#Chinese dissident who fled by dinghy to South Korea arrives in #Canada: friend, HONG KONG — A Chinese political dissident who had fled to South Korea last month in a dinghy has arrived in Canada, his friend said on social media on Saturday.

Dong Guangping was aboard a 3.3 metre (10.8 foot) inflatable boat in the waters off a western South Korean island in May when he was detained by South Korea’s coast guard for allegedly violating the country’s immigration law. It was his fourth known attempt to flee China.

Appearing at a court hearing in South Korea, he told reporters that he hopes to go to Canada to reunite with his wife and daughters, who have already been resettled there, according to South Korean media.

In a post Saturday on X, his friend Sheng Xue, a Chinese Canadian activist, said Dong had landed in Toronto following an Air Canada flight on Friday.

“He just had a big bowl of noodles with eggs, tomatoes and shrimps,” she wrote in the post, adding that she has spent more than 10 years trying to get him out of China.

She attached a photo of Dong in a car with her and another photo of Dong holding a bowl.

Dong, a former police officer in China, had previously been detained several times for his activism. He was imprisoned for three years in 2001 for “inciting subversion of state power” and spent more than eight months behind bars after being arrested in 2014 for participating in a memorial for victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to past statements from Amnesty International.

He previously escaped to Thailand and Vietnam, but authorities there deported him back to China. Dong also unsuccessfully tried to swim to a Taiwanese island.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has not immediately commented.

Kanis Leung, The Associated Press

Artificial intelligence may fuel inflation not just by driving up the cost of chips, but also by making consumers wealthier and more willing to spend, according to the International Monetary Fund’s chief #economist

#Utah governor restricts fireworks as largest U.S. wildfire surges uncontained

As costs rise, Calgary businesses count on Stampede’s economic boost. CALGARY - With the Calgary Stampede less than a week away, some business owners say this year’s event could not come at a better time as they grapple with rising costs and tighter margins.

For restaurant owner and chef Ashish Damle, the annual influx of visitors can make a big difference.

“The impact is significant. It really, really helps a small business operator like us,” said Damle, owner of Wok and Co. and several other Calgary restaurants.

Damle said his restaurants typically sees weekly revenue increase by between 40 and 60 per cent during the Stampede, with elevated sales often continuing through the rest of July.

The additional customers are especially welcome this year.

“It is challenging. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. Costs are really up,” he said.

“With prices of food and fuel especially, that affects the price of food and alcohol that we buy. The bottom line changes, but then we get relief through events like this.”

The economic benefits are also being felt beyond the restaurant industry.

Robby Khunkhun, an Airbnb host and real estate specialist, said July is consistently his busiest month of the year but so far things have been slow.

“It has been a little bit challenging. I think the number of bookings I’ve seen compared to (this time) last year it’s a little bit less. But we do have so many last-minute bookings when it comes to the summertime,” he said.

He said the city is lucky to have an event like the Stampede to give them the economic lift.

“A lot of people are relying on this income to bank for the summer, to help them get through the winter.”

Moshe Lander, economics professor with Concordia University, said a combination of Canadians choosing to vacation closer to home to save money and potential spillover from the FIFA World Cup in Vancouver, may be what’s helping drive interest in this year’s Stampede.

“Anybody who’s in Vancouver and has a little bit of leftover time is going to say, ‘Hey, let me check out the Calgary Stampede. I’ve heard a lot about this,’” he said.

Beyond the financial gains, Damle said the Stampede also provides valuable exposure for local businesses.

“There’s going to be more people on the streets and we’ll get better exposure as far as a brand goes. That will bring in, of course, financial gains and people will get to know about us more,” he said.

According to an economic impact analysis conducted by MNP for the Calgary Stampede, Stampede-related activity generated $872.4 million in economic output nationally in 2025, including $664.2 million in Calgary and nearly $191 million in wages and salaries for Calgarians.

#UK: King Charles breaks precedent to reveal £30 million paid in taxes since 2022

Get a load of this: Humans and great apes share similar giggles.

How do we know this? Researchers tickled 13 captive apes — including gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and #bonobos — and recorded the results. The new research reexamined those decades-old recordings and compared them with the newly captured giggles of four young children while they were being tickled and playing at home.

It turns out that the chuckles of humans and great apes follow similar rhythms, with regular timing between their laughs, a uniting thread that likely reflects their ties to a common ancestor, researchers said.

“In a way, we are very similar to other great apes because we’ve been laughing in a similar way for 15 million years,” said study author Chiara De Gregorio, a primatologist at the University of Warwick in England.

Laughter communicates a playful, happy feeling without using words. Many animals can laugh too, but the giggles don’t follow human patterns as closely. When researchers tickle rats, for example, they respond with ultrasonic squeaks.

Scientists trying to uncover how laughter evolved have picked apart animals’ facial expressions, but less work has been done on how laughs sound. And compared with apes, human laughter has become faster and more complex. For one, our laughs sound different based on context — from a polite chuckle among colleagues to a full-bodied guffaw with close friends.

“We are like the masters of laughter, I would say,” said De Gregorio, whose findings were published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.

These giggles evolved to best suit animals’ different social lives, said Brittany Florkiewicz, who studies animal communication at Lyon College and had no role in the new research. She said the study’s findings make sense, and point to a need for more investigation.

Florkiewicz said she’d like to hear comparable recordings of other animals with playful facial expressions, like dogs, horses and cats. That could tell us more about how laughter evolved, so we can “understand what makes us uniquely human, but also what is similar between humans and other animals.”

Studying the origins of laughter may seem corny, but it’s one aspect of human communication that can help us understand others — including how we learned to speak. Because sounds don’t fossilize, scientists are using the evidence we do have to trace things back, one chuckle at a time.

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Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

‘It’s heartbreaking’: #Canada’s #Venezuelan community reeling after devastating earthquakes. Among the devastating images coming out of Venezuela, is one of a woman waving a piece of clothing from a damaged building in La Guaira, hoping to be rescued.

She is one of many people who were trapped inside their homes following two of the strongest earthquakes to hit the country in more than a century. Both quakes struck near Venezuela’s northern coast, with the first — a magnitude 7.2 — hitting at around 6:04 p.m. local time, and the second — a magnitude 7.5 — occurring just 40 seconds later.

“I don’t think we can really comprehend just what this is, you know, having two huge earthquakes so close together,” said Jon Rosemberg, a Toronto resident who grew up in Caracas. “It’s heartbreaking.”

First responders, rescue workers and civilians spent the night combing through the rubble of collapsed buildings trying to find survivors. The two earthquakes battered the country’s already fragile infrastructure with hundreds of buildings toppled in the cities of Caracas and La Guaira. Nearly 200 people have been killed and there are fears the death toll could climb to the thousands. But rescue efforts have been complicated by decades of corruption and a lack of investment in basic services some say.

“First responders and all of the infrastructure that can be used for a situation like this, there’s no resources available,” said Rosemberg in an interview with CTV News.

Today Venezuela’s President Delcy Rodriguez, called for unity in the face of the disaster in a televised address The earthquake is likely to further test her presidency as new concerns about the long-term impact the damages will have on the stability of the country.

Rodriguez was installed after the United States ousted former president Nicolas Maduro in January. While many Venezuelans had hoped their country had turned a corner after decades of his oppressive rule, they say the natural disaster could present new challenges.

First global rules adopted for self-driving cars: #UN. The first global regulations for fully autonomous vehicles were adopted Wednesday, a UN agency said, establishing uniform international safety requirements that could pave the way for larger-scale rollouts of self-driving cars.

Safety concerns and the cost of developing next-level systems have long slowed progress on autonomous vehicles.

As self-driving cars have begun to hit the road in a growing number of cities, the fragmented national approaches to regulation have spurred manufacturer fears that vehicles developed for one market could be blocked from others.

In a bid to address that issue, a meeting of the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations at the United Nations in Geneva decided to introduce a global regulatory framework for vehicles equipped with fully autonomous driving systems (ADS).

The forum brings together dozens of countries, carmakers and technology giants.

“The global regulatory landscape has reached a decisive milestone,” said the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the forum’s umbrella organisation that counts 56 member states in Europe, North America and Asia.
‘Really big step’

The new regulatory framework, which does not cover assisted systems, comes at a time when the market is heating up especially for so-called “robotaxis” -- driverless cars loaded with sensors.

In China and the United States combined, private robotaxi fleets more than doubled in 2025 to reach 8,000 vehicles across more than two dozen major cities, according to a May report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

By 2035, the IEA forecasts there will be between 700,000 and three million robotaxis in 40 to 80 major cities.

The global regulations aim to “to strengthen trust among governments, industry and the public by ensuring that automated systems everywhere meet rigorous ... safety standards”, UNECE said.

“This is a really big step,” said Richard Damm, chair of the UNECE Working Party on Automated/Autonomous and Connected Vehicles (GRVA) behind the proposal.

“It’s very important, as automation will be one of the future technologies we will see on the road,” he told AFP.

The new framework will require manufacturers to ensure testing meets strict credibility criteria, and also to implement audited safety governance and processes throughout the ADS lifecycle.

They would also need to provide evidence their system “poses no unreasonable risk”, UNECE said, and would be required to provide continuous performance monitoring.

The vehicles must also record and store safety-relevant ADS data.
January 2027 target

The move was backed by all the major auto markets, including the United States, China, the European Union, Japan and Britain, the organisation said, voicing confidence that the worldwide deployment would be speedy.

“We expect it to enter into force in January 2027,” GRVA secretary Francois Guichard told AFP, adding that a few manufacturers “are already in the starting blocks”.

Under the complex system of international vehicle regulations, identical sets of rules were adopted in two separate votes Wednesday, according to UNECE.

They will be included in two existing international agreements, adhered to by separate and partially overlapping groups of countries.

More than half of the 62 state parties to a 1958 agreement took part in Wednesday’s vote, agreeing unanimously to implement the new rules.

Under this agreement, autonomous vehicles produced in one of the countries can be sold without further controls in the others.

The United States, Canada and China -- not party to the first agreement -- were meanwhile among 13 countries to vote to add the same set of regulations to a 1998 agreement, which is similar but does not provide for mutual recognition between countries.

Damm stressed that bringing all the big players on board had not meant weakening safety requirements.

“This regulation is not a compromise on safety,” he said.

Anand announces $35M to boost Caribbean security, tackle Haiti's gang crisis.

#OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced $35 million in new funding Tuesday for projects aimed at shoring up security and curbing violence in the Caribbean.

Anand was in Panama on Tuesday for meetings of the Organization of American States, a multilateral organization that co-ordinates state efforts on security, democracy and economic development across the Western Hemisphere.

Most of the new funding focuses on the violence and political chaos caused by Haiti’s gang crisis. Armed gangs have controlled much of the country since 2021, including critical infrastructure and food production.

The gangs have caused a major humanitarian crisis, with Washington trying to avoid a wave of asylum claimants and Caribbean states urging the U.S. to stop the flow of American handguns into the region. Canada has targeted members of Haiti’s economic elite with sanctions, arguing they have collaborated with the gangs sowing instability across the country.

Tuesday’s funding includes $7.5 million to support the Haitian National Police service’s fight against the gangs, $6.8 million to help countries in the region stop drug trafficking through better policing and information sharing, and $10 million to help launch a task force on drug trafficking.

The funding also covers projects to help Jamaica recover from Hurricane Melissa, a category five storm that was one of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic.

Some of the funding is also going to support Colombia’s peace process.

Canada has been a major funder of OAS projects, including elections monitoring in South America, and has advocated in recent years for better financing for Caribbean states hit by climate change.

Anand said Canada also has ratified a 1994 convention on gender-based violence which sets obligations for member states on preventing, investigating and punishing violence against women.

A Global Affairs Canada news release did not explain why it took so long for Canada to ratify the convention. Global Affairs said ratifying the convention required consultation with other levels of government and the terms “are consistent with obligations that Canada is already subject to under the international human rights treaties to which it is a party.”

Anand’s office said that, while she was in the region, she also met with her counterparts from Mexico, Brazil and Panama, and the head of the OAS.

The meetings come as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says Canada and Mexico are boosting bilateral trade while working to retain the continental trade deal known in Canada as CUSMA. They also come as Canada tries to secure a trade deal with a bloc of Southern American countries known as Mercosur.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 23, 2026

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press

#MOSCOW, June 23. Russian Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bombers conducted a scheduled flight over the neutral waters of the Barents and Norwegian seas, with Mikoyan MiG-31 supersonic interceptor aircraft providing escort, the Russian #Defense Ministry said.

"The Tu-160 strategic bombers of Russia's Aerospace Forces long-range aviation performed a scheduled flight through international airspace over the neutral waters of the Barents and Norwegian seas. The flight lasted approximately 16 hours. During the mission, the Tu-160 crews practiced aerial refueling," the Defense Ministry said.

The ministry also noted that "escort support was provided by MiG-31 crews from the Russian Aerospace Forces."