- Benjamin Netanyahu is not sufficiently hardline for Benny Gantz, who resigned from Netanyahu's cabinet on Sunday accusing Netanyahu of failing to come up with a plan for victory. The thing is, Gantz and Netanyahu may have a different idea of what constitutes "victory"; for Gantz it would be the elimination of Hamas at a minimum, but for Netanyahu it would be staying prime minister and thus staying out of jail, so perhaps it's in his interest to drag the war out for as long as possible.
- While Elizabeth May says the intelligence report on foreign interference in Canadian politics left her "vastly relieved" and that she saw no any evidence that any MP was intentionally disloyal to Canada, Jagmeet Singh says he is "more alarmed than ever", which is understandable given that he was apparently targeted by unspecified foreign agents. As for Pierre Poilievre, he is unwilling to get the necessary security clearance to read the full report; Singh thinks that both Poilievre and Trudeau are, in their own ways, putting loyalty to their party over their country.
- Shannon Phillips, the Alberta NDP MLA and former environment minister who was put under intensive and probably illegal surveillance by Lethbridge police, has announced her resignation. As reasons, she cited the viciousness aimed at politicians, especially if they are leftwing and/or female (and it's a safe bet that she doesn't trust the police to have her back). The Tyee notes that Phillips is significantly to the left of the provincial NDP as a whole, which likely didn't make her decision any more difficult.
- Even if Joe Biden prevails in November, the Democrats are unlikely to retain control of the Senate, and it could be many years before they have a realistic chance of regaining it. For this reason, some are calling for Sonia Sotomayor (69) and Elena Kagan (64) to take one for the team and step down to allow Biden to appoint two younger liberal-minded judges, on the grounds that there is a very significant chance that they will die before it's possible to appoint another liberal, and this make the rightwing stranglehold on the court that much more dire. Some disability advocates are vehemently opposed to this kind of talk about Sotomayor in particular, saying that it's ableist due to her diabetes (though the Vox article above makes no mention of it), but perhaps they should look at the bigger picture, such as what might happen to the Americans with Disabilities Act if a court thoroughly stacked with Trump appointees decides it violates some rich person's property rights.
- Hunter Biden has been found guilty on federal firearm charges. In stark contrast to Trump and his supporters, Joe Biden says that he accepts the court's decision.
- Ukraine is following Russia's example in recruiting soldiers from its prisons, though they say that they aren't using coercion in the way Russia is. One of their new recruits was seven years into a ten year sentence for murdering his boss in a pay dispute; if nothing else, at least they can count on him not being too squeamish to kill people.
- Axon, the parent company of Taser, has announced an AI product that can supposedly generate police reports from body cam footage. This does not sit well with people who know anything about the reliability of AI, not least because the data the bots are trained on often has its own biases that too few cops would question.
- Winnipeg Humane Society staff arriving at work last Saturday found no less than 10 animals dropped off in front of their building, including a dog, 3 cats, and 6 rats. The notes left by the owners are rather sad (the rats' owner in particular was clearly in a bad way). It's a lot harder to sympathize, on the other hand, with puppy mill operators that abandon dogs that are no longer useful to them.
- An attempted carjacking in downtown Winnipeg failed because the carjacker didn't know how to drive a standard. To add to his misfortune, the victim was an off-duty cop, which doubtless made the police response time a little faster than usual.
