Tuesday, June 4, 2024

News roundup, 4 June 2024

- Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist who had previously served as mayor of Mexico City as well as on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will become Mexico's first female president, having won nearly 60% of the vote in Sunday's election.

- In South Africa, last Wednesday's election has produced a hung parliament, forcing the incumbent African National Congress government to seek out potential coalition partners.

- In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which consists of the BJP and allied parties, are projected to increase their majority based on exit polls.

- Americans are, not surprisingly, deeply divided over the conviction of Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. On the positive side, some independent voters say they're less likely to vote for Trump as a result of the conviction; on the other hand some of the MAGA diehards openly called for violence in response to their hero's conviction.

- A Florida company hopes to revive an old plan to extract groundwater from Wyoming and send it into the Colorado River basin via pipeline. This is of course a rather ambitious idea, and there are numerous doubts about its feasibility, both at the technical and the political level. But as times get more desperate in the American Southwest, there will be more proposals like this.

- The indigenous inhabitants of Gardi Sugdub, a small island off Panama's Caribbean coast, are preparing to relocate to the mainland in the face of the inevitable loss of their homeland to rising sea levels.

- Dangerously high temperatures are expected in much of the US in the coming weeks and through the summer. Meanwhile Mexico City could be at risk of running out of water within a matter of weeks, and in the Mexican state of Tabasco there have been reports of monkeys dying of heat stroke and falling out of trees.

- Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo expressed disbelief and disappointment at reports that his successor threatened a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile the Israeli newspaper Haaretz say that they were blocked from publishing a story about this matter two years ago by the Israeli government.

- Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused China of pressuring countries out of attending a peace conference being held later this month in Switzerland, though he did not name any countries or pressure tactics specifically.

- Two candidates in the Louis Riel School Division byelection being held this Thursday are using far-right dog whistles about "parental rights". The fact that there are two of them is actually somewhat reassuring, as it suggests that the movement doesn't have the level of organization needed to make sure only one of them runs to avoid splitting the vote. What's far less reassuring, though, is the fact that support for LGBT* rights has declined markedly in Canada, and furthermore the decline has been worse here than in many countries. My suspicion with regard to the latter is that Trudeau has become so hated that many of the simple-minded masses have reflexively decided that they're opposed to anything he's for, or that Pierre Poilievre is against, even if they don't have a good understanding of the issue.

- Singapore police have been given access to diagnostic tools to extract data from a vehicle's event data recorder. They applied this in the case of a driver suspected of speeding; this was accepted by the court as legitimately collected evidence, and she received five days in jail and a two year driving prohibition. There is no indication as to how fast she was driving.

- A man was stabbed in a bikejacking last Thursday morning in front of the University of Winnipeg. The victim was apparently walking the bike when he was confronted by the attacker.

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