News roundup, 13 July 2026

- Reform UK is panicking about the possibility of Nigel Farage losing the byelection resulting from his resignation stunt. The party had been hoping to win the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, where polls showed them within striking distance after the position was vacated by Andy Burnham, but are now desperately shifting resources to Farage's riding of Clacton in the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of losing to Count Binface. Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph seems a bit worried too. Unfortunately it looks like the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is running a spoiler candidate. Kind of like one of the races in Monty Python's Election Night Special, except that this time it won't be the Sensible Party that benefits from the split.

- A recent poll of Canadian manufacturers found that 40% of them have either moved some of their operations to the US or are planning to do so in response to ongoing tariffs, while 11% plan to move their headquarters there. This isn't an exclusively Canadian problem, of course; Toyota is expanding its plant in Texas while reducing operations in Mexico, but voters tend not to care about such niceties - in fact they don't care if the people they vote in are worse than the people they vote out, because they're voting out of vengeance, not out of hope of improvement. So naturally this puts Carney in a tough spot. If he wanted to be really bold he could expropriate any plant closed in such a move at current market value, with the proviso that the compensation will not occur until relations are normalized with the US. I wouldn't count on him doing that, though; I don't think he's made of that kind of stuff (he is, ultimately, still a neoliberal at heart, even as he recognizes that neoliberalism doesn't seem to be working anymore). Maybe the NDP should start loudly pushing for that sort of thing; it's not like not being radical has done them much good at the federal level of late.

- South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham has died at the age of 71. On the other hand Mitch McConnell seems to be in better shape than many suspected, assuming of course that it was actually him that made the statement in question and not a staffer.

- A 37 year old man has been arrested after allegedly delivering a hateful and threat-filled tirade against two hijab-wearing women in a Costco in Halifax and assaulting someone who filmed his rant. He had to be Tasered after reportedly brandishing a weapon at police; he has been charged with assault, public incitement of hatred, and four counts of uttering threats to cause bodily harm or death.

- An economics professor at Brown University announced one year that one of his classes would use a take-home exam format. The class then had a surge of enrollments compared to previous years; when the midterms were marked, the average grade was 96% and 40 students got a 100% grade. Not surprisingly, the people who marked the exams found answers with a wording that was uncannily similar to the way ChatGPT answered the questions. At this point he decided to change the format for the final exam, making it an in-person test and warning the class that if the grade distribution was substantially different from the midterm, only the final would count towards the actual grade in the class. 27 students dropped out of the class by the time the final rolled around, of whom 22 had scored 100% in the midterm.

News roundup, 7 June 2026

- Another severe storm hit southwestern Manitoba on Sunday night. No tornadoes have been confirmed, but strong winds and hail caused substantial damage to property and cut power to about 6,000 customers. Floodwaters also came dangerously close to breaching dikes in the community of St. Lazare.

- The mayor of St. Andrews, Manitoba is suing her own municipality to recover legal fees incurred during her ultimately successful fight to regain powers that the RM's council had stripped from her. The episode began within a year of her election in 2018, after she clashed with five council members over a wastewater treatment project.

- Several centrist Democrats (who, it should be noted, are only "centrist" in the American context; they'd be considered moderate rightwingers in most countries) are running scared at the success of left-leaning candidates in several recent Democratic primaries. In an open letter called "The Promise to America" they explicitly declare themselves "capitalist, not socialist" and talk about "extremes on right and left". Well, they're  half right there, I suppose, in that the present day right really is extreme. But to imply that people like recent primary winners are just as extreme as the MAGA crowd one has to be either disingenuous or delusional.

- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has been in hospital since mid-June and very little information about his condition has been made public, at least at an official level. However, NBC has apparently gotten hold of a recording of EMS communications indicating that CPR was performed on a person at an address associated with McConnell on the day that the senator was hospitalized. The lack of information from his office since then has led some to speculate that he's being kept on life support to avoid forcing a special election (i.e. byelection); Kentucky law requires one if a vacancy occurs more than 3 months before the next election. Since McConnell's seat is one of those up for grabs in November, this would mean he'd have to be kept alive till August in order to avoid the kind of awkwardness that might result if, say, recently primaried representative Thomas Massie were to run for the seat. Speculative for sure, but not implausible.

- Far right fundamentalist Christian nationalist pastors/podcasters Wesley Todd and Joel Webbon called for churches that display Pride flags to be seized by the state and transferred to more pliant churches and their pastors defrocked and prosecuted. What's perhaps more interesting is that they warned allies who are running for political office to refrain from saying things like that out loud, because the voters aren't ready for such overtly totalitarian messaging. Webbon has said some other "interesting" things, such as telling parents that they're failing in their duty if they don't warn their kids to stay away from black people and that women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

- Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino after Team USA striker Folarin Balogun was given a red card during the match against Bosnia-Herzgovina; subsequently, FIFA then reversed the suspension in time for the Americans' match against Belgium. It wasn't enough to stop Belgium from giving them a 4-1 thrashing and eliminating them from the World Cup, though.

News roundup, 7 March 2024

- The World Meteorological Association has confirmed what many have already suspected - that this past February was the warmest in recorded history. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to have a good idea why, you just have to not be an idiot or an ideologue.

- Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed Donald Trump's candidacy for president, despite having previously said that Trump was "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and also despite the fact that he is stepping down from that leadership post. I guess despite the latter he still thinks he has something to lose by not endorsing Trump - his seat perhaps, or maybe his life.

- A Republican former member of Congress is warning that Trump's appeal outside the hardcore MAGA crowd might not be enough to push him over the top in November. Let's hope that's the case.

- The Manitoba NDP government is repealing a Tory-era ban on "project labour agreements". These agreements, which require non-union workers on projects be covered by the same rules as union workers, were common before 2016, and are allowed in every other province. Members of the Manitoba Building Trades agree with the repeal, however an organization called the "Merit Contractors Association", which claims to represent those non-union contractors, is not happy at the prospect of having to provide their employees with proper wages and benefits.

- The provincial Tories are trying to make hay with the Kinew government's lifting of the ban on school tax increases; the government says (I think correctly) that school boards need to catch up after years of Tory cuts. Unfortunately if you hold off on tax increases (either voluntarily or not) until you really have to, the increase will be that much harder when it comes.

- Los Angeles County has passed a law requiring that all food purchases by county departments be plant-based by default.

- A commissioner of Sussex County, New Jersey has left the Republican Party after the four other Republicans on the commission board voted to censure him for lying about his supposed military service.

- The Israeli government has ordered physicians and other healthcare workers not to cooperate with a UN commission investigating atrocities committed by Hamas in October, calling it "an anti-Israeli and antisemitic body". In other Israel/Palestine news, even Germany, which has tended to shy away from criticism of Israel owing to not wanting to remind people of their own rather problematic history with the Jewish people, is condemning new settlements planned for the West Bank.