News roundup, 29 Sept 2026

- Manitoba Progressive Conservative leader Obby Khan has resigned, not only as party leader but from the caucus; he will sit as an independent for the remainder of his term. Khan had recently survived a confidence vote by his caucus, winning the vote 13-6, and had initially planned to stay on but learned over the weekend that a "small group of MLAs" intended to continue to push for his removal.

- Donald Trump's threatened import bans on several Canadian products, including motorcycles, alcoholic beverages, dairy byproducts, and molasses, have taken effect. The impact of these bans may not be very significant, though the alcohol will hit a bit harder than the others. Nonetheless, Trump is convinced that Canada will back down any day now.

- Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally has just gained enough seats in the French senate to have party status in that assembly. Senators in France are indirectly elected by municipal and regional representatives.

- South Africa's ambassador to the US, who is white, is rejecting the claim by the US that there is a campaign of genocide against people like him. That hasn't stopped the US from accepting nearly 13,000 white South Africans as refugees, at a time when they are quick to dismiss most refugee claims. Of course, the people claiming that there is a genocide are mostly far right racist types - in other words, exactly the kind of people that Trump and his supporters want in their country. Pastor Rudi Swanepoel, who is also white, believes (probably correctly) that the real thing many white South Africans fear is not persecution but loss of privilege (mind you, to people who have grown up with privilege the two might appear to be the same thing).

- Chinese researchers say they are making progress towards proton-boron fusion, which has the potential to be much more useful than the deuterium-tritium fusion being focused on by most other researchers. Besides not requiring scarce isotopes, proton-boron fusion is aneutronic whereas D-T fusion produces high energy neutrons that would gradually make the containment materials radioactive. Getting the reaction to scale, though, is expected to be much more difficult than with D-T fusion.

News roundup, 3 July 2026

- The Bank of England has announced that fossil fuel companies' debt will be downgraded from October onwards. Other central banks are taking similar measures; some 40 of them use a statistic called "weighted average climate intensity" (WACI); notably one of the easiest ways to improve that statistic is to sell US Treasuries. The fact that it's the Telegraph (aka the "Torygraph") reporting this is particularly interesting, given that paper's general hostility to things like renewable energy. Unfortunately, the changes that result probably won't happen in time to stop the collapse of the Thwaites glacier and the resulting sea level rise (possibly up to 2 metres by the end of this century), but it might buy some time to adapt to the rise.

- Spain has banned state-owned enterprises from entering into new contracts with Palantir on national security grounds. Other places are taking measures as well; London's mayor Sadiq Khan recently blocked a £50 million contract that the Metropolitan Police had negotiated with the company. Palantir intends to sue over the matter.

- Wally Daudrich, the former Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership candidate who was disqualified from running in the Turtle Mountain constituency, has left the party in favour of the far right Keystone Party. He will be running for the latter party in the upcoming byelection in The Pas-Kameesak.

- Edmonton seems to be making excellent use of the land formerly occupied by the decommissioned City Centre Airport. The new neighbourhood, called Blatchford, is being developed with a lot of mixed use midrise buildings with retail on the main floor. This is something that many would see as simply good sense, but it's been difficult to build in much of North America for many decades due to archaic zoning laws. The buildings will be heated and cooled by a shared geothermal system and be well served by the city's LRT.

- A recent study in BC has found that life expectancies in the province are diverging. As of 2024, the provincial average has increased since 2004, and in most of Metro Vancouver (with the stark exception of the Downtown Eastside and vicinity) as well as the Victoria area, people can be expected to live substantially longer. A resident of Richmond born in 2024, for instance, should have an average life expectancy of 89.4 years. The Downtown Eastside itself, not surprisingly, has the lowest life expectancy in the province, but notably the province's interior is doing badly as well - and the farther inland you live, the worse your life expectancy is on average. It's not simply that the interior isn't gaining, it's actually retreating - the life expectancy there actually rose between 2000 and 2014 and has been declining since.

- Nine monks on a pilgrimage walk in Thailand were killed when they were hit by a pickup truck driven by an 11 year old boy. The child is in custody.