News roundup, 27 May 2025

- While residents in Lac du Bonnet and nearby areas have been allowed to return home following wildfires, several more northern communities are not so fortunate. Pimicikamak Cree Nation has evacuated vulnerable residents, and the entire town of Sherridon is being evacuated; meanwhile the community of Bissett is on alert due to the fires that continue in Nopiming Provincial Park.

- The federal NDP's leadership is drawing fire for devoting a lot of party resources to a last-ditch effort at salvaging Jagmeet Singh's seat in Burnaby Central, possibly at the expense of other, more winnable ridings.

- Members of the Point Douglas Residents' Association are accusing the Main Street Project of helping people to set up a new encampment. The province says the people in question have since been housed and have asked the organization not do do that in the future. One complainer says the MSP told him that the relocation was due to flooding risks at another encampment, but he's upset that the people had to be put somewhere that he can see them.

- A 53 year old man has been arrested after driving a car into a crowd of soccer fans in Liverpool. More than 20 people were injured, several of them seriously; police insist that this is "not terror-related" (perhaps because the suspect is white).

- Less than 5% of Gaza's cropland remains undamaged and accessible to Palestinians.

- When a Winnipeg-area man man named Jaswinder Singh Brar defaulted on a loan for a semi truck, the financing company put liens on all properties in the city owned under that name. Problem is, there are several people by that name who own properties here. One of them managed to get the lien removed after he contacted the financing company and submitted evidence that he wasn't the same guy; the fate of others is unclear.

News roundup, 30 April 2025

- Mark Carney's Liberals won their highest share of the popular vote in decades on Monday, receiving 43.5% of the vote. Paradoxically, the Conservatives also won their highest vote share in decades, at 41%. This means a number of things - most notably, that the Liberals were bailed out by NDP and Bloc voters. How much longer that can continue to happen is an open question. And it means that despite the Liberals' high share of the popular vote, they fell just short of a majority with 169 seats. It also, however, shows that the inefficiency of the Conservative vote masks some pretty strong divisions. If you go to the interactive map of results and click on rural ridings won by the Cons, you'll see margins of victory of 60, 70, or even 80%. And like it or not, those people are not going away any time soon, meaning the Conservative Party will not become more moderate for the foreseeable future. And this in turn means that the NDP will likely go into the next election with their prospective voters pondering the same tactical voting question that they did this time.

- Despite failing to win his own seat in addition to failing to defeat the Liberals, Pierre Poilievre says he intends to stay on as Conservative leader. It's possible that the speech was written before it became apparent that he was going go lose his seat; nonetheless, some party strategists believe that he can and should stay on as leader (possibly asking someone in a rural Alberta riding to step aside so he can run in the byelection). Oh, and one interesting tidbit - by law, Stornoway is reserved for the "Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons" - without a seat, Poilievre may have to move out of there unless he can get back into the House pretty quickly.

- Donald Trump is apparently aware of his impact on the Canadian election. Currently he seems to be twisting this into some sort of perverse pride - "I'm so important Canadians couldn't ignore me". Given his volatility, we'll have to see how this evolves in the future.

- Manitoba's public health officials are trying to build trust with rural communities in the province's Bible belt in the hope of increasing the vaccination rate enough to prevent a full-scale measles outbreak. So far nine cases have been confirmed in the province, as well as four suspected cases with known connections with the outbreak in southern Ontario. Meanwhile modeling by Stanford University has concluded that there is a significant risk of the disease coming back in a big way - along with polio, rubella, and all kinds of other nasties.

- North Dakota's hospitality industry continues to take a severe beating as Canadians no longer want to spend money in a country that has threatened to take over Canada, and perhaps doubly so in a state that voted overwhelmingly for the guy who's making all the threats.

- One of the problems of using generative AI for your front line customer service is that AIs sometimes just make stuff up. People who contacted customer support for an AI-driven coding assistant regarding getting logged out of the app were told that this was "expected behaviour" under a "new login policy". The problem is, there was no such new policy. Stuff like this is not good publicity for any company, but especially when your primary product is itself dependent on AI. Companies are also finding that it weirds people out when an AI answers their call to a customer service line and starts calling them by their name unprompted, as if the AI had been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People or something.

- A woman says she was bitten by bedbugs when staying at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre to give birth to twins.

News roundup, 29 April 2025

- Mark Carney has retained power, but appears to have fallen short of the 172 seas needed for a majority; the Liberals show as leading or elected in 168 seats as of this morning. If these numbers hold, that could still give the much diminished NDP caucus the balance of power. With only 7 seats, though, the NDP loses party status; leader Jagmeet Singh has been soundly defeated in his own riding of Burnaby Central and has resigned as leader. As for the Greens, Elizabeth May held onto her seat in Saanich-Gulf Islands, but her colleague Mike Morrice is behind the Cons in Kitchener Centre, though the results aren't final as of this post. On a more positive note, Pierre Poilievre has been defeated in his riding of Carleton. Full country-wide results may be found here.

- Besides the designs Donald Trump has on the Panama Canal, he's also turning his attention to the Suez Canal. He thinks that American and American-registered ships should be exempt from canal tolls, because Americans are special or something.

- A small ferry in Clearwater, Florida was hit by another vessel which then left the scene of the accident. One person on board the ferry died and several more were injured. From the pictures in that article, the ferry is one of those catamaran ones with a tentlike canopy; it looks like it might be the topmost picture on the ferry company's page about their fleet, which seats 42. The AP story states that "police did not immediately provide any information about the boat that fled the scene", but one ferry passenger in this article described it as a "big yacht". What stands out more to me, though, is the statement that the U.S. Coast Guard and Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission will be investigating; isn't that supposed to be the NTSB's job?

- There has been a significant change in opinion among registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents as to how the party's leaders should be dealing with the Trump agenda. In 2017, 74% wanted Democrats in Congress to "work with Republicans" to overcome the divisions in society; now, however, 57% want to see congressional Democrats do their utmost to try to stop them. The party's leadership, though, has yet to figure out what to do about the situation.

- An Irish woman who had lived in the US since childhood has been detained at an ICE facility in Tacoma over past criminal convictions. She had been convicted of drug possession more than 20 years ago, but under the understanding that the convictions had been expunged, she had travelled back and forth between the US and Ireland numerous times without trouble - until now.

- A massive power outage affected the entire Iberian peninsula on Monday; Portuguese authorities are blaming the blackout on extreme temperature variations.

- A Northern Irish rap group, Kneecap, has raised eyebrows after footage emerged of a gig a year and a half ago in which one of the members said "The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP".

News roundup, 27 March 2025

- Winnipeg police now believe that the woman hitherto known as Mashkode Bizihiki’ Ikwe ("Buffalo Woman") was Ashlee Shingoose of St. Theresa Point First Nation, who went missing in March 2022. Moreover, based on when she is believed to have been killed and the location of the bin where she was dumped, they now believe that her remains were taken to the Brady Landfill. This does offer at least some hope that something of her will be found. 

- Jagmeet Singh admits that the NDP faces "massive challenges" in the coming election, as the anti-Conservative vote is coalescing almost entirely around the Liberals. Former leader Tom Mulcair sums it up in terms of what is known as "the ballot question"; the threat from the US is the sole deciding factor for most voters, and it's increasingly turning into a two party race (Mulcair notes that the Bloc is struggling as well).

- Wildfires in South Korea have killed at least 24 people and destroyed a 1,300 year old temple in Uiseong City, though fortunately relics from the temple were removed in advance of the fire. Wildfires have historically not been common in the country, and this is the biggest death toll from such fires that the country has experienced.

- Eascan Automation Inc., a Winnipeg-based company that provides custom-built industrial robots to manufacturers, has laid off a third of its workforce owing to the fact that while most of their clients are Canadian, the products they manufacture are heavily dependent on the US market, meaning they're not in a hurry to upgrade their equipment right now.

- Immigration lawyers are advising Canadians living in the US to avoid international travel for the time being, given the increasingly unpredictable nature of ICE. One Toronto-based lawyer points out that even people who successfully got green cards after having previously gotten into trouble have had their old mistakes brought up at the border when they try to reenter; in addition, there is a danger that anything you might have ever posted online could be dug up and used against you. Myself, if I were giving advice, I wouldn't be advising against international travel. Quite the contrary - I'd advise any Canadian - or other foreign citizen - living in that benighted country to take a one-way international trip as soon as possible.

- It seems that the Atlantic journalist who was inadvertently sent sensitive military plans was not the biggest security risk in that chat group. Steve Witkoff, who serves as an envoy to the Middle East as well as Ukraine, was part of the chat group - and he was actually in Moscow at the time it was sent.

- The estranged wife of slain California fire captain Rebecca Marodi has been captured alive by Mexican authorities and sent back to the US to face trial for first degree murder. She has pleaded not guilty. Somehow I doubt she'll get it knocked down to manslaughter like she did last time she did something like that, though.

News roundup, 14 March 2025

- An American Airlines Boeing 737 en route from Colorado Springs to Dallas made an emergency landing in Denver due to an engine issue, and then caught fire as it was taxiing to the terminal. The aircraft was successfully evacuated without any serious injuries, though.

- Donald Trump once again repeated his threats to annex Canada and Greenland, this time in front of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. Rutte, who previously served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, was notably quiet on the matter of a threat to conquer one NATO member in its entirety and steal a territory from another. Trump hasn't forgotten about the Panama Canal either; he's asked the military to develop "options" for the territory.

- The latest poll from Nanos puts the Conservatives at 36%, just one point ahead of the Liberals. The NDP is at 15%, which if nothing else is better than some early polls had them. The margin of error is 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, meaning that the two main parties are statistically tied. Notably, this poll was done before Carney took over as the Liberal leader. A poll from Leger a few days later, over a time period that includes the Liberal leadership election, has the two parties tied at 37% and the NDP down to 11%. The Leger poll also has a regional breakdown as well as a breakdown by age and gender; notably the Liberals are ahead in the 55+ age group but behind the Cons in younger age groups. I guess the silver lining to that is that boomers are more likely to vote; even then, though, it's a mixed bag, because the NDP does especially poorly in this group. So if the Liberals win there's a good chance it will be with a majority; while much better than a Conservative majority this would still be a disappointing result.

- South Korea sent a delegation to Ottawa to advocate for their country as a more reliable source of military hardware than the US. They're offering to sell advanced submarines with a 7,000 NM range; furthermore, they're prepared to set up maintenance facilities in this country and give Canada full access to the technologies behind the subs, which is more than the Americans are willing to do with some of their hardware.

- Empire Foods, the parent company of Sobeys, Canada Safeway, and Freshco, reports that sales of goods from the US are declining sharply as shoppers are increasingly unwilling to buy American stuff if they can avoid it.

- A Canadian entrepreneur was arrested by ICE while trying to reenter the US from Mexico in order to get a new visa, after her previous visa had been revoked. Because of the revocation of the first visa, she was told that she would have had to go to a US consulate outside of the country to reapply. The key phrase is "would have", because they weren't going to give her another chance - or even let her just leave and not return. She's currently being held in a private, for-profit prison in Arizona while they decide what to do with her. She describes the conditions as "inhumane", which is telling, because if they're treating a white person whose first language is English that way, it's probably worse for almost everyone else in the facility.

- A bill before Alberta's legislature to amend the province's Wildlife Act (which governs hunting) would, among other things, allow kids as young as 12 to use firearms without adult supervision. I can't see anything going wrong with this, no siree. The bill also allows "cervid hunt farms", where you'd be able to pay to shoot captive cervids (i.e. deer, including things like elk as well as whitetails or mule deer). They have that in some places in the US but it's worth noting that even the Alberta Wildlife Federation, which advocates for hunters in the province, thinks that allowing canned hunts is going too far.

News roundup, 3 March 2025

- Volodymyr Zelenskyy attempted to talk some sense into Donald Trump and JD Vance in a meeting at the White House on Friday. It did not go well; Trump and Vance spent the whole time berating Zelenskyy and trying to get him to grovel, and then kicked him out of the meeting without an agreement when he didn't. Europeans were appalled; Italy is calling for an immediate summit between the EU and the US, though it's doubtful that this will change anything. The Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne has made no bones about the scale of the disaster we are seeing; he warns that we have always underestimated just how far Trump will go, and that we're going to have to learn fast. Now it's worth noting that Coyne is a liberal (his cousin Deborah Coyne ran for the Liberal Party leadership in 2013), and a centrist or centre-right liberal at that. So he naturally sees the potential collapse of the American hegemony as an unmitigated disaster. From a more leftwing perspective, it's a bit less clear. Some hope that this could lead to a more multipolar world, where instead of a single hegemon you have a number of major powers (perhaps the US, EU, China, Russia, and India) balanced against each other. That is indeed possible, and it could lead to a good outcome in the long run. On the other hand, another possibility (probably more likely) is the US and Russia both become sufficiently weak due to their own failings that China simply becomes the new hegemon - and while the Americans have been far from benevolent overlords in much of the world I don't share the confidence of some leftists that the Chinese would be better. A third possibility that no new stable equilibrium can form and the world degenerates into chaos and, eventually, nuclear war; a fourth is something not unlike the scenario created decades ago by science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, in which the US and Russia (the USSR in the novels) form a political union called the "CoDominium" to maintain stability, which they do but at immense social cost. Given the friendly relations between Trump and Putin, and the fact that they seem to need each other, this last scenario actually starts to look sort of plausible.

- Jagmeet Singh is calling for Donald Trump to be "uninvited" from the G7 summit that Canada is hosting in Kananaskis, Alberta in June, and for the meeting to be refocused on building a "common front" against Trump's America. This seems to be a bridge too far for the federal government; energy minister Jonathan Wilkinson was particularly dismissive, calling on Singh to "find new advisers who could provide him with more thoughtful positions". See my comments above about liberals being unable to imagine an alternative to the existing world order; it seems that in Wilkinson's mind the only possible course of action is to continue doing CPR on the old order until rigor mortis sets in.

- A "guidance document" from the US Centers for Disease Control prohibits scientists employed by the agency from co-authoring papers with anyone employed by the World Health Organization. It further orders that employees who have co-authored papers with WHO employees that were submitted before the Trump regime took power must withdraw them, or remove their names from the papers prior to publication. Because "international" is a four-letter word to the MAGA crowd, after all.

- Tesla's sales in Europe have dropped by 45% since last year, even as EV sales overall increased by 37% over the same period. The company's stock has dropped by 23% since the start of the year.

- One of the many downsides of firing huge numbers of civil servants is that you end up with a lot of disgruntled people, who may become recruitment targets for foreign intelligence.

- Kash Patel, Trump's new FBI director, wants the agency to establish a formal relationship with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I guess he figures submission holds could be a useful technique for interrogating prisoners.

News roundup, 23 Dec 2024

- Justin Trudeau's new cabinet includes eight MPs who have never served in cabinet before. Given that Jagmeet Singh has decided that enough is enough and that the NDP is ready to vote non-confidence at the first opportunity, they may have little more to show for it than the right to say that they were once a cabinet minister.

- Manitoba's government hopes to have some movement on the homelessness file in the near future; they plan to have people moving from encampments into more stable housing within the first few months of 2025.

- The US narrowly averted a government shutdown after passing a budget at the last minute in the wee hours of Saturday morning with some provisions sought by the Democrats removed.

- Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates so as to deprive Trump of the pleasure of kicking off his second term with an orgy of executions.

- Ukraine's prosecution service says that at least 147 Ukrainian POWs have been executed by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Of those, 127 occurred just this year.

- In a rare bit of good news on the invasive species front, a population of the Asian Giant Hornet (often known as the "murder hornet") that got established in Washington State a few years ago has apparently been eradicated, as has another population in BC. Across the Atlantic, a population in England seems to have been contained as well. Of course, it's a lot easier to locate nests to eradicate when the target is a spectacular orange and black wasp that grows up to 5 cm long and is active out in the open during the daytime than it is with many invasive animals.

- A 31 year old employee of a manufacturer in Michigan is accused of stabbing his boss at a staff meeting.

News roundup, 20 Dec 2024

- Donald Trump is suing media outlets who report negative stories about him. Among the defendants are a newspaper that published a negative poll about him (he's suing the pollster too, of course), as well as the Pulitzer Prize foundation for giving awards to newspapers that reported on his ties to Russia.

- Justin Trudeau is reportedly preparing to announce a major cabinet shuffle today, in an attempt to fill the holes left by recent resignations; meanwhile more MPs keep coming out of the woodwork and calling for him to step down. For his part, Jagmeet Singh is unwilling to commit to bringing down the government in a confidence vote, but he isn't saying he won't either; he says it depends on the specific situation at the time of the vote. This is an eminently reasonable position, but unfortunately it probably won't endear him to a public who, especially in these times, tend to view caution as dithering.

- As has been predicted for some time, insurance companies are starting to cancel policies in areas facing serious climate-related risks. Nearly 2 million policies have been cancelled since 2018 for such reasons.

- Joe Biden has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to give California a waiver to enable the state to ban the sales of new fossil fuel-powered cars and light trucks by 2035. Eleven other states are also on board; the hope is that this will delay Trump's efforts to reverse course on EVs long enough for the automakers to shift their production to a degree that they won't want to undo.

- Montana's supreme court has upheld a ruling by a lower court that issuing permits for fossil fuel extraction without regard for climate change is a violation of the right to a clean environment that is written into the state's constitution.

- Residents of a Winnipeg apartment block who were evacuated last spring after structural issues were found in the building have been allowed to return home, though some lack confidence in the safety of the building and are declining the offer.

- A Winnipeg police officer who crashed his motorcycle last year was acquitted of impaired driving because the folks who took the blood samples used as evidence somehow "forgot" to label them with the date.

- Police in the Spanish town of Soria got a break in a missing person case when they found a Google Street View image of someone stuffing a corpse-sized object into the trunk of a car. Further investigation led to the discovery of remains believed to be the victim and the arrest of the deceased's ex and her new boyfriend.

News roundup, 20 Sept 2024

- Dozens of pagers and similar devices used by Hezbollah members have simultaneously exploded in two waves, killing over 30 people and injuring many more. Experts think this is a case of the Israelis playing the long game to get explosives into the supply chain for the devices; this may have been in the works for years. Gwynne Dyer has some ideas on the matter here.

- The fallout related to Mark Wasyliw's expulsion from the Manitoba NDP caucus continues. Caucus chair (and Riel MLA) Mike Moyes says that Wasyliw's conduct towards his colleagues and the premier shows a pattern of disrespect. Now if it's a longstanding issue, then the decision to expel Wasyliw may well have been correct - but in that case mentioning the tenuous Nygard connection, which has aroused the ire of law societies across the country, should have been avoided.

- Manitoba Hydro has plans to add 600 megawatts of wind power to the grid in cooperation with several First Nations and Metis governments. They are also trying to promote the use of heat pumps. The government concedes, however, that they won't be able to completely eliminate fossil fuels in the short term, though they want to make the power grid clean by 2035 and bring the entire province to net zero by 2050.

- Despite pulling out of the supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals, federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is not going to back the Cons' non-confidence motion, and neither is the Bloc Québécois. Not surprisingly, the Cons are enraged by this, and some of their brownshirts tried to confront Singh on Parliament Hill on Tuesday (the Cons deny any connection with them, of course).

- South Carolina is preparing to execute a man even after new evidence, including his co-defendant admitting to having lied about his presence during the trial, has come forth. I guess they can't risk admitting that they could be executing an innocent man, otherwise there might be questions about all the other people they've executed over the years.

- A Kentucky sheriff has been charged with fatally shooting a judge following a confrontation in the judge's chambers at the Letcher County courthouse in Whitesburg. There have been no official statements about the motive so far, though there's some speculation here.

News roundup, 12 Sept 2024

 - Jagmeet Singh has indicated that he now opposes the carbon tax as introduced by the Liberals, saying that it puts too much burden on working people. I kinda, sorta get what he's saying, but I think a better approach would be to oppose the GST. If I was in charge, what I'd do is eliminate the GST and raise the carbon tax to make the change revenue neutral; that way there'd be no net increase in the regressiveness of the tax regime, but a strong incentive to shift one's purchases towards more environmentally benign things. Of course politics is the art of the possible, and maybe Singh fears that the existing carbon levy is so tainted by the fact that it was introduced by the Trudeau government that the only way to avoid being associated with the Liberals is to reflexively oppose it.

- The Toronto International Film Festival has cancelled the screening of Russians at War, a documentary by Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova. The film profiles frontline Russian soldiers, some of whom express doubts about the war, and its official description as submitted to TIFF describes the war as "unjust", but nonetheless some Ukrainian groups denounced the film as "propaganda" (perhaps because it humanizes the Russians too much for their liking).

- The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed new rules that would limit the sizes of vehicles for the consumer market. A good move on both safety and environmental grounds; unfortunately there's a good chance that auto industry lobbyists will kill it.

- A division of Cox Media Group has pitched the idea of having smartphones do what many have suspected for years that they already do - namely listen to ambient conversations and direct advertising to their users based on the content of said conversations. Notably, the pitch mentioned that Apple, Google, and Meta are all clients of CMG; all those companies have denied that they make use of this capability, but meanwhile Ford has filed a patent for something similar that would direct ads towards their cars' users.

- Following the sudden death of Cathy Merrick, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, at a public event, the Winnipeg Free Press published a photo of Merrick lying on the ground. The AMC was outraged at the publication of the photo and called for a boycott of the newspaper. The paper is apologizing for their handling of the incident.

- Peter Nygard has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for five sexual assaults committed in his company's Toronto office. Including credit for time served he'll be out in 7 years if he's still alive (a big if, that).

- A few thousand years ago the Sinai Peninsula was a much greener place than it is now. A Dutch engineer has a scheme to make the desert bloom, though some environmentalists fear that there could be serious unintended consequences, assuming that the scheme works at all.

News roundup, 5 Sept 2024

- Following the incident on Monday night when a woman was run over and killed by a police car driving through a park, numerous protesters blocked the intersection of Portage and Main yesterday. One vehicle attempted to plow into the protesters, hitting one of them (though not seriously injuring her); other protesters then attacked the vehicle and driver in retaliation. Video of the incident can be seen here.

- The decision by federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to scrap the supply and confidence accord with the Liberals may lead to an earlier election than planned - but not necessarily. Singh is keeping mum about whether he intends to bring down the government; he likely wants to delay an election long enough to benefit from being less closely tied to the Liberals, and even more important he probably wants to ensure that enough people see the benefits of the dental care plan to make scrapping it unpalatable to the Conservatives (who are virtually certain to win the election when it comes). Interestingly, recent polling suggests that the accord was supported by a slight majority of Canadians.

- A 14 year old in the Atlanta suburb of Winder has been charged with fatally shooting two students and two teachers at a local high school. The suspect had been interviewed by the FBI as recently as last year regarding alleged online threats to commit a mass shooting, but was not charged due to lack of evidence. Fun fact - guns are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 18.

- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is threatening legal action against two counties if they proceed with mailing out registration forms to enable voters to vote by mail. Not surprisingly, the two counties in question are both urban and have a large Latino population; can't make it too easy for those people to vote, you know.

- The far-right AfD has won a plurality of seats in the German state of Thuringia with over 32% of the vote; they may find it difficult to cobble together a coalition though, especially with party leader Björn Höcke hurling insults at prospective coalition partners including the Christian Democrats. Some think his real plan is to tolerate a minority government by one of the other parties until he can vote to bring it down at a convenient time.

- James Gaddis, a cartographer in Florida's state parks authority, was fired after he blew the whistle on a secretive plan to convert several environmentally sensitive areas into golf courses and the like. The plan was withdrawn after an uproar when it became public, but Gaddis was nonetheless sacked for "conduct unbecoming a public employee".

- A zoo in Toledo, Ohio had been maintaining natural prairie grass on the median of a nearby street. Unfortunately the city decided to mow it all down, apparently because the wild look upset some loudmouthed citizens' suburban sensibilities.

News roundup, 14 June 2024

- 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.

News roundup, 27 Feb 2024

- Aaron Bushnell, the American airman who burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy this past weekend, grew up in a peculiar Christian sect, and apparently had identified as an anarchist at some point. There is a long (albeit not large) history of suicides similar to his.

- In other news on the Israel-Gaza war, the governments of Ireland and Spain are calling for an "urgent review" of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. This treaty "makes respect for human rights and democratic principles an essential element of the relationship", which is kind of awkward when a senior UN human rights expert is accusing Israel of deliberately starving the inhabitants of Gaza, something generally recognized as a war crime.

- Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh believes that Alberta will eventually reverse their decision to opt out of a national pharmacare program, and points out that there were similar holdouts when medicare was brought in back in the 1960s. Meanwhile Quebec has also said that they'll opt out given the option.

- It's a good time to be a rightwing blowhard in this country apparently. The latest Nanos poll puts the Conservatives 17 points ahead of the governing Liberals; the difference between the Liberals and NDP is less than the margin of error. That's not surprising given Trudeau's low popularity; harder to explain is Doug Ford's continued popularity in a recent poll from Abacus. It's enough to bring to mind George Carlin's infamous remark: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

- Remember how a few years ago Cape Town was on the verge of running out of water? Well that's nothing compared to the potential crisis in Mexico City, one of the largest cities on the planet, which could run out in a matter of months.

- A judge in Texas has blocked a new federal requirement that cryptocurrency miners make public the amount of energy they consume, saying that the industry would face "irreparable injury" if made to comply. I don't know about you, but I think an industry that can't survive exposure to the truth deserves to die.

- France is outlawing the use of words like "steak" and "ham" to describe vegetarian substitutes for meat, presumably fearing that a bunch of hayseeds with pitchforks will come for them.

- Donald Trump is trying to argue that he's "too rich" to have to post bond while he appeals the judgment against him in the E. Jean Carroll case (apparently bond is for the poors), while simultaneously claiming that requiring him to post bond would do him "irreparable injury". Go figure.

News roundup, 11 Jan 2024

- Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent has died at the age of 87.

- South African delegates to the International Court of Justice in The Hague have presented their opening arguments in a case accusing Israel of genocidal acts. Meanwhile, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar has expressed discomfort with the idea, based on past crimes against Jews in Europe. Varadkar has, in fact, articulated what is probably the main reason a lot of people in the West want to handle Israel with kid gloves; probably there's a certain amount of guilt mixed in even on the part of countries that fought against Nazi Germany, given that many of them (including Canada) were not keen on accepting Jewish refugees from there back when it was really needed. And for their part, many Israelis are questioning what the war will achieve.

- Toronto police have charged a protester with public incitement of hatred for waving what is described as a "terrorist flag" at a demonstration. Police have declined to identify the specific flag that was waved; if it was an ISIS flag that would be one thing, but if it was a Palestine flag that would be quite another.

- A bomb threat was made against the home of the judge hearing Donald Trump's civil fraud trial. This follows the judge's ruling that Trump cannot make his own final arguments because he would not agree to stick to "relevant" issues.

- The National Review has published an editorial urging Republicans to select anyone except Trump for the nomination, on the grounds that it's the only reliable way to beat Biden. Encouragingly, a poll indicates that Biden now has a three point lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, so maybe the editors' fears are justified. In any case, whoever might beat Trump, it's not going to be Chris Christie.

- The US Food and Drug Administration is warning that vaccination rates, not only for COVID-19 but for numerous other diseases, are low enough that herd immunity is now at risk. Unfortunately the prospects for fixing this any time soon are poor, especially when even the Democrats don't want to talk about the subject, even as some 1,500 Americans a week are still dying from COVID. And some reports indicate that, in the case of COVID, that which does not kill you might make you weaker.

- At a Fox News town hall session, Trump was asked about a congressional report that found that he was paid almost $8 million from multiple foreign governments while president. His reply was that he was "doing services" for those governments, and that it was "a small amount" of money anyway.

- The Conservative Party of Canada's entire strategy under Pierre Poilievre is centred around framing the next election as a referendum on Justin Trudeau. Given Trudeau's dismal standing in the polls, that is understandable, and it may well work, but it's interesting to note that Deveryn Ross, a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and the Brandon Sun who tends to lean right, is not comfortable with this, fearing that it could backfire. Jagmeet Singh's NDP is not mentioned in the article at all, but a situation like this would seem to be ripe for exploitation for them, if they are both bold and lucky. Maybe that's what Ross is really afraid of.

- Worldwide renewable energy production is growing at a remarkable rate, which is very good news (in a "the future may not be very good, but at least there probably is going to be a future" kind of way. In Europe, wind has overtaken coal for electricity production, for instance.

- The Max 9 variant of the Boeing 737 remains grounded in the US following Alaska Airlines' little misadventure with one last week. In the course of inspections of their fleet, as well as that of United Airlines (the only other North American carrier to operate the type) several other aircraft were found to have loose bolts that would have the potential to cause a similar failure; it appears that the aircraft may have been delivered to the airlines in that condition. Boeing CEO David Calhoun admitted the existence of the loose bolts; when asked how something like this could have happened, he replied "Because a quality escape occurred". Have to remember that one, "quality escape". If you want the really geeky details of what is known about the incident so far, check this video out.

- It appears that China isn't the only place where they actively harvest the organs of people who die in custody. Several families in Alabama say that their deceased relatives have been returned to them with organs missing.

- In Florida, the Escambia County School District, serving Pensacola and vicinity off in the western panhandle, has apparently gone above and beyond in their effort to keep forbidden thoughts from impressionable minds - they've removed dictionaries and encyclopedias from school libraries.