In other news, Canada has “absolutely no intention” of acquiring nuclear weapons, Defence Minister David McGuinty said Tuesday — rejecting the suggestion from former chief of the defence staff Wayne Eyre that Ottawa should not rule it out.

McGuinty said Canada has signed international treaties explicitly opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“Canada is a signatory to international treaties which preclude us, number one, and Canada has been a non-nuclear-proliferation state for a long time,” McGuinty told reporters on his way into a cabinet meeting Tuesday.

“We are going to continue to build conventional weapons. We’re going to continue to re-arm. We’re going to continue to reinvest. We’re going to continue to rebuild our Canadian Armed Forces and we’re doing that.”

Eyre suggested at an event in Ottawa on Monday that Canada shouldn’t altogether rule out acquiring nuclear weapons.

Both The Globe and Mail and La Presse reported that Eyre said Canada may never have true strategic independence without its own nuclear deterrent.

The Canadian Press has more.

In Other Headlines

Internationally

A painting in a Rome church has prompted an investigation following complaints that a newly-restored cherub bears a remarkable likeness to the nation’s leader, Giorgia Meloni.

The controversy surrounds restoration works carried out on a painting in the Chapel of the Holy Souls in Purgatory in the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Lucina, central Rome.

Although the work was completed in December, side-by-side images posted to social media in recent days of the restored work and Meloni show a striking resemblance.

While many politicians would surely like to have their constituents think of them as angelic, the Italian prime minister took to Instagram at the weekend to say she “definitely” does not look like an angel, in a post accompanied by a laughing emoji.

Italy’s cultural minister Alessandro Giuli has ordered an investigation as to whether the restorer intentionally added Meloni’s face to the fresco.

Read more on CNN.

Over in France, prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations that include spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.

They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.

X and Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain’s data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.The French investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement.

It’s looking into alleged “complicity” in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

AP reports.

In other international headlines

The Kicker

Former prime minister Stephen Harper’s portrait was unveiled in a ceremony in Ottawa Tuesday. Canadian artist Phil Richards told the crowd he had wide ranging discussions with Mr Harper during the portraiture, from politics to art to gossiping, that left him a “very different impression of Mr Harper’s personality than the one created by the media.”