How Vivajets Leverages Collaborations, Tech to Facilitate Business Connectivity in Africa

OTTAWA — Two senior members of the federal cabinet were in Florida Friday pushing Canada's new $1.3 billion border plan with members of Donald Trump's transition team, a day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself appeared to finally push back at the president-elect over his social media posts about turning Canada into the 51st state. Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Foreign Affair Minister Melanie Joly shared few details of their meetings in Palm Beach, simply saying in a statement the U.S. officials they met with took notes and agreed to relay messages to Trump. "Minister LeBlanc and Minister Joly had a positive, productive meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Howard Lutnick and Doug Burgum, as a followup to the dinner between the prime minister and President Trump last month," wrote Jean-Sébastien Comeau, a spokesman for LeBlanc. Lutnick is Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, and Burgum is the former governor of North Dakota and current nominee for secretary of the interior. When announcing Lutnick as his commerce pick Trump said the chief executive of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald would be in charge of the Trump "tariff and trade agenda." "Both Ministers outlined the measures in Canada’s Border Plan and reiterated the shared commitment to strengthen border security as well as combat the harm caused by fentanyl to save Canadian and American lives." He added the ministers agreed to continue the discussions in the coming weeks. Joly is also expected to meet in Florida with senator Lindsay Graham Friday evening. This trip comes less than four weeks before Trump is sworn in again as president. He has threatened to impose a new 25 per cent import tariff on Canada and Mexico the same day over concerns about a trade imbalance, as well as illegal drugs and migration issues at the borders. The broad strokes of Canada's new border plan were made public Dec. 17, including a new aerial intelligence task force to provide round-the-clock surveillance of the border, and improved efforts using technology and canine teams to seek out drugs in shipments leaving Canada. Comeau said earlier Friday morning the ministers would also emphasize the negative impacts of Trump's threatened tariffs on both Canada and the U.S. Comeau said the ministers were to build on the discussions that took place last month when Trudeau and LeBlanc met Trump at Mar-a-Lago just days after Trump first made his tariff threat. It was at that dinner on Nov. 29 when Trump first raised the notion of Canada becoming the 51st state, a comment LeBlanc has repeatedly since insisted was just a joke. But Trump has continued the quip repeatedly in various social media posts, including in his Christmas Day message when he said Canadians would pay lower taxes and have better military protection if they became Americans. He has taken to calling Trudeau "governor" instead of prime minister. It isn't clear if LeBlanc raised the issue with Trump's team in Palm Beach Friday. Trudeau had not directly responded to any of the jabs, but on Thursday posted a link to a six-minute long video on YouTube from 2010 in which American journalist Tom Brokaw "explains Canada to Americans." "Some information about Canada for Americans" was all he wrote in the post. The video, which originally aired during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, explains similarities between the two countries, including their founding based on immigration, their trading relationship and the actions of the Canadian Army in World War 2 and other modern conflicts. "In the long history of sovereign neighbours there has never been a relationship as close, productive and peaceful as the U.S. and Canada," Brokaw says in the video. Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, who is at the centre of some of Trudeau's recent domestic political troubles, also called out Trump's antics on X Thursday, calling it "casual disrespect" and "carrying the 'joke' too far." "Time to call it out, stand up for Canada, and build a true North American partnership," said Carney, who Trudeau was courting to join his cabinet before Chrystia Freeland resigned as finance minister last week. Freeland's sudden departure, three days after Trudeau informed her he would be firing her as finance minister in favour of Carney, left Trudeau's leadership even more bruised than it already was. Despite the expectation Carney would assume the role, he did not and has not made any statements about it. LeBlanc was sworn in as finance minister instead the same day Freeland quit. More than two dozen Liberal MPs have publicly called on Trudeau to resign as leader, and Trudeau is said to be taking the holidays to think about his next steps. He is currently vacationing in British Columbia. He did not make a public statement about the meeting as of publication. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 27, 2024. Alessia Passafiume, The Canadian PressThe distributions are for the annual non-cash capital gains distributions, which are typically reinvested in additional units of the respective funds at the year-end, and do not include ongoing monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual cash distribution amounts. The additional units will be immediately consolidated with the previously outstanding units such that the number of outstanding units following the distribution will equal the number of units outstanding prior to the distribution. The record date for the 2024 annual distributions will be December 30, 2024, payable on January 3, 2025. 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Undercover FBI agents had no role in US Capitol attack: report

Undercover FBI agents were not present during the 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, a Justice Department watchdog said Thursday in a report debunking a popular right-wing conspiracy theory. "We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6," Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz said in an 88-page report. Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6 in a bid to prevent congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden's election victory. Right-wing media and even some Republican lawmakers have spuriously claimed that undercover FBI agents provoked the attack on Congress, which followed a fiery speech by Trump in which he falsely claimed the election had been stolen. The inspector general said that while no undercover FBI agents were present at the Trump rally or the Capitol, 26 FBI informants known as confidential human sources (CHS) were in Washington at the time. Three of the informants had been tasked with reporting on domestic terrorist suspects while the others were there on their own. "None of these FBI CHSs were authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6," the report said. The inspector general also said there had been an intelligence-gathering failure by the FBI ahead of the January 6 attack. "While the FBI undertook significant efforts to identify domestic terrorism subjects who planned to travel to the Capital region on January 6," the report said, "the FBI did not take a step that could have helped the FBI and its law enforcement partners with their preparations. "Specifically, the FBI did not canvass its field offices in advance of January 6, 2021, to identify any intelligence, including CHS reporting, about potential threats to the January 6 Electoral Certification," it said. FBI deputy director Paul Abbate was quoted as saying this was a "basic step that was missed" in "understanding the threat picture prior to January 6." Trump was impeached by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives following the attack on the Capitol, but acquitted by the Senate. He is to return to the White House on January 20 after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the November presidential election. More than 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the assault on Congress. Trump has lauded them as "patriots" and "political prisoners" and pledged to pardon many of them when he returns to the White House. cl/stDeepak Kaul awarded a 2024 Global Recognition Award for AI and cybersecurity contributions

Broncos’ inside-out build has worked so far, but playoff hopes ride on leaning in further: “It always comes down to blocking”If you’re already out, you don’t need to read further. Job well done. This article is for all the photographers who are still signed up to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, who are still paying the £9.98 per month for the Photography Plan. I believe it is time to stop – that we can’t ignore or indulge this company’s behaviour any longer. It’s time for a serious, co-ordinated, sustained photographer boycott of Adobe. Pick one of the , and don’t look back. Adobe’s generative AI push has been much-publicised and much-criticised in recent years. The company is constantly updating and boasting about its Adobe Sensei and Adobe Firefly tools, which integrate generative AI technology comprehensively across the company’s suite of programs. With Adobe Firefly in Photoshop, you can use Generative Fill to expand an image beyond its borders, or use Generate Image to make something up wholesale. A new world of possibilities, unleash your creativity, blah, blah, etc, etc. If you’re a photographer, your initial reaction to all this may have been understandable confusion. You enjoy taking pictures. You may even earn something approaching a living by taking pictures and selling them. What would you gain from getting a computer to hallucinate a picture for you? However, as Adobe released more and more ads with messages like ‘ ’, it began to feel like this tech wasn’t being marketed towards photographers. It began to feel a lot like this tech was being marketed towards photographers’ clients. Like many of you reading this, I am a purely amateur photographer – I take pictures for personal enjoyment, not profit (which is a very handy stance to have when nobody wants to buy your pictures anyway, but I digress). I make my money from writing, sometimes about photography, sometimes about other things. For many years, if I needed more cash to give to Kodak, I’d do a little copywriting for small businesses. Unglamorous stuff – it might be writing the ‘About’ page for a plumbing company’s website, finessing some brochure copy for an auction house, or whatever else. The reason I bring this up is because those jobs are gone, completely gone, and I know why they are gone. So when someone tells me that ChatGPT and its ilk are tools to ‘support writers’, I think that person is at best misguided, at worst being shamelessly disingenuous. I’ve interviewed a lot of photographers about how they developed their careers, and dozens of them have talked about supporting themselves in the early years by doing the kinds of here-and-there jobs that are going to be completely swallowed when businesses all have access to a big red button that says ‘Generate’. Because who cares if the generated image looks stiff and awkward? Who cares if the people in the image have legs that are too short and dead eyes that aren’t quite in the right place? Who cares if an image of the English pastoral countryside features roads that go nowhere and an African bird that went extinct in the 1990s? It was free! Well, it wasn’t free exactly; you do have to pay £9.98 a month for the software package. Still, it’s so much cheaper than hiring someone every time. Can you believe we used to pay someone a hundred quid to snap a photo lol? Creatives in all disciplines are starting to notice. The Adobe MAX conference took place in October, and designers who attended were by how relentlessly generative AI was being pushed on them. Why would a professional designer want a tool that automatically makes something sloppier and uglier than something they’d make themselves? Once again, the answer is that they wouldn’t. Their clients would. Filmmakers, video editors and animators, meanwhile, woke up the other day to the news that this year’s . Of course, this claim is a bit of sleight of hand, because there would have been a huge amount of human effort involved in making the AI-generated imagery look consistent and polished and not like nauseating garbage. But that is still a promise of a deeply unedifying future – where the best a creative can hope for is a job polishing the computer’s turds. What joy. What a world we’re building. Adobe, Microsoft, Google and all the rest of the companies that have pivoted hard into this stuff – they aren’t going to stop. In May 2024, the American Society of Media Photographers wrote a to Adobe in response to the ‘Skip the photoshoot’ ads, asking the company to stop throwing photographers under the bus, to support the community of creatives who made it what it is. ‘Do better Adobe,’ was the signoff, and of course, in the six months since, Adobe has not shown any interest in doing better. The ASMP may as well have written a letter asking their neighbour’s dog to stop barking. The dog might have at least been curious enough to sniff it. I cancelled my Adobe Photography Plan in late 2023. The final straw for me was when . They were labelled, but in a way that was easy to miss, and several of the images had been bought and used by publications where the staff were probably not aware that they were fake. Once the story broke, Adobe removed the images, but that was when I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. So I cancelled – I ate the early cancellation fee, a disgustingly predatory practice we’ve all just become inured to – and I did not look back. (As an aside, if your response to all this is something along the lines of then save it. You were already told in the first line that you didn’t need to read any further. This article is for all those who are still using Adobe software, despite everything, whether it’s because it’s easiest, because they’re used to it, or because they understandably just haven’t paid much attention to what the company is doing.) It’s time to give it up. I honestly think it’s the only thing left to do, because they won’t stop. Open letters from the American Society of Media Photographers won’t make them stop. Direct won’t make them stop. We can all read and share another eye-rolling article on Petapixel about how Adobe are throwing photographers under the bus yet again, but the only thing that will effect any course change at all is if the executives start seeing the numbers go down. Given the eye-watering expense of generative AI, it might not take as much as you’d think. Boycott Adobe. Stop giving them your money. Use something else – is a brilliant photo editing tool that you can buy and keep without a subscription. GIMP is a complicated but perfectly capable photo editor that is completely free and open-source. If Adobe is going to rip the livelihoods away from photographers, then the very, very least you can do is stop bankrolling them while they do it.

Tehran refutes IAEA statement, says nuclear activities transparent

Eyes on the skies

GUELPH, Ontario, Dec. 08, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Current Water Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: WATR) (“ ” or “ ” or “ “), announces that due to the ongoing postal strike in Canada, the Company’s annual meeting materials are being delayed. The Company’s Meeting materials may be viewed on the Company’s SEDAR+ corporate website at and are also available electronically at . shareholders requesting a proxy for the meeting may contact TSX Trust Company at 1-866- 600-5869 or email . Proxies, completed and signed, should be forwarded by deadline, 10:00 a.m. EST, Wednesday, December 18, 2024. who hold their shares through a broker, and have not received their information from Broadridge Investor Solutions, should contact their broker representative to request that a proxy be issued for them. If you wish to receive a paper copy of the Meeting materials, please call 1-866-600-5869. In order to receive a paper copy in time to vote before the Meeting, your request should be received by Wednesday, December 11, 2024. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. is a “Technology Company” applying its patented and proprietary “Electrochemical Technologies” to the treatment of waste water, desalination water and drinking water contaminated by metals or nutrients, i.e., nitrate/ammonia associated with the mining, metal processing, chemical, agricultural, municipal and waste management sectors. Pumptronics Incorporated operates as a division of the Company and continue to function as an integrated pump station manufacturer specializing in custom design and automation. The common shares trade on Tier ll of the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol “WATR”. The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Dr. Gene S. Shelp, Ph.D., P.Geo. President and CEO Tel: (519) 836-6155 Fax: (519) 836-5683 E-mail: gshelp@currentwatertechnologies.com Web Site: www.currentwatertechnologies.com

Al-Assad’s private fleet of luxury cars revealed as Syrians loot his palaces after he fled the country

Online debate over foreign workers in tech shows tensions in Trump's political coalition

NEW YORK (AP) — The man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was not a client of the medical insurer and may have targeted it because of its size and influence, a senior police official said Thursday. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told NBC New York in an interview Thursday that investigators have uncovered evidence that Luigi Mangione had prior knowledge UnitedHealthcare was holding its annual investor conference in New York City. Mangione also mentioned the company in a note found in his possession when he was detained by police in Pennsylvania. “We have no indication that he was ever a client of United Healthcare, but he does make mention that it is the fifth largest corporation in America, which would make it the largest healthcare organization in America. So that’s possibly why he targeted that company,” said Kenny. UnitedHealthcare is in the top 20 largest U.S. companies by market capitalization but is not the fifth largest. It is the largest U.S. health insurer. Mangione remains jailed without bail in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested Monday after being spotted at a McDonald's in the city of Altoona, about 230 miles (about 370 kilometers) west of New York City. His lawyer there, Thomas Dickey, has said Mangione intends to plead not guilty. Dickey also said he has yet to see evidence decisively linking his client to the crime. Mangione's arrest came five days after the caught-on-camera killing of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. Police say the shooter waited outside the hotel, where the health insurer was holding its investor conference, early on the morning of Dec. 4. He approached Thompson from behind and shot him before fleeing on a bicycle through Central Park. Mangione is fighting attempts to extradite him back to New York so that he can face a murder charge in Thompson's killing. A hearing has been scheduled for Dec. 30. The 26-year-old, who police say was found with a “ ghost gun ” matching shell casings found at the site of the shooting, is charged in Pennsylvania with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police. Mangione is an Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family. In posts on social media, Mangione wrote about experiencing severe chronic back pain before undergoing a spinal fusion surgery in 2023. Afterward, he posted that the operation had been a success and that his pain had improved and mobility returned. He urged others to consider the same type of surgery. On Wednesday, police said investigators are looking at his writings about his health problems and his criticism of corporate America and the U.S. health care system . Kenny said in the NBC interview that Mangione's family reported him missing to San Francisco authorities in November.Is Elon Musk Using X To Target H-1B Visa Critics? Allegations Of Censorship Surface