News roundup, 3 July 2025

- A severe heatwave is sweeping through much of Europe as it has so often in recent summers. Temperatures in the Spanish town of El Granado hit 46°C, and a municipal employee in Barcelona collapsed and died shortly after completing her shift operating a street sweeper.

- Having cleared the Senate, Donald Trump's "one big beautiful bill" is expected to be passed in the House of Representatives by tomorrow. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly had to make some unspecified concessions to get compliance out of a few Republicans; the exact nature of the concessions is not public, but probably something like "we won't back your opponent in the primary".

- Trump is now musing about revoking the citizenships of people he doesn't like, including New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and possibly also Elon Musk.

- Ukraine successfully carried out a drone attack on a military factory in the Russian city of Izhevsk, killing three people. The operation was carried out from 1,300 km away, some 300 km inside the Ukrainian border.

- Edward Kelley, a man who participated in the Jan 6 putsch, was of course pardoned by Trump along with all his co-conspirators. Unfortunately for him, that pardon probably doesn't apply to crimes committed since his arrest on those charges, such as his involvement in a conspiracy to attack an FBI office with car bombs and drones, for which he was just handed a life sentence. Of course, Trump could very well pardon him for that too if the case manages to hold his attention long enough.

- Two Alberta MLAs now sitting as independents after being kicked out of the UCP caucus for dissent are petitioning to restore the old Progressive Conservative party. In order to accomplish this they will need to collect signatures representing 0.3% of eligible voters, or 8,819 people. Amusingly, two other splinter parties are trying to use the Wildrose name as well. I wish all of these little parties a modest amount of success; not too much though.

- Brendan Berg, the bassist for Winnipeg band Royal Canoe, was killed in a car accident along with his partner Olivia Michalczuk on Highway 10 near Duck Mountain Provincial Park. Their vehicle was stopped on the side of the road when a vehicle coming in the other direction crossed the centre line and hit them at high speed. Berg would have turned 43 the following day.

News roundup, 2 July 2025

- The feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk continues, as Musk condemns the huge increase in the US deficit that will result from the "One Big Beautiful Bill", which has just made it through the Senate. Trump is now hinting that he might cancel contracts with Musk's companies; others are questioning the feasibility of this given the Pentagon's dependence on SpaceX. And now Musk is threatening to form a new political party to challenge the Republicans. Meanwhile China is watching the feud with great interest.

- Manitoba is considering increasing the markup on cannabis. Glen Simard, the minister responsible for Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries (which serves as the wholesaler for cannabis in the province) says this will bring Manitoba in line with other provinces and will help to fund measures to combat impaired driving and the like, however some in the industry fear that this will simply make it harder to compete with the black market. The industry is more hopeful, however, about a proposal to eliminate the requirement that cannabis stores cover their windows; other provinces have already done away with similar rules due to fears that it made it easier to rob them.

- A Sikh activist in the UK died suddenly two years ago after being admitted to hospital; while the official story is that he died from acute myeloid leukemia, some are calling for further investigation, especially given that his death occurred around the same time as the shooting death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and the attempted murder of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the US.

- The revamp of Winnipeg Transit's routes is getting mixed reviews; many are not happy that more transfers are needed and there are fewer stops; others say that the more frequent service of the major routes outweighs the downsides. Transit officials expect that service will improve for 60% of passengers, get worse for 10-20%, and stay about the same for the rest; we'll have to see.

- Noted televangelist Jimmy Swaggart has died at the age of 90. Swaggart, a cousin of musician Jerry Lee Lewis, was one of the most successful televangelists in the US, despite several embarrassing transgressions.

News roundup, 1 July 2025

- Numerous nonprofits, including Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Oxfam, are calling for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint US-Israeli operation, to be shut down. They accuse the organization of putting people in harm's way by essentially serving as a honeypot for the IDF.

- The Carney government's move to cancel the digital services tax may have been short-sighted. The next thing in the Trump regime's sights is supply management, and getting rid of that would be a hard sell indeed. Fortunately, a recently passed piece of legislation, Bill C-202, explicitly prohibits trade negotiators from "making any commitment on behalf of the Government of Canada" that would impact supply management.

- Criminologists report that homicides in the US, after peaking dramatically in 2020-2021, have declined just as dramatically. It is believed that the spike was driven by the pandemic, and that the decline was driven by the return of jobs and services that had been disrupted.

- A church in Winnipeg's West End has just held its final service; the building will be donated to a nonprofit to serve as housing for seniors. 

- A man who had been assaulted by a crowd of people was taken to the drunk tank at the Main Street Project after being medically cleared by paramedics, and was again cleared on arrival, however he died shortly afterwards. The death is under investigation; if I had to guess it might be that he sustained a concussion in the assault and the symptoms were mistaken for signs of intoxication, but we'll have to see.

- British punk/rap act Bob Vylan, as well as Irish rap group Kneecap, are being investigated for possible "public order offenses" over things they said from the stage at the Glastonbury music festival. Bob Vylan chanted "death to the IDF" (the BBC is apologizing for not pulling the plug on the live broadcast) while Kneecap also made anti-Israeli chants as well as attacking UK prime minister Kier Starmer. The Trump regime has revoked Bob Vylan's visas for a planned US tour; Liberal MP Anthony Housefather and several Conservative MPs are calling for Canada to take similar measures. I do have to wonder if an artist who chanted "death to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" would have been subject to the same scrutiny.

News roundup, 30 June 2025

- The US Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of nationwide injunctions so that they only apply in the jurisdictions that brought the matter to court in the first place - severely limiting courts' abilities to stop the Trump regime's efforts to limit birthright citizenship (and potentially many other things).

- A man has been charged with mischief after allegedly vandalizing the National Holocaust Monument with red paint and the slogan "feed me" (apparently a reference to Israeli starvation tactics against the Palestinians). While anger at Israel for this is more than justified, it's hard to justify expressing said anger with an attack on a monument to a crime that was committed against the Jewish people before Israel even existed. The suspect is a lawyer who was employed by the City of Ottawa until his arrest, whereupon he was fired.

- The federal government has decided to cancel the digital services tax in the hope of appeasing the Trump regime sufficiently to get them to reopen negotiations on tariffs.

- A poll suggests that the majority of supporters of the Conservative party in Manitoba say that they would either definitely or probably vote to leave Canada. The "definitely or probably" group accounted for only 22% of Manitobans overall, but 52% of supporters of the provincial Conservatives and 56% of supporters of the federal party lean towards separatism. On the positive side, this will make it harder for the Cons to court non-extremists; on the downside, under our first past the post electoral system this will probably make it harder for reasonable alternatives to the Liberals (e.g. the NDP or Greens) to make any headway.

- Winnipeg's revamped bus network made its debut yesterday; whether it improves service for more people than it worsens it remains to be seen.

- Manitoba's Minister of Families, Nahanni Fontaine, had an unfortunate hot-mic moment when, at a graduation ceremony for indigenous women, she muttered to her assistant about the placement of the ASL interpreter in a way that could have been interpreted as a complaint about the very presence of said interpreter. Unfortunately her utterance was picked up by an APTN camera crew. Fontaine, whose responsibilities include people with disabilities, has apologized about the matter, though some members of the deaf community are not satisfied.

News roundup, 27 June 2025

- A 49 year old Canadian citizen has died in ICE custody in Florida. He had been a permanent resident since 1991 and was in custody pending deportation, having been convicted of drug offenses; he suffered from epilepsy and needed a medication to control his seizures, though it is not yet known if this is the reason for his death.

- Even as the IDF continues to demolish Gaza, their irregulars (the nominally civilian West Bank settlers) held a vicious pogrom in the town of Kafr Malik. When the locals responded by throwing stones at the attackers, the official wing of the army opened fire, killing three people. It's stuff like this that has led many to question whether the settlers should be considered to be civilians (and thus whether killing them counts as terrorism).

- The so-called "revenge tax" provision of the "One Big Beautiful Bill", which would have taxed US investment income for residents of countries that had annoyed Trump, has been removed by Republican senators following a recommendation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Evidently the prospect of foreign investors divesting from US securities en masse didn't seem like such a good thing after some consideration.

- New York City's establishment, including the likes of hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, are freaking out over Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary for mayor, and are getting in line behind incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent. Better a crook than a lefty in their minds, I guess.

- Winnipeg's most famous intersection, Portage and Main, is reopening to pedestrian traffic after 46 years. 

- A report submitted to Winnipeg's Public Works Committee has recommended the installation of bike lanes and the lowering of the speed limit to 40 km/h on the part of Wellington Crescent where a cyclist was killed last year. The proposal is for the changes to be in place by next spring, to give time for consultations; activists think a better approach would have been to provisionally make the changes and then see what people think of the reality of it rather than the idea of it, but that would make too much sense I guess.

- Trump Mobile, the president's venture into cellphone services, has removed the phrase "made in the USA" from its website, though they still insist that the phones are "brought to life" in the US, and that there will be "American hands behind every device". A cynic might wonder if the hands in question are the users' hands; if that were the case it would probably be technically accurate (who but an American would be fool enough to buy one?)

- Chinese authorities have declined a request for information about the crash of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 in 2022 that killed 132 people, citing "national security". Based on information that has already leaked out about the crash, there are suspicions that it may have been a case of pilot suicide; perhaps the authorities don't want to have to answer any hard questions about that.

News roundup, 26 June 2025

- Banks in the US have been reversing decisions made during the Biden administration and reinvesting in fossil fuels. Notably, this is disproportionately an American trend; most of the banks offering financing in this sector are US-based, suggesting that these moves may be motivated by other considerations than the objective quality of those investments. Perhaps the fact that states like West Virginia and Texas are actively punishing institutions for divesting from the sector has something to do with it.

- The Trump regime's "One Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that charges a tax on investment income paid to residents of countries that the US considers to have "unfair or discriminatory" taxes, such as Canada's digital services tax. Of course, this has the potential to cause investors from such countries to invest elsewhere, potentially driving millions in investments out of the US.

- The proposal to put a build a migrant detention centre in the Everglades, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz", is going ahead; construction on the facility has begun at an old airport despite concerns from environmentalists as well as human rights activists.

- Hedge funds are buying subrogation claims from insurers, often at steep discounts, in the hope of profiting in the event that the fires are deemed to have been caused by Southern California Edison's equipment. California has a fund in place to pay out such claims and protect utilities from bankruptcy; essentially the state is getting all the downsides of public ownership with none of the upsides.

- Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian AI researcher who won the Nobel Prize in physics for work on neural networks, is warning that Canada needs to regulate the technology more stringently. He will be meeting with AI and digital innovation minister Evan Solomon to discuss the matter but there is a lot of resistance to the idea, and Solomon himself has said that he has no plans to reintroduce legislation that died on the order paper when the last election was called.

News roundup, 25 June 2025

- The ceasefire in the Israel-Iran conflict seems to be holding for the time being. Meanwhile there are some doubts about whether the US strikes on Iran's nuclear sites were as effective as Trump claims.

- Heat warnings are in place for a large portion of North America, including the US Midwest and east coast as well as parts of Ontario, Quebec, and even Nova Scotia. Even overnight temperatures are hovering in the high twenties in some cities.

- Kat Cammack, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida who serves as co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, found herself in a dangerous situation due to experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. It seems doctors were initially reluctant to treat her due to fears that new anti-abortion legislation could be used against them, although they eventually went ahead and saved her life. For her part, Cammack blames the messaging from Democrats and pro-choice activists for the doctors' fears, which she says are unfounded.

- A Norwegian tourist says he was denied entry into the US because a search of his phone revealed a meme that made fun of JD Vance. This is DPRK-level pettiness, and his handling while they were waiting for a flight to deport him on, while not yet in DPRK territory, certainly doesn't sound like how a well-functioning democracy is supposed to behave.

- Leftwing candidate Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, defeating former state governor Andrew Cuomo. In the general election he will be facing off against incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante organization. The possibility has also been raised of Cuomo also running as an independent. Meanwhile another Democratic primary, for a seat in Florida's state senate, featured two siblings facing off against each other. LaVon Bracy Davis defeated her brother Randolph Bracy in that contest.

- Flin Flon residents who were evacuated due to wildfires will be able to return home as of this morning. The city was spared direct damage from the fires, though residents fear smoke damage, not to mention the prospect of cleaning out the contents of freezers and the like.