Friday, September 15, 2023

News roundup, 14 Sept 2023

- Hurricane Lee is now a significant concern in parts of the Maritimes and New England. Several orders of magnitude worse, though, is what already just happened in Libya. The death toll is already over 11,000 and rising, and as pointed out in the article, years of infighting between two rival claims to the legitimate leadership of the country has led to the neglect of mitigation measures which could theoretically have saved a lot of lives. It wouldn't have hurt for the article to have reminded the reader of what kind of external interventions could have produced such a divided country in the first place.

- Looks like another sad example of demolition by neglect in the case of Winnipeg's Windsor Hotel. One is left with the impression that the current owner(s) just ran it into the ground, then let nature take its course once it had deteriorated to the point where people couldn't live there anymore.

- The federal Liberals are removing the GST on the construction of new rental apartments. Better than nothing I suppose, though the effect on their electoral fortunes remains to be seen. The funny thing is, though, as recently as a few decades ago the federal government was actually building housing; that would seem to be a much more sensible approach. Problem is, it might be politically unpopular among those who use housing as an investment as opposed to those who use it for, you know, housing.

- Kenora OPP officers, upon finding an injured deer that needed to be put down, got the fire axe from their vehicle instead of using their service weapons; perhaps they didn't relish filling out the paperwork that would have been required had they used their guns. Now that they've made the news for it, though, they'll probably be reassigned to Moosonee or something.

- The Republicans are presumably salivating at the indictment of Hunter Biden, but given that the indictment is on firearms charges, I can't help thinking there's an irony in there somewhere.

- It just came out that a rogue Russian pilot allegedly tried to shoot down a British aircraft in international airspace last year. Assuming (as I do) that this was indeed a rogue act rather than being the intent of Russia's leadership (they presumably aren't suicidal, after all), the next question has to be whether the rogue pilot had malicious intent (e.g. to draw a NATO power into the war) or was just reckless. Not sure which possibility is scarier.


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