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Europe continues to rely on alternatives to air conditioning even as deadly heat waves claim lives across the continent.  Officials argue that expanding air conditioning is not a long-term solution.

France’s record-breaking heat last week has been linked to about 1,000 deaths, most involving elderly people.

According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Europe has recorded more than 1,300 excess heat-related deaths since June 21.

Despite experiencing fewer hot days than many other regions, it also records the highest number of heat-related deaths per capita.

A 2007 study found that air conditioning can reduce heat-related deaths by 75%. Even so, only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning, compared with roughly 90% of homes in the United States.

Rather than expanding air conditioning, many European officials have focused on alternative strategies, including public cooling stations and other measures designed to reduce heat in densely populated historic cities.

Ine Vandecasteele, an urban adaptation expert with the European Environment Agency, said widespread air conditioning is not the preferred solution.

“My honest response is I don’t think that should be the solution anywhere,” Vandecasteele told CBS News.

“It is an immediate response, which can support essentially those who may be vulnerable in hospitals, or in very short term can help. But in the longer term, what happens is, installing more air conditioning actually emits more heat into our environment, so it will actually increase the speed of warming.”

Higher energy costs have also discouraged broader adoption of air conditioning across much of Europe.

Italy has taken a different approach than many of its European neighbors.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, about 56% of Italian homes had air conditioning as of 2024.

European Union data also show Italy accounts for roughly one-third of the bloc’s electricity consumption for air conditioning.

Italian officials have also distributed wearable devices in Rome to monitor elderly residents, who face the greatest risk during periods of extreme heat.

Public attitudes toward air conditioning also differ from those in the United States. A recent survey in France found that one in six respondents said they would rather endure the heat than increase air conditioning use for environmental reasons.

Vandecasteele said she was not surprised by those findings. “We’re not doing this for us,” she said. “We’re doing this for the future generations.”

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

• two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
• five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once

Most people can only manage one.

The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.

The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?

The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:

“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.

Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…

…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.

You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.

That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.

But nothing that we do are actual remedies.

Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.

A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.

The elephant in the room: Immigration

Immigration was our masterpiece.

For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.

We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.

That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.

Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.

Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.

Then we changed the filter.

The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.

The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.

Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.

Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:

This is a screening argument, and nothing else.

When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.

Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.

Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.

The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.

People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.

True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.

This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.

For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.

Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.

Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A bakery on a corner is culture. A hiring rule keyed to race is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.

Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.

For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:

Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status.  A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.

And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.

We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.

The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.

A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.

The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.

We had this one in the bag.

Now, not so much.

Happy Canada Day.

If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca

A mole working for the Biden FBI was secretly recording Gavin Newsom's inner circle before the agency expanded its corruption probe into the California governor and his wife, according to a bombshell report by the NY Post. 

Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Sacramento consultant and Newsom appointee - no known relation to John Podesta - secretly taped conversations for the FBI as early as June 2024, while Joe Biden was still in the White House, according to McGregor Scott, the former US attorney now representing Dana Williamson. Williamson, 53, ran Newsom's office as chief of staff until late 2024; in May she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to federal agents.

Federal prosecutors accused Williamson and others of orchestrating a scheme to siphon roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account which belonged to former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra -disguising the payments as legitimate consulting fees while routing the money to benefit Becerra's former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie. According to Podesta's attorney, she was placed in charge of overseeing the account in question - but did not know the payments were improper.

Becerra is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as governor. 

"Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not," said Williamson's lawyer and former US attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott. 

"A lot of people received letters essentially informing us that there were certain periods of time where the FBI was given access to follow phone calls," said assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), who said he was among those who received a letter even though he had never spoken with either Podesta or Williamson. 

"I don’t know how these investigations work, but it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community to see what they could find." 

A separate source with knowledge of the matter said they knew of four Sacramento insiders who also received FBI notifications confirming they had been recorded.

One recipient told the source: “Dude, I got this f—ing letter. I never even met with Dana Williamson!”

“Their curiosity was that they never even met with Dana Williamson, so they were wondering what this is all about,” the source said.

“And now you have the answer.” -NY Post

News of the wire comes just over two weeks after Newsom claimed that the Trump administration is punishing him because he may run for president in 2028. 

"They're demanding records, they're abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. Donald Trump isn't just coming after me because of my mean tweets, he's coming after me because I'm considering running for president, because he hates that I've consistently called him out over and over again for his lies and deceit," Newsom said, before sending a mass email asking for political donations. 

Sources close to the investigation, however, told The Post that the feds have spent the past year digging into Newsom, his staff, and his wife's taxes after whistleblowers reportedly dropped the dime that led to the probe. Williamson's attorney told the outlet that his client declined to cooperate because she didn't have anything on Newsom. 

Podesta - a former staffer for the late Dianne Feinstein, is a longtime Democratic power broker who remains on California's State Compensation Insurance Fund board - to which Newsom appointed her in January 2020. She also held senior positions in Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, and served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. While she hasn't been charged with a crime, her attorney identified her as an uncharged co-conspirator in the Williamson indictment.

Of note, Podesta is still getting paid $60,797 by the state while cooperating with the FBI, while she sits on the Insurance Fund Board. 

Campaign finance records show Becerra's committee making $10,000 monthly payments to 'Podesta Company' during 2023 and 2024. During this period, Williamson - while Newsom's CoS - shared confidential info with Podesta regarding a corporate client that has now been identified as Activision Blizzard.

Williamson’s plea agreement states that she was captured in a June 2024 wiretap strategizing with the co-conspirator about how to respond to a Public Records Act request involving the state’s litigation against the company. Williamson and Podesta exchanged text messages on the issue, according to court records. Podesta has not publicly commented on the matter. -NY Post

Hoover, the Republican assemblymember, told The Post: "All of this stuff just raises so many questions ... "What is going on in this administration? What types of conversations are being had? I think the entire case should be really concerning for the general public. It’s really raising a lot of mistrust."

"I think it underlines how problematic this current administration is. [Newsom] is someone who wants to run for president of the United States. It’s really disappointing to see that this is the level of our politics."

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, its economy has grown to nearly $31 trillion, making it the world’s largest by a wide margin.

Using the latest estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), this visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, ranks every state by nominal GDP in 2025, showing how each contributes to national output.

California: The Economic Engine of America

If California were an independent country, it would have the world’s fourth-largest economy, behind only the U.S., China, and Germany, and ahead of all other nations. It is currently the world’s largest subnational economy.

This data table lists U.S. states by their 2025 nominal GDP.

Rank	State	Nominal GDP in 2025 (billions $)	Share of U.S. GDP (%)
1	California	4,251	13.8
2	Texas	2,904	9.4
3	New York	2,468	8.0
4	Florida	1,835	6.0
5	Illinois	1,202	3.9
6	Pennsylvania	1,056	3.4
7	Ohio	967	3.1
8	Georgia	925	3.0
9	Washington	895	2.9
10	North Carolina	894	2.9
11	New Jersey	887	2.9
12	Massachusetts	820	2.7
13	Virginia	798	2.6
14	Michigan	730	2.4
15	Arizona	598	1.9
16	Tennessee	590	1.9
17	Colorado	584	1.9
18	Maryland	568	1.8
19	Indiana	545	1.8
20	Minnesota	531	1.7
21	Wisconsin	473	1.5
22	Missouri	468	1.5
23	South Carolina	379	1.2
24	Connecticut	376	1.2
25	Oregon	343	1.1
26	Alabama	341	1.1
27	Louisiana	340	1.1
28	Utah	316	1.0
29	Kentucky	307	1.0
30	Nevada	281	0.9
31	Iowa	277	0.9
32	Oklahoma	274	0.9
33	Kansas	241	0.8
34	Arkansas	198	0.6
35	Nebraska	198	0.6
36	District of Columbia	193	0.6
37	Mississippi	165	0.5
38	New Mexico	153	0.5
39	Idaho	136	0.4
40	New Hampshire	126	0.4
41	Hawaii	125	0.4
42	Delaware	117	0.4
43	West Virginia	109	0.4
44	Maine	103	0.3
45	Rhode Island	84	0.3
46	Montana	82	0.3
47	North Dakota	82	0.3
48	South Dakota	81	0.3
49	Alaska	75	0.2
50	Wyoming	53	0.2
51	Vermont	48	0.2
-	???? U.S.	30,762	100.0

California is a powerful, diversified economy in which different sectors dominate different areas. Los Angeles, for example, is a major media hub, while San Francisco and the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley remain a global center for many of the world’s most valuable tech firms.

The Central Valley, meanwhile, serves as one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world, with high output in dairy products, wine, nuts, fruits, and vegetables.

Beyond these well-known sectors, the Golden State is also a major player in energy, particularly solar power, as well as a key logistics hub owing to the massive ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The Trillion-Dollar Club

Beyond California, five other states have a GDP exceeding a trillion dollars as of 2025: Texas ($2.9 trillion), New York ($2.5 trillion), Florida ($1.8 trillion), Illinois ($1.2 trillion), and Pennsylvania ($1.1 trillion).

Some of these state economies, like Illinois and New York, are highly concentrated in one major city, such as Chicago or New York City. Others, like Florida and Texas, are more diffuse. Four Texan cities, for example, number among the country’s 10 most populous as of 2025.

In line with its diversified economy, Texas is a major agricultural, defense, and energy player. The Lone Star State also has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state.

The Diversified U.S. Economy

While technology and entertainment drive California, Texas combines energy, manufacturing, agriculture, and defense.

Elsewhere, states specialize in industries ranging from finance and pharmaceuticals to tourism and farming. This geographic diversity helps make the U.S. economy more resilient, as slowdowns in one industry or region can be offset by strength in others.

The Great Plains, for example, are major producers of agricultural goods like soy and corn, as seen in the Iowan ($277 billion) and Nebraskan ($198 billion) economies. These states are particularly sensitive to droughts or trade disputes with major agricultural markets like China or Mexico.

Meanwhile, other states depend more on tourism, particularly in major cities. Nevada’s $281-billion economy, for example, is heavily concentrated in Las Vegas, making the state vulnerable to drops in tourist numbers.

Curious how each U.S. state ranks in terms of its business reputation? Check out Ranking the Best State Economies in 2024 on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Across most of the world, men and women are present in nearly equal numbers.

Yet in a handful of countries and territories, women make up well over half the population, creating some of the world’s largest gender imbalances.

This visualization, created by Harris Saleem via Visual Capitalist, ranks the countries and territories with the highest female share of the population using the latest available World Bank data.

Longer female life expectancy is a major factor, but migration and age structure also shape these demographic patterns.

Where Women Make Up the Largest Share

Hong Kong leads the ranking, with women accounting for 54.9% of the population. Moldova, Macao, Latvia, and Armenia round out the top five, each with female population shares above 53%.

 

Many countries on the list are in Eastern Europe or are island territories, where aging, migration, and historical mortality patterns can all have an outsized effect on the population mix.

 

Although the differences may appear small, they are significant at the national level. A female share above 53% can represent hundreds of thousands, and in larger countries millions, more women than men.

Why Some Countries Skew Female

In many developed economies, the answer often comes down to longer life expectancy. Women tend to outlive men globally due to biological advantages and lower exposure to certain high-risk behaviors and occupations. As populations age, this longevity gap becomes more visible.

Healthcare improvements also play a role. While better medical care has increased life expectancy for both sexes, women generally retain a longevity advantage that becomes more pronounced in older populations.

Migration can also reshape gender balances. In some countries, working-age men leave for jobs abroad, increasing the share of women who remain. In others, male-dominated immigration has the opposite effect.

When the Pattern Reverses

Not every country skews female. Some Gulf states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have large male immigrant workforces, pushing their populations heavily male.

Meanwhile, parts of South Asia and China have historically seen male-skewed populations, partly reflecting son preference and imbalanced sex ratios at birth. National gender ratios are ultimately shaped by a combination of health, aging, migration, and social factors.

To compare the other side of the demographic divide, check out Countries With the Highest Percentage of Male Population.