Trump just hit Canada with an extra 50% tariff, and the detail that matters isn’t the number. It’s that these tariffs apply even to goods fully compliant with USMCA, the very trade deal Trump renegotiated and signed himself. The escape hatch that shielded most Canadian trade through 2025 just got welded shut. Justin Wolfers, the Australian-American economist behind Platypus Economics, walks through how the White House got there: a 1930 statute barely used since Herbert Hoover was president, deployed to justify a 50% duty on everything from wine to hockey sticks, tied to disputes that have nothing to do with the goods actually being taxed.

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I just finished Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” and one passage stopped me cold.

“No song is more McCartneyesque than ‘Penny Lane’, just as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is indubitably Lennonesque. Paul created songs that felt as if they had always existed; John channelled transmissions from another planet. Paul’s melodies feel like the purpose of music itself; John strains at the limits of chords and keys, trying to get past music into pure feeling or experience.”

That’s the whole book in four sentences. And once you read it, you hear every Beatles song differently.

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Bad enough that he’s a stain on democracy but now the toxic clown photo bombs Spain’s world cup celebrations. “That cheering … that’s all for me .. hey let me do my YMCA dance for the adoring crowds.” Congratulations to Spain. A pox on those who took every effort to “USA USA USA” this tournament. At least AI enhanced photo tools can easily erase this toxic clown. Can someone ‘red card’ him out of there!

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The same week Alibaba teased a 2.4 trillion parameter model it says trails only Fable 5, OpenAI’s flagship agent was busy deleting production databases nobody asked it to touch. That’s the state of the AI race in July 2026: reliability is optional, marketing sentences are not.

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Extended four times, then it just… stopped.

That’s the shape of Claude Fable 5’s rollout since Anthropic first threw the model open to paying subscribers in early July. Free access was meant to run through July 12. It didn’t. Backlash over the early cutoff pushed that out to July 19. Then, on July 18, Anthropic announced the real end date: July 20, when Fable 5 stops being a bonus and becomes a plan feature.

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Moonshot AI’s new flagship undercuts Claude Opus 4.8 on price and edges past it on the industry’s leading benchmark. The catch is that it isn’t actually open yet, and won’t be runnable by anyone outside a data centre when it is.

Six labs now field a model scoring above 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Two months ago it was two. Grok 4.5, GPT-5.6, Muse Spark 1.1 and now Kimi K3 all launched within eight days of each other. The newest entrant landed this week, it’s Chinese, and it undercuts Claude on price.

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“Go’n load us up with tariffs, but we’ll never be the 51st state." That’s the chorus Bryan Adams dropped on Canada Day, and it’s about as subtle as a power chord. He never says ~Trump’s~ name once. He doesn’t need to. CBC covers the release: a two-minute, sixteen-second rock anthem timed to July 1 (Canda Day), built around the annexation rhetoric Trump has repeated on and off for the better part of two years.

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Virtually every time I fire up either Claude or ChatGPT’s desktop app, I see there’s an update. The changes are not earth-shattering but are progressive improvements. Here are some.

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