The Israeli government threatened on Sunday to disregard an order by Israel’s highest court, escalating a long-running clash between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a judiciary whose authority he has vowed to weaken.

Legal analysts called the statement one of the more brazen steps so far by the Netanyahu government to legitimize defiance of Israel’s Supreme Court. They said it might pave the way toward an eventual constitutional crisis.

On Sunday, the members of Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet passed a resolution attacking the court over a decision issued last month in a case involving Israel’s broadcast regulator. In apparent defiance of the decision, they said they would not recognize actions taken by the regulator for the time being and would use “every legal means” to annul it.

Yariv Levin, Israel’s justice minister, asserted in a joint statement with another senior minister that the court’s decision “contradicts the clear language of the law.” They said the government “will not recognize actions taken under its authority.”

That stance quickly prompted fierce criticism inside Israel. President Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely symbolic, warned that “statements of noncompliance with Supreme Court rulings strike at the heart of the nation’s unity.”

He said, “Noncompliance with a court ruling is a red line that must not be crossed under any circumstances.”

By Sunday night, the government’s cabinet secretary, Yossi Fuchs, appeared to be trying to defuse the controversy, saying the resolution did not explicitly defy the Supreme Court order. He argued that it had only voiced “sharp criticism of a ruling,” although he did not try to square this explanation with the defiant comments offered earlier by Mr. Levin and the other minister.

The dispute raised fresh fears of democratic backsliding in Israel, where Mr. Netanyahu’s attempt to curb the country’s justice system ignited mass protests three years ago. Critics said the overhaul was aimed at giving the ruling coalition near-unchecked executive power.

At the heart of the latest legal dispute is Israel’s broadcast regulator, known as the Second Authority. The agency is still staffed by a board of commissioners from the previous government, which was run by Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents.

In recent months a group of investors, including Assaf Rappaport, who has been critical of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, moved to purchase Channel 13, a major Israeli broadcaster. The acquisition would most likely require regulatory approval by the Second Authority.

When Mr. Netanyahu’s government put forward its own set of commissioners for the board, the Supreme Court froze their appointment while it heard petitions by media organizations and civil rights groups. Some challenged the new board over prospective members’ conflicts of interests.

In the decision that the cabinet appeared to defy on Sunday, the court ruled that the original board could continue operating, given the “exceptional circumstances.” Mr. Netanyahu’s government said that the justices’ decision flew in the face of existing legislation and noted that several members had resigned, leaving the board without the quorum mandated by Israeli law.

Since returning to power in late 2022, Mr. Netanyahu has sought to weaken Israel’s judicial establishment, asserting that the Supreme Court had accrued too much power and was tying the hands of elected officials. He has also denounced the country’s prosecutors for indicting him in 2019 on corruption charges, accusations he denies.

After the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited the war in Gaza, the judicial overhaul initiative largely ground to a halt as Israelis focused on external threats. But Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition later resurrected the judicial campaign, including by passing a law last year that changed how judges are picked for the bench.

Israel is set to hold parliamentary elections later this year for the first time since the Oct. 7 attacks, a contest that many in the country see as critical. In a recent interview with right-wing Channel 14, Mr. Netanyahu vowed to press on with the judicial overhaul.

“We are continuing with our judicial amendments,” he said. “Is there anybody who doesn’t think there’s a need for them?”

Plates of oysters, prawns and sushi sat on Ashwin Reynolds’s table. A singer performed soothing R&B, bartenders poured sparkling wine, and the guests in this suite at a horse racing track wore fitted suits and fancy floral headpieces.

As a child who used to record horse racing bets for his grandfather, Mr. Reynolds, who is 52 and owns a construction company, never could have imagined enjoying such opulence at a racetrack in Durban. Until South Africa’s apartheid system was dismantled in the early 1990s, people of color like him were barred from such elite spaces.

But there he was on Saturday, alongside a racially diverse crowd at Durban July, the most lucrative horse racing event in Africa. In 2021, he became the first person of color to own the horse that won the main race.

This year is the 130th running of the Durban July horse races, in this sprawling city on South Africa’s south coast. The daylong event has become about much more than racing. The music, fashion, food and ostentatious displays of wealth make it possible to briefly forget the economic and social hardship that continues to define life for many South Africans.

More than a dozen V.I.P. tents, known as marquees, sprawl across the grassy infield of the 2,800-meter, pear-shaped track. The marquees charge hundreds of dollars to book a table offering sleek banquettes, bottle service and buffets. Some marquees become hubs for networking, gathering people from particular industries like fashion, music and politics. Up-and-coming artists may rub elbows with an established producer; entrepreneurs seeking government contracts may try to butter up politicians.

Each year, attendees are encouraged to dress to a theme. This year’s was “country allure.”

Many Black attendees see Durban July as a celebration of their place in high society in a country where, for hundreds of years, they were robbed of resources and prevented from building wealth.

This is no longer “just a white man’s event,” said Teddy Geldart, a South African television producer, sporting a white feathery top as he lounged on a sofa in a marquee where the American R&B singer Bryson Tiller was the headline act.

“It’s now ours,” Mr. Geldart, 40, added. “That’s a great feeling, that we can enjoy luxury in our own country.”

During apartheid, nonwhite spectators were allowed to attend Durban July, but they were confined to a small section of the grandstand known as the silver ring, said Anita Akal, 83, who was in her 55th year photographing the event. White guests sat in the gold ring, near the finish line.

But spectators at that time could still move around and mingle across racial lines, an uncommon display for the apartheid era, said David Thiselton, a South African horse racing journalist who has been attending since 1990.

Today, the grandstands mostly attract those interested in horse racing, who buy an $18 ticket and don’t necessarily wear the same elaborate outfits as those who come to party. Many in the grandstand crowd are South Africans of Indian descent, a community in which horse racing is wildly popular. Behind the grandstands, inside the ring where the horses parade before races, most people are white; they still own most of the horses. The V.I.P. hospitality areas in the infield tend to be mostly Black.

“It’s an event that everybody leaves everything behind for this day — the racial tension, the bickering, the fights that we have,” said Vishal Ramlakan, a 50-year-old from Durban who works in trucking and was attending for the third time.

Muzi Yeni, 39, said he was pleased that more Black people were attending Durban July than in previous years, but he wished that more of them were interested in the racing. Mr. Yeni, a jockey for 22 years, is one of a handful of Black jockeys at Durban July. Diversification of the ranks of jockeys has been slow, he said, in part because most trainers are white and they may not always give Black jockeys a chance.

Three Black jockeys have won Durban July’s main race, and Mr. Yeni said he hoped to add his name to that list to show other Black riders that they could do it, too. (Mr. Yeni finished seventh in Saturday’s race.)

One Black attendee who came for the racing was Doris Mataboge, 55, attending for the fifth time. She grew up in a rural area and developed a love for horses from seeing them in the fields. Ms. Mataboge, who teaches nursing, said she bet about $1.85 and, for the first time, won, getting just under $10 after the horse she backed was victorious.

Before the races started, the crowd focused its attention on a group of models.

One of them, Karabo Bapela, 18, said the event is helping her gain confidence.

“We’re not that good yet,” she said.

And she does not take the opportunity for granted.

“It’s very freeing to be able to do this,” she said, “knowing that our grandmothers, back in the day, couldn’t go out in public or hang out with people of a different color.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s slain supreme leader, had seemed immovable for decades, a man whose authority had become so deeply woven into Iran’s political and religious life that imagining the country without him felt almost impossible.

Now Tehran — the capital from which he ruled, where he was killed and which had shaped his life — is the center of his final journey, filled with mourners for funeral ceremonies taking place across several days, which are part farewell, part spectacle and part turning point.

In the days leading up to the first public mourning, the city changed. First gradually, and then all at once, in the way cities often change before moments of consequence.

Families from provincial towns rolled into Tehran, joining masses who revered Ayatollah Khamenei as patriarch and guardian of the Islamic republic, an order that so many others had long opposed while suffering under its deep repression. Foreign officials, many from authoritarian nations, militia members and religious leaders flew from all over the world, reflecting both Iran’s global reach and its distance from the West.

We traveled there as well, the first visit by New York Times journalists to the country since before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February and the government cracked down brutally on protests that started in December. We found a country trying to project strength and stability but pervaded by uncertainty.

We arrived in Tehran, a dense city of around nine million that spreads outward in a sprawl of apartment blocks, glass towers and tree-lined boulevards, with neighborhoods that shift in character from one district to the next. Beside the pomp and circumstance, war-damaged buildings stood scarred along major roads and daily life was still shaped by water shortages and electricity blackouts. Families who lost loved ones in the crackdown were still living with grief — and hoping for justice.

As more people arrived, Ayatollah Khamenei’s presence seemed to expand with them. Across major highways and narrow alleys, in small cafes and sprawling bookstores, portraits of him began to cover the city.

Some show him young, with a dark beard and a stern expression. Others portray the older man many Iranians had grown used to seeing over decades, his beard turned white with age. In some, Ayatollah Khamenei appears beside Mojtaba, his son and successor, the pairing feeling less like a portrait than the passing of one chapter into the next.

The funeral preparations unfolded with the choreography of a major state event. Security checkpoints, organized transportation, public announcements, carefully arranged ceremonial spaces.

We were granted restricted access to the funeral ceremonies by the Iranian government, which closely controlled our movements, and which required a translator and guide to accompany us. It was a quiet reminder of how closely the story itself was being choreographed, and who was permitted to tell it.

The streets, too, were managed and staged.

Along Valiasr Street, where traffic usually performs its daily ritual of impatience and frustration, movement slowed as the roads gradually surrendered to the funeral preparations. Workers built stations to feed and give water to those arriving to mourn him.

Loudspeakers sent chants and laments through the air, and praised the supreme leader who was killed at the onset of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

A little farther away, at Enghelab Square, another version of Tehran moved beneath a giant mourning billboard.

Young women with uncovered hair and cigarettes in hand, and men with pierced ears, crossed paths with conservative women in black chadors carrying Iranian flags and praying quietly. It was an image that seemed to contain the contradictions of Iran itself: a nation Ayatollah Khamenei had shaped for decades, and one that, in his final years, had increasingly pushed back against the boundaries of his oppressive rule.

We lingered for almost two hours at the square, where most people were unwilling to talk to us, wary of foreign media. We asked to interview a woman with blond hair, a dark blue denim skirt, full makeup and a hijab barely resting at the edge of her hair. She smiled softly and said, “I am afraid I won’t be able to say what’s in my heart.”

At the square, some people stopped to photograph the giant statue of a clenched fist. Others kept walking and driving by. Every evening, life continued beneath the preparations, ordinary rhythms folding themselves into something much larger. Street vendors calling out, motorcycles weaving between cars, tea glasses clinking in small cafes.

Beneath the banners and portraits was another Tehran, a city worn by months of pressure.

A regional war with Israel last year compounded a financial malaise exacerbated by sanctions. Those economic frustrations boiled over into mass protests beginning in late December that the authorities crushed, killing thousands. Then came the war with the United States and Israel, taking the lives of young children at school, damaging historic sites like Golestan Palace and leaving residents checking the skies and refreshing news alerts. The past months had seemed to compress multiple eras of strain into a single season.

And states — especially autocratic ones like Iran’s — often answer uncertainty with scale.

So this exhausted capital has suddenly found itself transformed into the stage for a burial spectacle of extraordinary proportions.

At the Grand Mosalla, a sprawling mosque complex in Tehran, tens of thousands arrived this weekend dressed almost entirely in black to pray for and pay their respects to the Shiite Muslim patriarch. They cried and wailed openly. They struck their chests and heads in ritual mourning. Some sat on the ground, weary and stunned.

“Khamenei was the foundation of our lives,” said Mohamed Soleimani, from Tehran, who sat at the mosque’s grounds, head bowed, holding a photo of Mojtaba Khamenei.

Grief also gave way to anger. Fists rose in the air. Chants of revenge filled the space — directed at Israel, at the United States and, repeatedly, at one man whose name was taken up again and again by the crowd: Donald J. Trump.

The funeral, which will continue in the coming days through Tehran, other Iranian cities and even neighboring Iraq, seems designed to do something larger than simply bury a leader.

It is an effort to project continuity at a moment when the country itself seems caught in a period of transition and uncertainty.

So Iran moves forward for now, beneath commemorative banners and enormous portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei, still trying to understand what exactly is ending — and what is taking shape in its place.

When the Vatican excommunicated the priesthood of a rebel conservative faction last week, creating the biggest schism in Roman Catholicism in decades, it also hoped to drive the group’s many followers back to the mainstream church.

Instead, according to interviews with some of the faction’s followers in Argentina, Italy and Switzerland, the punishment has been met with defiance.

“It changes nothing,” said Blandine Guillaumin, 42, a teacher at a school run by the group in France. Ms. Guillaumin said she would remain part of the faction, called the Society of St. Pius X, even if the Vatican went ahead with its threat to excommunicate worshipers who stayed loyal to the breakaway group.

“We are sure we are doing God’s will,” Ms. Guillaumin said. It is the society, not the Vatican, she said, that represents “pure, authentic Catholicism.”

Ms. Guillaumin’s defiance embodied the climax of a 56-year-old impasse between the Vatican and the society, founded in 1970 to protest the Roman Catholic Church’s modernizing turn after the Second Vatican Council, which took place between 1962 and 1965.

The society bemoans the council’s change to the form of Catholic services. Though the council allowed priests to hold services in vernacular languages, the society still celebrates the Traditional Latin Mass, arguing it preserves a sense of reverence and mystery.

The society also rejects the substance of the council’s teachings, which it says contradict the church’s millennial teaching. The society’s members oppose the council’s acceptance of other religions and its push for interfaith dialogue and outreach to other Christian denominations.

They point to the council as the beginning of the end for the Catholic church, resulting in fewer people in European pews, fewer priests in pulpits, and all manner of perceived heresies and errors. (The number of Catholics is, in fact, rising, at least in America and Africa.)

Vatican leaders, including Pope Leo, naturally dispute the faction’s position, saying that it has broken with key church teachings. Leo said last month that its followers “refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the church.”

Andrea Tornielli, a senior Vatican official who helps run its communications department, wrote in an editorial on Thursday that the group was “very far removed from the Catholic faith” because it refused to accept the diversity of Catholic teaching.

These disagreements culminated last week in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Écône, where the society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, oversaw the construction of its first seminary in 1970. In a ritual-laden ceremony on Wednesday, the society’s new leaders defied Pope Leo XIV by consecrating four bishops against his will, an event that the group said attracted some 17,000 people.

A day later, the Vatican declared the society was in schism with the church and issued an excommunication decree against its bishops — six in all, after Wednesday’s ceremony — as well as its priests, barring them from officiating marriages and hearing confessions, which were to be considered invalid.

Other clergy and the lay faithful were told that they risked excommunication if they continued to follow the society’s teachings. The Vatican offered an olive branch to those who wanted to leave the society, issuing specific instructions as to how they could return to the Catholic fold.

At Écône on Friday, that entreaty appeared to have been ignored.

In a public statement the society’s superior general, the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, did not reverse or apologize for the consecrations and described the Vatican’s decision as “objectively unjust and invalid.” Still, he wrote in a letter — the society’s first formal response to the excommunication — that it accepted the Vatican’s position without “bitterness or revolt” and promised “to love the Holy Church even more.”

Though Écône wasn’t as bustling as it had been in recent days, the hamlet was still a beehive of activity as the group’s members worked to tidy the place after a week of ceremony.

Wearing a bright gold cross, Bishop Marc Hanappier, one of the newly minted prelates, stopped to bless the faithful who knelt reverently at his feet. Children knelt to kiss a ring on his right hand. He said he did not have time to speak to a reporter.

The society has only about 1,500 formal members, half of whom are priests, but its officials say they can count on between 300,000 and 600,000 lay followers worldwide.

Seminarians stacked hundreds of chairs, dismantled wooden daises and scampered up electricity poles to unhook wiring, surprisingly agile despite their long black cassocks.

The hall outside the chapel where Archbishop Lefebvre is buried had been transformed into an impromptu bookshop. There were biographies of the founder, a table-full of children’s books about sundry saints and one book raising doubts about the holiness of John Paul II, the former pontiff.

John Paul excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre and the four bishops he consecrated during an earlier standoff in 1988. Relations improved under Pope Benedict XVI, who lifted the excommunications of the surviving bishops in 2009, and Pope Francis, who allowed the priests to celebrate marriages and hear confessions.

Claire-Marie Brunet, 55, a teacher at a society school in Lyon, France, challenged the Vatican’s decision.

“Excommunication is a punishment imposed for a mistake, but if there is no mistake, it’s just unfair,” she said. “Excommunicating the faithful, excommunicating the bishops, it’s as though the Vatican excommunicated two thousand years of Christian history, because we have not changed anything that the apostles taught,” she added.

That defiance was echoed across The Atlantic in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where an S.S.P.X. congregation gathered for Mass on Thursday evening in a church tucked behind one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

“Apparently we are breakaway heretics,” said Thiago Berlanga, 23, an economics student, as he stood outside the church’s gates.

Like other attendees, Mr. Berlanga bristled at Pope Leo’s excommunication order. “I am going to keep coming here,” he said. “The heretics are the others.”

Mr. Berlanga said that the modernizing wing of the church, not the St. Pius X society, was violating Catholic rules. He listed his grievances: priests blessing gay unions, giving communion to divorced people, and treating Catholicism as if it were on equal footing with Judaism or Buddhism. He complained that some “sermons sound like TED Talks,” and that at Mass, “they play music with some little guitars and stuff.”

“Today the church welcomes everybody,” he said. “You can be homosexual, you can be an adulterer — you can do everything except be a traditionalist.” There were no guitars at the Mass in the St. Pius X Priory in Buenos Aires — not even a piano or any songs. There was more kneeling than at a standard Mass, more striking of the breast, no signs of peace, and much more Latin.

“We pray for the Pope,” Mr. Berlanga said: “How can you call ‘schismatic’ a congregation who prays for the Pope?”

In Albano Laziale, outside Rome, the Rev. Gabriele D’Avino said the faction had prepared their followers for two years for the consecrations — and their possible fallout. “We have spoken about it in our writings, in our homilies,” said Father D’Avino, who leads the society’s roughly 2,000 followers in Italy.

Only one family had left his flock since the excommunications, he said. The others “understood the problem and they do not feel polluted by these sanctions,” he added.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.

The atmosphere in Palmarejo, a middle-class neighborhood in Praia, the capital of the tiny country of Cape Verde, was electric after the country’s World Cup elimination match on Friday against Argentina.

People jumped onto cars in wild celebration. Drivers honked their horns. Crowds waved flags and music blasted away from the bars.

As it happened, Cape Verde lost, 3-2, ending its World Cup dreams.

The celebratory atmosphere might have felt misplaced, but for residents here, there was still an enormous sense of accomplishment in having advanced to the first elimination round after the group stage and finding a space in the global spotlight.

“We won despite losing because we have gone very far — more than anyone expected,” said Romina Delgado, 38, a banker.

Residents of Cape Verde live what they like to call a “No Stress” way of life, a calm, easygoing philosophy rooted in the belief that everything will naturally run its course and find its rhythm.

The notion of a stress-free life briefly went out the window on Friday when Cape Verde astonishingly found itself in extra time, pushing Argentina, the defending champions, to the brink.

Twice, Argentina took the lead. And, twice, Cape Verde came back to even the score, including once in extra time, raising the possibility of one of the greatest upsets the sport had ever seen. In the end, it was too much to ask, and Argentina survived, thanks to an own goal after a misplaced header from a Cape Verde defender, but that did not diminish what Cape Verde had accomplished.

Argentina entered the match as one of the strongest teams in the tournament, led by Lionel Messi, a global superstar and one of the greatest players ever to kick a ball.

On the other hand, Cape Verde — the team and the country — was a total mystery to most global soccer fans. An archipelago off the coast of West Africa with a population of about 500,000, it was making its first World Cup appearance with a team cobbled together from a diaspora of players.

Throughout the match — shown at a fan zone on the beaches of Quebra Canela, an upscale Praia neighborhood that is home to restaurants, bars and foreign embassies — Ms. Delgado had been glued to her chair with her hands over her mouth, praying and rocking anxiously back and forth. Her 10-year-old son kept asking her when Cape Verde would score again.

As she got up to leave, holding her son’s hand, the fans who flooded the fan zone danced beneath the giant televisions. She said she would enroll her son in a soccer academy this year so he could finish the job that had been started.

“Write this down,” she said. “One day, it will happen. He’s very determined, he’s very eager.”

If Cape Verde was a huge underdog, it refused to play the part. Its fairy-tale run was perhaps best demonstrated in the spectacular performance and showmanship of its goalkeeper, Josimar José Évora Dias, better known as Vozinha.

Vozinha made several brilliant saves, but beyond that, he played with a confident flair, casually dribbling past attacking forwards in his own penalty box, and the fans loved it.

“We know Vozinha very well,” said David Ramos, a math professor in Cape Verde, when asked about some of those nerve-racking moments. “We were not nervous. We know him very well. What he did was beautiful.”

Now, it is time to look ahead, and the next chapter, Mr. Ramos said, is to conquer African soccer. “I think African teams are afraid of us now,” he said.

It’s been a provocative year and a half for the relationship between Canada and the U.S., two countries celebrating birthdays this week. Canada turned 159 on Wednesday, and the U.S. is celebrating its 250th year today.

Since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, he has imposed punishing tariffs on some of Canada’s most important industries, insulted two prime ministers by calling them “governor” and frequently suggested that Canada become the 51st state.

Canadians have expressed hurt, anger and even confusion at their once closest ally turning on them. Many stopped traveling to the U.S. and buying American products. International sporting events between the two countries feel like the War of 1812. It got us thinking about how we understand each other and how much we really know about each other.

And so, in honor of the countries’ birthdays, we put together a quiz we hope will be fun (and a little bit challenging) for everyone. To our American friends, we even made it a little bit about you. If you find it difficult, of course we’re sorry.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Times’s Canada bureau chief, reported on the multibillion dollar investments, including a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Coast, along with natural gas facilities, that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Thursday, as he aims to diversify trade away from the U.S.

There were a few surprises in the projects in British Columbia, which will include expansions for the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert, as well as the development of five liquefied natural gas terminals in the North Coast, which will keep in place the politically important restriction on the movement of tankers in those waters.

And despite the Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s monthslong advocacy for a pipeline to the North Coast of British Columbia, the current plan is for it to run alongside the TMX and exit on the south coast, near Vancouver. The last-minute change of heart suggests that Ms. Smith was convinced by the federal and British Columbia governments that a northern pipeline would have encountered a wall of resistance from coastal First Nations and required lifting the tanker moratorium, leading to unpalatable delays. Read the full story.

Canada at the World Cup

Canada plays Morocco in the World Cup round of 16 today at 1 p.m. Eastern time in Houston, and the team has created a national hysteria that, depending on the outcome, may or may not peak with this match.

No. 6-ranked Morocco is heavily favored, but Canada has been on a historic run. Coming into the tournament, the Canada men’s national team had never won a World Cup game. They opened the tournament with a 1-1 draw with Bosnia and Herzegovina, beat Qatar 6-0, lost 2-1 to Switzerland and beat South Africa 1-0 in a round of 32 thriller this week to advance alongside the powerhouse nations France, England, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Throughout the tournament, fans across the country have been gathering by the thousands at outdoor and indoor watch parties, as well as in bars and at home, to cheer on the team. This week, Canada’s coach, Jesse Marsch, said that preparing for Morocco was like “a gory, horrible nightmare.” But with the way underdogs have been performing at the World Cup, it would be a mistake to count them out. Tariq Panja, a global sports reporter for The Times, will be covering the match.

The free trade stalemate

My colleagues Ana Swanson in Washington, Ian Austen in Ottawa and Emiliano Rodriguez Mega in Mexico City reported that the Trump administration on Wednesday declined to renew the trade deal President Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term, a pact that he later came to criticize.

“It was the expected result,” Ian told me. “All three countries, overtly and otherwise, had suggested that the 16-year extension of the trade deal Canada and Mexico requested was unlikely to be approved by the Trump administration.”

He added: “The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, as Canada calls it, will continue for another 10 years, but as a zombie agreement. The three countries will formally review it every year and, for the time being, continue to meet and negotiate its terms and the American tariffs that violate it. At some point, perhaps after President Trump leaves office, those talks may lead to a 16-year extension. But at meetings later this month, Canada will most likely push for an end to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos.” Read the full story.

The Interview: Robby Hoffman

Robby Hoffman, a comedian and actor who grew up in Montreal’s Hasidic community after relocating from New York, sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for a wide-ranging interview that touched on her being raised by a single mother, coming out as gay in high school and cutting her teeth as a young comic in Canada.

“I am simultaneously the most nervous and confident person,” she said. “I don’t know how that happened, either. But I’m always nonbinary, not just in the gender sense. I’m Canadian, I’m American, I’m nervous, I’m confident. The whole thing is a disaster.” Read the full story or watch the video.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

Last spring, Ephrat Livni reported, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. Suddenly, the community saw its trees in a different light. Read the full story.

• Canada faced a prolonged heat wave this week, with some areas experiencing their first major heat event of the season as temperatures surged well above normal levels. Read more about how heat domes work and how without climate change, the current heat wave wouldn’t even be possible. Track the heat across the country with The Times’s Canada heat tracker.

• Canada will compete in the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest. The decision, announced on Canada Day, came less than a week after the CBC became a full member of the organization that runs the high-camp singing competition.

• A beaver statue representing the U.S. was smashed to pieces in Toronto, Vjosa Isai reported. It was one of dozens of statues of Canada’s national animal and part of a public art installation for the World Cup located in the city’s downtown. Was the destruction random or a political message?

• A woman’s morning walk with her dog in Kananaskis, Alberta, took an unexpected turn after a grizzly bear galloped toward her, stood on its hind legs and continued to move closer as she shouted, grunted and slowly retreated. Incredibly, she captured the entire encounter on video.

• A Chinese dissident who fled by sea to South Korea has landed in Canada. Dong Guangping reached Toronto after a decade of failed attempts to escape China. He traveled to South Korea last month in an inflatable rubber boat.

The Canada Letter is edited by Shawna Richer, who oversees Canada coverage on the International desk at The Times. She lives in Toronto.

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