News roundup, 13 Jan 2026

- Manitoba premier Wab Kinew is voicing solidarity with Minnesota following the killing of Renee Good last week. Less sympathetic is far-right perennial candidate Patrick Allard, who has had his membership and board position with the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party suspended following some unpleasant social media posts about the killing. One tweet quoted in the article was posted as an inquiry about whether ICE is hiring in Canada; not mentioned in the article is that he also declared that Good was "rightfully terminated". I guess stuff like that is a bridge too far even for Obby Khan. The thing is, the Cons presumably knew he was a scumbag when he was elected to their board (he hasn't exactly made a big secret of it) so they're presumably just annoyed that he said the quiet part out loud.

- The US sanctions against the International Criminal Court are making life difficult for the court's judges. They find themselves unable to do business with any American company, including credit card companies, or even buy US dollars. The court itself is having to adopt new payment systems in order to pay its employees and receive payments from the countries that recognize its authority; it has also abandoned Microsoft Office in favour of openDesk, an open source package similar to LibreOffice. This doesn't solve all their problems by any means; there are fears that even non-American companies might be reluctant to deal with them for fear of annoying the US.

- Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has managed to talk Trump down from intervening militarily in her country. Trump has mused lately about doing just that to deal with drug cartels; hopefully he can be sufficiently distracted by something else (and hopefully that something else won't be Canada).

- The US Department of Labor released a promotional video that contains the slogan "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage". The similarity to "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" is hard not to notice; whether they're actively trying to sound like Nazis or just using punchy slogans that will resonate with the simple-minded folks that they're trying to appeal to and just end up sounding that way is uncertain. Either way, not a good thing.

- A Dallas woman who worked for a subcontractor for the Hilton hotel chain was apparently fired after posting a warning on TikTok about ICE agents staying in one of the chain's hotels. 

- A novel that had been awarded both the grand prize and "reader's choice" awards in a contest in Japan has had the prizes revoked after it was discovered that it had been written mostly by AI. 

- A 19 year old woman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was apparently irate at being blocked on TikTok by an 18 year old acquaintance. She's now accused of killing her over the matter. 

News roundup, 4 Feb 2025

- Donald Trump has agreed to defer the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for another month, following talks with Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum in order to give time for more negotiations. The 10% tariffs on China are still going ahead on schedule; in addition he also has the EU in his sights. The chaos of the on-again, off-again tariff threats has spooked markets; presumably Trump, Musk, and their cronies are buying on the dips. In Manitoba, the Kinew government is reciprocating with a pause on the removal of American liquor from stores. Meanwhile in BC, David Eby is considering a more substantive move (assuming the tariffs come back) - he wants to ensure that sales of energy and critical minerals are directed towards other markets.

- If the current uneasy truce fails to hold, one possible target of export restrictions could be potash. The US imports around 80% of their supply, and Canada controls some 40% of global reserves of this crucial fertilizer. The prospect of this worries Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had requested that potash be exempted from the Trump tariffs.

- The Inspector General of the US Department of Agriculture, Phyllis Fong, was escorted from her office by security after refusing to leave voluntarily after Trump fired her. I'm sure the fact that her office had investigated one of Elon Musk's companies is totally coincidental...

- After the World Federation of Advertisers suspended advertising on Twitter/X, Elon Musk launched a lawsuit last year claiming that the federation and its members were unlawfully conspiring to deprive Musk's platform of revenue. He is now expanding the lawsuit to target several companies whose ads were removed from the platform.

- The European Union is continuing with a piecewise rollout of legislation to minimize the risks from artificial intelligence. Apps with certain kinds of functions, including cognitive behavioural manipulation, classifying people based on personal characteristics, and biometric identification and categorization of people, is banned outright. Sounds eminently reasonable, but there's a lot of hand-wringing from techbros in this Reddit thread about allegedly stifling innovation (mixed in with slightly more valid concerns that more harmful uses of AI will just be developed elsewhere anyway).

- An AI chatbot created by the Israelis to disrupt online discussion of the country's policies towards Palestinians has gone rogue, at times attacking the Israeli and American governments.

News roundup, 1 Oct 2024

- Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and former Mexico City mayor, has been elected as president of Mexico. She becomes the country's first female leader as well as its first Jewish one. While a protege of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, she does plan on going beyond AMLO's excessive emphasis on fossil fuels; we'll have to see.

- In 2019 the BC legislature unanimously passed legislation to implement the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among those who voted to pass it was an MLA by the name of John Rustad, then a member of the BC Liberals. Now, however, as leader of the BC Conservatives, he's vowing to repeal the legislation, claiming that the issues it was meant to address don't apply to Canada. And the property rights of resource companies are more important than indigenous rights anyway, right?

- Ukraine is accusing Russia of deliberately poisoning a river by dumping industrial wastes. The river in question, the Desna, connects with a reservoir that supplies water for millions of people.

- Germany reserves the right to deny a citizenship application on the basis of antisemitism. That's fair enough, especially given their history. However, some of the things that are taken as prima facie evidence of antisemitism include not only clear examples like Holocaust denial, but the use of slogans such as "from the river to the sea..." and "Israel, child murderer".

- The Manitoba government is reviewing the provincial Mental Health Act to find ways of reducing the role of police in dealing with people in a state of mental health crisis. Currently, only peace officers are able to carry out orders under the Act; given the toll this takes on police resources, not to mention the tendency of many cops to shoot first and ask questions later, the province is looking to change this.

- Caroline Giuliani, daughter of Rudy, has endorsed Kamala Harris in an article in Vanity Fair, saying "I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too".

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.