News roundup, 6 Oct 2025

 - Israel captured the flotilla attempting to deliver aid to Gaza on Friday, and took the 437 participants, including climate activist Greta Thunberg, into custody. Many of them, including Thunberg, have now been released; she has reported mistreatment by Israeli authorities during her detention.

- Israel has ordered all Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza City, saying that those who do not leave will be considered "militants" (i.e. fair game for IDF target practice). I guess we're not supposed to call this "ethnic cleansing" when the Israelis do it, but I'm not sure what else you can call that.

- A study using data from the reinsurance giant Munich Re has confirmed what most of us already know - that wildfires are getting worse, presumably due to climate change. Of the 43 wildfires between 1980 and 2023 that did over a billion dollars in damage, half occurred in the last decade.

- The Trump regime has extended a $20 billion lifeline to Argentina, apparently with no strings attached. The reason seems to be to prop up an economy that Argentine president Javier Milei is trying to operate on the principles favoured by Trump's backers, including widespread austerity and promoting a strong currency even at the expense of exporters. The IMF and the OECD seemed satisfied with the numbers, but the Argentine people are not, and the ruling party suffered a crushing defeat in the provincial elections in Buenos Aires in September. Fearing that the country could move back to the left in upcoming elections, they acted - only for Argentina to respond by slashing their export tariffs on grains and making a big soybean sale to China. This naturally does not sit well with American farmers, who are struggling to sell their crops, but it's probably not enough to make them oppose Trump so long as he continues to hurt the people they want to see suffer.

- Teachers in Alberta have walked off the job after negotiations with the Smith government broke down. The strike affects all regular public schools as well as francophone and Catholic schools. The government, unwilling to give the teachers anything, is now offering parents $150 a week to cover childcare costs.

- US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra says that he takes "great offence" to Canadians saying that his Dear Leader President is uninformed and untrustworthy.

- The director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas has been ousted, apparently after refusing to give Trump a historic sword once owned by Eisenhower. Trump had wanted to give the sword to King Charles III on a recent state visit.

 - After a Republican representative in Homer, Alaska objected to an article in the Homer News about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, the newspaper revised the article to satisfy the representative. This sparked mass resignations at the paper and an affiliate. The original version of the article is archived here.

News roundup, 3 Oct 2025

- Two CRJ-900LR regional jets owned by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air collided at the intersection of two taxiways at New York City's LaGuardia Airport on Wednesday. Fortunately the collision occurred at low speed, but both aircraft were substantially damaged; a flight attendant on one of them suffered minor injuries. Juan Browne (blancolirio) offers his opinions here.

- California governor Gavin Newsom has signed the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act into law. This is a diluted version of the original bill, which Newsom vetoed last year following intense lobbying by the tech industry, but still requires tech companies to report safety protocols used and their projections of the biggest dangers that could arise from the technologies they develop. It also offers enhanced whistleblower protection for employees. Predictably, the cowboys who dominate the tech industry aren't satisfied; they've created superPACs to fight AI regulation.

- Germany plans to invest more than €2 billion in nuclear fusion research by 2029. Hopefully this will bear fruit; the world badly needs it.

- Leonardo Garcia Venegas was born in the US, but that hasn't stopped ICE from hauling him into custody twice in the last few months on suspicion of being an illegal resident. He's suing, saying his Fourth Amendment rights were violated. A reasonable court of law ought to agree; unfortunately his chances of getting a reasonable court in Trump's America are not good.

- A Benin-flagged oil tanker suspected of being part of Russia's "shadow fleet" was boarded by the French navy, and the captain and first mate were taken into custody on suspicion of espionage. The tanker, currently named the Boracay, had been blacklisted by the EU under its previous name Kiwala.

- Redditor u/-Badger3- says that they received a thinly veiled threat from the Tennessee branch of the Republican Party, reminding them that voter records are public and that "Party leadership would be VERY DISAPPOINTED" if they don't turn out to vote in an upcoming special election (byelection) in the state's 7th Congressional District. Although the district includes part of Democratic-leaning Nashville, it also includes some heavily Republican rural areas, and is considered a likely Republican hold, which raises the question about why such intimidation tactics would be necessary - except to remind potential dissidents that they're being watched.

- Following the postponement of Steinbach's Pride parade due to far-right threats following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the LGBT* community are being forced to downsize events and hire security. They are also finding that security is harder to come by; the firm they previously worked for has backed out citing "a need to protect its own staff because they aren’t armed".

- A consortium including Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has taken over video game giant Electronic Arts. This is not the Saudis' first venture into the sector; they already own significant stakes in Nintendo and Take-Two Interactive as well as other gaming companies. Some Redditors are afraid that the new owners' socially conservative values will leak into the games, notably the Sims franchise, though it seems doubtful that existing titles will be impacted due to the difficulty of changing the code to, say, prohibit premarital sex or LGBT* content. It's possible that the products will be discontinued, though, or that future releases will be less inclusive. 

News roundup, 2 Oct 2025

- US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a meeting on Tuesday with the military's top leaders, and told them to "prepare for war". He also fulminated about "woke" culture in the military and said that he doesn't want to see "fat generals and admirals" or efforts to contain bullying and hazing.

- An open letter from over 200 prominent politicians and scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, was presented to the UN General Assembly calling for binding international measures to contain hazardous uses of artificial intelligence. Given the pace of AI development, they're calling for an agreement to be reached by 2026. This is probably a bit much to hope for, especially given the current US regime's hand's off approach to the technology. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is particularly concerned about possible military uses of AI such as autonomous drones.

- Marjorie Taylor Greene, long one of Donald Trump's staunchest allies, is not backing down on the Epstein issue. She is refusing to take her signature off the petition calling for Congress to vote on the release of the files, even after an official said that any support for the petition by Republican representatives would be viewed as a "hostile act".

- One of the owners of the house on the outskirts of St. Thomas, Ontario that had a swastika mowed into its lawn worked as a nurse at Homewood Health Centre in Guelph until she was suspended by the College of Nurses of Ontario following a disciplinary hearing for multiple racist, homophobic, and other hateful statements made on the job. The swastika was added the same day by her partner. Both of them are now facing charges for criminal harassment and incitement of hatred; neighbours report that the couple frequently "blared loud white supremacist music" from the house.

- A staffer with the BC Conservative Party has been fired after calling a flag honouring residential school survivors a "fake flag" after it was flown at the legislature for National Truth and Reconciliation Day. The staffer, Lindsay Shepherd, has a history; she's the former teaching assistant who created a stir by playing Jordan Peterson clips for a communications class at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2017.

- A radio station in Surrey that serves the south Asian community was hit by gunfire on Tuesday; nobody was injured. The station had covered extortion threats in the community; Surrey, like numerous other cities across the country, has had a big problem with this of late.

- Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91. 

News roundup, 1 Oct 2025

- The US has entered a government shutdown due to the failure to get a budget through Congress. Among other things, this means that air traffic controllers and TSA workers, who are considered "essential", will be expected to show up for work despite not getting paid; it is widely expected that many of them will call in sick and flights will be grounded. Other federal workers will simply be laid off until the budget crisis is resolved, and programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also referred to as "food stamps") are expected to run out of money. 

- Donald Trump is again expressing a desire to annex Canada. He had stopped talking about that for a while after the election of Mark Carney, but his mind has wandered back in that direction. Carney, for his part, is hoping to placate the Americans by lifting or reducing restrictions on US dairy sales in Canada.

- A bill before the North Carolina legislature will, if passed, prohibit overseas citizens from casting a ballot in that state. This is part of a broader push by the Republicans to disenfranchise overseas voters. Until 2016, the majority of overseas voters were military personnel stationed abroad, but now the majority are civilians; presumably they fear that people exposed to foreign media without the countervailing influence of the military might be too reasonable (read: anti-Trump) for comfort.

- Winnipeg police are investigating after a fire broke out at the constituency office of  Manitoba Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine on Tuesday morning. This comes a week after the windows were smashed at the same office, and also follows several fires at the office of Housing Minister Bernadette Smith.

- South Africa's ambassador to France, Nathi Mthethwa, fell to his death from the 22nd floor of the four star Hyatt Hotel in Paris. One naturally wonders if maybe he annoyed the Russians in some way, however his wife had reported receiving a "disturbing message" from him and had reported him missing, which seems to suggest a more mundane (though no less tragic) explanation.