Less than two months after hitting the ice, North America’s new pro women’s hockey league is already breaking records.

What happened: A Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) match between Toronto and Montreal last week drew 19,285 fans to a sold-out Scotiabank Arena, breaking the attendance record for any women’s hockey game. 

A decade-long effort to take down a so-called ​​"party of thieves and crooks" has left one of Russia’s most prominent opposition leaders dead. 

What happened: ​​A wave of outrage gripped the international community after authorities confirmed that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died in a Siberian prison. He had been jailed since 2021, and was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges.

 On this week’s episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we sat down with Adam Seaborn of Playmaker Capital to talk about what the streaming era means for the sports media industry. 

Meet Prabowo Subianto. He loves cats. He gets jiggy with it. He was the head of military special forces under a dictatorship. And he’s going to be the next president of Indonesia.  

Driving the news: Indonesia held one of the largest democratic elections in the world this week, with almost 205 million eligible voters. Early results show that Subianto, the defence minister and ex-general, is all but guaranteed to win the race and take office in November.  

What is a data clean room?

A secure platform where companies can share and compare their customer data. 

Why would you need a special platform for that?

Most of what’s shared in a clean room is personally identifiable data — email addresses, purchase data, IP addresses — that a company has but isn’t allowed to share. A clean room ensures that sensitive data brought in doesn’t come out, which is generally considered to be safe under most privacy regulations.

OpenAI’s video generator brings two words to mind: “wow” and “uh-oh.”

You can now add “malfunctioning AI chatbot” to your list of potential travel headaches alongside carry-on baggage fees, screaming babies, and doors that blow off in mid-air. 

What happened: Air Canada must reimburse a B.C. flyer $650.88 after a provincial small claims tribunal ruled that the airline’s chatbot misled the customer about the cost of his flight to Toronto.

You think you had a rough week? Waymo had one of its cars literally set on fire in the middle of San Francisco — and that’s not even their biggest problem. 

Driving the news: Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle unit Waymo yesterday recalled 444 of its autonomous vehicles after a software issue caused cars to wrongly predict the movements of towing vehicles. In some cases, the errors led to collisions, including two in Arizona.

While most of us are trying to save up these days, NATO nations are spending on defence like a rich kid who got their hands on their daddy’s credit card.

Driving the news: NATO projects that 18 of its 31 member states will meet the military bloc’s goal of spending at least 2% of annual GDP on defence this year. That’s over 58% of members, compared to 35% just last year and a paltry 14% of members a decade ago.  

Everyone’s favourite yoga pant maker is in some hot water over its ‘green’ claims.

Driving the news: Lululemon is facing a complaint from a climate-focused non-profit alleging the athleisure company is misleading customers about its environmental impact, joining the growing list of companies facing investigations over so-called “greenwashing.” 

Like when Jerry Seinfeld’s beloved Bee Movie character Barry B. Benson finally settled down with a nice florist, Canadian honeybees have found themselves a loving home.

Driving the news: Alberta may be known more for raising cattle and pumping out barrels of oil, but it’s also the province that produced nearly $105.6 million worth of honey last year — good for setting a new Canadian record, according to the CBC. 

The Loblaw corporation has previously beefed with Frito-Lay and other smaller suppliers. Now, it’s in a spat with a guy making novelty T-shirts.   

Driving the news: Toronto-based artist Christopher Lambe was forced to remove products from his Etsy store that lambasted grocery store chain Loblaw and its high prices after the company filed a copyright infringement complaint through Etsy. Lambe is disputing the case.

The corporate sector’s mad dash for AI may be leaving sustainability goals behind.

Driving the news: Data centres are driving up electricity demand, which is expected to double by 2026. While some of this can be attributed to more internet use and electrification in countries like China, a big culprit is AI, which requires massive amounts of data processing.

How did ArriveCan, an app for screening travellers during the COVID-19 pandemic, become a spending scandal that has dogged the government for over a year?

Quantum computers run a lot of calculations simultaneously, which results in a lot of errors. One way to correct errors is to add more qubits — the quantum version of a bit — that essentially check each other’s work. But the most advanced quantum computers have roughly 1,000 qubits, a fraction of what’s needed to reduce errors enough for quantum computers to be effective.

Like us after putting down a non-refundable deposit to book the perfect venue for a birthday party, Vancouver and Toronto are hoping that playing host will be worth it.  

Driving the news: In 2026, Vancouver and Toronto will host seven and six FIFA World Cup matches, respectively. Neither city has given an updated cost estimate since 2022, so now attention has turned to figuring out how much hosting will cost, and whether it’s worth it.

Housing isn’t the only shortage facing the federal government these days: It turns out there are about as many judges in Canada as there are apartments for under $1,500. 

What happened: Ottawa has been ordered to start appointing judges across the country more quickly, according to the Toronto Star. The ruling found that vacant judicial slots have backlogged the legal system, in some cases leading to criminal cases being tossed out. 

Welcome back to The Peak’s Inflation Drinking Game. The first rule, take a sip (of your coffee, of course) every time you read any variation of the phrase “rate cuts.”  

What happened: U.S. inflation growth cooled once again in January, falling to 3.1% from 3.4% in December. That sounds peachy keen, but analysts expected growth to drop below 3%.

If you tuned into the Super Bowl on Sunday, you were bombarded with no fewer than three ads (plus more before and after the game) urging you to “shop like a billionaire.” That was part of a hyper-aggressive marketing campaign by Chinese e-commerce retailer Temu to conquer the North American market.

Why it matters: Temu’s big spending marketing blitz — one 30-second Super Bowl ad spot was selling for US$7 million, and Temu had six — is unprecedented, and its sheer scale is disrupting both retail and ad markets in North America.