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President Donald Trump lashed out at Canada early Sunday in his first public comments since trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed, accusing Ottawa of wanting the “benefits of being a State, without being one.”

“Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs,” he added. “No more!!!”

The comments come a day after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations with the U.S. and ordered Canada’s trade team back to Ottawa as Trump’s 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports took effect early Saturday.

CANADA’S CARNEY SAYS US MADE LAST-MINUTE ‘POWER PLAY’ AS TRADE TALKS COLLAPSE; RETALIATORY TARIFFS IN PLACE

President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have traded criticism following the collapse of U.S.-Canada trade negotiations. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

For its part, Canada has vowed to retaliate.

Carney said Friday that Ottawa plans to match the U.S. tariffs “dollar for dollar,” with the levies targeting multiple sectors, including steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics.

The duties are set to take effect the Tuesday after Labor Day, Sept. 8.

The prime minister on Saturday accused Washington of making a last-minute “power play,” saying the U.S. sought to restrict Canada’s ability to negotiate trade agreements with other countries.

US-CANADA TRADE NEGOTIATIONS SUSPENDED, CARNEY VOWS DOLLAR-FOR-DOLLAR RETALIATION AGAINST TRUMP’S 50% TARIFFS

President Donald Trump lashed out at Canada in his first public comments since trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed, accusing Ottawa of wanting the “benefits of being a State, without being one.” (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

“It’s a power play,” Carney said. “It becomes a question of sovereignty.”

According to Carney, trade talks broke down after the U.S. introduced new demands involving Canada’s other trading relationships, its auto sector and protections for Canadian culture and the French language.

“In short, they asked too much, and they offered too little,” Carney said.

The Trump administration has disputed Carney’s version of events, arguing that Canada walked away from terms the two countries had already agreed to.

TRUMP ALLOWS 300,000 METRIC TONS OF TARIFF-FREE BEEF IMPORTS IN BID TO CUT PRICES, DRAWING RANCHER BACKLASH

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney greets U.S. President Donald Trump at the official welcome ceremony during the G7 Leaders’ Summit on June 16, 2025 in Kananaskis, Alberta.  (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“Our interest is in protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains. We’ve been offering to bring the Canadians along on that path, really to cut the tariffs on them on steel, on autos, even lumber, things that are sensitive for them,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Saturday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

“And they’ve always had the best deal, and they still would have an even better deal, but they didn’t want that,” he continued.

Greer said no additional trade negotiations with Canada have been scheduled.

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FOX Business’ Brittany Miller and Fox News Digital’s Madison Colombo contributed to this report.

However, fellow student Jessica, who is also going to study at Liverpool John Moores University, feels she will miss out.

She says she would have loved to live on campus and enjoy student life, but the price of renting is “ridiculous” and “insane”.

“I have a part-time job as everything is so expensive, and then commuting is going to kill a lot of my free time as well,” she says.

“It is a bit sad really when you think about it.”

But she is pleased that staying at home means she will still be able to have her mum and dad’s cooked dinners.

Earlier this year, BBC News followed the daily journey of one first-year student who said she was saving over £7,000 on accommodation by commuting 90 minutes into Manchester each day from home.

The figures were recorded on results day and are expected to rise over the coming month as more students accept university places through clearing.

A record number of UK 18-year-olds have been accepted into university this year.

But student rents have risen sharply in recent years, alongside other living costs.

The Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) said last year that students needed £61,000 over the course of a three-year degree in order to have a “minimum socially acceptable standard of living” – and that’s excluding tuition fees.

Its report found that in 2024 the cost of renting in university-owned accommodation ranged from £108 per week, for 40 to 44-week contracts in Northern Ireland, to £338 a week for the shortest contracts in London, where rent makes up nearly half (46%) of students’ costs.

In most areas it was between £140 and £180 a week, with private halls usually being more expensive.

Many students are eligible for a maintenance loan, which can help with the cost of accommodation, but the average annual price of a room on campus is increasing much faster, according to some student unions.

Hepi says most young full-time students now work in paid employment during term time to make up the difference between their maintenance loan income and the cost of living.

A small power plant has been shut down during a cyber attack.

The government said that at no point was there a risk to the UK’s energy system, but the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has contacted power companies to advise them about the risk of cyber attacks.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the attack, which took place last month, was carried out by hackers affiliated to the Iranian regime.

For security reasons, neither the government nor the National Cyber Security Centre, which deals with attacks on critical infrastructure, would give further details of the site affected. However this was not an attack on an essential service such as a large power station.

According to the Telegraph, external, the power plant was shut down for four days.

DESNZ said the incident had affected a small-scale generator and at no point had there been a risk to the wider energy system.

The UK’s power network has a number of smaller gas generators which provide short-term power when needed.

Protecting the country’s supplies is a key challenge for the government. It is updating its regulations for cyber security, and working on a new energy resilience strategy for later this year.

Iran has long been regarded as a capable cyber power but while the Western cyber-security world is braced for attacks either from the state or hackers linked to the state as a result of its conflict with the US this year, there has been little activity so far.

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

McDonald’s has been compiling extensive personal data files on individual customers, tracking everything from past orders and loyalty points to codes scanned during the company’s Monopoly sweepstakes promotion, according to a Wired investigation that found the resulting customer dossiers can run hundreds of pages long.

Wired reporter Reece Rogers requested a copy of his own customer data file from McDonald’s Privacy Rights Center, a portal the company describes as allowing customers to “exercise your privacy rights at any time.” Because Rogers is a California resident, he had a legal right under state privacy law to request access to the personal information a private company has compiled on him. The result was a 515-page file, which McDonald’s described as containing “specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching McDonald’s systems which contain information about our customers.”

According to Futurism’s coverage of the Wired report, McDonald’s has been feeding that expansive trove of customer data into its own predictive algorithms, using it to estimate metrics such as how many times a given customer is likely to visit the chain over an upcoming period, as well as that customer’s total predicted lifetime dollar value to the company.

The sheer size of the file drew a pointed comparison in the reporting to historical government surveillance records. A 515-page dossier sits right at the threshold typically considered a “large” file within the FBI’s own historical record-keeping standards, comparable in scale to the bureau’s file on musician John Lennon, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War made him a target of deportation efforts by the Nixon administration. The comparison underscores the scale of commercial data collection now occurring at a company known primarily for selling fast food.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, offered a blunt assessment of the underlying business model driving this kind of data collection when speaking with Wired. “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” Chester said.

The revelation arrives roughly a year after a separate, unrelated security failure at McDonald’s exposed the personal information of an estimated 64 million job applicants through a vulnerability in the company’s virtual hiring assistant system, according to Futurism’s reporting. That earlier incident highlighted a recurring pattern across the corporate data collection landscape: companies amassing enormous quantities of personal information on customers and applicants alike, while not always maintaining the security infrastructure necessary to adequately protect that information from exposure.

McDonald’s extensive customer profiling reflects a broader shift in how consumer data is being collected across industries that have not traditionally been associated with digital surveillance. While technology and social media platforms such as Google and Meta have long been understood to compile detailed behavioral profiles on users, Futurism’s coverage noted a growing trend of similarly extensive data collection by companies outside the traditional technology sector, including retailer Target and even privately owned venues such as Madison Square Garden, which has previously drawn scrutiny for its own use of facial recognition technology to track and restrict entry for certain visitors.

California’s data privacy laws, under which Rogers was able to request his file, represent one of the more robust state-level consumer privacy frameworks currently in place in the United States. The California Consumer Privacy Act generally grants state residents the right to request disclosure of what personal information a business has collected about them, along with the right to request deletion of that information in certain circumstances. Not every U.S. state currently offers residents a comparable legal right to request this kind of detailed accounting from companies collecting their personal data, meaning the scope of information McDonald’s, or any similarly data-hungry company, holds on customers outside California may be less accessible for individual review depending on where a customer resides.

The McDonald’s loyalty program and app-based ordering system, central to the kind of granular purchase and behavioral tracking described in the Wired investigation, has grown increasingly central to the company’s broader marketing and customer retention strategy in recent years, as fast food chains across the industry have leaned more heavily into app-based loyalty programs designed to both encourage repeat visits and generate detailed behavioral data that can be used to refine targeted promotions and predict future customer spending patterns.

Futurism’s analysis characterized this kind of extensive commercial data harvesting as a practice unlikely to be voluntarily curtailed by the companies engaging in it, given the financial incentives involved. As long as detailed customer profiling continues to generate measurable business value through improved marketing targeting and customer retention forecasting, companies including McDonald’s have limited incentive to reduce the scope of personal data they collect and retain on individual customers.

The broader pattern of expanding corporate surveillance extends beyond customer purchase tracking alone. Futurism noted that Burger King, a McDonald’s competitor, has separately begun incorporating artificial intelligence into employee headsets specifically to continuously monitor whether staff members are behaving in a sufficiently friendly manner toward customers, an example the outlet cited as further evidence of AI-driven monitoring technology expanding into new areas of the fast food industry beyond customer-facing data collection alone.

As consumer awareness of the scale of corporate data collection continues to grow, cases such as Rogers’ 515-page McDonald’s file are likely to fuel continued public and regulatory scrutiny regarding how companies across a widening range of industries, not just traditional technology platforms, are compiling, storing and monetizing detailed personal profiles on their customers, often without those customers having a clear or complete understanding of the scope of information being collected about them during the course of routine, everyday transactions such as ordering a meal through a mobile app.

MINNEAPOLIS — Far-right activist Jake Lang and several members of his group were arrested Saturday after two vehicles associated with Lang drove onto a sidewalk outside Minneapolis City Hall toward a crowd of people gathered there, according to the Minneapolis Police Department.

According to police, the incident began shortly before noon Saturday when Lang and his group arrived at City Hall in two vehicles. Officers said both vehicles drove onto the sidewalk toward a group of people assembled outside the building. Minneapolis police officers then “moved in” to force the vehicles off the sidewalk, according to a social media statement from the department. Police said both Lang’s group and counter-protesters deployed mace during the confrontation, while no Minneapolis officers used mace themselves.

Following the incident, police tracked down Lang’s two vehicles to separate locations: one was stopped near Washington Avenue and Interstate 35W, and the other was stopped in Bloomington near Lindau Lane and IKEA Way. Police said all occupants in the vehicles, including Lang, were arrested on probable cause of riot, and both vehicles were impounded. Four additional arrests were made at the City Hall scene itself, according to police.

Interim Police Chief Bill Peterson said at a subsequent news briefing that three officers were injured during the confrontation, ranging from an ankle rolled over by one of Lang’s vehicles to an officer struck in the head with what Peterson described as a “hard object.” One injured officer was hospitalized and later released. The four additional arrests made near City Hall were on suspicion of disorderly conduct and assault, among other alleged violations, according to Peterson.

Lang, 30, served four years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, where he was charged with inflicting bodily injury on police officers. He received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in January 2025 and has since built a public profile as a far-right activist, provocateur and political candidate, currently running in the 2026 Republican U.S. Senate primary in Florida.

Saturday’s arrest was not Lang’s first confrontation in Minneapolis. According to the Star Tribune, he staged an anti-Islam rally outside City Hall in January following the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent during a federal immigration crackdown in the city. Lang said he returned to Minneapolis Saturday to advocate on behalf of a Rochester woman who had used a racial slur against a Black autistic child, according to a post on his account on the social platform X.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had publicly urged residents to avoid Saturday’s rally in a post on X earlier in the week. “Let this lame-ass racist rally fall flat and fade into irrelevance,” Frey wrote ahead of the event.

Lang has developed an extensive public record of activism and legal controversy since his 2025 pardon. According to a background analysis published by the American Jewish Committee, Lang has leveraged the notoriety of his pardon to build prominence within far-right political circles, particularly among younger conservatives, while promoting rhetoric the organization characterized as fueling antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. That same analysis noted Lang has espoused conspiracy theories involving claims of Jewish control over banking and finance, even as he has separately disclosed his own partial Jewish heritage through his mother.

Lang’s activism has repeatedly drawn confrontation and legal consequences in other cities as well. He was previously chased away from an event outside the 2026 BET Awards in Los Angeles after appearing with signs featuring racist messaging, while wearing a bulletproof vest displaying a Confederate flag and a hat bearing an Iron Cross symbol historically associated with Nazi Germany, according to Complex’s coverage of that incident. Separately, Lang organized a “Protect White People” rally in Frisco, Texas, that drew broader public backlash after he attempted to use the image of a deceased teenager in his promotional materials without the endorsement of the boy’s family, according to reporting on that event.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has documented an extensive timeline of Lang’s activities since his pardon, including instances of burning copies of the Quran, publicly harassing Muslim individuals, displaying racist banners, and burning Pride flags, according to the organization’s published research. That same organization has described Lang as having accumulated numerous criminal charges over the course of his activism, including allegations of making terroristic threats.

Saturday’s arrest adds to that pattern of legal entanglements tied to Lang’s public demonstrations. As of Saturday afternoon, Minneapolis police had not disclosed how many total individuals were arrested in connection with the incident beyond Lang and the occupants of his two vehicles, nor had officials confirmed whether Lang remained in custody. Police indicated that additional information regarding the incident would be provided during a forthcoming press conference involving Mayor Frey and Minneapolis police officials.

The confrontation outside City Hall reflects a broader pattern that has followed Lang’s public appearances in various cities since his release from prison, in which his demonstrations have frequently drawn organized counter-protests and, at times, physical confrontations between his supporters, counter-demonstrators and law enforcement. Saturday’s arrest marks one of the more serious legal consequences Lang has faced during this current wave of public activism, given the riot charge stemming directly from vehicles associated with his group driving toward a crowd of bystanders outside a municipal government building.

As of this report, it remained unclear how many additional individuals beyond the initial arrests near City Hall and the vehicle occupants stopped later in Washington Avenue and Bloomington had been taken into custody in connection with Saturday’s events. Minneapolis police said further details, including the total number of arrests and the current custody status of those involved, would be addressed during the planned press conference with city officials.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is facing sustained legal and community backlash over dozens of unpermitted gas turbines powering its massive Colossus supercomputer facilities in the Memphis metropolitan area, with civil rights and environmental groups arguing the company has repeatedly skirted air quality regulations while pumping pollutants into neighborhoods already struggling with poor air quality.

The controversy centers on two facilities: Colossus 1, located in South Memphis, and the newer Colossus 2, situated just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line in Southaven, Mississippi. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, xAI began operations at Colossus 1 in June 2024 using as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility, installed without obtaining the necessary preconstruction or operating air permits required under federal and local regulations.

SELC first raised the alarm in June 2025, submitting a formal notice of intent to sue xAI on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act, a required legal step that must precede any such lawsuit by 60 days. “Over the past year, xAI has installed and operated at least 35 combustion turbines and other sources of air pollution at the Colossus site without ever obtaining the necessary preconstruction or operating air permits,” SELC wrote in its letter to the company at the time, according to TechCrunch. The organization noted that the turbines had the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxides annually, a group of chemicals that contribute to smog formation.

Memphis already carried a troubling public health backdrop before Colossus 1 began operating. According to SELC’s reporting, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America designated Memphis the nation’s “asthma capital” in 2024, citing high rates of emergency room visits and deaths tied to the condition, while the American Lung Association gave the broader region an “F” grade for ozone pollution in 2025.

Despite mounting public pressure and legal action, xAI’s turbine operations expanded rather than contracted. The company removed its unpermitted turbines at Colossus 1 only after SELC sent its formal notice of intent to sue on behalf of the NAACP. However, according to SELC’s April 2026 update, xAI officials indicated the company planned on “copying and pasting” its earlier unlawful turbine strategy to power its newer Colossus 2 facility in Southaven.

That warning proved accurate. SELC and Earthjustice filed a new lawsuit on April 14, 2026, on behalf of the national NAACP and its Mississippi State Conference, this time targeting 27 unpermitted gas turbines discovered operating at Colossus 2. “We cannot allow for companies to promise a better future while pumping harmful chemicals into the air we breathe. We demand that xAI follow the Clean Air Act and stop operating these unpermitted turbines to protect the people of Southaven,” SELC said in a statement announcing the litigation.

By July, reporting from Technology.org indicated the number of unpermitted turbines running at Colossus 2 had grown further still, to 59, operating separately from a set of 41 permanent gas-fired turbines for which Mississippi regulators had issued a permit in March, following the state’s only public hearing on the project. Nicholas Mailloux, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies air quality, assessed the scale of the facility’s emissions in stark terms. He said the nitrogen oxide output attributable to roughly half the plant would put it “up there with some of the heaviest polluting natural gas power plants across the entire country,” ranking on par with the top 25 gas plants nationally for nitrogen oxide emissions, based on EPA data on actual emissions.

xAI and Mississippi state regulators have defended the unpermitted turbines in court filings by arguing they qualify for an exemption because they are classified as mobile equipment intended to operate on site for less than a year. “MDEQ has determined that portable/temporary turbines do not require an air permit,” the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality told reporters, according to Technology.org.

The health impacts alleged in the litigation extend beyond air quality metrics to specific community accounts. According to Tech Insider, pediatric emergency room visits for respiratory distress in the 38109 ZIP code, which sits near the Colossus facilities, climbed 14% year over year between 2024 and 2025, the first full year Colossus 1 was operational. Easter Knox, a 64-year-old Whitehaven resident and named plaintiff in the litigation, described the direct impact on her family in a statement released by the NAACP. “My grandson Marcus has had three asthma attacks since November,” Knox said. “His school is four-tenths of a mile from those turbines. We don’t need another AI model. We need to breathe.”

Independent air quality monitoring data cited in the litigation has bolstered those community accounts. According to Tech Insider, a dataset compiled by Memphis Community Against Pollution using portable air sensors between January and March 2026 showed daily one-hour nitrogen dioxide readings exceeding 100 parts per billion on 41 of 89 monitored days at three locations within a mile of the turbine yard, levels the litigation’s supporting exhibits characterize as significantly elevated.

SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia has pointed to a broader pattern of inconsistency and lack of transparency surrounding the facility’s operations. “The back-and-forth about how many gas turbines are at the xAI data center and how many are running really underscores the lack of accountability surrounding this facility,” Garcia said. Fellow SELC Senior Attorney Patrick Anderson characterized the company’s conduct more directly as unlawful. “xAI’s decision to install and operate dozens of polluting gas turbines without any permits or public oversight is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act,” Anderson said.

Local government has responded to the growing controversy with at least one concrete policy step. According to SELC’s timeline of the dispute, following months of advocacy from community groups, the Memphis City Council approved an ordinance allocating 25% of tax revenue generated from xAI’s operations to communities located closest to the facilities.

Neither xAI, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, nor the Environmental Protection Agency has responded to questions regarding the pollution’s specific impact on communities of color living near the facilities, according to Technology.org’s reporting. As the litigation continues to move through the court system, the case is expected to test how existing environmental regulations, many written well before the current wave of AI-driven data center construction, apply to an industry that critics argue has expanded its physical infrastructure footprint faster than regulators have been able to keep pace with enforcement.