Hobson's Choice for the Armenian people

With all this talk about "great powers" and "middle powers", spare a thought for some of the "small powers".

Take little Armenia, for example: population about 3 million, area about half the size of Nova Scotia or a bit bigger than Wales, GDP in the same range as Burkina Faso and Mongolia? Armenia is about to hold a general election on June 7th, and the run-up to it has brought home just what a balancing act a small land-locked country like that has to maintain.

Armenia has been a life-line for Iran, on its southern flank, providing thousands of truckloads of agricultural produce, cargo and fuel. But it must be painfully aware that Iran can turn on its allies in a heartbeat.

It maintains a fragile peace with next-door neighbour, historic rival and perennial bugbear Azerbaijan, particularly in the aftermath of yet another skirmish over Nagorno-Karabakh, in which many thousands of ethnic Armenians were expelled, and some Armenian POWs remain in custody.

Its relationship with Turkey (sorry, Türkiye) on its western border is in constant state of fracture, especially under the iron rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Notwithstanding the ongoing debate over the 1915 Armenian Genocide by the Turkish Ottoman Empire - well, only debated in Turkey and Azerbaijan, really; accepted fact everywhere else - there are many other points of contention with Turkey, some going back centuries. For example, Mount Ararat, with all its historical and cultural significance, sits firmly within the legal borders of Turkey, but Armenians still see it as the mythical birthplace of the Armenian people, and the recent removal of its image from Armenia's passport entry/exit stamps was highly controversial.

And, overshadowing everything, is the looming presence of Russia, Armenia's one-time overlord back in the Soviet Union days. There is still a Russian air base near the Armenian capital Yerevan, and Russian FSB officer can still seen patrolling Armenia's southern border. Vladimir Putin still considers Armenia to be within Russia's sphere of influence despite its many years of independence, and he has warned Armenia in no uncertain terms against pursuing closer links with the European Union. Russia has exerted pressure in many ways, some subtle, some not so much, from a ban on seafood, mineral water, fresh fruit and vegetables and flowers(!), to the withdrawal of its ambassador, to veiled threats over the functioning of Armenia's (poorly) Russian-run railway system.

Into this volatile mix, then, come the candidates standing for the position of President: former president Robert Kocharyan, staunchly pro-Russia and running on a nationalist platform but also aiming to distance Armenia from the pro-Europe stance of the current President Nicol Pashinyan; the almost equally pro-Russia billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, Moscow's preferred candidate, technically still under house arrest for plotting to overthrow the government, who is promising a "strategic re-alignment" with Russia; and the sole pro-European candidate, the unpopular incumbent Pashinyan (unpopular mainly because of making concessions in favour of peace with Azerbaijan).

If the two pro-Russian candidates were to work together they would handily beat Pashinyan. But, as things stand, Pashinyan may just speak out a victory, Russian pressure notwithstanding.

America hijacks D-Day memorial to score what they see as political points

The arrogance! The disdain! The pompousness! The insensitivity! Yes, I could be talking about almost any member of the Trump administration on almost any day, but this time it's the turn of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth was giving a speech in Normandy, 82 years after the joint D-Day operation to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. Under the codenames Operation Overlord and Operation Neptune, D-Day remains the largest amphibious invasion in military history, and marked a crucial turning point in World War II.

I guess the Europeans felt they had to invite an American to speak, as the USA did provide the largest contingent of troops in the operation and was directly responsible for two of the five beach landings. But they must have had some misgivings at handing Hegseth the mike. And they would have been so right.

Hegseth thought it was appropriate to turn a solemn memorial event into a tub-thumping political diatribe and a pointed critique of European immigration policy from a (totally inapposite) American perspective.

"Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

"The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war-fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary."

I don't know whether Hegseth thought up the (spurious) link between these "invasions" himself, or had a speech-writer do it. But I'm sure he felt himself very clever for it. 

And clearly it never even occurred to him that the callous politicization of a such a sombre and reflective event might not be, well, appropriate. European speakers could have drawn parallels between the "dangerous ideologies" of the Nazis and what is happening in the USA today, but they realized that that would have been inappropriate. Or they could have pointed out modern America's penchant for invading other countries, but that would have been cheap political point-scoring, wouldn't it?

Hegseth - and the whole Trump administration for that matter - has no such qualms, no such subtlety or delicacy. They feel emboldened to say whatever they want in whatever arena at whatever time. They are boors and churls (and much worse).

Canada pledges to accelerate AI development just as others advise caution

It sometimes seems like half of all articles in the newspaper are something to do with artificial intelligence, sometimes something good, often something bad.

Canadian news outlets are all reporting and commenting on Prime Minister Mark Carney's big reveal of Canada's AI strategy yesterday, outlining the government's approach to what he calls "the defining technology of our era". Under the banner "AI For All", Carney's upbeat, if somewhat vague, presentation promises: protections for Canadians, young and old, from the risks and potential online harms of AI (through modernizing consumer privacy legislation, introducing online safety laws, watermarking AI-generated content, creating a Canada trusted AI certification program, protecting elections from interference, etc); access to free AI literacy training (an area where Canada particularly lags), including for post-secondary students; up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities for young Canadians, plus another 250,000 new jobs through increased AI adoption by 2031; boosting business adoption of AI from 12% today to 60% by 2034; building a world-leading supercomputer by 2031; building up a multilateral alliance giving Canada "sovereign autonomy" in key AI capabilities; and $2 billion in direct investment to achieve these strategic aims.

It all sounds very forward-thinking, ambitious, even Panglossian, although what it is really is Canada trying to make up some lost ground on everyone else. Some Canadian tech companies like Cohere are extremely positive about the new policies, calling it "an incredible step forward", "a defining moment of opportunity", and "the beginning of the next chapter", particularly since Canadian researchers were at the forefront of AI's early development.

Critics of the strategy, though, have questioned how AI is supposed to create so many thousands of jobs rather than cost jobs, as many are predicting (Signal 49, for example, warns that AI and automation could lead to 550,000 Canadian job losses by 2030 as businesses restructure.) Others have complained that the government strategy is vague on timelines and specific safety measures. 

Be that as it may, the Canadian government had to make some kind of an announcement about how it is pursuing and dealing with AI, if only because everyone else is.  

It's interesting, though, that it comes hard on the heels of Pope Leo XIV's papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which warns about the urgent need tor an ethical framework for AI to prevent it from becoming an instrument of domination and an agent of lethal autonomous warfare, to avoid the manipulation of reality (e.g. deepfakes), and to protect the rights of workers, the marginalized and the vulnerable.

It also comes just as major AI developer Anthropic warns that maybe there should be a coordinated and verifiable pause in all AI development, because AI systems are approaching the point where they can improve themselves, without human intervention, faster than society can manage the risks.

This, then, is the environment in which Canada is, somewhat belatedly, committing itself to accelerating AI development and adoption.

So, are we in a recession or not?

Why is it so hard to get a straight answer? Well, that's because it depends on who you ask, and what particular axe they have to grind.

The news that Canada is now in a "technical recession" has set political birds a-twitter, with Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre squawking about the "Liberal recession" and the dire need for an immediate emergency debate in parliament. Mr. Poilievre, of course, is hysterical-complainer-in-chief, and will probably never amount to anything more than that. His whole job, as he sees it, is to expostulate that the sky is falling and that it is all the Liberals' fault, leaving Conservatives to hopefully conclude that it would all have been quite different had he been in charge. It's only a matter of time until Conservatives tire of his smarmy Grinch-like smile and his negativity.

But I digress...

Most non-conservatives and most economists of any (or no) political stripe have treated the news with much more nuance, cautioning that the idea of a "technical recession" (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth) is not actually that helpful, and not even an official label. Many economic institutes, including he widely-recognized traditional arbiters of recession-calling, the National Bureau of Economic Research in the USA, and the CD Howe Institute's Business Cycle Council in Canada, do not use that definition. Most economists are cautioning that the weakness in Canada's economy is not yet widespread or persistent enough to warrant the recession label. Even the Bank of Canada, which issued the news, warned against overreacting to the announcement.

In the current case, real GDP by expenditure was actually pretty much flat over the last two quarters (Q4 2025 and Q1 2026). StatsCan produces many different variants of national growth statistics, but the one usually used for these purposes shows a 0.036% decline in Q1 2026, and 0.246% decline in Q4 2026. Annualizing the figures magnifies the quarterly changes somewhat to about 0.1% and  1% fall for both quarters, but these are all tiny percentages, well within the margin of error for a stat that often gets adjusted or revised in retrospect, as often happens.

Getting still more granular, it turns out that it was really only October 2025 and March 2026 that showed actual decreases in real GDP - growth was either flat or modestly positive for the four months in between. Early estimates for April 2026 also suggest quite a sharp rebound to 0.4% growth.

And pulling out for a slightly different view of things, real GDP per capita, which some say is a better measure of economic growth and productivity, actually expanded 0.2% in Q1 2026, after a tiny dip in Q4 2025, as the country's overall population shrank slightly. Tellingly, a year or so ago, Mr. Poilievre and other critics were focussed much more on GDP per capita; now, when it doesn't serve their purposes quite so well, they are downplaying it.

Recession is, to some extent at least, in the eye of the beholder. Remember the great non-recession of 2015? Towards the end of Stephen Harper's Conservative administration, Canada's GDP fell by 0.5% and then 0.8%. But the Conservatives of the day, with an election looming, "declined" to call it a recession, even of a technical nature - one euphemism was a "discrete sectoral downturn" - while the opposition Liberals of course insisted that it was most definitely a full-blown recession. After much deliberation, the CD Howe Institute ultimately ruled that that technical recession didn't qualify as a real recession because its impact was not broad enough.

According to CD Howe, the last real recession was 2008/9, often referred to as the "Banking Crisis" (although Canada did not experience any major bank failures, and it weathered the downturn much better than other G7 nations), with a deep but very short one - which I would have thought ruled it out as a recession, by their own rules) in March-April 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic. Before that, we are talking about the early 1990s and then the early 1980s. Recessions are not very common, particularly in Canada.

So, what are we to conclude? You can berate statistics and damned statistics all you like, but the fact is that they can usually be manipulated to prove a point, any point. While it's clear that, in very general terms, Canada's economy is not particularly healthy - how could it be, with all the external pressures on it? - most economists and financial institutions (including, let it be said, the Business Cycle Council) are urging extreme caution on the use of the R-word. 

Sorry, Pierre.

Trump tries some new tariffs - well, why not?

The Trump administration is at it again with tariffs, this time against almost all of America's major trading partners, with the pretext being that they are not pulling their weight on preventing the importation of goods manufactured using forced labour, which unfairly disadvantages the USA.

After the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs (levied, illegally as it turned out, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act), he needed to find another way to impose tariffs, because that seems to be the sum total of his economic policy. What his highly-paid lawyers and policy wonks came up with this time was to use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose tariffs of 10%-12.5% on 60 countries (including Canada) that they say are not doing enough to enforce the import ban on goods produced using forced/slave labour (from Xinjiang, China mainly). Canada, however, should be largely protected from these tariffs due to its participation in the USMCA/CUSMA agreement.

It's a bit of a stretch, and it's hard to see the current US regime taking the moral high ground on ANYTHING. But, to some extent, in this area, they may be right. 

Canada does have laws around forced labour imports, and there are specific provisions built into USMCA/CUSMA which prohibit the importation of goods produced wholly or partly by forced labour. But enforcement does seem to be lax. While Canada has intercepted 50 shipments on suspicion of forced labour contraventions since 2020, just 2 were ultimately turned away. The Coalition Against Forced Labour has called Canada out on this, and auditors from PwC agree that enforcement has been far from perfect. This will all no doubt also come up in some detail at the USMCA renegotiations later this year.

I confess, the first thing that occurred to me after I heard the news about the new tariffs was, "I bet America doesn't enforce their forced labour rules any better than we do!" Former Liberal MP John McKay, who was involved in the original implementation of the Canadian laws on forced labour, notes that the US still allows private American firms to make exports using prison labour, and it does not adequately enforce its own laws on forced labour imports, such as the Biden-era Uyghur Forced labour Prevention Act.

Actually, though, the US does seem to be enforcing that specific law quite well, as well as the terms of the Tariff Act of 1930 insofar as they relate to the products of forced labour. Some 6,300 shipments were denied entry into the US in 2024 alone (although that was pre-Trump; figures for 2025 do not seem to be available).

That said, most people seem pretty sure that the Trump regime is not doing this out of moral indignation. They are doing it as "an excuse to impose the tariffs that they wanted to do anyway", as one European diplomat put it, adding that it's completely implausible that all these US trading partners are equally guilty - all 60 major trading partners appear to have failed to meet the bar the US has arbitrarily set - and there seems to be little or no proof being offered. Human rights groups also caution that, while the problem of forced labour does exist, the US tariffs are not the way to deal with it. 

I have looked previously at the whole issue of forced labour in Xinjiang, China - because that is essentially what we are talking about here -  and it is not as black-and-white an issue as it might appear. But the bottom line is, Trump is effectively using any justification he can to impose tariffs (because he's a "tariff guy", don't you know?), and if he can also engineer a hit on China at the same time, then all well and good.

These new tariffs cannot be imposed immediately, but must go through a period of public comment and review, starting with hearings in July. Given how many legal set-backs Trump has experienced in recent months, the tariffs are not the slam dunk they may have been even a year ago.

Wait, so now we need to worry about AI worms?

As if viruses, malware, phishing threats, and all were not enough, now cybersecurity experts are warning about AI-powered worms.

While viruses require a user to execute a file or open a link, worms can slither their way into a network or operating system to exploit vulnerabilities, move from device to device and replicate themselves across computer networks, all without human intervention. Once in, worms can carry out any number of cyberthreats, from network overload to denial of service attacks to spam distribution to ransomware delivery to data theft. Any device connected to the Internet - whether it be computers, cameras, printers - is potentially at risk. 

Remember the ILOVEYOU bug back in 2000, and WannaCry in 2017, and all the chaos and fear they engendered? Well, they were worms. But now, the addition of artificial intelligence into the mix has made everything that much more dangerous and harder to fix. While most cybersecurity concerns have centred around large language models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber and Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, AI worms are a much cheaper and more accessible way for hackers to wreak havoc on the Internet.

Back in the day, worms used to follow scripts generated by humans and, when they hit a defence they weren't designed to crack, they failed and died. AI has upped the ante and can create worms that modify their tactics as they spread from one device to another, tailoring attack strategies to each machine they interact with.

So potentially destructive is their impact that researchers actually debated whether or not to publish their findings at all, worried that they would give bad actors a ready-made blueprint for how to conduct such an attack. Eventually, they decided to publish and just omit certain operational details, judging that the call to action - particularly at a governmental level - is a much higher priority.

Why do people smash things when their sports team wins?

Can someone please explain to me what burning cars and e-bikes and smashing and looting stores has to do with celebrating a sports victory?

After Paris St-Germain beat Arsenal in soccer's Champions League final this weekend, PSG fans went on a rampage in Paris and clashed with police. 219 fans were injured, eight of them seriously. Bus, train and rail services were severely disrupted, and one person was reported dead after an accident on the Paris ring-road (which may or may not have been connected to the riots). Some 6,000 police officers were mobilized this year after similar celebrations in Paris turned violent last year, and 57 of those police officers were injured. In all, 780 people were arrested, with over 450 of them still in custody. 

So, this then is what the French do when their team wins? What is the psychology behind that? Or is it just a function of the amount of alcohol imbibed? I could almost understand it if they had lost and they were frustrated, although it still wouldn't be justified.

Well, it turns out that psychology and sociology do have something to say about these violent revellers. 

For one thing, there is something called the "group contagion effect", whereby the anonymity of being part of a large group makes people feel they can get away with something illegal or dangerous, and generally let loose their aggressive side. After a particularly intense game, people may search for a release from the tension through destructive behaviour. This can quickly spiral out of control in a large crowd of other like-minded people, and soon the usual rules and norms get overridden.

There's also an aspect of crowd behaviour called "excitation transfer", where extreme happiness can turn into extreme aggression as one part of the brain gets over-stimulated and over-excited. A state of high physical excitation (increased heart rate, adrenaline production, etc) can continue even after the initial arousal, and the body's leftover energy can become misattributed or transferred to a different emotional stimulus.

Well, maybe there are perfectly good psychological explanations for this stuff, but it still doesn't make any sense to me!

How Spain became so successful: immigrants

Remember back in the late 2000s/2010s, Spain, along with southern European neighbours Portugal, Italy and Greece were disparagingly referred to as "PIGS", and mercilessly berated as failed states by more successful European countries like Germany and France?

Well, not any longer. Since the 2020 pandemic, Spain's economy has boomed while the likes of Germany, France and the UK have struggled. Disposable income in Spain has risen three times as fast as in France and eight times as fast as in Germany. Unemployment, poverty and inequality have all fallen to their lowest levels in nearly 20 years. The Economist ranked Spain as the No. 1 economy in the world in 2024.

All this has happened under the progressive centre-left government of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, which has now been in power for eight years. It has welcomed record numbers of immigrants, hiked the minimum wage, implemented energy price controls, fast-tracked renewable energy projects, and even implemented a kind of guaranteed income system. Just about the only negative arising from all this is a burgeoning housing crisis, which the government will need to address if it wants to retain voter popularity.

When the initial COVID lockdowns started to fade in 2021, and tourists started to flock back to Spain (the country has always been in the top three of global tourist destinations), Spain, with one of the fastest-ageing populations in all of Europe, just didn't have enough workers to keep up. Increased immigration was the obvious solution, but that also had political ramifications, and the country's surging hard-right faction was ever active on that file, as always.

Spain's solution was elegant. It visibly cracked down on the most controversial form of immigration: African migrants entering the country illegally by boats across the Mediterranean. This was actually just a tiny proportion of its overall immigration, but it was the one most often targeted by the populist right wing and by the Spanish public in general. At the same time, they substantially ramped up the least controversial form of immigration: legal Latin American migrants. Given that they share a language and certain cultural affinities, Latinos have always been reasonably well-tolerated in Spain, especially if they do the least-popular and poorly-paid manual jobs.

They fast-tracked work authorizations for immigrants willing to work in those sectors with labour shortages, streamlined the foreign worker visa process, and encouraged workers to settle in areas where the local workforce had dried up. Government representatives would even recruit individuals from the migrant refugee camps on the US-Mexico border. 

It was a very successful strategy even if it wasn't particularly progressive in some respects (this is not quite on a par with Donald Trump declaring that only white South African Afrikaners are welcome to immigrate into the USA, but it does sniff of discrimination). In just two years from 2021-3, Spain added 3 million workers to its 48 million population. They injected new life into Spanish economy, allowed businesses to expand, and some of the more ambitious immigrants even went on to open up new businesses themselves. By some estimates, a quarter of the rise in Spain's GDP over the last few years can be attributed directly to immigrants.