- The Alberta government is legislating striking teachers back to work and imposing a collective agreement. The government limited debate on all three readings of the bill, and the notwithstanding clause is being used to ensure that the legislation can resist a court challenge.
- Hurricane Melissa is bearing down on Jamaica. The hurricane is a Category 5 storm, with winds of up to 280 km/h; if it retains that strength when it reaches the country it will be the strongest to hit the island since detailed records began in 1851. Parts of the country could see up to 760 mm of rain.
- Germany's far-right AfD party is being accused of espionage. Georg Maier, the interior minister of the state of Thuringia, alleges that the party is using its parliamentary privileges to gain access to sensitive information about the country's infrastructure and handing the information over to Russia.
- Canada is on the verge of losing its status as a country where measles is not endemic. Of course, there's an obvious reason for it; whether the political will exists to overcome it is another question. It wouldn't be hard to bring back the idea of "vaccine passports" as used at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic - or at least it wouldn't in theory. Of course, enforcement would be challenging, and it might push some of the more extreme antivaxxers to violence - though it's an open question whether that violence would outweigh the harm done by measles itself. And some would feel uncomfortable on bodily autonomy grounds - except that the unvaccinated are potentially interfering with the bodily autonomy of everyone around them, so that argument falls flat even if you consider that principle to be fundamental. Myself, I frame this sort of thing as "what would do the greatest good and/or the least harm to humanity as a whole"; with that as the most fundamental principle, it's a lot simpler to argue for vaccine passports. Unfortunately, as we saw with the clownvoy a couple of years ago, the antivaxxers can get together enough support to make life difficult for a lot of people, and governments are often unwilling to take the necessary measures to contain such a disruptive force.
- Former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has asked authorities in Switzerland, where he currently lives, to investigate death threats made against him in response to his, um, tone deaf response to the tragic death of US grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky (not to mention his behaviour towards Naroditsky when he was still alive). I can't condone that sort of thing, of course, but Kramnik shouldn't be surprised that some people are taking it badly. A side note - while Kramnik has been accusing just about everyone of cheating, he had a scandal of that sort himself a while back,