Then-Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., speaks at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in 2009. Hoekstra, now the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, is the subject of a Canadian petition to have him removed from the country. File Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI | License Photo
Aug. 12 (UPI) — Thousands of Canadians have signed a petition demanding the government kick the U.S. ambassador to Canada out of the country.
The petition, which had almost 60,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning, will be presented to the House of Commons this fall by Green Party leader Elizabeth May. It says that Ambassador Pete Hoekstra should be declared persona non grata and the Canadian government should request his removal from the country.
The petition accuses Hoekstra of repeatedly making public statements that undermine Canada-U.S. diplomatic relations, including characterizing the 2025 Canadian federal election as “anti-American;” normalizing the Trump administration’s threats to annex Canada as the “51st state;” and accusing Canada of interfering in U.S. domestic politics while making repeated interventions in Canadian political discourse. The petition also said Hoekstra was linked to a Michigan-based voter identification app used by the Alberta separatist Centurion Project, while claiming no knowledge of its use, and that The Alberta Prosperity Project [a separatist organization] met with U.S. State Department officials three times between April 2025 and January 2026, with Hoekstra claiming to have no knowledge of those meetings.
The petition was created by a woman from Calgary.
A representative for the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment on the petition except to say the embassy is aware of it, the CBC reported.
In June, Hoekstra said that Canada’s annexation by the United States would be a great topic of discussion for Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Hoekstra was a member of the House of Representatives representing western Michigan from 1993 to 2011. He was the ambassador to The Netherlands, his country of birth, during Trump’s first term. He was named ambassador to Canada in April 2025.
In 2023, the Canadian government declared Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei persona non grata after he was accused of gathering information in Hong Kong about the family of Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Chong.
The following year, six diplomats and consular officials from India were expelled after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police alleged that the agents were targeting Canadian citizens. They linked the tracking to the murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijar in Surrey, British Columbia, in 2023.
The police linked the campaign to the June 2023 murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C.
“Historically, if you start from the high end here, missile defense and missile warning were operating on separate and distinct stovepipe networks,” Lt. Gen. Rick Zellman said during a panel at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium (SMD) in Huntsville, Alabama, attended by TWZ. “Missile warning, of course, was going to detect a launch and let people know something’s coming inbound and see a duck and cover and whatnot, and missile defenders were looking to get a little bit more fidelity in their track and be able to shoot down an incoming missile,” he continued. “But today we don’t really have any ballistic missiles. Everything is maneuvering. Everything is complex, and so we can’t provide warning without providing a lot more observations on these missiles.”
DF-26 missiles on display at the military parade in Beijing, China, Sept. 3, 2015. (Xinhua/Cha Chunming) Xinhua News Agency
As a result of the evolution in missile technology, “the lexicon that we’re starting to see is missile tracking, right?” the general proffered. “And so missile warning and missile defense are really coming together in that realm. Missile warning was a space legacy mission area, and of course missile defense is missile defense. And you can see how these things are coming together. So really, the distinction between missile warning is almost obsolete at this point.”
To achieve the objective of fusing missile warning and tracking functions together, “we have to leverage a couple of really good partners,” Zellman stated, pointing to two in particular. One is the Space Development Agency (SDA), tasked with quickly delivering needed space-based capabilities to the U.S. military. The other is the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), charged with developing, deploying, and sustaining layered and integrated missile defense capabilities.
“So those two together are really helping Space Command take separate disparate stovepipe information and bring it together,” he stated.
The Space Development Agency is launching small satellites into space to help track advanced weapons like hypersonic glide vehicles. (SDA render) Space Defense Agency
“It also has to talk about decision speed, and this really is going to require us to look at more than man-in-the-loop [MITL], and maybe a man on the loop [MOTL] situation,” he noted. MITL is when a human is fully engaged in assessing and controlling the operation compared to MOTL, which usually relies on more heavily automated systems where the human approves critical decisions, usually based on distilled data presented by the system. AI is becoming a large part of making that possible in an increasingly successful way.
The reason to make this change, Zellman explained, is that “we have to make these decisions faster, and that data flow has to be able to enable our layered defenses – whether that’s coming from a THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense], or a Patriot, or directed energy, or SM-3, or space-based interceptors in the future – all that is going to be dependent on our decision speed.”
A Patriot interceptor launch. (Lockheed Martin) (Lockheed Martin)
“At the heart of all this for the United States Space Command is one of our unified command plan responsibilities, and that is as a global sensor manager,” the general said.
“We don’t use sensors dedicated to a single mission,” he explained. “They may have originally been conceived to do space domain awareness or missile warning, or in some cases, missile defense, but we try to take the goodness of all those sensors and use them for all three of those mission areas.”
Under SPACECOM, “we take those sensors and we dynamically task them and prioritize accordingly, so we can support multiple commands around the globe. And that really, once again, gets to the theme about defending at home and abroad is being able to support these multiple commands simultaneously.”
The Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) operates around the clock collecting metric and Space Object Identification data for man-made orbiting objects without the disruption of weather, time of day and atmosphere that can limit ground-based systems. SBSS has a clear and unobstructed view of resident space objects orbiting earth from its 390-mile altitude orbit. (Image courtesy of Boeing)
The command’s “modern systems, whether it’s a long-range discrimination radar or some of our systems that have been around a little bit longer – like an upgraded early warning radar – they’re all inherently multi-mission,” Zellman put forth. “A single radar can see an object in space and give me space domain awareness information, and a little bit later it can see a missile launch and provide warning, and then hopefully down the road a bit more… provide essentially a track so that we can shoot an interceptor at it and kill it.”
“All these three things can be done in the same duty cycle with that same system, and so we have to be able to dynamically task these systems to ensure that whichever is the priority mission at that time is the one that is being serviced,” the general cautioned. “Historically, space domain awareness information went to space operators, and I would argue missile warning information probably went to both space operators and the missile defense community. But today, that information has to all be put in one data location, and we pull the information we need for the mission we have at hand.”
Long Range Discrimination Radar Capabilities
“We recognize that what we do in space at Space Command is really fundamental to what the missile defense community has to do for missile defense,” Zellman vocalized. “So that really talks about the high end. Let’s talk about the low end.”
Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, commander of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, and Joint Task Force-Gold “mentioned some of this today,” Zellman noted, referring to an earlier SMD panel. “We see, I think, the low end on Epic Fury. Sure, the missiles are more high end, but we’ve seen our adversary employ a number of one-way attack systems that are coupled with these ballistic missile volleys, and we are really at this point in the history of warfare because of the democratization of space.”
Iranian missiles in an underground facility. (Iranian media) (Iranian media)
“Space isn’t a sanctuary,” the general shared. “It’s no longer just the playground of nations with a lot of money. The commercialization of space has created what many call essentially a transparent battlefield. And because I can see everything all the time with commercial ISR, it’s given our adversaries capabilities that they haven’t had in the past.”
“That ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], if you couple it with a platform that has access to GPS or some other PNT [position, navigation and timing] system, and then you add in another layer of over-the-horizon comms, like say from an Iridium or a Starlink, and you have a pretty lethal asymmetric weapon system that our adversaries can get a hold of.”
Regardless of how much integration and automation occurs, it’s still a people business in Zellman’s eyes.
“So whether it’s a combination volley of attack drones or hypersonic glide vehicles, the mission at SPACECOM remains the same, and that’s to synchronize global missile defense and space domain awareness using a common set of information,” Zellman said. “But that synchronization doesn’t just happen in a vacuum; it happens with the joint warfighters that are standing on watch.”
Aug. 12 (UPI) — President Donald Trump confirmed he was smuggled off Air Force One and secretly boarded onto a different aircraft before departing the NATO Summit in Turkey for a flight to a British air base in July, amid a possible threat on his life.
Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Tuesday night, Trump said the decision to make the switch in Ankara was made by the “Secret Service and the military.”
“I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane. I just have to do what they say,” he said.
NBC News said it had confirmation of reports that after apparently boarding Air Force One as normal, Trump was moved, secreted in a catering truck, to an unmarked VIP transport aircraft for the first leg of the July 8 flight back to the United States, via RAF Mildenhall.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remained on board and the press corps accompanying Trump and most White House staffers flew the leg on Air Force One unaware that Trump was not present, but Trump dismissed questions over whether leaving them aboard the decoy aircraft may have placed them in harm’s way.
“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for,” said Trump, without saying why that might be the case.
Trump said he didn’t delve too much into the threat but he said he was “not surprised” he had been targeted, saying it was an occupational hazard for any president who was getting results.
“Any consequential president has a lot of threats,” he said.
NBC said it had been told by a U.S. official the switch was due to credible intelligence of an Iranian threat to kill Trump, possibly using a shoulder-fired missile launcher to attack Air Force One as it departed Ankara.
Other reports said U.S. intelligence had information of a person with a shoulder-fired missile launcher seen near where the summit was being held.
“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats,” the White House said in a statement to ABC News.
Trump said at the time he would take the original Air Force One and not the new one provided by Qatar because he was sending it to Mildenhall for U.S. service members to tour.
However, the sequence of events was that Trump boarded Air Force One in view of the cameras in Ankara, clandestinely switched to the C-32 carrying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the flight to Britain. Once on the ground at Mildenhall, the maneuver was reversed and Trump emerged from Air Force One as if he’d been aboard the whole time.
Administration officials, even Hegseth, reportedly were unaware of the ruse until afterward.
Trump subsequently switched onto the new Qatari-gifted “Air Force One” for the rest of the flight back to Washington.
President Donald Trump hosts Olympic and Paralympic medal-winning athletes during a reception for Team USA in the East Room of the White House on Thursday. The reception honored the team’s medal achievements during this year’s Winter Games, where American athletes earned 57 total medals, including 25 gold. Photo by Aaron Schwartz/UPI | License Photo
Aug. 12 (UPI) — Lightning struck a northern Ohio state prison, injuring at least 16 people, who were transported to the hospital, officials said Tuesday night.
The lightning struck the Grafton Correctional Institution, located about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland, Tuesday night, as inmates were returning from their evening meal, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said in a statement.
Of the 16 people transported to an outside hospital, one was airlifted, it said.
The conditions of those injured were not immediately clear, though the department said, “there have been no reported deaths at this time.”
The incident comes as larges portions of Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia were under flood watches amid thunderstorms and heavy rainfall, according to the National Weather Service.
Ohio correctional authorities said they are continuing to assess and monitor the situation.
The Grafton Correctional Institution opened in 1988 on 1,396 acres, according to its website.
