French far-right 'history is on our side' Former Trump adviser addresses Front National as Marine Le Pen attempts to relaunch her party

Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon has told France’s far-right Front National that, “history is on our side and will bring us victory” in an address to the party’s conference.

At the two-day conference in the northern city of Lille, FN president Marine Le Pen’s is attempting to “re-found” her rightwing party, announcing a change of name – to be revealed on Sunday and validated by a members’ vote – to show the FN has come of age, shaken off its controversial past and is ready to govern.