Timbits

Mainstream and social media outlets reported on Friday that a batch of equipment sent to a Russian drone unit by volunteers was filled with plastic explosives.

Farage spoke of “societal decline” while he relaxed against the lectern as if addressing all-comers at the golf club bar. He was fluent, as he always is, speaking without notes or a script. Lowe, by contrast, stood at the lectern reading. “Family, community, country – this is what we stand for,” Farage proclaimed. He praised Donald Trump’s war on woke, promised Reform would cut the size of the administrative state and said he would never judge anyone “by their colour, religion, sexual preference or gender”. He said “something extraordinary was happening out there” in the country. Reform, a new political party which until recently had no representation in parliament and no proper organisation or infrastructure, had polled “ahead of the Tories in seven consecutive polls” and was just behind Labour. Like a political seismologist alert to what was coming, he predicted an earthquake: “the biggest political change this country has ever seen”.

Serbia’s powerful populist leader Aleksandar Vučić was facing his biggest challenge yet as student-led demonstrations intensified at the weekend in what was being called the Balkan country’s greatest ever protest movement.

"We will not hesitate to act," Trudeau said at a meeting of the newly formed Council on Canada-U.S. Relations in Toronto. "We will respond and, I will say it again, everything is on the table."

Canadian political leaders say "nothing is off the table" when it comes to responding to potential 25% tariffs from the US, days before they could come into force.

But strains are showing in "Team Canada" when it comes to whether energy supply should be a tool in a possible tariff war with the US.

Poland’s minimum hourly wage has, for the first time, surpassed the federal minimum wage in the United States. On 1 January, the minimum wage in Poland rose to 30.50 zloty per hour before tax, which at the average exchange rate so far this year is $7.35

When the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials in November, the response from the country’s government was all too familiar. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected outright the warrants for alleged war crimes in Gaza against him and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, calling them “an antisemitic decision”. The ultranationalist national security adviser, Itamar Ben-Gvir, declared that the court had shown “once again that it is antisemitic through and through”. And the transport minister, Miri Regev, chimed in, claiming: “This is modern antisemitism in the guise of justice.”

His son confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after a series of hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his liver and brain.

Russia has imposed a new tariff on a category of imports from China, an ally that has been a crucial lifeline for Moscow since President Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Politico reported that these goats, 432 of them pregnant according to the press release, were likely exported to help "relieve North Korea's food shortages."