News roundup, 28 Aug 2026

- Donald Trump has signed an executive order officially renaming Lake Ontario as "Lake America". Some folks on social media are suggesting that we should respond by closing the Welland Canal to American vessels, which would create a rather awkward situation for the US Midwest as they depend on the canal to ship their goods overseas. On a related note, Danielle Smith, predictably, continues to be vehemently opposed to using oil and gas exports as a bargaining chip with the US, and her fellow collaborator Scott Moe has similar opinions about potash.

- The investigation into the runway collision between an Air Canada jet and an airport fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, killing the pilots and injuring more than 40 other people, has found that two air traffic controllers had clocked out early, leaving the tower seriously understaffed. The FAA is looking to fire the controllers. Other factors in the accident, including the fact that the truck lacked a transponder, are still under investigation.

- Some Republican strategists are sufficiently concerned about Trump's collapsing approval ratings that they favour focusing on specific races. Trump's ego, of course, can't tolerate that, so his PAC, aptly known as MAGA Inc, is reportedly planning to bombard the country with ads making it all about himself.

- The spike in fuel prices resulting from Trump's war in Iran has led to a surge in the popularity of electric vehicles in pretty much every country except the US. This bodes poorly for the long term future of the American auto industry unless something changes soon.

- A civilian professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, NY has been fired for continuing to teach about human-caused climate change. Adam Kalkstein, who taught at the institution for 17 years, compares the prohibition to "trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution"; he is suing for reinstatement and requesting a jury trial.

- UK prime minister Andy Burnham is facing pressure from his MPs to move ahead with electoral reform. Burnham has advocated doing away with first-past-the-post for quite some time, and now nearly 100 of his MPs are calling on him to create a commission on the subject in his first 100 days in office. This is a refreshing stance for Labour; the party has long benefited from the status quo, but perhaps they're now realizing that this might be the best defense the country has against the rise of Reform UK.

- A car belonging to Salma Zahid, the Liberal MP for Scarborough Centre, was torched early Thursday morning by person or persons unknown; the fire spread to two other vehicles before being extinguished. Toronto police have not yet confirmed that Zahid was the target.

- A security guard at a Dollarama in suburban Winnipeg was stabbed after confronting a shoplifter. The suspect, who has a significant criminal record already, was captured quickly and charged with aggravated assault as well as robbery and failure to comply with a probation order.

News roundup, 21 July 2026

- The US and Iran continue to exchange fire for the tenth day since the breakdown of the ceasefire. Trump is in an awkward spot, since any course of action he takes is almost sure to at the very least look bad in the eyes of his supporters and at worst be a total disaster.

- Andrew Tate and his equally vile brother Tristan were arrested in Florida on a British extradition warrant. Both are wanted for multiple sexual assault and trafficking charges; Andrew also faces child pornography charges. This would seem to be good news, except that the US Secretary of State has the power to veto extraditions, and given how popular Andrew is with the MAGA base, plus the fact that Trump has previously bullied Romania into releasing the brothers, it seems unlikely that they'll be extradited.

- The Trump regime is threatening 50% tariffs against a wide range of Canadian exports. Energy, potash, critical minerals, fish, and auto parts are exempt; presumably the costs to the US would be too high if they weren't. The tariffs don't take effect until mid-August; Trump presumably hopes that Carney will capitulate in the ongoing CUSMA talks.

- Andy Burnham has now taken office as the UK's prime minister, and has selected his cabinet. There are 15 new faces in the cabinet, in addition to Burnham himself.

- Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has announced that his country will not be holding any more elections in order to keep the opposition out of power. It's a pity; in the 1980s Ortega was a hero to much of the left for standing up to the US, but he seems to have turned into just another tinpot dictator.

News roundup, 13 July 2026

- Reform UK is panicking about the possibility of Nigel Farage losing the byelection resulting from his resignation stunt. The party had been hoping to win the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, where polls showed them within striking distance after the position was vacated by Andy Burnham, but are now desperately shifting resources to Farage's riding of Clacton in the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of losing to Count Binface. Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph seems a bit worried too. Unfortunately it looks like the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is running a spoiler candidate. Kind of like one of the races in Monty Python's Election Night Special, except that this time it won't be the Sensible Party that benefits from the split.

- A recent poll of Canadian manufacturers found that 40% of them have either moved some of their operations to the US or are planning to do so in response to ongoing tariffs, while 11% plan to move their headquarters there. This isn't an exclusively Canadian problem, of course; Toyota is expanding its plant in Texas while reducing operations in Mexico, but voters tend not to care about such niceties - in fact they don't care if the people they vote in are worse than the people they vote out, because they're voting out of vengeance, not out of hope of improvement. So naturally this puts Carney in a tough spot. If he wanted to be really bold he could expropriate any plant closed in such a move at current market value, with the proviso that the compensation will not occur until relations are normalized with the US. I wouldn't count on him doing that, though; I don't think he's made of that kind of stuff (he is, ultimately, still a neoliberal at heart, even as he recognizes that neoliberalism doesn't seem to be working anymore). Maybe the NDP should start loudly pushing for that sort of thing; it's not like not being radical has done them much good at the federal level of late.

- South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham has died at the age of 71. On the other hand Mitch McConnell seems to be in better shape than many suspected, assuming of course that it was actually him that made the statement in question and not a staffer.

- A 37 year old man has been arrested after allegedly delivering a hateful and threat-filled tirade against two hijab-wearing women in a Costco in Halifax and assaulting someone who filmed his rant. He had to be Tasered after reportedly brandishing a weapon at police; he has been charged with assault, public incitement of hatred, and four counts of uttering threats to cause bodily harm or death.

- An economics professor at Brown University announced one year that one of his classes would use a take-home exam format. The class then had a surge of enrollments compared to previous years; when the midterms were marked, the average grade was 96% and 40 students got a 100% grade. Not surprisingly, the people who marked the exams found answers with a wording that was uncannily similar to the way ChatGPT answered the questions. At this point he decided to change the format for the final exam, making it an in-person test and warning the class that if the grade distribution was substantially different from the midterm, only the final would count towards the actual grade in the class. 27 students dropped out of the class by the time the final rolled around, of whom 22 had scored 100% in the midterm.

News roundup, 10 July 2026

- The ceasefire in the US-Iran war is in ruins after Donald Trump accused Iran of attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and launched airstrikes on the country, killing at least 14 people and destroying a bridge on a key trade route with Russia and China. Iran in turn launched strikes on Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Iran admits to firing on the ships, which it says ignored warnings about taking a non-approved route through the strait.

- Andy Burnham appears set to be the UK's next prime minister after winning the support of 322 out of 403 sitting Labour MPs. If nobody steps up to oppose him he will be declared party leader next week and take office later this month.

- The "Water Not Coal" campaign, an initiative by country singer Corb Lund which sought to ban coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Alberta (or force a referendum if the government wanted to push ahead), was deemed by Elections Alberta to have not gotten the necessary 177,732 signatures in order to be deemed valid. Lund's campaign had submitted over 200,000, but staff at the agency attempted to contact a small sample of the signatories in order to determine how many could be deemed valid and deemed enough of them illegitimate to cancel the initiative. A statistician at the University of Toronto, however, believes that Elections Alberta's methodology was suspect and that the initiative likely had enough legitimate signatures to proceed.

- The BC government is suing OpenAI for its role in the Tumbler Ridge shooting that left nine people dead. The government believes that there were plenty of warning signs in the shooter's interaction with the platform that could have prevented the tragedy; OpenAI had banned her but had not notified the police.

- A Texas woman who was fired by her employer after video of her unhinged rant at two Muslim women went viral has raised over $100,000 in donations on GiveSendGo (which is, as I've called it before, the GoFundMe for deplorables). The women she harassed were doxed and have faced death threats.

- Two teenagers in Greensboro, NC were arrested after allegedly using a device described as a "homemade plasma cannon" to break into a school. The term may be technically accurate but makes it sound way more sci-fi than it actually is; it's not that dissimilar to the potato cannons that teens have been making for decades.

- A student pilot in Argentina was forced to land the aircraft by herself after her flight instructor suddenly opened a door and jumped to his death. While shaken, the student landed the Cessna 150 without further incident. I suppose if nothing else it was a good test of the student's ability to handle an emergency.

News roundup, 22 June 2026

- Keir Starmer is has announced that he will be resigning as the UK's prime minister. This follows Andy Burnham's byelection victory, as more than 50% of Labour's caucus now support Burnham for leader, making Starmer's position untenable. He will stay on until the party chooses a new leader this summer.

- A jury in Birmingham has refused to convict four activists who admitted breaking into a Wolverhampton factory owned by US manufacturer Moog Inc. Among other things, the company manufactures components used by the Israeli military, leading to the protest. The four had been charged with criminal damage over £5,000, having caused substantial damage to the facility. This contrasts with the fate of four other activists who broke into a plant in Filton, near Bristol, which is owned by Israeli company Elbit Systems. The latter company manufactures drones as well as land-based equipment for that country's military. Three of them were given sentences of around five years, while one of them, Samuel Corner, got seven (to be fair, he had also severely injured a cop with a sledgehammer as she attempted to arrest one of his colleagues). What's especially problematic here, though, is that a decision was made after the conviction to make a "terrorist connection" an aggravating factor in the sentencing, while the jury was only told that the activists other than Corner were on trial for criminal damage with no mention of terrorism. The judge in the Elbit case also tried to have one of the defense lawyers prosecuted for contempt of court for having the audacity to remind jurors in his closing speech of their right to acquit if they believed that the actions of the accused were moral, regardless of the letter of the law.

- An environmental activist who organized a team of volunteers to clean up a river in England is being threatened with prosecution by the UK's environment agency. The agency says that they are concerned that enough material may have been removed from the river to constitute dredging, which requires a permit from the agency, and that this could have potential flood impacts downstream. It's hard not to wonder, though, if the agency isn't also a bit embarrassed by the fact that a bunch of volunteers did what they'd been stalling on for years.

- Abelardo de la Espriella, the Trump-backed candidate in Colombia's presidential election, appears to have scored a narrow victory over left-leaning candidate Iván Cepeda. De la Espriella has vowed a military crackdown on armed groups, the construction of "mega-prisons" in the jungle, and to shrink the state (except for the military and those mega-prisons, presumably).

- Europe is enduring another severe heatwave, with temperatures expected to reach the mid-40s in parts of Spain and France. Even in the UK, an extreme heat warning has been issued for southern England and parts of Wales, with temperatures as high as 38°C expected.

News roundup, 19 June 2026

- Labour Party dissident Andy Burnham won a resounding victory in the byelection in the constituency of Makerfield, winning nearly 55% of the vote compared to 34% for the Reform UK candidate. His vote share was almost double that of Josh Simons, whose resignation triggered the byelection in the first place. Burnham, who until now served as the mayor of Greater Manchester, says that this represents Labour's final chance to reverse its current direction; it remains to be seen whether this will push the party to dump Kier Starmer, much less whether the party could win the next general election by doing so.

- NDP house leader Heather McPherson posted (I'd say tweeted but this was on Bluesky rather than Twitter/X) a quip that billionaires shouldn't exist and trillionaires should be put in jail. This has thrown the folks at Juno News into a tizzy, ranting about a "leftwing hate fest" and misrepresenting the post to boot (McPherson didn't actually call Musk a Nazi, she just reposted someone else's post calling him that, not that I could fault her if she had). Juno News is just a rebranding of the True North Centre for Public Policy, so they shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it's kind of amusing to see what snowflakes they are when you pick on one of their heroes.

- Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on Moscow and some other Russian targets on Thursday. Among the targets hit was the capital's main oil refinery; some 17 people were injured in the attacks, and Moscow's four airports were shut down for most of the day. Meanwhile the Kyiv Post alleges that authorities in a town near the capital refuse to disclose the location of civil defense shelters out of fear of causing panic, saying that this information will only be made public "during mobilization and in wartime". And of course, this conflict is officially just a "special military operation", and calling it a war can get you put in jail or thrown out a window, so...

- The board of directors of the South Winnipeg Community Centre has disbanded and handed control of the facility back to the city. The board had been accused of financial irregularities and other governance-related issues by some members of the community, but an independent audit found no evidence of financial wrongdoing, and the General Council of Winnipeg Community Centres' own investigation found similar results. Despite this, board members continued to receive online harassment, and when you're a volunteer you're only going to put up with so much of this. I haven't been able to find much background on this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of culture war nonsense bubbling underneath all this.

- Selkirk has become the first city in Manitoba to take advantage of funding the province is offering to provide free bus passes to youth aged 12-21. They will need proof of enrollment to be eligible, however. The province is still working with other cities, including Winnipeg as well as Brandon, Winkler, and Flin Flon, to get the program in place in time for next fall; it would be nice if the program covered university and community college students as well, at least in Winnipeg and Brandon, as that would probably lead to a reduction in impaired driving.

- Researchers are reporting that some AI systems are really good at finding loopholes in rules. This should give pause to anyone who hopes that some kind of constraints like Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics could be made to work in the real world.

News roundup, 20 May 2026

- An Israeli legal organization, Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center), is threatening legal action against the Canadian Museum for Human Rights over plans to host an exhibit on the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians when Israel was formed in 1948. The exhibit isn't scheduled to open for months, but the organization has vowed to "seek instructions to pursue all available legal remedies" if the museum goes ahead with it. The legal basis for this seems rather tenuous, but several pro-Israel organizations are angry that they weren't consulted about the matter. I have to wonder if they'd be calling for Russia to be consulted over an exhibit about the Holodomor.

- Andy Burnham, the chief challenger to Keir Starmer's leadership, says that he will not pursue readmission to the EU if he becomes prime minister. This is in contrast to another potential challenger, Wes Streeting, who says he would like to see the UK rejoin. Some in this Reddit thread feel betrayed by Burnham's stance, but one poster made a very good point:

Tbh supporting the EU at this point is not a valid policy and is purely performative. You can say that you would want to join the EU, but it’s currently off the table.

With a Reform premiership likely, you would just be wasting 3 years unless there was significant evidence to show rejoining the EU could win you the election.

The EU know this and won’t bother negotiating.

I suspect that this is Burnham's reasoning. Can't really fault it, unfortunately.

- Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who had challenged Trump on the Epstein files, was defeated in his primary yesterday by Trump-backed candidate Ed Gallrein, demonstrating the uncanny grip that the orange monster still has on his sheeple. Meanwhile in Louisiana, Republican senator Bill Cassidy suffered the same fate.

- Experienced farmers develop an intimate knowledge of seasonal patterns that help them to optimize their business. However, farmers in many parts of the world are finding that those patterns are breaking down, thanks to climate change. And it is expected that for each additional 1°C for the average temperature, the average available food supply will decrease by about 120 calories per person per day. Of course this will not be equally distributed; the rich countries will experience inflation in food prices while poor countries face starvation. As I've said before, this also poses a conundrum for the left - the old argument that there's enough food for everyone and it just needs to be distributed properly is soon going to become obsolete, and I fear that a lot of leftists are going to be in denial about this fact.

- On the more positive side, it seems that Trump and Netanyahu's reckless attack on Iran is doing what generations of activists couldn't do - pushing the world towards renewable energy. It's enough to make a person wish that Cheney and Rumsfeld had succeeded in convincing Bush to attack Iran back in the noughties - that way the shift to green energy would have happened two decades earlier and so maybe climate change wouldn't be as bad as it's going to be.

News roundup, 19 May 2026

- Two armed teenagers attacked a mosque in San Diego on Monday, killing three people before turning their weapons on themselves. This is being investigated as a hate crime; the mother of one of the shooters found a note that he had left behind, though the content of the note has not been made public.

- Global Affairs Canada is warning Canadians to be wary about travelling overseas this summer, due to the possibility of flight cancellations as a result of skyrocketing prices of jet fuel due to the war in Iran. They also warn that fuel shortages could disrupt access to products and services at some popular destinations. 

- A Canadian who was a passenger on the plague ship MV Hondius has tested positive for hantavirus. Three others are in isolation after showing symptoms consistent with the virus.

-  An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed at least 131 people and may be spreading faster than originally thought.

- Manitoba is temporarily suspending the ban on sale of certain American alcoholic beverages, in order to sell off stock that expires in the fall.

- Keir Starmer is facing a direct challenge of his leadership of the Labour Party from Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham is running in a byelection in the constituency of Makerfield, which was vacated by incumbent Josh Simons in order to make way for him.

- Thomas Massie, a Republican member of Congress from Kentucky, is facing a tough primary today as Donald Trump has aggressively endorsed his opponent. Massie drew the ire of Trump after pushing a bill to force the release of the Epstein files.

- A car crashed into a fireworks store in Toronto on Monday, starting what became a five-alarm fire. Nobody was in the vehicle by the time fire crews arrived.