News roundup, 2 Jan 2025

- There was yet another aviation accident/incident on the weekend, when a de Havilland Dash 8, operated by PAL Airlines on behalf of Air Canada, landed at Halifax without its left main gear extended. Despite a fire breaking out, passengers were successfully evacuated without serious injury.

- The Jeju Air Boeing 737 that crashed at Muan International Airport in South Korea had passed a pre-flight inspection with no apparent issues prior to the fatal flight. The government has ordered that airline as well as another one, Aero K, to suspend operations while the matter is investigated; several safety violations not directly related to the crash have been found so far.

- There have been 16 major disease outbreaks on cruise ships in the last year; diseases include norovirus, salmonella, and pathogenic strains of E. coli. 

- Joe Biden has said that he could have won the election; he has, however, expressed regret for going along with advice to appoint Merrick Garland as attorney general. While I have my doubts that the first part is correct, Garland's failure to aggressively prosecute Trump seems worthy of regret.

- Finnish investigators have found a 100 km long seabed trail where the anchor of that Cook Islands-registered oil tanker seems to have been dragged, adding to suspicions that the undersea electrical cable to Estonia was the target of sabotage. Estonia has been trying to make its power grid independent of Russia, and many suspect that this didn't sit well with the Kremlin.

- Fifteen people are dead and around 30 injured following a vehicle attack on New Year's revellers in New Orleans on Wednesday morning. The driver, who was killed by police, was American-born, but a flag associated with ISIS/Daesh was found at the scene. Meanwhile in Las Vegas someone detonated a primitive device in a rented Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in that city, killing the driver and injuring several other people; police are still investigating whether the two events are connected.

News roundup, 30 Dec 2024

- Jimmy Carter, possibly the most decent human being to occupy the White House in living memory, has died at the age of 100. He probably didn't want to wait around for Trump's inauguration anyway.

- An Embraer 190 operated by Azerbaijan Airlines on a flight from Baku, Azerbaijan to Grozny, Chechnya has crashed after diverting to Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people on board. Russia is attributing the crash to a birdstrike; however, images of the crashed aircraft show shrapnel damage that is not consistent with this, and footage from inside the aircraft indicates that the cabin had depressurized. This has led others to suspect that the aircraft was damaged by Russian air defense systems, especially since according to some reports there was Ukrainian drone activity in Chechnya around the time of the crash. Russia is predictably warning against promoting "hypotheses" about the incident, but Azerbaijan says that it was indeed a missile and claims that the diversion to Aktau was necessary because the Russians wouldn't let them attempt a landing at Grozny.

- Skepticism about the Russians' claims about the Azerbaijan Airlines crash notwithstanding, a birdstrike is being investigated as the possible cause of a landing gear problem that led a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, a low-cost South Korean carrier, to crash and burn at Muan, killing 179 people. Two flight attendants are the only survivors; they were apparently seated in the tail section which separated before the rest of the fuselage was consumed by fire.

- Finland has seized an oil tanker after an undersea electrical cable between Finland and Estonia was disrupted just as the ship passed over it; it is suspected that the ship's anchor caused the damage. Finland suspects that the tanker, which is officially registered in the Cook Islands, is actually part of Russia's "shadow fleet" and that the disruption of the cables was deliberate. Sweden is calling for NATO members to meet to discuss the matter.

- An Oregon pet food company, Northwest Naturals, has recalled one of its products after discovering that it was infected with avian influenza.

News roundup, 13 Feb 2024

- The Kinew government is reevaluating the outsourcing of Manitoba's park reservations and hunting and fishing licenses by the previous government, which has handed over $5 million to a Texas based company.

- Former Tory cabinet minister Rochelle Squires thinks that when the NDP's honeymoon period is over, it is the Liberals, rather than her own party, that stand to make gains. She attributes this to the Tories' hard right turn in the election campaign.

- Following a spike in 2020, violent crime rates in the US have dropped considerably. When you ask people, though, they tend to think it's still increasing; in a poll released in November, 77% of respondents believed that there was more crime in the US than the previous year. That said, some specific crimes, such as carjacking, have increased in recent years.

- The US Senate has approved a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 22 Republican senators voted along with the Democrats on the matter. Whether it will make it through the House of Representatives is more doubtful. After all, if the government manages to get anything done in the next seven months, Biden might get credit for it.

- A PAC called Fairshake is pulling out all the stops to try to stop Democrat Katie Porter from getting elected to the Senate. The PAC is backed by the cryptocurrency industry; she has not made much in the way of specific statements about crypto, but she is in favour of consumer protections and is an ally of Elizabeth Warren, so I guess that spooks the techbros.

- The MAGA crowd are claiming, as expected, that the Super Bowl was rigged in order to shine a spotlight on Taylor Swift so that she can encourage young people to vote. I guess most young adult Americans hadn't heard of her before the game. In any case, Trump has had a hate on for the NFL for some four decades, dating back to his ownership of the New Jersey Generals of the rival USFL. That league collapsed within a few years, a collapse for which he has been partly blamed.

- Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, as well has her state secretary and the Lithuanian culture minister, have been put on a wanted list by Russia, over the removal of Soviet era war memorials that were considered to excessively glorify the USSR.

- Two Al Jazeera journalists were seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike. Both were apparently clearly identifiable as media; they were relatively lucky compared to the 85 journalists (78 of them Palestinian) who have been killed in the conflict so far.

- The woman killed after opening fire at that megachurch in Houston had a lengthy criminal and psychiatric history, but somehow was able to get her hands on an AR-15. There are some indications that she may have been partly motivated by the church's open support of Israel.

- A legislator in Idaho has introduced a bill to amend the state's existing cannibalism law (yes, they have one) to make it an offense to "willfully provide the flesh or blood of a human being to another person to ingest without such person’s knowledge or consent". Fair enough I guess, but I don't think cannibalism is a major problem even in Idaho; apparently she was motivated by Washington's recent legalization of "human composting" and imagined that the compost resulting from this would turn up on the shelf at her local Home Depot (spoiler: it won't anyway) as well as a decade-old clip from a TV show in which someone was pranked into thinking they'd consumed human flesh, which led her to believe that cannibalism was going to be somehow "normalized" any day now.