- A 19 year old Winnipeg man, who has previously been charged with spraypainting antisemitic graffiti on buildings, is now facing several terrorism-related charges; these include two counts of commission of an offence for a terrorist group (not clear if the offence in question was the graffiti or something else), as well as one count each of facilitating a terrorist activity and participating in an activity related to a terrorist group.
- Speaking of vandalism and terrorism, the Trump regime's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has declared a recent outbreak of arson and other vandalism against Tesla vehicles and dealerships to be "nothing short of domestic terrorism". The thing is, the growing distaste for Elon Musk among thinking people around the world is actually starting to become a serious threat to Tesla. Auto insurers are planning to raise insurance rates for Tesla vehicles due to the high incidence of vandalism. Meanwhile a poll in Germany found that 94% of respondents would not consider buying a Tesla. And Tesla insiders are selling large amounts of stock. The latter point is particularly telling since insiders face strong constraints on how they trade shares in the company - they potentially would need to convince the SEC that they were trading on information available to anyone, not just insiders. So basically, the insiders are admitting that anyone can see that the stock is headed in the wrong direction. And now major investors in the company are starting to call for Musk's head. Be interesting to see what, if anything, the regime does in the event that Musk loses all his money.
- OpenAI is calling for a ban on Chinese AI products such as DeepSeek in the US. I could actually approve of that if they also banned American, European, and all other AI products, including OpenAI. That might be a very good idea, if you could somehow come up with an international treaty that the relevant countries could agree to. But since it's not going to happen, I'm not sure there's much point in banning one particular country's AIs. Sure, China's government is a nasty one, but that's largely irrelevant since they won't likely be in control of it either after a point. And it's hard not to notice that OpenAI themselves want to be exempted from all kinds of long-established copyright laws in order to compete with these Chinese products. It's not that they're libertarians - they want rules, they just don't want the rules to apply to them.
- The latest opinion polls put the federal Liberals in first place for the first time in a couple of years. The fact that the Conservative majority that seemed inevitable a couple of months ago may be slipping out of reach is definitely good news. Not such good news is the fact that the NDP has sunk so low that they will likely be largely irrelevant in the next parliament. It looks like either the Liberals will win a majority, or else they will win a plurality but need the support of the Bloc to form a government. That said, the NDP might not do quite as badly as the seat projection model predicts; such models usually look at the change in popular vote from the last election for a region of the country and adjust the vote in each riding in the region by that amount. So hopefully the prospect of the NDP losing all its Manitoba seats, as predicted by the model, won't come to pass.
- At the provincial level, of course, the NDP is doing much better in Manitoba. Shannon Corbett won an easy victory yesterday in the byelection forced by the death of Transcona MLA Nello Altomare.
- Donald Trump is claiming that pardons issued by Joe Biden in the dying days of his administration are null and void because the orders were signed using a device known as an autopen. The fact that a previous Republican administration had gotten approval for the use of an autopen to sign orders doesn't matter to the current regime, of course.
- A Republican member of Minnesota's state senate has been arrested on suspicion of soliciting an underage person for sex. Funny, I thought rightwingers were supposed to be all about protecting children...
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