Monday, March 18, 2024

News roundup, 18 March 2024

- To the surprise of no one, Vladimir Putin has been announced as the winner in Russia's presidential election. Yulia Navalnaya seems to be taking over from her late husband as the chief opposition figure, at least until she falls out of a window or something. In related news, Ukraine reported over the weekend that their citizens in Russian-occupied regions were being forced to vote in Russia's presidential election.

- Donald Trump's lawyers have admitted that he is unable to come up with the $450 million needed to cover his bond for the New York civil fraud case. They are trying to argue that the amount is excessive and thus unconstitutional; whether this will persuade the courts remains to be seen. Of course, he may yet get a mysterious foreign bailout, but only if the mystery donor(s) think he has a chance of regaining the White House in the fall; if not, this could be another nail in his campaign's coffin, one much more significant than his reported inability to speak in complete sentences (which his supporters probably just see as authenticity).

- With the UN warning that famine is imminent in Gaza, the EU is now accusing Israel of weaponizing hunger. Still not quite fair to compare it to the Holocaust, but it's starting to look a bit like the Holodomor.

- The federal NDP has introduced a motion in the House of Commons that calls on the government to recognize a Palestinian state. This is expected to open up divisions, particularly in the Liberal caucus.

- New modelling suggests that a major outbreak of measles could be imminent in Canada. Only 31 cases have been reported so far, but the risk is high in communities where less than 85% of the population is vaccinated, and there are pockets where the rate is as low as 30%. Ironically, efforts to contain COVID-19 may have contributed to the problem as medical appointments where vaccinations might have occurred were deferred due to lockdowns.

- A bill introduced this past Thursday in the Manitoba legislature would prohibit those convicted of certain sexual offenses from changing their names. Some people who work with offenders oppose this, however, saying that existing sex offender registries will still enable them to be tracked and that this will further stigmatize offenders and potentially prevent them from getting treatment.

- South Sudan is closing all of its schools due to a heatwave that has been forecast to reach as high as 45°C. This is unusually hot even for that country; usually they don't get higher than 40. They're urging people to keep their kids indoors; looking at the picture in the article showing what constitutes "indoors", though, I wonder how much good that will do.

- Wildlife Haven, a nonprofit specializing in rehabilitating injured or orphaned wildlife, is facing a financial crunch, and has announced that they will not treat invasive species (notably House Sparrows, Starlings, and Pigeons). They are also putting a three year moratorium on raccoons.

- Dell has told their workers that fully remote employees won't be eligible for promotions. Whether the bump in pay the workers would get from a promotion would outweigh the added costs of the commute is another question; the folks at Reddit mostly think it's just a way of getting people to quit and thus removing them from the payroll without having to record it as a layoff. If that's the case, though, it's shortsighted, because the people who leave will be the ones who can get a better job elsewhere, i.e. the people you'd expect they'd want to hold on to.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

News roundup, 16 March 2024

- While cities like to tout how many trees they plant, many are not very good at maintaining them. The small city of Morden, Manitoba is an exception. 

- Municipalities in Minnesota are apparently able to set their own minimum wage. Minneapolis' city council passed a bylaw last fall that applies this to rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. Mayors there have the power to veto a bill, and did so, whereupon a supermajority of council exercised their power to override the veto. Now, Uber and Lyft are threatening to pull out of the city entirely.

- Mike Pence is not endorsing Donald Trump this time round. Funny that.

- Cape Tribulation, a hamlet in far north Queensland, is dependent on tourism for its very existence. The destruction of the only road to the community by a cyclone is therefore a serious problem.

- Quebec premier François Legault claims that his province is "full" and has asked the federal government for full power over immigration. The feds have refused.

- A Winnipeg doctor who suffered significant injuries when an elevator in the parkade across from HSC suddenly fell while she was using it is suing the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, Shared Health, and the elevator manufacturer.

- A man in Richmond, BC has been arrested after police executed a search warrant and found over $150,000 worth of stolen Lego, other toys, and clothing in his home.

- Police have arrested a man for several instances of damage to gas lines serving businesses at several locations near Winnipeg's downtown, causing an extremely hazardous situation. Whether this was motivated by some sort of animus against those businesses, or just the act of a methhead who realized that a gas meter or regulator is several kilograms of scrap metal is not clear.

- American pop singer Olivia Rodrigo allowed reproductive rights activists to set up at her concerts, and at one concert in Missouri they were handing out condoms and morning after pills (particularly bold in that state given that abortion is banned in nearly all cases in that state). However, her management subsequently decided that actually handing these things out went too far, although the groups will still be allowed to distribute information and collect donations.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

News roundup, 14 March 2024

- A large number of staff at the Republican National Committee are being pushed out as Donald Trump seemingly tries to remake the committee in his image. How that will turn out remains to be seen; some speculate that this will turn out badly for a lot of down-ballot candidates, as increasingly limited RNC money is diverted to Trump's own campaign at the expense of the party at large. Then again, you can't count on billionaires not to pony up for them.

- Transport for London, and indeed pretty much every public facility in the UK, has long had huge numbers of CCTV cameras installed; the biggest limitation is not how many cameras you can install but how frequently you can monitor them. Never fear; they're now experimenting with AI to monitor the cameras. Some of the things they've done have actually been useful (e.g. preventing suicides and helping people in difficulties) but it's hard not to wonder what else this could be used for. That said, the biggest problem with AI may not be this, but rather the stupendous amounts of energy that are required to run it and the water needed to keep the hardware cool. And all the minerals needed to make that hardware could be put to better use in greening up the grid.

- A bill working its way through the New York State legislature would force companies to reduce single-use plastic packaging by 50%, as well as prohibiting certain toxic materials entirely from use in packaging. Lobbyists from the petrochemical industry are, of course, pulling out all the stops to try to prevent its passage.

- The organization providing services to troubled folks in the lobby of Winnipeg's Millennium Library is not having its funding renewed. Councillor Evan Duncan, who chairs council's Community Services Committee, says this is because he thinks it should be funded by the province, and that the lobby of the library is "not the best place" for these services. I'm guessing his suburban constituents have been telling him they don't want to have to look at those poors as they go to check out their books.

- In response to the Main Street Project's lawsuit against the neighbouring Manwin Hotel, which alleges that runoff from the hotel roof is causing damage to their building, the hotel's owners, in their statement of defense, not only denied wrongdoing but claim that the MSP's services harm the hotel's bottom line. They are seeking $10 million in punitive damages, and an injunction stopping MSP from operating their shelter at that location. I guess if your business model depends on a steady stream of broken people, having an agency that helps to fix said people is bad for business, but it takes a fair amount of chutzpah to actually admit that.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

News roundup, 13 March 2024

- This past winter (the meteorological winter ends on the 1st of March, not the equinox), was the warmest winter in the US in over a century of records. The Lower 48 had an average temperature of +3.1°C (37.6°F); that's 3°C above average. Those numbers don't fully convey the story, though. Leaves are budding on trees weeks earlier than normal, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have been essentially ice-free all winter, and mosquitoes were biting in Michigan as early as February.

- Since Paris moved to triple parking costs for SUVs, other cities are looking to follow their example. It's almost as if everybody knew it was a good idea, but nobody had the nerve to go first until Anne Hidalgo did.

- Manitoba's minimum wage will be going up to $15.80 an hour this fall. It did not go up this past fall because the deadline to make a decision on the matter came too soon after the election, and the new government, rightly or wrongly, was reluctant to make a snap decision on the matter. In the long run they want to bring it up to a "living wage", currently pegged at $19/h by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

- The interim leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, Wayne Ewasko, is following the standard rightwing playbook, calling for parents to be notified when their kids request to be addressed by different pronouns at school. I'm sure that the life of a trans kid in, say, the RM of Hanover would not be made any easier by this (not that it's easy in any case, of course) but it seems the PCs don't care and are doubling down on the far-right messaging that contributed to their defeat last fall.

- Manitoba Public Insurance has suspended the sale of "special risk extension" coverage for truckers that operate outside the province. The Tories are trying to make political hay with this by accusing the NDP of "abandoning" truckers; funny thing is, though, MPI says that they made this move in August, while the Tories were still in power.

- The City of Winnipeg's Executive Policy Committee has voted 5-1 in favour of moving ahead with reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians. It will not be surprising to anyone that North Kildonan councillor Jeff Browaty was the holdout.

- Loblaws, like many grocery companies, has been pushing hard on self-checkout, but they're having to take measures to combat theft, like setting up gates with receipt scanners at the exits. Many customers find this to be an alienating experience, of course. Interestingly, Loblaws claims that this is largely driven by "organized crime", even as many studies find that self-checkout makes thieves of previously honest people (and that's not even counting the number of people who accidentally fail to scan an item). In other places, many chains are abandoning it entirely, finding that it's not even cutting down on their labour costs.

- Many people think of opioid addiction as a big city problem. In fact, in Canada at least, when municipalities are sorted by population, the ones with the highest incidence of hospitalization from overdoses are small cities between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and the next worst are municipalities with less than 10,000. Hospitalizations were actually least common in large cities over half a million.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

News roundup, 12 March 2024

- Knowing that he can't hope to get a progressive budget that adequately taxes the wealthy and big corporations through Congress, Joe Biden appears to be trying to get the Republicans to publicly oppose such measures, hoping that they'll harm their own popularity in so doing. Worth a try, certainly, though it's hard not to think of the aphorism paraphrasing John Steinbeck, that "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

- Given that Great Salt Lake is in danger of becoming the American version of the Aral Sea, some hard decisions are likely to be necessary. Local farmers would have us believe that they support solutions to the problem, but given that extraction of water for agriculture is a big part of the problem, their protestations have to be taken with more than a few grains of the lake's namesake.

- A former longtime Boeing employee who had raised concerns about quality control issues in the production of its aircraft has apparently shot himself.

- The Youth For Christ skatepark in Winnipeg is having a hard time getting staff and volunteers as a result of negative publicity over their policies towards the LGBT* community. I dunno, maybe it should be turned over to the city, or another nonprofit, if YFC can't keep it open enough to serve it's function.

- Recent fires in apartment blocks have caused serious difficulties for the displaced tenants as they try to find new accommodation in a tight rental market. Meanwhile a commercial building is a total loss after a fire last Friday.

- Community activists are concerned with the pace of action on a potential search of the Prairie Green Landfill. The premier is being coy about the matter; presumably there are complex negotiations involved, but one can understand the activists' frustration.

- A 27 year old woman in Alberta, who has autism, is trying to access MAID, and her father is trying to get a court to stop her. She was scheduled to be put to sleep last month, but an injunction halted the process. It's an ugly scene no matter how you slice it, and I don't envy the judge who has to make a decision on this.

- In South Korea, where addressing the country's low birth rate by increasing immigration is anathema to most of the population, they're now deploying talking AI dolls to keep lonely seniors company. Some studies indicate that this has reduced depression among seniors.

Monday, March 11, 2024

News roundup, 11 March 2024

- Israel's claim that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) included Hamas militants apparently is based partly on "confessions" made when agency employees were subjected to what the Brits like to call "in-depth interrogation". In response, Canada is restoring funding to the agency after previously suspending it based on Israel's allegations. Meanwhile the US airdrop of aid supplies to Gaza appears to have actually caused more civilian deaths, as the parachutes on the aid packages failed to open. 

- Pope Francis has raised more than a few eyebrows with his suggestion that Ukraine should have “the courage to raise the white flag” and negotiate an end to the war with Russia. The most charitable interpretation is that he's viewing the conflict in pragmatic terms and has concluded that Ukraine can't win in the long run (which may well be true), but even by those criteria it's a questionable recommendation, since if Ukraine simply surrenders, rather than tying the Russians down in a long drawn-out guerilla conflict, Russia might possibly be motivated to have a go at someone else like Georgia or, much worse, the Baltic states. On the other hand, a drawn-out guerilla war would sap Russia's resources and make them less of a threat to the rest of the world (much as in the case of their attempt to conquer Afghanistan almost half a century ago). It'd be nice if there were a better role for Ukraine to play than as Europe's sacrificial anode, but that is the world we live in I guess.

- Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew remains popular with the electorate; a recent poll gives him a 63% approval rating, up six points since the last poll.

- Sarah Guillemard, the former Tory MLA for Fort Richmond, says that she was sexually assaulted by an "older former MLA" several years ago.

- Naheed Nenshi has made it official - he's off and running for the leadership of the Alberta NDP.

- At least 50 people were injured, 13 seriously enough to require hospitalization, when a Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by the Chilean carrier LATAM Airlines suffered a sudden loss of altitude on the Sydney to Auckland leg of a flight to Santiago. The airline attributed the incident to "a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement", though no more details about the cause were made available.

- Mahikan Bus Lines, a partnership owned by several First Nations and based in The Pas, has purchased a bus terminal in Brandon that had been mothballed following Greyhound's departure from the Canadian market a few years ago. 

- Joe Biden made it through his State of the Union address, described by David Shribman as "the most important speech in his political career", without any major gaffes. The same cannot be said for the response to the speech from rookie Republican senator Katie Britt, which was ridiculed by friends and foes alike.

- Donald Trump has posted a bond in the E. Jean Carroll case in order to be able to appeal the decision, after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan refused his request for a delay.

- The number of unclaimed dead bodies is on the rise in Ontario. According to the province's Office of the Chief Coroner, 1,183 bodies went unclaimed last year, compared to 983 in 2022 and 438 in 2019.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

News roundup, 7 March 2024

- The World Meteorological Association has confirmed what many have already suspected - that this past February was the warmest in recorded history. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to have a good idea why, you just have to not be an idiot or an ideologue.

- Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed Donald Trump's candidacy for president, despite having previously said that Trump was "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and also despite the fact that he is stepping down from that leadership post. I guess despite the latter he still thinks he has something to lose by not endorsing Trump - his seat perhaps, or maybe his life.

- A Republican former member of Congress is warning that Trump's appeal outside the hardcore MAGA crowd might not be enough to push him over the top in November. Let's hope that's the case.

- The Manitoba NDP government is repealing a Tory-era ban on "project labour agreements". These agreements, which require non-union workers on projects be covered by the same rules as union workers, were common before 2016, and are allowed in every other province. Members of the Manitoba Building Trades agree with the repeal, however an organization called the "Merit Contractors Association", which claims to represent those non-union contractors, is not happy at the prospect of having to provide their employees with proper wages and benefits.

- The provincial Tories are trying to make hay with the Kinew government's lifting of the ban on school tax increases; the government says (I think correctly) that school boards need to catch up after years of Tory cuts. Unfortunately if you hold off on tax increases (either voluntarily or not) until you really have to, the increase will be that much harder when it comes.

- Los Angeles County has passed a law requiring that all food purchases by county departments be plant-based by default.

- A commissioner of Sussex County, New Jersey has left the Republican Party after the four other Republicans on the commission board voted to censure him for lying about his supposed military service.

- The Israeli government has ordered physicians and other healthcare workers not to cooperate with a UN commission investigating atrocities committed by Hamas in October, calling it "an anti-Israeli and antisemitic body". In other Israel/Palestine news, even Germany, which has tended to shy away from criticism of Israel owing to not wanting to remind people of their own rather problematic history with the Jewish people, is condemning new settlements planned for the West Bank.