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Eight vaccines linked to a lower risk of dementia
Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 at 7:56 PM

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At a glance

  • Multiple large observational studies have found that routine adult vaccines are associated with a reduced risk of dementia, with some showing risk reductions of 25% to 40%.
  • The strongest evidence exists for shingles, flu, RSV, pneumococcal and diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis-containing (DTP) vaccines.
  • Researchers believe vaccination may reduce dementia risk by preventing infections that cause brain inflammation, though some evidence points to a more general immune effect.

More than 57 million people worldwide are living with dementia and, according to the World Health Organization, there are 10 million new cases every single year.

But over the past few years, a striking pattern has emerged from large population studies: vaccinations can be protective against dementia. The effect has now been observed across multiple vaccines, multiple countries and millions of people.

Viral infections can trigger long-lasting inflammation in the body, which then extends to the brain. That inflammation can damage the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other which, in turn, can lead to cognitive impairment and memory loss, leading to dementia.

The rationale behind vaccines protecting neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s comes from the way that viral infections can affect our brain.

Dementia is not a single disease, but a term for a cluster of symptoms, including memory loss and cognitive decline, that can have many causes. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common of those causes, accounting for an estimated 60-70% of cases.

Several viruses including herpes simplex virus type 1 (that causes cold sores), chickenpox virus (varicella zoster virus that also causes shingles) and SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) have all been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia after infection.

Viral infections can trigger long-lasting inflammation in the body, which then extends to the brain. That inflammation can damage the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other which, in turn, can lead to cognitive impairment and memory loss, leading to dementia.

Here are eight vaccines that have been shown to have a protective effect against dementia.

1. Shingles

The shingles vaccine has the most replicated evidence of any vaccine for dementia risk reduction.

A 2024 study in Nature Medicine found that the recombinant shingles vaccine Shingrix was associated with a significantly lower risk of dementia than the older live vaccine Zostavax, which has since been discontinued in the USA.

A key difference between the two is that Shingrix contains an ingredient called AS01, an adjuvant designed to boost the immune response.

A follow-up study from the same group, published in NPJ Vaccines in 2025, tracked more than 436,000 people and found an 18% reduction in dementia diagnoses over 18 months in those who received the shingles vaccine.

Curious about vaccines?

Visit our new YouTube channel that goes under the hood of immunity to explain how vaccines train your body to fight disease. Using clear, engaging storytelling, we explore how vaccines work, the history of major outbreaks and the science that protects us every day.

2. RSV

The respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine is a relatively new addition to adult immunisation schedules, but it has already been linked to dementia protection.

The Oxford NPJ Vaccines study found a 29% reduction in dementia risk over 18 months in those who received the RSV vaccine, Arexvy.

What makes this finding particularly interesting is that Arexvy contains the same AS01 adjuvant as the shingles vaccine, Shingrix. The fact that both vaccines showed similar levels of protection, despite targeting completely different viruses, led the researchers to suggest that the adjuvant itself may play a direct role in lowering dementia risk.

3. Flu

Flu vaccination has been studied more extensively than any other vaccine in relation to dementia.

A 2022 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease analysed nearly two million people aged 65 and older and found that those who received at least one flu vaccine were 40% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s over four years. The more frequently people were vaccinated, the greater the protection.

In April 2026, the same team published new findings in Neurology showing that a high-dose flu vaccine, which contains four times the antigen of the standard jab, was linked to a 55% reduced risk.

That finding comes from a single retrospective study and will need replication, but it adds to a consistent body of evidence around influenza vaccination and cognitive protection.

4. DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis)

A 2023 study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease found that adults aged 65 and over who received the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (Tdap) or Td (without pertussis) vaccine were 30% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s over an eight-year follow-up.

A meta-analysis in Frontiers in Immunology, pooling data from 17 studies and more than 1.8 million people, had uncovered a similar finding in 2022: the risk of developing dementia was reduced by 31%.

A more recent meta-analysis in Age and Ageing (2025), covering 104 million participants, confirmed the association, showing a 33% reduction.

DTP is one of the most widely administered vaccines in the world, so even a modest protective effect against dementia would have enormous public health implications.

5. Pneumococcal

The same 2023 study found a 27% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s in adults who had received the pneumococcal vaccine.

A 2025 Age and Ageing meta-analysis, which pooled data from 21 studies covering 104 million participants, also found a significant association.

Fewer independent studies have examined pneumococcal vaccination than shingles or flu, but the consistency of the finding across both a large cohort and a major meta-analysis suggests the association is worth investigating further.

6. Hepatitis A

Hepatitis A vaccination was among the vaccines identified in the Cambridge review as protective.

The Frontiers in Immunologymeta-analysis indicated a 22% lower risk of dementia. A systematic review from the University of Cambridge in January 2025 analysed 14 studies drawing on health records from roughly 130 million people.

Among its findings, vaccinations against hepatitis A, typhoid and the combined hepatitis A and typhoid vaccine were all associated with a lower risk of dementia.

A Welsh population study by Wilkinson and colleagues, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that receiving both the typhoid and hepatitis A vaccines together was associated with a greater reduction in risk than either vaccine on its own.

That pattern, where combining vaccines appears to offer more protection, shows up repeatedly across the research.

7. Hepatitis B

Hepatitis B vaccination appeared in the same Frontiers in Immunology meta-analysis, with a hazard ratio of 0.82, indicating an 18% lower risk of dementia.

The Cambridge systematic review also flagged the combined hepatitis A and B vaccine as showing a greater protective effect than either alone.

This is consistent with a broader pattern in the literature where receiving multiple different vaccinations appears to be associated with a lower risk than receiving just one, though researchers caution that this could also reflect the healthy vaccinee effect rather than a biological mechanism.

8. Typhoid

Typhoid vaccination was linked to a 20% reduced risk of dementia in the Frontiers in Immunology meta-analysis and in the Cambridge systematic review.

The original data on typhoid came from the Welsh population study by Wilkinson and colleagues, which examined the association between all prescription medications and dementia incidence across more than half a million people. Of 744 medications analysed, only four were associated with a lower risk of dementia, and all four were vaccines.

These are not vaccines that most adults receive as part of their standard immunisation schedule. But the fact that they show a similar pattern to the five routine vaccines above is notable and adds weight to the idea that the protective effect may not be specific to any single pathogen.

Why might vaccines protect the brain?

Researchers are still working to untangle the mechanisms, and there are several theories that are not mutually exclusive.

The most straightforward is that vaccines prevent infections, and infections cause inflammation that can damage the brain.

A Korean nationwide cohort study published in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy in 2024 found that both herpes simplex and varicella zoster virus infections were independently associated with an increased risk of dementia, with a particularly elevated risk in people who experienced both.

An Italian population study of more than 130,000 people, published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2025, found a 13% increased risk of dementia following severe shingles.

And a 2025 study in Nature Medicine led by researchers at Imperial College London and the UK Dementia Research Institute found that people who had previously contracted COVID-19 showed increased levels of blood biomarkers linked to amyloid build-up in the brain, which is linked to Alzheimer’s disease, with effects comparable to four years of ageing.

By stopping or reducing the severity of these infections, vaccines may be preventing the neuro-inflammation that contributes to cognitive decline.

A second theory focuses on what some researchers call non-specific effects of vaccination: the idea that vaccines can have broader effects on the immune system beyond protection against a single pathogen.

The Oxford finding that the AS01 adjuvant may itself reduce dementia risk supports this. The NPJ Vaccines study notes that AS01 activates macrophages and dendritic cells and triggers the production of interferon gamma, a molecule that has been shown in mouse models to reduce amyloid plaque deposits.

Whether this mechanism translates to humans is not yet established. A 2026 review in Frontiers in Immunology proposed a broader immunological model for how vaccines might protect against dementia, drawing on evidence from AS01 vaccines, BCG and other immunisations.

A third possibility is the healthy vaccinee effect: people who get vaccinated might be more likely overall to look after their health, and that broader health advantage may explain at least part of the observed risk reduction.

This remains the most important caveat. Most studies adjust for this, and several have found that the association persists after controlling for income, comorbidities and other health behaviours.

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sarcozona
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Get your shots!
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Mona Khalil, Who Devoted Her Life To Protecting Turtles, Killed By Israeli Airstrike | Defector
Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 at 5:21 PM

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For half a century, a house on the coast in southern Lebanon has kept vigil over Al-Mansouri beach and the blue Mediterranean waters beyond. Mona Khalil's grandfather built the house in the 1970s, around seven miles from the border with Israel. A decade later, the Khalil family fled the Lebanese Civil War and left the house behind. Khalil eventually settled in the Netherlands and found work as a porcelain restorer. In 1999, on a visit to her grandparents' old home, Khalil walked along the shores, a beer in hand, when she heard a soft crunch. She watched, mesmerized, as a sea turtle lugged herself across the sand to lay her eggs, each soft and white and big as a ping-pong ball.

This turtle altered the course of Khalil's life. After she learned Lebanon's sea turtles were under threat, she devoted her days to protecting them. The following year, Khalil moved back into the house, which she painted tangerine—a tribute to the safe haven she had found in the Netherlands—and transformed into a conservation hub with a partner, a woman named Habiba Fayed. This became the Orange House Project, a bed and breakfast where guests could help clean litter off the beach, watch for turtle tracks, and monitor nests. In a 2017 interview, Khalil vowed to continue this work "as long as God gives me life."

Earlier this month, on June 4, an Israeli airstrike hit the Orange House and grievously wounded Khalil and burned another woman. On June 19, the 76-year-old Khalil died of her injuries, one of the 4,175 people killed in Israeli attacks across Lebanon since March 2. (Lebanon's health ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.)

The vibrant orange home was a conspicuous civilian target. And Khalil, who was one of the most esteemed conservationists in Lebanon, was a conspicuous civilian. Over her years working with the turtles, she made some enemies, chiefly property developers and fishers who used dynamite fishing, a practice Khalil successfully fought against. She was shot at with assault rifles. People tried to burn down her house. For her work, she was beloved by her community of environmentalists, whose tributes have poured in since her death. "The strike targeted a site that had long been known for environmental conservation, biodiversity protection, and public awareness," the Lebanese wildlife conservation group Green Southerners wrote in a statement. "Her death stands as a stark reminder of the devastating toll that Israeli attacks continue to exact on civilians, environmental defenders, and the natural heritage they sought to protect."

On the day Khalil died, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire. But such agreements have never stopped Israel from bombing. Since a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip in October 2025, Israel has violated the agreement at least 3,300 times, per Al Jazeera. It is now turtle nesting season, but it is unclear when the volunteers Khalil trained will be able to return to the beach to keep watch as the turtles enter the world in the most vulnerable stage of their lives.

Conservation takes many forms. It can involve political advocacy or laboratory research. The conservation work Khalil did might best be described as labor. Each day during sea turtle nesting season, which spans roughly May through October, Khalil woke before dawn to walk the beach. She placed metal grates above any eggs she found to secure them from hungry foxes, dogs, and crabs until they hatched. She watched for the tracks of adult turtles and moved eggs away from the surf in times of high-tide flooding. She was trained by scientists from the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles (MEDASSET), presented her data at conferences, and shared it with conservation groups. She held beach cleanups, did television interviews, and wrote monitoring guidelines for future volunteers. She invited families vacationing in the area to join her on her morning patrols and taught them about the turtles, their habitat, and the threats they face.

Mona al-Khalil (R) and Habiba Fayed collect turtle eggs and baby marine turtles 26 August 2004 at Mansuri beach, about 95 kms south of Beirut.Habiba Fayed and Khalil collecting turtle eggs at Al-Mansouri Beach in 2004.Joseph Barrak/AFP via Getty Images

Both endangered green sea turtles and loggerhead turtles nest at Al-Mansouri beach, where gardenias and pink bougainvillea grow wild. For millions of years, female turtles have hauled their heavy bodies out of the water to lay their eggs in the sand. For millions of years, hatchling turtles have scurried to the safety of the open water while dodging the hungry mouths of predators. Although Al-Mansouri beach is small, less than a mile long, it has become one of the last undeveloped havens for nesting turtles amid the factories and beach clubs that dominate Lebanon's shores, with one resort built just a 15-minute walk away. In one 2005 paper assessing the turtles of Al-Mansouri for MEDASSET, Khalil called for the beach to be given legal protection and defined as a national park. "Southern Lebanon is the least developed part of the country and has been devastated by the war," the authors wrote. "Effective protection and management is essential in the region before these pristine beaches are overrun."

Pristine did not mean clean. Khalil and Fayed found needles, syringes, and medicine bottles with labels in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. They found diapers, plastic cups, and picnic paraphernalia. Khalil suspected that much of this trash was swept in by coastal winds from rubbish dumps less than a kilometer away. All this litter was unsightly for people and treacherous for the hatchlings, which often became entangled in refuse. The trash also sheltered scavenging ghost crabs that preyed on the baby turtles.

In her conservation work, Khalil recognized one of the brutal ironies of Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, which officially ended in 2000 and restarted this year. The military occupation kept the beaches free of development for decades, which ensured the turtles would have empty beaches on which to nest. Khalil wrote about how the nesting beaches of Northern Sinai experienced widespread tourist development after the end of Israeli occupation there, and worried the same would be true for south Lebanon.

In a 2013 paper, Khalil and colleagues wrote about how Al-Mansouri had changed over the years. They observed how the beach had eroded, with a stretch of sand more than 500 feet long reduced to a rocky shelf. They referenced plans to build a tourist resort on the land next to Al-Mansouri. A new private beach house flooded the beach with bright security lights that disorient hatchlings, which evolved to follow the light of the moon and stars sparkling on the surface of the sea. As Khalil and colleagues placed the protective metal cages over clutches of turtle eggs, they installed signs reading: "Will you help us protect the sea turtles nests? Please Do Not Disturb." They were signed, "Friends of the Sea Turtles."

Mona Khalil, a conservation specialist who behind the Orange House Project, holds a small turtle to be released into the sea at al-Mansouri beach near Lebanon's southern city of Tyre,Khalil holds a turtle hatchling to be released to the sea off the coast of Lebanon.Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images

By this time, Khalil had ensured Al-Mansouri's recognition as one of the most important sea turtle nesting spots along the Lebanese coast. She and her colleagues called for formal protections, such as the removal of old army structures, barriers to keep cars off the beach, and a local awareness program that encourages locals to take part in the conservation work. "Any conservation project will ultimately only succeed with the involvement of the local community," the authors wrote. What the authors meant by this is that many of the people of southern Lebanon live in poverty, a socioeconomic strain that has persisted since Israeli occupation. North of Al-Mansouri beach, the city of Tyre—also often referred to by its Arabic name, Sour—is home to three Palestinian refugee camps. Local fishers, farmers, and refugees will not care about the livelihoods of sea turtles if their own livelihoods remain imperiled. Khalil knew she alone could not save the turtles; if they stood a chance at survival, she needed not just to make people care about them, but to see their futures as entangled. She wanted people to understand the health of the fisheries impacted every species in the area, human and non-human. She wanted to rebuild the infrastructure of the region, for the good of all—turtles and people.

In the turtle nesting season of 2006, Khalil had persisted in her work despite heavy Israeli bombing. When Khalil and Fayed encountered Hezbollah fighters on one patrol, the two asked them to leave to prevent an Israeli strike. "They agreed—albeit perplexed about what two middle-aged Lebanese women staying in a war zone to look after sea turtles might be thinking," Khalil wrote in the State of the World's Sea Turtles 2007 report. "The turtles paid no heed to the strife, but our own plight became starker, with no electricity and constant explosions," she wrote.

When an Israeli strike destroyed her neighbor's house, costing Khalil some of her hearing, she and Fayed fled to safety in Beirut. When they returned, they found the Orange House had also been hit by a shell. But Khalil and Fayed found Al-Mansouri had evaded the worst of the war's pollution—up to 15,000 tons of fuel oil that spilled from a bombed power plant to the north. They estimated around 5,000 turtle hatchlings made it to sea that year. And Khalil made a statue from the fragments of the Israeli shell that hit her home.

A sea turtle hatchling is released at Mansouri beach, Southern Lebanon, into the Mediterranean SeaA hatchling released by Khalil and Fayed at Al-Mansouri reaches the surf.CC by-sa 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In a 2013 interview, Khalil said she wished to remain in the Orange House for the rest of her life. She considered it her heaven on Earth. She made jam from whichever fruits were ripest in the groves surrounding the bed and breakfast: strawberry, grapefruit, passion fruit. She wanted the Orange House to be a haven for people and turtles. "It's a place that nobody is going to judge them, so long as they respect the nature," Khalil said in the interview. "Homosexuals, lesbians, whatever—nobody will judge them here." In this recent bout of war, Khalil refused to leave her house despite its proximity to Israeli forces, her relatives told The New Arab.

As baby turtle hatchlings dash toward the waves, they imprint upon the magnetic field of their home nest so that they might return to lay their own eggs after decades spent exploring the open sea. There is an easy allegory here: Some species inherit magnetic signatures from their forebears, others seaside homes. Both Khalil and the turtles she worked to save felt compelled to return to a shared homeland that had changed irrevocably since their youth. The beach at Al-Mansouri has borne the terrors of airstrikes, pollution, and foxes, but it has also felt the presence of protectors who woke before sunrise to give the most vulnerable a better future. Khalil spent years fighting for a world where no individual should be displaced from their home, and her legacy lives on in the people and turtles who will return to the beach despite certain peril, who labor to shield the lives of those yet to be born.

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Prairieland ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison – Mother Jones
Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 at 5:16 PM

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Three people hold signs reading free Benjamin Song, free Zachary Evetts and free Ines Soto around a large banner reading this is a show trial on a street corner

Demonstrators in support of the Prairieland defendants outside a federal courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas, March 13, 2026.Kevin Krause/Dallas Morning News/Getty

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

On Tuesday, eight protesters who the Justice Department accused of having connections to antifa were sentenced to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that left one police officer wounded. 

The demonstrator who was convicted of shooting and wounded the officer, former US Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder in March and received a 100-year prison term. Seven other protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years. 

US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee, said the defendants in what has become known as the Prairieland trial, didn’t participate in a protest but “an assault on democracy.”

Justice Department prosecutors under the Trump administration have made extensive use of wide-ranging conspiracy charges in cases like Prairieland, where some of the defendants who received decades-long sentences were not involved with the planning of the protest in question and left when guards at the facility asked them to.

As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote in September, the Trump administration signed a September 22 executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a memo three days later, known as NSPM-7, assigning federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” protesters engaging in “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Americanism.” The Prairieland trial was one of the first tests of the White House’s ability to make such claims stick.

The defendants, who were protesting the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, denied that they were affiliated with antifa, a decentralized term for various left-wing activists and anti-fascist groups, and were demonstrating in support of immigrants being detained at the facility.

In November, seven other defendants who were present at Prairieland pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support for terrorism or damaging property. 

The Trump administration has deployed allegations of terrorism against protesters at an unprecedented scale. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, the Justice Department charged 15 Minneapolis-area residents last week with felony “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” and secured a conviction on the same charges against three Spokane, Washington, protesters. Both groups protested ICE facilities.

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Energy minister plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040 | CBC News
Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 at 5:12 PM

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Canada is looking to build up to 10 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years, sell Canadian-made reactors to more countries and double uranium exports, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said Monday as he released a new national strategy for nuclear power.

Hodgson called it a plan for a "new civilian nuclear renaissance" as the federal government looks to double the capacity of the country's electrical grid by 2050.

"If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides," Hodgson told a news conference in Newmarket, Ont.

"There is no credible plan for Canada to become an energy superpower if we choose not to build upon one of the strongest energy advantages we have."

WATCH | Minister says strategy would create tens of thousands of jobs:
Announcing Canada's new nuclear strategy on Monday, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said the government believes its new national strategy for nuclear power — which aims to build up to 10 new reactors over the next 15 years — will double employment in the sector, 'going from roughly 90,000 jobs today to 180,000-plus jobs in the coming decades.'

The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035.

It also calls for a Canadian-made microreactor to be finalized by 2035 and deployed to a remote community by the late 2030s.

Taking questions from reporters in Vancouver ahead of the announcement, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he wasn't sold on the plan.

"An announcement will not build anything," he said.

"And this is the problem we've had with the Carney Liberals is their promises are being reported on as results and so far there have been no results."

Right now, Canada has four nuclear power plants — three in Ontario and one in New Brunswick — which generate about 15 per cent of Canada's electricity.

A new proposed facility at the existing nuclear plant in Darlington, Ont., would see the first small modular reactor in the G7, capable of producing up to 300 megawatts per unit. Saskatchewan is also looking at the potential to bring small nuclear reactors online by the mid 2030s.

The energy deal between Ottawa and Alberta also committed to collaborating on developing a strategy to build a nuclear power plant.

Officials from Natural Resources Canada told reporters in a background briefing that construction of the reactors outlined in the new national strategy could cost more than $100 billion.

The strategy does not say how Canada would pay for them, though an official pointed to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund as possible funding sources.

Hodgson said the strategy would double the 90,000 jobs in Canada's nuclear sector "over the coming decades."

Carney's ethics screen in place

The plan also looks to expand sales of Candu reactors to new export markets. It says the government wants to break into at least four new international markets by 2040 and "engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon, cementing Canada as their partner of choice."

Thirty Candu reactors currently operate around the world, including in South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Pakistan and Romania, and there are plans to build two more.

The document says Prime Minister Mark Carney was not shown the strategy and government officials said he had no role in developing it due to the ethics screen he has in place.

Carney had stock options and deferred shares in both Brookfield Corporation and Brookfield Asset Management that were put into a blind trust after he became prime minister. Candu competes with a reactor model co-owned by Brookfield.

The move to sell Candu to new markets is an attempt to establish Canada as a reliable uranium export partner and to use nuclear energy as a geopolitical lever.

"Reactor exports are not transactional. They establish multi-decade partnerships, creating durable geopolitical and commercial relationships that advance Canada's broader foreign policy interests," the strategy says.

"As Canada works to diversify its trading relationships and strengthen ties with middle powers, Candu can be a central instrument of that strategy."

WATCH | Carney, Ford announced small modular reactor investment in 2025:
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced $2 billion in federal funding and Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced the province will invest $1 billion to build Canada’s first small modular reactors, new nuclear energy technology to be built next door to the Darlington power plant.

If Ottawa fails to sell more Candu reactors worldwide, the strategy suggests Canada look into boosting domestic uranium enrichment to fuel other reactors.

Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.

Earlier this year, the government launched a discussion paper which proposed having impact assessments for nuclear projects be handed over to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

The strategy on Monday reaffirmed that proposal, however it has not been implemented while the government consults on it. The consultation period was extended last month after pushback from environment and Indigenous groups.

"Our approach is to repeal the anti-development laws, depoliticize the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, stop the Liberal obstacles so that we can actually produce more affordable and abundant electricity and other forms of energy across the country," Poilievre said.

"But the focus has to be on results, not yet more promises and illusions."

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sarcozona
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Wtaf do you know how much green transition you can do for 100 billion dollars???
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This is not helpful, it's control | Girl on the Net
Monday June 22nd, 2026 at 6:48 AM

Girl on the Net
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Image by the fabulous Stuart F Taylor

I haven’t felt this brand of rage in a while, so I thought I’d have a go at capturing it while it still flows fresh through my veins. Basically, at the heart of it, I am angry with a man because he wanted to be helpful. He wanted to be helpful so much that he ignored me saying ‘no, please do not be helpful.’ Inevitably, no matter how angry I am at him, I am even more angry with myself. Here’s the thing…

I just got home from a lovely bike ride and, annoyingly, about five minutes from home my bike made an ‘uh oh’ kind of noise. I got off, flipped it over, spotted what the problem was and started to fix it. It’s happened before, more than once, and there’s a 50/50 chance I can sort it myself. If I can’t, I take it to a bike shop and ask them to do it for me: no big deal. In an ideal world, of course, I’d have repair tools. I’d carry them with me on every single ride, having spent time building up my knowledge of bike repairs so I could do everything myself. I haven’t done that, though: instead I spend my limited spare time learning DIY, singing along to punk covers of Disney songs and eagerly wanking off hot men, and there are only so many hours in the day. Just as you might budget for a painter to come and decorate your hallway, so I budget a certain amount of ‘whoops my bike went uh oh’ money each year to save me having to learn some of the stuff that other bike enthusiasts might prefer to do themselves.

So! Long ago I made an executive decision that I don’t mind much if I can’t fix everything that goes wrong with my bike. It broke. I was willing to put in 10 minutes to having a go at sorting it, but if that didn’t work I’d take it to the bike shop five minutes round the corner. I might have looked like a woman with a huge problem, but in fact I was a woman in a state of sanguine calm, mildly annoyed by the fact that my bike wasn’t working, but actually quite proud of the fact that (unlike at so many other points in my life) I could get it fixed without worry.

I was pondering this and feeling pretty pleased with myself when a man on a much fancier bike stopped and asked if I’d like any help.

“No thank you,” I said, extremely clearly. He stopped anyway and came over to stand next to me.

“Honestly, please don’t,” I told this man I had never met. “Something similar has happened before, I’ll be fine.”

He chuckled patronisingly, grabbed my bike anyway and started touching it, getting bike grease all over his hands and essentially taking my bike away from me.

Obviously what I did at this point was scream at the top of my lungs GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF MY BIKE YOU CUNT ask him once again to please stop, while framing it in a way that made it seem like I didn’t want to trouble him.

“Honestly, there’s a bike shop literally around the corner, this has happened to me before. I can just carry my bike to the shop, save you the bother!” I said, adding “hahahaha,” so that this man (this stranger) who was holding my bike and standing over me would realise his help was unwanted and back the fuck off.

He told me that he knew about bikes (I have no way of knowing whether that’s true) and that I shouldn’t worry (I did). He knew exactly what the problem was! It was this thing, and that bit was caught there and blah blah etc. He pulled a bike tool out of his backpack and jammed that in the derailleur while explaining to me (a woman who knew exactly what was wrong with her bike) what was wrong with my bike.

Once again, I tried to stop him.

“No, please don’t,” I repeated. “No point both of us getting dirty. There’s a bike shop round the corner, I’ll take it there. No need. Let me.”

“I just don’t like losing a battle with a bike!” he chuckled, while undoing the catch to remove my back wheel.

“No! Seriously, please don’t trouble yourself,” I said, still trying to make it sound like I didn’t want to put this guy out rather than the truth, which was that I wanted his grubby, patronising, misogynist hands off my precious bike immediately.

Those of you who rely on bikes to get around will understand how gutpunch upsetting this kind of thing is. A total stranger taking your bike away is, in most circumstances, an act of fucking war. If you don’t have a bike but you have a car, imagine this instead: you’ve broken down and a random stranger just opens the bonnet and starts yanking bits out while you ask him to stop.

At the point when I physically put my hand on the wheel to try and prevent this dickhead from undoing my brake cables, a glimmer of realisation must have briefly fluttered into his otherwise-oblivious brain and he looked at me with a kind of shocked sneer.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, with the tone of someone telling a child to back away from a hot oven, “I do know what I’m doing.”

“OK MATE,” I did not scream. “BUT I DON’T FUCKING KNOW THAT, DO I? I DON’T KNOW YOU, AND I DIDN’T ASK YOU FOR HELP. I DID NOT AND DO NOT CONSENT TO THIS.”

I’m not a princess and I don’t need to be rescued

I am so fucking angry with myself for not being stronger. But, you know, I’m a woman and I was on my own and this random guy seemed determined to do something. And sometimes when men are determined to do something it’s safest if you don’t get in their way and… oh fuck it, who am I kidding? I could so easily frame this story as one in which I was concerned for my personal safety. And no doubt that could have been the case for some (as it would have been the case for me in different circumstances – if it was late at night instead of daytime, or if I were far away and not so close to home), which is certainly another tick in the column totting up this guy’s cuntery. He was pushy enough with my boundaries and explicit ‘no’s that it would have been eminently reasonable for me, or someone else, to fear violence if he couldn’t get his white knight boner by fixing this bike-related problem.

But that’s not actually how I felt. I didn’t let him keep going out of fear for my personal safety, I kept going because I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to be rude. I didn’t want to upset him! My thought processes went: “I really don’t want this stranger touching my bike but… he’s trying so hard and he seems to really care and it feels rude to push him away when he really wants to help me!”

In short: this man’s desire to help me was more important than me keeping control over one of my most valued possessions. His feelings were more important than my needs.

Christ, I fucking despise myself.

This is what I mean when I say I haven’t experienced this kind of rage in a while. This rage isn’t just anger at the man who ignored me, who patronised me, who thought that ‘what he reckoned’ would obviously be so much more useful than my own experience that it was worth overriding every single one of my ‘nos’. The man who crossed a boundary I had restated time and time again. The rage is also for myself. For the woman who didn’t have the fucking guts to say to him ‘STOP. I mean it, just STOP. Take your hands off my bike, and leave me the fuck alone.’

In that moment, so many of the ‘nos’ I had expressed but never advocated for came back in a rush to haunt me. All the times a boyfriend had tried to make ‘helpful’ suggestions about something I was doing – a skill or hobby or project I was enjoying learning on my own that swiftly became miserable and boring now he’d used it as a springboard for diving into patronising ‘advice’. All the times when some helpful dude on Twitter had asked me if I’d ever ‘just’ considered doing something extremely basic, based off no knowledge whatsoever of my situation or my needs. The times when my own father tells me how to live my life, with absolutely no understanding of what I want or what my life is like, because he hasn’t cared enough to learn in the four decades I’ve been on this planet.

All the times a man has taken something precious to me and ripped it out of my hands, chuckling in a voice that makes me feel like a child before declaring ‘don’t worry, I know what I’m doing!’ The implication being, of course, that I do not.

I hate it when men do this: decide from a very limited brief glance at my life that they know exactly how I could live it better. They say they want to be helpful, like I should somehow be grateful, but 99% of the time they’re ignoring what I have specifically told them (“NO!”) or assuming incompetence on my part, as if I’m a child who has never encountered the world before. That’s not helpful, that’s control. It’s patronising and ugly and rude and aggressive and demoralising.

It’s not helpful to grab the steering wheel when I’m driving

And yet these men want me to be grateful to them. They want me to rely on them. They want me to trust them and look up to them and be weak for them. Like the multiple men who (I swear I’m not making this up) leap in the second I have a single complaint about my website, and immediately offer to fix it for me. What can I say? I am followed by a lot of horny nerd types, and that is one of the ways they like to be helpful.

“You know, it wouldn’t take me long to sort that out!” these dudes tell me, before having asked a single fucking question about how the site is built.

“No thank you,” I always say. There’s precisely one person I trust to make changes to my website: he’s an expert who I specifically approached for help when I needed it because I know him and respect his expertise. He’s read the documentation and very kindly taken time to talk me in detail through the architecture, addressing my questions from a place of respect and care, knowing that although I may not be a developer I am certainly not a fool. He also understands and respects what a terrifying thing it is for me to have my entire career resting on technology that’s grown too complex for me to maintain myself. This is what genuine help looks like, and words cannot express how grateful I am to him for providing it.

And because his help is genuine, I trust him. I do not trust many people. Often my trust issues are a result of me being extremely risk-averse and hyper-cautious, but this is the one area of my life where I am rock-solid, 100% confident that my caution is reasonable. I am not going to simply hand the keys to my career, the website on which my entire income rests, over to some random guy I barely know (sometimes have literally never even met!) purely because he wants to ‘be helpful’.

“Seriously, though, it really wouldn’t take long,” these strangers sometimes continue, completely ignoring my ‘no’ because of course my actual words can’t possibly have meaning because I am just a silly little girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I must just be saying no because I don’t want them to go to any trouble! Or because I don’t understand how much difference these white knights could make to my life! Even though they have literally not even asked a single question about how my site is built or what services they might need access to in order to do it!

There are men out in the world who expect me to let them push code changes to production on GOTN dot com in the same way a delicate Victorian lady might allow a gentleman to carry her fucking suitcase. The ease with which these dudes expect me to give them control over the site on which my financial security and independence rests is truly astonishing. It blows my mind.

“WOULD YOU DO THAT?!” I do not yell. “Would you hand control over something so precious to someone you barely know? How about you give me your fucking bank details, hmm? I’ll log in and work out a monthly budget for ya? Give me the keys to your house, I’ll pop round and tidy up! WHY NOT?! I’m just being HELPFUL!”

Just as Helpful Bike Prick would never have dreamed of letting a stranger put their hands on his fucking bike the way he was molesting mine, so other men also sometimes offer me ‘help’ that they themselves would be insulted and horrified to imagine handing over to a borderline stranger. But it’s OK for me to hand it over! I’m just a silly little woman. Surely nothing I could ever want or need would be important enough to trump whatever this guy has decided he wants to do. My bike, my website, my life? These things mean nothing, because I am nothing. They – and I – are merely tools this random guy can use to prove how special and clever he is.

Fuck you

I should have recognised, the second this man ignored my first ‘no’, that I was drifting into one of those awkward situations where he’d keep ignoring my ‘no’ and patronising me until he either got bored or I physically took my bike away from him. There’s a lesson here for me somewhere: when I say ‘no’, regardless of a man’s ‘but…’ I need to stick to that no. Obviously there’s a lesson for the guy too – he should take ‘no’ for a fucking answer. But I’m going to keep encountering these men in my life, and I don’t want to be the woman who lets them get away with it. I want to be the woman who says ‘sorry mate, did you not hear me? I said ‘no” and then deals with the fallout.

Maybe if I could be that woman, I would live a happier life. Maybe if I could be the woman who says ‘no’ and firmly sticks to it then I wouldn’t be fuming with self-hating rage right now.

I’d definitely have spared myself the cringey sight of this man trying to fix my bike and then – in a fit of childish pique because his pride was hurt that he failed – launching into a snide little lecture in which he informed me (THIS IS TRUE, THIS REALLY HAPPENED) that in order to stop this happening again, I really should consider doing more regular bike maintenance.

“Fuck you!” I didn’t say. “How fucking dare you barge your way into my life and try to tell me how to live it just because you want to feel smug?!” I failed to add. “Who the fuck do you think you are putting your hands on my stuff when I’ve told you not to?!” I also did not say.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, boiling with rage. As I do. As I always do. As I will keep doing until the day the last of these men causes me to snap, and I scream so loudly I tear my own throat.

And I will spit these words at him through gobfuls of blood and bile: Fuck you. Get away from me. Fuck you. Get your hands off me.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

This is what my therapist calls a ‘trigger’. I am triggered by men who try to help me by controlling me. In case you were looking for the subtext.

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sarcozona
2 days ago
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Epiphyte City
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World Cup 2026: Toronto Matches Thrill Fans of Bosnia, Panama, Ghana - Bloomberg
Sunday June 21st, 2026 at 11:50 AM

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Thousands of Bosnia and Herzegovina fans snaked toward the stadium, chanting, banging drums, waving flags and setting off flares. The humid air was thick with smoke colored in the Dragons’ traditional blue and yellow. It was a hot, sunny day in Toronto, which was making its debut as a FIFA World Cup host, and the Bosnians were doing their best to transform a slice of the city into downtown Sarajevo.

They’d gathered to march the 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from a downtown park in Canada’s most populous city to the field where their team would be playing its opening match. It was a brave proposition considering their opponents: host country Canada.

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sarcozona
3 days ago
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Epiphyte City
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