Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump’s comments about turning Canada into the United States’ 51st state are just a distraction from the consequences of Trump’s tariff threats.

Trudeau, who announced earlier this week he would resign as prime minister once his party had chosen his successor, told Tapper that Canada becoming another US state was “not going to happen.”

Trump in November promised massive hikes in tariffs on goods coming from Mexico, Canada and China starting on the first day of his administration.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

That policy that could sharply increase costs for American businesses and consumers, a fact Trudeau was quick to point out Thursday. Canada, Mexico and China are the US’s biggest trade partners.

“Everything the American consumers buy from Canada is suddenly going to get a lot more expensive if he moves forward on these tariffs,” Trudeau said.

Trudeau stressed that Canadians “are incredibly proud of being Canadian. One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”

A seaplane crashed during takeoff from an Australian tourist island, killing three people including Swiss and Danish tourists and injuring three others.

Only one of the seven people aboard the Cessna 208 Caravan was rescued without injury after the crash Tuesday afternoon on Rottnest Island, police said.

The plane owned by Swan River Seaplanes was returning to its base in Perth, the Western Australia state capital 30 kilometers (19 miles) east of Rottnest Island, which is also known by its Indigenous name Wadjemup.

The dead were a 65-year-old Swiss woman, a 60-year-old man from Denmark and the 34-year-old male pilot from Perth, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook said.

The dead tourists’ partners, a 63-year-old Swiss man and a 58-year-old Danish woman, survived. A Western Australian couple, a woman aged 65 and a 63-year-old man, also survived.

It is not clear which passenger was uninjured. Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch said no survivor sustained life-threatening injuries.

The three injured people were flown to a Perth hospital.

Cook said the cause of the crash was not yet known. Reports that the plane had struck a rock at the entrance of a bay on the west side of the island could not be confirmed from video viewed so far, Cook said.

Rottnest Island is renowned for its sandy beaches and cat-sized hopping marsupials called quokkas which are rare on the Australian mainland. The island’s tourist accommodation is fully booked during the current Southern Hemisphere summer months.

“Every Western Australian knows that Rottnest is our premier tourism destination,” Cook told reporters.

“For something so tragic to happen in front of so many people, at a place that provides so much joy, especially at this time of the year, is deeply upsetting,” Cook added.

Blanch said police divers had recovered the bodies on Tuesday night from a depth of 8 meters (26 feet). Wreckage of the plane was still being recovered.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the aviation crash investigator, said specialist investigators were being sent to the scene.

“As reported to the ATSB, during take-off the floatplane collided with the water, before coming to rest partially submerged,” the bureau’s chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said in a statement.

Greg Quin, a tourist who was vacationing on Rottnest, said he saw the plane crash.

“We were watching the seaplane take off and just as it was beginning to get off the water, it just tipped over and it crashed,” Quin told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in Perth.

“A lot of people in the water on their boats rushed to the scene and I think got there really, really quickly,” he added.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crash as “terrible news.”

“The pictures would have been seen by all Australians as they woke up this morning,” Albanese told ABC television. “My heart goes out to all those involved.”

Venezuelans are bracing for yet another wave of repression as strongman leader Nicolas Maduro prepares to be inaugurated for a third time on Friday – sealing an election outcome that opposition politicians and the US government say was stolen.

In recent days, the government has deployed a show of force ahead of the inauguration, increasing the number of policemen and security officers on the street and detaining dozens of people across the country, including a former presidential candidate, according to human rights advocates.

The climate of fear is palpable on social media, with the Instagram account of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency recently posting a video of a hand knocking on a door in the middle of the night – a message suggestive of the kinds of retaliation critics might encounter.

Maduro and his allies are “showing they are not going to tolerate any dissent, and people are scared,” the diplomat said, asking to speak anonymously to avoid possible repercussions.

After a contested election, a security crackdown

Maduro’s re-election could hardly be more controversial. On July 28, he was proclaimed winner of the presidential election by electoral authorities under the tight control of the ruling Socialist Party.

When protests erupted over the vote, Maduro’s government detained over 2,000 people in less than a week to quash dissent.

Gonzalez is now on an international tour to sympathetic countries – such as the United States, whose government formally recognizes Gonzalez as Venezuela’s president-elect – to rally support for what he argues is his rightful presidency.

Likely at great personal risk, Gonzalez is also pledging to crash Maduro’s reelection party by returning to Caracas – where he is now accused of terrorism, with a $100,000 bounty on his head – ahead of the inauguration on Friday.

Several Latin American leaders, including nine former heads of state from around the region, have pledged to accompany him to Caracas, to which the Maduro government responded by banning the group from entering the country.

How exactly Gonzalez intends to do it is anyone’s guess: Maduro remains firmly in control of the country’s military, and security measures have been tightened as the government claims to be under constant threats of insurgencies and foreign plots.

On Tuesday, Maduro deployed Venezuela’s army to the streets to “guarantee the victory of peace.” He also announced that seven foreign mercenaries, including two US citizens and three Ukrainians, had been detained for terrorism in the country, without showing any proof but promising the group will soon confess their alleged crime.

“It’s really tense,” says Gerardo, a tourist guide who often travels outside Caracas and who believes the number of checkpoints and controls has increased in recent days.

“It’s not normal to have military counterintelligence, and not just the police, manning the checkpoints on the road to the airport… Driving around and you suddenly are stopped by men in balaclavas with an AK-47 asking to see your ID,” he said, asking to go only by his first name because of security concerns.

Arrests and ‘political beheading’

In quick succession, Tuesday also saw the alleged detentions of Gonzalez’s son-in-law, Rafael Tudares; Carlos Correa, a human rights activist and the director of the NGO Espacio Publico; and Enrique Marquez, who also ran for president in July, according to their families.

Such detentions have a clear strategy – “political beheading,” according to Gonzalo Himiob, the director of Foro Penal, a Venezuelan NGO that provides legal assistance to political prisoners.

“It means putting a leader in jail to scare off the entire movement, political or human rights,” Himiob said.

“Correa is a veteran of human rights activism in Venezuela, he’s a reference for the entire human rights movement. His reported detention and forced disappearance are very serious, because it foresees the repressive response the Government is mounting ahead of Friday’s inauguration,” said Laura Dib, Director of the Venezuelan Program at the Washington Office for Latin America, a think tank.

Meanwhile, Maduro has increased his public appearances. He maintains the show of force is necessary to prevent his country from falling into chaos and conspiracies, though the Venezuelan government has so far presented no proof of any destabilizing plot.

One high-profile case in recent weeks involves Nahuel Gallo, an Argentinian policeman detained in Venezuela late last year. Caracas accuses him of plotting to kill Maduro’s deputy Delcy Rodriguez, while Buenos Aires says Gallo was simply visiting his partner’s family for the holidays. Over the last six months, at least 125 people of 25 different nationalities have been detained on similar charges, according to interior minister Diosdado Cabello.

The first possible major confrontation between the government and its critics could come on Thursday, when Gonzalez’s ally in the country Maria Corina Machado has vowed to lead mass protests.

Her supporters are keenly aware of the risks .“One tries not to be paranoid, but you go to the streets, and you see so many policemen, so many of them looking for you, it’s hard to remain calm,” said an opposition leader in the central state of Aragua, who asked to speak anonymously for fears of retaliation.

“Personally, I haven’t decided if I’ll go out on Thursday or not, we need to see what happens,” he said.

In a video message on Tuesday, Machado told supporters to have courage and welcome defectors with open arms. Many security officials in uniform are actually ready to turn their backs on Maduro, she also said.

It’s not impossible, according to another diplomat in Caracas, who said the government’s actions could well be signaling that it also fears dissent in the uniformed ranks.

“The fact the government is sending out other security corps to integrate those already on the street indicates that they are suspicious of within their own ranks too,” the diplomat said.

‘They can do it again’

For many, this new wave of government muscle has a feeling of déjà-vu, as the country went through a similar cycle of expectations and repression in the summer after the presidential vote.

Nathaly’s teenage son was detained on August 2 as part of a widespread security crackdown on protests after the vote. He was held until December 20 when the government released hundreds of political prisoners in a gesture of leniency ahead of Christmas.

When she finally saw him walking out of jail, “it was like my soul came back to my body: every step we walked, I was feeling lighter,” Nathaly remembers.

“He did nothing wrong, he was just walking the streets… When he got out, he had lost 19 kilograms and from that moment I never lost sight of him… I’m just terrified if they did it once, they can do it again…” she said.

“Every mother in Venezuela holds the same fear: don’t take away our children,” she says.

Elon Musk praised the co-leader of the German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “very reasonable” on Thursday, urging Germans to vote for the far-right party in what is the latest high-profile sign of the tech billionaire’s involvement in European politics.

“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story, and people really need to get behind AfD, and otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany,” Musk said during an audio livestream alongside party co-leader Alice Weidel on X.

Musk, a close ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, compared the political climate in Germany to that in the United States, saying that people were unhappy and demanded change when voting for Trump in November. Germany holds its own election February 23.

“If you are unhappy with the situation, you must vote for change, and that is why I’m really strongly recommending that people vote for AfD,” Musk said.

He went on to claim the president-elect will solve Russia’s war in Ukraine “very quickly,” prompting Weidel to say she wishes the incoming Trump administration will “end that terrible war” because “Europeans – they cannot.”

“They completely depend on the US, in the sense of – ‘oh the USA need(s) to do the entire job. We don’t need to do anything. We just escalate the entire conflict against Russia.’ It’s very dangerous, what’s going on here, and only you can basically stop it,” Weidel told Musk.

Weidel also said that it was “unbelievable” how Germany treated Trump while he was campaigning for president, saying that it caused her “physical pain” to see him “disparaged.”

In the same conversation, Weidel said that Germany needs to protect both the existence of Israel but also to “take our responsibility as a German nation state to protect Jewish life,” which she said was threatened by “Muslim crime.”

AfD is the “only protector of the Jewish people” in Germany, she claimed.

How did we get here?

Musk has run into hot water among European leaders – particularly in the UK and Germany – for playing politics abroad as the world braces for Trump’s imminent return to the White House.

The US billionaire has been increasingly vocal in his support for Europe’s far-right and seems keen to strengthen ties between such parties and Trump’s camp.

Another example of this is the burgeoning relationship between Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Trump’s cohort, with Meloni hosted in Mar-a-Lago over the weekend and hailed as a “fantastic woman” by the President-elect.

Musk has publicly endorsed the AfD ahead of Germany’s snap election on February 23, in which it is expected to come in second behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote on X on December 20 after the German government collapsed that week, prompting Weidel to respond at the time, “Yes! You are perfectly right!”

Musk also called German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier “an anti-democratic tyrant” after he spoke out against foreign interference during his speech on the dissolution of the country’s parliament, and called for Chancellor Olaf Scholz to resign following a deadly car-ramming attack in Magdeburg, describing him as an “incompetent fool” in a post on X.

Germany’s mainstream politicians were not happy with Musk’s public support for the AfD, with the Social Democrats (SPD) co-leader Lars Klingbeil drawing comparisons between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Scholz even stated during his New Year’s address that it was up to German citizens to decide the fate of the country, not “the owners of social media platforms.”

What could come next?

As Musk has already stirred angst in Germany over election meddling, Thursday’s livestream could be perceived as another example of that.

The recent heightened tensions come amid an ongoing probe by the European Commission into Musk’s platform X and possible violations of its Digital Services Act (DSA).

Thierry Breton, the EU’s former internal market chief who oversaw the introduction of the DSA, took to X ahead of Thursday’s livestream to write to Weidel “as a European citizen concerned with the proper use of systemic platforms authorized to operate in the EU under the strict respect of our (EU) law (#DSA), especially to protect our democratic rules against illegal or misbehavior during election times.”

“I believe it’s crucial to remind you… that your counterpart (Musk) should, once again, fully respect all its obligations under our EU law,” he added.

At the same time, the administration of Germany’s lower chamber of parliament said it was examining whether Musk’s live chat could amount to illegal interference in the election campaign, according to Reuters.