Canada: ‘Inconvenient Indian’ author Thomas King says he is not Indigenous

A prominent Canadian-American author, who has long claimed Indigenous ancestry and whose work exposed “the hard truths of the injustices of the Indigenous peoples of North America”, has learned from a genealogist that he has no Cherokee ancestry. In an essay titled “A most inconvenient Indian” published on Monday for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Thomas King said he had learned of rumours circulating in recent years within both the arts and Indigenous communities that questioned his Cherokee heritage. In mid-November, he met with members of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (Taaf), a group based in the state of North Carolina that exposes perpetrators of Indigenous identity fraud. King says this group was the main source of the rumours. The genealogist working with Taaf told King she found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry on either side of his family lineage. King says he accepts the findings. “It’s been a couple of weeks since that video call, and I’m still reeling. At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story,” he wrote. “Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.” King, a California-born academic, writer and activist, has lived in Canada since 1980, when he took a job in Alberta teaching Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge. He rose to prominence with work that Canada’s governor general said displayed “formidable wit to explore the social, economic and political dimensions of the modern Aboriginal experience”. King has long said he grew up hearing a story that his father, Robert King, was not his biological father. Instead, Thomas King’s grandfather was Elvin Hunt, a man believed to have Cherokee ancestry. But the genealogist working with Taaf found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry on either side of King’s family lineage. King won the 2014 RBC Taylor prize for non-fiction for his book The Inconvenient Indian and in 2020 won the Stephen Leacock memorial medal for humour for his work Indians on Vacation. That same year, he was promoted to companion of the Order of Canada, commended for his “prolific and groundbreaking work [which] continues to enrich our country’s culture, and has changed our perception of Canadian history”. In an interview with the Globe and Mail published on Monday, King said he intended to return the National Aboriginal Achievement award, which he received in 2003. “The rest of my awards are based on my writing, not my ethnicity,” he said. King is the latest prominent figure whose claims to Indigenous ancestry have been disproven. Recently, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation claimed folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in Massachusetts to white parents, not to Cree parents as she had long claimed. King says he never intentionally misled people, instead genuinely believing he had Cherokee ancestry. “Taaf suggested that I might want to offer up an apology for my life, but an apology assumes a crime, an offence, a misdeed,” he wrote in his essay. “And I don’t think that’s appropriate. Throughout my career – activist, academic, administrator, writer – I’ve conducted myself in the belief that I was mixed-blood Cherokee.” But he wrote that after seeing the evidence, if he chose to withhold that information “then an accusation of fraud would have merit”.

Ukraine war briefing: Russia launches strikes on Kyiv, setting buildings ablaze

Russia launched a wave of attacks on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv early Tuesday, striking residential buildings and energy infrastructure, according to video footage and local authorities. At least four people were injured in Kyiv. A high-rise residential building had been hit in a district on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the capital’s military administration. Four people had been treated for injuries and at least eight rescued from the building, he said. Pictures posted on unofficial Telegram channels showed apartments on fire on upper floors. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said another high-rise building was being evacuated after being hit in the city centre’s Pechersk district. He also reported disruptions to Kyiv’s power and water supplies. Ukrainian airstrikes killed one person and wounded three others in the Russian port city of Taganrog, the mayor said early Tuesday. “As a result of the massive overnight airstrike on our city, two apartment buildings, a private home, the Mechanical College building, two industrial enterprises, and Kindergarten No. 7 were damaged,” mayor Svetlana Kambulova posted to Telegram. Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the war, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly. Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Luke Harding, Jon Henley and Pjotr Sauer also report that Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks. The White House has pushed back against criticism – including from within the Republican party – that Donald Trump is favouring Russia in the efforts to end the war in Ukraine. “The idea that the United States of America is not engaging with both sides equally in this war to bring it to an end is a complete and total fallacy,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday. The US president was “hopeful and optimistic” that a plan could be worked out to end the war, she said. The US-Russia peace proposal leaked to the media last week has thrown Washington, Kyiv and European capitals into disarray. Pjotr Sauer writes in this analysis that the plan has creating precisely the conditions Vladimir Putin has long sought: a negotiating table sharply tilted in the Russian president’s favour, with Ukraine cornered into weighing terms it cannot accept and the threat of losing its most important ally hanging over its head. A heating and power plant in Russia’s Moscow region has resumed operations after shutting down due to a fire caused by a Ukrainian drone strike, regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said on Monday. The attack on Sunday on the facility in Shatura, a town of about 33,000, sparked a major blaze and cut heating for residents as night temperatures hovered around freezing. It marked one of Kyiv’s most significant strikes to date on a power station deep inside Russia. A Lithuanian court convicted a Ukrainian national on Monday of carrying out an arson attack last year on an Ikea store in the Baltic country’s capital, Vilnius, which authorities have accused Russian military intelligence of being behind. The Vilnius regional court convicted the man of charges including a terrorist act and illegal possession of explosives and sentenced him to three years and four months in prison. The man, who was a minor at the time of the May 2024 attack, had pleaded guilty. Ikea was allegedly targeted because the company withdrew from Russia and because of Sweden’s aid to Ukraine.

China’s Xi Jinping raises future of Taiwan in call with Donald Trump

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told Donald Trump that Beijing’s claims to Taiwan remain unchanged, in a phone call that came amid rising tensions over the self-governing island. Xi told Trump on Monday that Taiwan’s return to China was an “integral part of the postwar international order” forged in the joint US-China fight against “fascism and militarism”, according to the Chinese foreign ministry. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to annex it, by force if necessary. Taiwan’s democratically elected government strongly rejects China’s stance. The ministry said the call touched on other issues, including Ukraine, with Xi also stressing the need to build on a fragile trade truce between China and the US. But Taiwan featured prominently. China is embroiled in a weeks-long diplomatic row with key US ally Japan over the island that has seen a dip in Chinese tourism to Japan, a ban on Japanese seafood and the cancellation of joint cultural events. The bitter dispute between Tokyo and Beijing was triggered after Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister, suggested this month that Tokyo could intervene militarily in any attack on Taiwan. While the United States does not officially recognise Taiwan’s claim to statehood, Washington remains the island’s most important partner and arms supplier. Trump did not mention Taiwan in his post about the call on Truth Social. Instead, he praised “extremely strong” US-China relations. According to China’s foreign ministry, Trump told Xi during their discussion that the United States “understands how important the Taiwan question is to China.” In response, Taiwan premier Cho Jung-tai said on Tuesday that a “return” to China is not an option for the island’s 23 million people. “We must once again emphasise that the Republic of China, Taiwan, is a fully sovereign and independent country,” Cho told reporters outside parliament, referring to the island’s formal name. “For the 23 million people of our nation, ‘return’ is not an option - this is very clear,” he added. The US president’s statement also confirmed that he will visit China in April and that Xi will come to Washington later in 2026. Beijing said nothing about the state visits. Their call came after the pair met in late October for the first time since 2019, engaging in closely watched trade talks between the world’s top two economies. The Washington-Beijing trade war, which encompasses everything from rare earths to soya beans and port fees, has rocked markets and slowed supply chains for months. A tentative deal reached in October’s meeting in South Korea saw Beijing agree to suspend for one year certain export restrictions on critical minerals. China is hugely dominant in the mining and processing of rare earths, which are essential for sophisticated electronic components across a range of industries including auto, electronics and defence. Meanwhile, the United States said it will cut back tariffs on Chinese products, and Beijing will buy at least 12m metric tons of American soya beans by the end of this year, and 25m metric tons in 2026. Xi told Trump on Monday that their two countries should “keep up the momentum”, according to the foreign ministry. He added that the “successful” meeting in South Korea “recalibrated the course of the giant ship of China-US relations and provided more momentum for it to sail forward steadily”. Since the meeting, China-US ties have “generally maintained a steady and positive trajectory, and this is welcomed by the two countries and the broader international community”, Xi said. Trump struck a similarly optimistic tone in his statement. “This call was a follow-up to our highly successful meeting in South Korea, three weeks ago. Since then, there has been significant progress on both sides in keeping our agreements current and accurate. Now we can set our sights on the big picture,” he said. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said Washington hoped to finalise a deal with Beijing for securing supplies of rare earths by the Thanksgiving holiday, which falls on Thursday. The two leaders also discussed the war in Ukraine – an issue high on Trump’s agenda as he pushes for an end to the war. China has positioned itself as a neutral party and, in Monday’s call, Xi reiterated his backing to end the nearly four-year conflict. With Agence France-Presse

What is the Muslim Brotherhood – explained in 30 seconds

The Muslim Brotherhood is a pan-Islamist organisation that was founded in Egypt in 1928 as an Islamic political movement to counter the spread of secular and nationalist ideas. It swiftly spread through Muslim countries, becoming a major player but often operating in secret. Its founder, Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, believed that reviving Islamic principles in society could enable the Muslim world to resist Western colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood is now outlawed as a terrorist group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. More recently, Jordan banned it in April 2025. It is popular in Jordan, and had continued to operate there even though the country’s top court in 2020 ruled to dissolve the group. Authorities have turned a blind eye to its activities in the past. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned since 2013, after the overthrow of its leader and then-president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a military coup led by then military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi has led Egypt since then, forging a key alliance with Washington in the process. In May 2025, president Emmanuel Macron of France ordered his government to draw up proposals to counter the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the spread of political Islam in that country. In November, the US president, Donald Trump, began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organisations and specially-designated global terrorists, a move would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.

Ukraine makes significant changes to US ‘peace plan’, sources say

Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the conflict, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly. Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks. The original 28-point US-Russian plan was drawn up last month by Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, and Trump’s representative Steve Witkoff. It calls on Ukraine to withdraw from cities it controls in the eastern Donbas region, limit the size of its army, and not join Nato. During negotiations on Sunday in Switzerland – led by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak – the plan was substantially revised. It now includes only 19 points. Kyiv and its European partners say the existing frontline has to be the starting point for territorial discussions. On Monday, Zelenskyy said: “As of now, after Geneva, there are fewer points, no longer 28, and many correct elements have been incorporated into this framework,” adding that sensitive issues were to be discussed with Trump. They say there can be no recognition of land seized by Russia militarily, and that Kyiv should make its own decisions on whether to join the EU and Nato – something the Kremlin wants to veto or impose conditions on. Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, Sergiy Kyslytsya, told the Financial Times such issues had been “placed in brackets” for Trump and Zelenskyy to decide upon later. Rubio hailed Sunday’s talks as “very very positive”. Writing on Truth Social on Monday, Trump, who days earlier had accused Ukraine’s leadership of having “zero gratitude”, also struck a positive tone. “Is it really possible that big progress is being made in Peace Talks between Russia and Ukraine??? Don’t believe it until you see it, but something good just may be happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” he wrote. Ukraine’s delegation briefed Zelenskyy about the talks on Monday after returning to Kyiv from Geneva. They described the latest version of the plan as more realistic. Separately, Zelenskyy spoke to the US vice-president, JD Vance, and urged him to involve European countries in the process. Vance reportedly agreed. But in the clearest sign yet the original 28-point plan – widely seen as favourable to Moscow – still falls short of several key Kremlin demands, Putin’s top foreign policy aide on Monday said Moscow would seek to “rework” parts of it. “We were given some sort of draft … which will require further reworking,” said Yuri Ushakov, adding that “many provisions” of the plan appeared acceptable to Russia, but others would “require the most detailed discussions and review between the parties”. Underscoring the Kremlin’s hardline stance, Ushakov said Moscow would reject a European counter-proposal from the weekend, which, according to a copy seen by Reuters, changes the meaning and significance of key points concerning Nato membership and territory. “The European plan, at first glance … is completely unconstructive and does not work for us,” he said. The UK and EU were blind-sided last week when the original plan was leaked to US media. The army secretary, Dan Driscoll – Vance’s friend and university classmate – was sent to Kyiv with a military delegation to brief Zelenskyy on its contents. Since then, European governments have sought to revise the document, which appears to have originally been written in Russian. EU leaders attending an EU-Africa summit in Angola welcomed a degree of progress, but said far more work remained to be done and insisted Europe must be fully involved and Russia must be present if talks were to advance substantively. The European Council president, António Costa, praised “a new momentum”, saying after talks on the sidelines of the summit that while issues remained, “the direction is positive”. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, also called the “refined peace framework” agreed in Switzerland “a solid basis for moving forward”, but added: “Work remains to be done.” Von der Leyen said the core principles the EU would always insist on were that “Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty must be respected – only Ukraine, as a sovereign country, can make decisions regarding its armed forces”. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said both Europe and Russia must be fully involved. “The next step must be: Russia must come to the table,” Merz said, while Europeans must be able to give their consent to “issues that affect European interests and sovereignty”. Talks would be a “long-lasting process” and Merz said he did not expect a breakthrough this week. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the talks were delicate because “nobody wants to put off the Americans and President Trump from having the US on our side in this process”. Tusk also stressed that any peace settlement needed to “strengthen, not weaken, our security” and must not “favour the aggressor”. Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said Russia “must be forced to the negotiating table” to see “aggression … never pays”. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, said there was more work to do but progress was being made. A group of countries supporting Ukraine – the coalition of the willing – would discuss the issue in a video call on Tuesday, he said. The chairs of the parliamentary foreign affairs committees of 20 European countries, including France, Ireland, Poland, Spain and the UK, issued a rare joint statement saying just and lasting peace would not be achieved by “yielding to the aggressor” but must be “grounded in international law and fully respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty”. On Monday, the White House pushed back against criticism, including from within the Republican party, that Trump is favouring Russia. “The idea that the US is not engaging with both sides equally in this war to bring it to an end is a complete and total fallacy,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters. Zelenskyy is at his most vulnerable since the start of the war, after a corruption scandal led to two of his ministers being dismissed while Russia makes battlefield gains. Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, was hit by what officials said was a massive drone attack that killed four people on Sunday. With smoke rising from the rubble, one man was seen crouched and holding the hand of a dead person. “There was a family, there were children,” Ihor Klymenko, Red Cross commander of the emergency response team in Kharkiv, told Reuters. “I can’t tell you how, but the children are alive, thank God, the man is alive. The woman died, unfortunately.” Across the border, Russian air defences downed Ukrainian drones en route to Moscow, forcing three airports serving the capital to pause flights. A reported Ukrainian drone strike on Sunday knocked power out for thousands of residents near Moscow, a rare reversal of Russian attacks on energy targets that regularly cause power blackouts for millions of Ukrainians.

Nauru president floats returning NZYQ refugees to home countries

Nauru may seek to return refugees from the NZYQ cohort to their home countries, the Nauruan president has said in a new translation of a February interview that has been the subject of months-long controversy. David Adeang’s interview erroneously claimed those being sent to Nauru were not refugees and said Nauru may seek to return them to their countries of origin where possible. Guardian Australia has confirmed members of the NZYQ group have had refugee protection claims recognised by Australia. It is understood some of the men already transferred to Nauru are among those who are refugees. The Guardian has previously reported a partial transcript, which was corroborated by the full transcript read into Hansard by senators David Pocock and David Shoebridge late on Monday. The translation read into Hansard was not the Australian government’s document, but an independently sourced and verified translation obtained by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC). The Australian government has consistently resisted disclosure of its translation of the interview, including winning a non-publication order over its document in the federal court. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Responding to a Senate order to produce the official translation, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, wrote that its publication would “prejudice Australia’s international relations … and our broader standing in the Pacific”. At least five members of the NZYQ cohort have been forcibly removed to Nauru and are being held at a regional processing centre on the Pacific island. Australian is legally obliged to protect refugees under the refugees convention, and cannot return them to their home country where they face a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”. Even if that return is made through a third country – such as Nauru – it is unlawful, known in international law as “chain refoulement”. Nauru is also a party to the convention. Adeang granted the interview in February, speaking in Nauruan to a government staff member, and explaining the new agreement Nauru had signed with Australia to accept members of the NZYQ cohort. The deal will see Australia pay Nauru up to $2.5bn over three decades. Adeang said those removed to Nauru by Australia would stay on the island for 30 years. “Unless of course, we, your government, find a way for them to move around, for example; they get to go home,” he said, according to the ASRC translation released on Monday. “The problem now is, Australia cannot return them home, these people are what you would refer to as stateless. “Their homelands do not want them and they do not have a way to go home. And if over time we find a way to return them home then of course they will not reach the 30 years, but the visa we are providing them to start is 30 years.” The Guardian understands none of the men sent to Nauru under the new agreement so far are stateless. Adeang repeatedly said – incorrectly – that members of the NZYQ cohort were not refugees. “To clarify, these people are not refugees. They are regular people but their background or their history is that they have been to jail. “These days, they are free to roam around Australia and while they are no longer under penalties but they are not of that place and despite Australia’s preference to send them home, they are unable to.” The NZYQ cohort is a group of 354 non-citizens released from indefinite immigration detention in Australia after a high court ruling in late 2023. Their visas had been cancelled on “character grounds”, most as a result of a criminal conviction. Most have completed a jail term but cannot be returned to their home countries because they face persecution there. Some have lived in Australia for decades and have Australian-citizen partners and children. Shoebridge told the Senate Adeang’s claim that the NZYQ cohort were not refugees was “plainly wrong”. “Did the government tell them that? Did … our government mislead the Nauruan government? Do they adhere to what the Nauruan president said about these people not being refugees? None of them refugees? “And they’re probably also embarrassed by the fact that President Adeang has made it very clear he wants these people to return from the country they came from. We know that they have fled from persecution by and large.” Ogy Simic, head of advocacy at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said on Monday night the Australian government’s secrecy around its offshore program was “deeply alarming”. He said the secrecy and cover-ups eroded public trust, and abuse and corruption thrived in the opacity of the offshore regime. “The transcript reveals for the first time that Nauru plans to send people back to their countries of origin ‘if they find a way’, even though these are people Australia has not removed to their country of origin because they are refugees. This means the Australian government has effectively outsourced refoulement – paying another country to do what Australia legally cannot.” He said the Adeang interview – the release of which was resisted by the government – exposed a dangerous loophole. “Australia claims to be upholding international law while quietly paying for people to be returned to danger via third-party deals.” The legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, Sanmati Verma, said the government had tried to hide “nearly every detail” of its agreement with Nauru. “Now we learn that the Nauruan government may not have any intention of holding up its end of this lamentable deal.” She said the forced removals to Nauru must be stopped, because the government could not guarantee people’s safety. “Our government is tearing people away from their lives, families and communities in Australia and exiling them to a place where they are clearly not welcome. Our government has known all along that it might be sending people to their deaths – through denial of the medical care they need to survive, or by forcing them back to the countries they fled as refugees.” The Guardian has sought comment from the Department of Home Affairs and the Nauruan government.

Grizzly bear that attacked children and teachers in Canada still eludes searchers

Conservation officers in British Columbia are still searching for a female grizzly bear and her two cubs, four days after the sow attacked a group of schoolchildren and their teachers in an “exceedingly rare” encounter that has shaken the remote Canadian community. Eleven people, some as young as nine years old, were injured on Thursday when the bear emerged from the forest near 4 Mile, a Nuxalk community near the town Bella Coola and attacked a school group on a lunch break alongside a walking trail. Three teachers fought the bear off: one emptied two cans of bear spray that appeared to have little effect, another jumped on the bear, pummeling it with punches. A third hit the grizzly repeatedly with her crutches before it finally fled back into the woods. Three children were taken to a hospital following the incident, including two with critical injuries. An adult was also flown to a hospital in Vancouver. Seven others were treated in the community. The province’s environment minister, Tamara Davidson, said the teachers “took great risk” when they intervened to protect children. “They were well prepared, and they were the true heroes.” Conservation officers say that given the size of the group, the attack was largely unprecedented in the region. But it has sent ripples of worry throughout 4 Mile, and put the outdoors-oriented residents on lockdown as officers search for the aggressive bear. Over the weekend, the province’s conservation service said it had scoured a large, cordoned-off area of the Bella Coola River valley for the female bear and her two cubs, but the rocky and densely forested landscape has offered up few clues. “This is, speaking from experience, probably the most dangerous thing that conservation officers do, especially dealing with family units with sows,” Sgt Jeff Tyre of the Conservation Officer Service, or COS, at a news conference Sunday. If possible, teams will live-trap bears and collect DNA samples to identify the likely attackers. But, as Tyre said: “The bears don’t necessarily cooperate.” The teams, working amid in freezing temperatures and under threat of snow, are also racing against the biological clocks of bears, who will soon begin hibernating as the deep cold sets in. Grizzly bears have coexisted alongside the Nuxalk nation for generations. But the area, dubbed the “gateway to the Great Bear Rainforest” in tourism campaigns, has seen increased numbers of grizzly bears in recent years that residents say have disrupted a delicate balance. Nuxalk leadership say both human action, such as logging, and the effects of climate change, including forest fires and droughts, have disrupted key food sources and displaced bears. Residents have reported seeing bears more commonly in their yards and experienced occasional break-ins. Tanyss Munro, who lives with her husband in the Bella Coola valley, told CityNews that she returned home last month to find their front door smashed in. Inside their house, the kitchen was destroyed and their fridge had been dragged to the yard. A metal trailer in their yard was also destroyed. “[The bears] had ripped off, and folded in half, the steel-clad door and gone in there and just demolished that,” she said. “They wrecked the furnace. We had just had it filled up with propane. And that was all gone… and just everything was smashed,” she said. The BC Wildlife Federation (BCWF) warned that Thursday’s attack, which conservation officers called “atypical”, reflects a broader trend in the province. The group, which advocates for hunters, said a decision to ban trophy hunting of grizzly bears in 2017 – a decision the group said was made “due to popular opinion, with no scientific rationale” – was partly to blame. “In the 10 years preceding the ban, calls to the [conservation officers] concerning grizzly conflicts ranged from 300 to 500 a year, peaking between April and November,” the group said. “Since the ban, calls about grizzly bears doubled, to nearly 1,000 a year.” But the group’s call to revive the trophy hunt has created fissures in the hunting community, reflecting the controversial nature of the hunt. “The idea of hunting to manage bears, it’s an old way of thinking that we really need to change and examine. And First Nations communities, like the Nuxalk nation have shown there is a different approach. They don’t manage wildlife because it’s not something to manage. They’re stewards,’ said Nicholas Scapillati, head of the non-profit Grizzly Bear Foundation. Many of the more isolated First Nations communities in the region have bear education programs that reflect a more holistic way of interacting with grizzlies. “As we see a change in food sources and forest fires, things are fluctuating. Bears are on the move and moving around in different ways. And so we need to think differently than how we have for centuries in this province,” said Scapillati. “First Nations communities have been leaders in this area. And so not only do they need support for us now in this time with this rare attack, but they also need support on the plans they’ve shown us are needed to do what they’ve long known is possible: coexistence with bears.”

Surprise envoy pushing Ukraine ‘peace’ plan belies Vance influence on US policy

The US army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, was an unlikely envoy for the Trump administration’s newest proposal to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine – but his ties to JD Vance have put a close ally of the Eurosceptic vice-president on the frontlines of Donald Trump’s latest push to end the war. Before his trip to Kyiv last week, Driscoll was not known for his role as a negotiator or statesman, and his early efforts at selling the deal to European policymakers were described as turbulent. His close ties to Vance, with whom he studied at Yale and shares a close friendship, indicate the resurgence of the isolationist vice-president in negotiations to end the Ukraine crisis. It was Vance who stepped in during Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s disastrous first trip to the Trump White House in March and demanded he show Trump more “respect” – now Ukraine is once again resisting pressure from the US to cut a quick deal that local officials have described as a “capitulation”. After a tumultuous first year in office, foreign policy decisions in the White House are said to be shaped by a handful of Trump’s top advisers – including chief of staff Susie Wiles, rightwing adviser Stephen Miller, envoy Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and finally Vance. Vance has been a vocal booster of the latest proposal, which was developed by Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner together with the Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev. Vance’s early efforts at hammering out a peace deal with Russia – while also seeking to renew relations with Moscow – were unsuccessful, and left his camp feeling frustrated with their Russian interlocutors. European officials, meanwhile, were angered by his early speeches in which he accused them of “running from their voters” – who Vance said had anti-immigration and conservative positions close to those of Trump’s own constituency. But the new peace deal published last week closely resembled his positions, and he has been one of the most forceful spokespeople for the deal in the administration while the US has been under fire for accepting a peace framework that largely resembles Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands. In posts this weekend, Vance argued that a peace deal would have to produce a ceasefire that respected Ukrainian sovereignty, be acceptable to both sides, and prevent the war from restarting. “Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misunderstands the framework or misstates some critical reality on the ground,” Vance wrote. “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.” “Peace won’t be made by failed diplomats or politicians living in a fantasy land,” he added. “It might be made by smart people living in the real world.” It was also Vance who followed up on the presentation of the peace plan in a phone call with Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his team with bringing a signature on the peace deal before Thanksgiving this Thursday in the United States. That was a notably more full-throated endorsement of the plan than that given by the secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more traditional hawk in the administration who has gone from a shaky stature inside the administration to more firm footing. Rubio was part of a US delegation that traveled to Geneva this weekend to meet with Ukrainian officials to help moderate the initial 28-point peace plan in order to make it more acceptable to leaders in Kyiv. But his initial response to the deal was lukewarm: “Ending a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas,” Rubio wrote over the weekend before the conference. “And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.” In private, he was said to be much more doubtful of the plan. The Republican senator Mike Rounds said last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had called lawmakers to explain that the deal was just a preliminary offer from the Russians and not an initiative pushed by the administration. “Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon and I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Rounds. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.” Rubio moved quickly to fall in line. “The peace proposal was authored by the US,” he later wrote. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”