News roundup, 12 May 2026

- Eileen Wang, the mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to acting as an "illegal foreign agent" of China. This apparently involved the creation of a news website for the Chinese community, which carried the Chinese state's version of news and current affairs. That in itself doesn't sound like a crime, however the US alleges that she and her co-conspirator were posting specific articles requested by the Chinese government and reporting back with screenshots and hit counts, all without disclosing that she was doing so at the request of China. That definitely sounds a bit more suspect, as does the accusation that her co-conspirator is accused of "cultivating" her in the hope of strengthening China's influence in California. That said, under other circumstances I'd be suspicious of the truth to these claims; I could easily see the Trump regime manufacturing these kind of charges against a political enemy - but her plea agreement casts some doubt on that possibility.

- Winnipeg's Siloam Mission is laying off 16 staff and reducing hours at its drop-in space beginning in June. The organization is caught in a pinch between increased homelessness (meaning more demands for their services) and a decline in donations (which has been observed across the charitable sector in Canada). The organization is also riven with internal turmoil following the hiring of new CEO Sonia Prevost-Derbecker; she began her term with an organizational review to get to the bottom of the financial difficulties, but was immediately hit with accusations of making derogatory comments about indigenous people (despite being indigenous herself). Not being privy to any internal discussions, I can't say who's to blame - but in any case, as a friend of mine who used to work there says, we can expect the downtown to look worse than usual this summer.

- The backlash against the use of existing social housing stock to house previously homeless people continues. The Your Way Home program, introduced by housing minister Bernadette Smith, ultimately aims to use 20% of Manitoba Housing's stock for this purpose. Several longtime residents of Manitoba Housing buildings are up in arms - but it's worth noting that the biggest noisemaker quoted in the article lives in a building that's not part of the program. More reasonably, Erika Wiebe of the Right To Housing Coalition favours keeping 55+ buildings out of the program and improving support for residents as well as security.

- Ontario's education minister Paul Calandra is ordering school boards to make sure that graduation ceremonies remain apolitical. This follows an incident last year when an Ottawa student included pro-Palestinian remarks in her graduation speech. Calandra warns that he "will not hesitate to consider every tool available to me in the Education Act"; this comes not long after the passage of new legislation that makes it easier for the province to take over school boards.

- A new issue related to data centres has emerged - noise pollution. For one thing, many of these centres generate their own power using gas turbines, which produce a sound similar to a jet engine (since that's essentially what they are). There are also reports of low-frequency vibrations (infrasound) near these centres, which aren't audible to humans but have been associated with physiological effects like headaches and nausea.

- Country singer (and fourth-generation Albertan) Corb Lund is getting called a "woke bastard" for his stance on coal mining in the Rockies. Danielle Smith's government is lifting a moratorium on mining on the eastern slopes that was imposed by Peter Lougheed's government half a century ago and was accepted as necessary by all parties until Smith came along; Lund is among those gathering signatures to force a referendum on the matter.

News roundup, 5 Feb 2026

- Jeff Bezos has ordered massive layoffs at the Washington Post, affecting a third of the newspaper's workforce. Among other things, the entire Middle East desk will be gone, as will be the paper's Ukraine bureau chief and correspondent. Former Executive Editor Marty Baron condemns this and previous decisions by Bezos, which he calls "ill-conceived". The thing is, though, they're only "ill-conceived" if you're thinking in terms of the greater good; if you're thinking in terms of Bezos' personal interests they aren't ill-conceived at all, especially in light of how Donald Trump is making new threats regarding the broadcast licenses of major networks in the US.

- The Trump regime appears to be issuing selective exemptions to tariffs for companies with which he has a good relationship. Nothing suspicious about that at all...

- Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi is warning federal leadership candidates to treat Alberta with kid gloves so that he has a chance of defeating Danielle Smith next year. Meanwhile, leadership candidate Rob Ashton singled out Avi Lewis for "turning New Democrats against each other".

- The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is taking over the Golden Door Geriatric Centre, a personal care home in the Fort Garry district of the city whose private owners had announced plans to close the facility. Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says that the province is working to fill the numerous beds that the owners had been leaving vacant in order to prepare for the closure.

- A little known fact - ICE actually has offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Their agents don't have the power of arrest in this country; they claim that these agents (who are not armed) assist in the investigation of international crimes. NDP MP Heather McPherson is calling on the Carney government to close those offices "until the human rights crisis is resolved"; whether the government will do so remains to be seen.

- Manitoba Hydro is hiring institutional safety officers for its downtown office tower following a seemingly random attack by a methed up teenager with a knife. Manitoba Housing is also hiring such officers for its downtown office. Unlike run-of-the-mill security guards, these officers have specialized training; they are equipped with handcuffs and pepper gel and are empowered to make arrests. CUPE, which represents Hydro employees, is calling for the officers to be deployed as soon as possible.

- Manitoba currently has the highest incidence of measles in Canada. To the surprise of few, these cases are concentrated mostly in the Southern Health Region, and in particular a church in Winkler, though some people were infected in Winnipeg after people from the province's Bible Belt were hospitalized at HSC. 51 confirmed and three probable cases have been reported in the province as of the 24th of January. This compares to 319 confirmed cases of measles and 29 probable cases last year, and only 18 cases between 2000 and 2024. At least 86% of the cases were in unvaccinated people; another 6.2% were in people of unknown vaccination status.

- Following the drowning death of a 12 year old student at a scuba school in Texas, her family sued the school. One thing that has come up in court is the fact that the school's owner had been caught on video bragging about the number of fatalities he'd gotten away with, which does not inspire confidence.

News roundup, 29 Jan 2026

- Some fear that the next round of "reapportionment" of the US House of Representatives will make things more difficult for the Democrats after 2030. I think this could be a hard problem to solve. The thing is, urban areas - and by extension, more urbanized states - are becoming more expensive to live in (this is of course a worldwide problem). And the kind of places where young people traditionally lived after moving out of their parents' houses are increasingly seen as desirable places to live even if you aren't young, which makes them harder for young people to afford them. So many of them move to less desirable cities in less desirable states - and many of those states are red states. On the other hand, this may well be academic given that we can't count on this year's midterms being free and fair elections anyway, much less those a few years down the line.

- Pierre Poilievre faces a leadership review at the Conservative Party's convention in Calgary on Friday. He seems likely to prevail given the lack of coherent opposition and his popularity among the party's base.

- The Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology is shutting down following a loss of over 55% of their enrollment after the federal government put a cap on international students. Renee Cable, the province's minister of Advanced Education and Training, says that students will be able to complete their programs at other institutions such as Red River College.

 - A pilot project being launched in Winnipeg  will see properties that have been seized by the city transferred to Manitoba Housing, renovated by the nonprofit social enterprise Purpose Construction, and sold to people leaving social housing.

- Research has found that self-service terminals at restaurants increase sales. This might seem counterintuitive to those who hope that a personal touch would seem friendlier, but the actual evidence suggests people are more likely to accept an upsell from a robot than from a person who they might imagine to be judging them for eating too much. 

- A court ruling in Colombia will outlaw cockfighting following a three year transition period to give those whose income depends on the sport time to find alternative livelihoods.

News roundup, 23 Dec 2025

- Mark Carney has appointed Mark Wiseman to take over as ambassador to the US, replacing Kirsten Hillman who announced her resignation earlier this month. Wiseman has previously served as chair of several investment funds, including that of the Canada Pension Plan, as well as having served as a manager at BlackRock. The choice has raised alarms in Quebec, though, because Wiseman has questioned the merits of supply management in the past, and there are thus fears that he might cave too easily to American demands on the matter. Carney, for his part, insists that supply management is safe on his watch; we'll have to see how that goes.

- The website for Global News, which has a brand licensing agreement with CBS for 60 Minutes, briefly hosted the segment that was spiked on the orders of CBS news chief Bari Weiss. The segment was removed from Global's website after about two hours. Global hasn't said why, but my guess is legal threats from CBS. In any case, screen recordings of the segment were taken by some users; a clip may be seen here.

- Security upgrades at a troubled Manitoba Housing complex in inner-city Winnipeg seem to be paying off, with a drastic drop in police calls to the building. Two years ago the police were attending daily and the place was so bad that no further placements were being made at the building and residents were getting their mail sent offsite due to the amount of theft. The controlled entry has no doubt helped, though one resident is ambivalent - even though he recognizes that things are much safer now, he says it "kinda brought me back to when I was in a residential school where we had more rules". Unfortunately tradeoffs like this are inevitable when trying to bring about a short-term solution to crime.

- The Kinew government plans to address differential pricing for groceries such as that used by third-party delivery service Instacart. The service, for their part, say that they aren't a retailer and don't control base prices; they've now also announced that they're stopping the practice that they say they never did before anyway.

- An AI weapons detection system recently installed at Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo, Florida sent the school into a lockdown after mistaking a band student's clarinet for a gun.

News roundup, 16 Jan 2025

- Premiers of all Canadian provinces and territories, with the glaring exception of Alberta's Danielle Smith, have pledged to stand together on the tariff threat from the incoming Trump administration. Smith is unwilling to accept any measures that have even the slightest impact on Alberta's oil and gas exports.

- Transcona MLA and Minister of Education Nello Altomare has died at the age of 61, apparently as a result of complications from chemotherapy after being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma.

- Chrystia Freeland is expected to announce her candidacy for the Liberal leadership this week. Meanwhile two MPs - Chandra Arya and Jaime Battiste - as well as former MP Frank Baylis have already announced that they're in the running - not that anyone's noticed.

- The City of Winnipeg will need to implement zoning changes in order to qualify for federal money for the much-needed upgrade of the North End sewage treatment plant. Specifically, the city will need to allow four units per lot; this does not sit well with some of the more NIMBY-friendly councillors, though.

- Manitoba's new homelessness strategy is getting good reviews from many, though not all, organizations that are dedicated to the issue. Detractors include University of Winnipeg professor Shauna MacKinnon, who has concerns about the fact that established residents in Manitoba Housing may be moved on, possibly into more precarious housing situations, in order to make way for people with more immediate needs; this could be problematic given the low vacancy rate in the city.

- Ontario premier Doug Ford is musing about calling an early election, ostensibly in order to secure a mandate to take action to address Donald Trump's tariff threats. Many question the need for an election in order to take action; more likely, Ford sees bad economic times coming due to the tariffs and wants to ensure he's reelected before that happens.

- While fires ravage the Los Angeles area, the Bay Area city of Pacifica has a different climate-related problem - increased erosion from tides due to sea level rise threatens to destroy the coastline and the houses built there. The situation is sufficiently dire that there is talk of "managed retreat", i.e. moving residents and public infrastructure away from the coast, but not surprisingly this is a highly divisive topic - so much so that police have had to be called to council meetings to keep the peace. Nor is the problem limited to that city, state, or country - on the other side of the planet, the community of Port Waikato in New Zealand is facing similar concerns. The very term "managed retreat" is becoming politically toxic in some places, and there are attempts to rebrand it as "resilient relocation" in the hope of sounding less defeatist - even if defeatism is the only rational response in many such situations.

- RFK Jr. has been slow to admit how much money he's made promoting anti-vaccine disinformation. The antivax nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense, earned him $1.2 million, considerably more than he had previously stated.

- The California Air Resources Board was hoping to phase out diesel trucks and impose strict emission restrictions on locomotives, and had applied to the EPA for permission to do so. Unfortunately approval didn't come in time, and they're now withdrawing the request in the face of the incoming Trump administration (which would doubtless veto the move).

- Israel and Hamas have signed a ceasefire agreement; the agreement has yet to be approved by Israel's cabinet though. Netanyahu seems to be getting cold feet about the deal, presumably realizing that he needs to stay at war to stay in office and out of prison. Meanwhile, the bombs keep dropping as usual.

- The former mayor of Woodstock, Ontario, Trevor Birtch, has been convicted on two of three sexual assault charges he was facing. Prosecution errors led to a mistrial on a separate, unrelated sexual assault charge; an impaired driving charge against him is scheduled to be heard next month.