News roundup, 15 Jan 2025

- Several NATO countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, are sending troops to Greenland as a message to Donald Trump. Subsequently, France announced that they'll be sending troops as well. This follows an unsuccessful attempt by Danish diplomats to talk sense into the orange monster. There is talk of Canada sending troops as well, though Defense Minister David McGuinty says that no decision has been made on the matter.

- Unions and community organizations in Minnesota are calling for a general strike on the 23rd of January. Meanwhile, ICE is being accused of using private information, of the sort that's not supposed to be readily accessible to them, to intimidate people keeping an eye on them. Under Minnesota law, license plate readers and car registration data is only supposed to be accessible to law enforcement during a criminal investigation, but ICE seems to be getting around the safeguards. ICE has also shot another person, this one non-fatally.

- The FBI searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson on Wednesday and seized several devices, apparently in an attempt to find the source of a leak about a defense contractor that Natanson had covered in one of her articles.

- Trump is backing away from threats to strike Iran, saying that the government has reassured him that the killing has stopped. This is good news for international stability, unless of course it's happening because he thinks he needs to focus on Greenland. The least bad possibility (still very bad though) is that he wants his troops close at hand to use at home.

- Quebec premier François Legault has announced his resignation, just under nine months prior to the scheduled election. Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec is being clobbered in the polls; only 18% of eligible voters plan to support them. If an election were held today, the CAQ would come third in the popular vote, and fifth in seat count. Also resigning is Ontario Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie, who fared poorly in a post-election leadership review.

- Winnipeg's infamous Manwin Hotel, which had been vacant since last year when it was declared unfit for habitation, was destroyed by fire yesterday morning. The fire forced the evacuation of the Main Street Project next door, and it may be several days before the facility is able to reopen. Nobody died, which is more than can be said for rather a lot of days when the hotel was actually open. Housing advocate Marion Willis of St. Boniface Street Links calls the fire a "predictable outcome" of the city's lax approach towards vacant buildings. To their credit, the city seems to be moving towards potential seizure of such buildings; we'll have to wait and see how well they follow through with that.

News roundup, 29 Oct 2025

- Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica today, packing winds of up to 295 km/h. Three deaths have been reported in the country, in addition to three in Haiti and at least one in the Dominican Republic. The storm has since been downgraded to a Category 4 storm as it advances on Cuba.

- The Netherlands is holding an election today. Far-right leader Geert Wilders is facing a significant decline in support; it is expected that Wilders will be unable to form a government even if he manages to win a plurality of seats. 

- US ambassador Pete Hoekstra cornered Ontario's trade representative, David Paterson, at a Canadian American Business Council event in Ottawa, and went into a tirade full of obscenities about the anti-tariff ad that Ontario ran in the US over the weekend.

- A cruise ship left an elderly passenger behind on a small island off the coast of Queensland. The ship returned several hours later after the crew realized their mistake and a search party was sent out; she was found dead, so the ship returned to its itinerary as if nothing had happened.

- A Toronto woman says that her 12 year old son was interacting with the Grok AI chatbot, asking it questions about soccer, when the chatbot suddenly asked him, "Why don't you send me some nudes?" The chatbot was automatically installed into Tesla cars this fall. When CBC asked xAI, the Musk-owned company that developed the chatbot, about this, the only response they got was a terse "Legacy media lies".

- OpenAI is developing quite a track record for intellectual property violations. Each time, they apologize and say they won't do it again - at least not with the specific piece of intellectual property being complained about. It seems that they figure that there's no point in following the rules until lawyers get involved.

- A landlord in Vancouver used AI to look up information he used to defend himself in bylaw trials and civil proceedings, and presented arguments full of fictitious case law that the AI had generated. The joke may be on him, however, as he may have to pay the costs related to the provincial assessment authority's search for the non-existent cases.

- A Winnipeg Transit driver was taken to hospital after being assaulted by a passenger on Monday afternoon. The suspect remains at large; police are investigating.

News roundup, 14 Aug 2025

- RJ May, a Republican member of Congress from South Carolina, has resigned his seat after being charged with distributing child pornography. He is being held without bail pending his trial. 

- A 35 year old woman participating in Montreal's Pride parade was arrested after allegedly throwing a balloon full of a liquid that "smelled like urine" at members of a contingent from two Jewish organizations, Ga’ava and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. The participation of the organizations was highly controversial due to their rabidly pro-Israel stance (in fact the organization behind Pride had initially banned them from the event before being pressured into letting them participate). A member of Faction Against Genocide said in an interview that the liquid was actually nettle extract, and was intended to remind them of the smell of human corpses; that said, it does seem a bit over the top, even if the organizations are as odious as they sound.

- Speaking of Israel, temperatures of nearly 50°C were recorded in parts of the country on Wednesday. I suppose on the bright side, the Israel-Palestine conflict will be irrelevant if the land is no longer suited for habitation by Israelis. Palestinians, or anyone else.

- Air Canada is cancelling flights in anticipation of a strike by their flight attendants. I guess they prefer that to actually giving them raises that keep up with inflation.

- Police in Edmonton are looking for the driver of an SUV that apparently deliberately swerved towards a cyclist, causing significant injury to the victim. A video clip of the collision, apparently taken by a passenger, was posted to social media; evidently these people aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, but a blunt instrument can unfortunately do a lot of harm as well.

- A researcher with a butterfly conservation organization in the Netherlands has received death threats after publishing a report outlining potential impacts of pesticides on butterflies.

- A man visiting Winnipeg brought his bike along. He stopped briefly, and locked the bike to the bike rack on the back of the car. He'd only left it 20 minutes, but when he returned the entire rack had been removed from the car, bike and all.

News roundup, 30 July 2025

- A major earthquake in eastern Russia has led to tsunami warnings on the BC coast and throughout the Pacific. 

- An intelligence report from the Netherlands' National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) has identified Israel as a potential national security threat for the first time. This follows attempts by Israel to influence public opinion in the country following a soccer riot by fans of the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last year. Fans of the team were caught on video vandalizing property and threatening people, but the Israelis planted stories in the Dutch media claiming that their team's fans were victims of antisemitism. NCTV has also raised concerns about Israeli and American threats towards the International Criminal Court, which is based in The Hague.

- After Toronto police officer Jason Boag got drunk and crashed his car two years ago, the incident was described as having occurred "off duty". However, an investigation has found that his superior seems to have falsified paperwork to cover up the fact that he, Boag, and several other officers spent the better part of their shift drinking at a restaurant before the accident.

- Evacuees are returning to Tataskweyak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba after two months. They had left at the end of May due to the threat from wildfires, and then their return was delayed by problems with the community's water treatment plant.

- A Winnipeg teenager named who checked in to a fight from Calgary to Tokyo was found to have 30 kilograms of meth in her luggage. I have to assume she wasn't acting alone.

- Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was spotted having dinner with American pop singer Katy Perry at a posh Montreal restaurant on Monday.

- A 76 year old man in the Chicago exurb of Schaumburg has been charged with murder after allegedly shooting his daughter-in-law to death. Apparently he was displeased that she had filed for divorce from his son.

News roundup, 14 Nov 2024

- Tom Homan, selected by Donald Trump to be his "border czar", has cited the Canadian border as an "extreme national security vulnerability" and says that there will be "tough conversations" with Ottawa about security. Andrew Coyne, in yet another grim prognostication, predicts that Trump's plans for mass deportations may lead to numerous undocumented residents in the US trying to flee to Canada - and as Coyne points out, "whatever our leaders may say, we have neither the capacity to accommodate them all nor to refuse them – not with a nearly 9,000-kilometre border we have never had to defend until now."

- A strange fact - a significant number of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's constituents voted for her, but voted for Trump for president. To her credit, AOC did not sweep this fact under the rug, but instead went to her Instagram page to ask what they had to say. Their answers may hold a fair bit of significance for the Democratic Party, assuming that they have another chance in 2028. On the subject of counterintuitive voting decisions, it's worth noting that despite often using highly racist rhetoric, Trump actually won 46% of the Latino vote, and 55% of the Latino male vote. Juan Williams thinks that the reason is painfully simple - a lot of Latino men did not want a woman as president and were willing to overlook Trump's racism for that reason. Plenty of discussion in this Reddit thread.

- A Dutch appeals court has struck down a 2021 order from a lower court that would have forced Shell to cut emissions by 45% over 2019 levels by 2030. The court ruled, essentially, that while Shell does have a responsibility to cut emissions, and that developing new oil and gas fields are at odds with this, courts are not empowered to make any specific order (such as an end to new exploration).

- A Tory candidate in Nova Scotia's provincial election, which is being held later this month, is being accused by the Liberals of illegally bribing voters after her campaign handed out Tim Hortons gift cards to citizens.

- The controversy over math requirements for education students in Manitoba is being debated in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, with mathematician Anna Stokke facing off against education professor Martha Koch. Koch argues that such decisions should be based on research, which she says supports the changes being brought in by the government. That is all very well except that what we're talking about here is social science research, which is usually a lot less rigourous than the term "research" would suggest to the layperson. That said, keeping the requirements more stringent could have the disadvantage of reducing the number of people going into teaching; maybe we're stuck with a tradeoff between quantity and quality of teachers here.

- Wab Kinew has conducted a cabinet shuffle, splitting some department responsibilities and adding Nellie Kennedy, Mike Moroz, and Mintu Sandhu to the cabinet. Moroz will head the new Department of Innovation and New Technology. Kennedy is the first Muslim woman to serve in the province's cabinet.

- Delays in Ontario's court system are now so bad that the majority of criminal cases are now ending before trial, in order to comply with the 2016 R v Jordan ruling. This includes not just petty crimes but serious ones like sexual assault. The situation is being attributed to a shortage of judges, prosecutors, and actual courtrooms.