Canada believes US President Donald Trump is no longer interested in turning it into the 51st state, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday. “He admires Canada,” Carney told Amanpour. “I think it’s fair to say, maybe for a period of time (he) coveted Canada.” Carney has frequently pronounced the old, close partnership between Canada and the United States as “over.” He began his term by courting European partners in the United Kingdom and France, and even collaborating with Australia on new radar systems for the Canadian Arctic. Still, Carney credited Trump for pushing Canada toward higher defense spending, especially meeting the defense spending benchmark for NATO members. “The president is focused on changing a series of bilateral relations,” Carney told Amanpour. “We’re at NATO. He’s been focused on making sure that all members, Canada included … pay their fair share. I think we’re doing that now.” Trump now has the…

Seventy-five years ago this week, more than 135,000 North Korean troops invaded South Korea, starting a war that cost millions of lives and left scars that linger to this day. Yet, the Korean War has been forever overshadowed by World War II, a much larger conflict that ended less than five years earlier. Even the US Army refers to Korea as “the Forgotten War” – despite more than 36,000 American lives lost. Sixteen nations, including the United States, sent combat troops in aid of South Korea under the United Nations Command. Chinese troops intervened on the North Korean side. War broke out on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces stormed across the 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea. An armistice signed on July 27, 1953, stopped the conflict, but the war never officially ended because there was no peace treaty. While the twists and turns of today’s US-North…

An empty base as a target, with many hours warning, and a limited number of missiles fired at some of the best air defense systems in the world. Iran’s retaliation for the US’s weekend strikes on three of its nuclear facilities can only have been designed to deescalate. The US-run Al Udeid airbase in Qatar had been evacuated days earlier, with satellite images showing the departure of planes and personnel widely publicised in the media. It is the most important US military airbase in the region, the home of Central Command. It even launched the drone that killed Iran’s top military personality, General Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, Iranian state media said in the hours after “Operation Glad Tidings of Victory.” The Monday strike against Al-Udeid had close to zero chance of American casualties – and provided the perfect moment of quasi-absurd face-saving for Iran. The first hint of a possible…

In the past 48 hours, the Middle East has witnessed an unprecedented US airstrike on Iran with its most powerful non-nuclear weapons, an Iranian retaliatory strike on the largest US air base in the region, to an apparent truce that will see Iran and Israel end their hostilities that have set the world on edge. The region and the wider world watched warily as events unfolded overnight into Tuesday, but with a degree of hope as daylight broke in the region that what US President Donald Trump called the “12 Day War” may be over. “THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. Around the same time, Israeli emergency workers were at the site of what appeared to be Iran’s final attack of the 12-day conflict, a missile strike in Beer Shiva that left at least five people dead and…