News roundup, 31 March 2026

 - Executives in Canada's federal civil service will be required to return to the office five days a week as of the 4th of May, and all other civil servants will be have only a single remote day per week. This comes despite the recommendation by the International Energy Agency that people "work from home whenever possible" to mitigate the risk of oil shortages as a result of the Iran war; the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, which represents some civil servants, is calling for the return to office order to be reversed. And Manitoba Hydro is also requiring its employees to be in the office four days a week as of this fall. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a similar fight is brewing as the Public and Commercial Services Union is calling for an end to the current policy which requires employees to be in the office 60% of the time. Plenty of other countries aren't waiting for it to become a real crisis; Thailand is not only allowing WFH but mandating it for those who can do so; Pakistan and Bangladesh are taking similar measures. It's worth noting that those countries are more dependent on oil imports than Canada and the UK are, and I suspect that commercial real estate, not to mention the kind of culture wars we see in the West, are not as big a factor there as in richer countries either.

- The Financial Times has reported that a broker at Morgan Stanley with ties to Pete Hegseth tried to make large investments in a defense fund in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iran. The deal apparently fell through because the fund had not yet been made available to Morgan Stanley brokers. The Pentagon is vehemently denying this, and is demanding a retraction from the newspaper.

- New legislation in Israel makes the death penalty the default sentence for certain kinds of terrorism - but the death penalty can only be used if the intent of said terrorism is intended to "negate the existence of the state of Israel". Presumably that provision is there to make sure no future government decides to use the law against West Bank settlers, some of whose actions against Palestinians could legitimately be called terrorism.

- The Ford government in Ontario has announced its intention to expropriate the City of Toronto's share in Billy Bishop Airport in the Toronto islands. They plan to extend the runway to allow jets to use the airport - something long resisted by Toronto - and to declare it a "special economic zone" so as to be able to exempt it from any municipal or provincial legislation that gets in the way of those plans. Prime Minister Mark Carney has diplomatically called the idea an "interesting vision" but has stopped short of endorsing it so far.

- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania decided to test how much trust people put in AI chatbots. Subjects were asked to answer a number of questions, and had the option of using ChatGPT to do so. More than 50% of the subjects across all the experiments blindly parroted the answers given by the chatbot. In one study, with a sample size of 359, subjects followed the advice of the chatbot almost 93% of the time when its advice was correct - but nearly 80% of the time when it was wrong. This is alarming given that these things are wrong far more often than many people realize - a study last fall concluded that these things misrepresent news content nearly half the time, for instance. Even more alarming is that there seems to have been an increase in the incidence of AIs deceiving people and disregarding instructions in the last six months. In one example, an AI agent that was instructed not to make any changes in code instead created a new agent to do it instead.

- China has introduced legislation that will ban the use of apartments to store cremated remains as well as the burial of corpses or the construction of tombs anywhere except public cemeteries. Apparently rental apartments are often cheaper than cemetery plots, so people just rent an apartment to store Grandma's ashes.

News roundup, 18 March 2026

- Pete Hegseth, in a press briefing, made the flippant remark "We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies". The thing is, the very act of someone near the top of the chain of command saying this may be a violation of American law going back to the Civil War, not to mention international law. 

- Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the US, has resigned, saying that he "cannot in good conscience" back the war on Iran.

- The partial government shutdown in the US and resulting shortage of TSA security screeners means that some smaller airports may have to close, just in time for Spring Break. That could get interesting for Florida businesspeople who gleefully supported Trump until now.

- The Israel question is starting to become an issue in Democratic primaries. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is spending huge amounts of money on primary campaigns, but there seems to be a generational shift that has caught AIPAC off guard.

- New polling from Leger suggests that 60% of the electorate says that the province is on the wrong track, but a strong plurality (48%) would still vote for the UCP if an election were held now. I guess as long as being on the wrong track is worse for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT* folks than it is for straight white dudes, Albertans are fine with it.

- Speaking of the UCP, their former candidate Caylan Ford, who had to exit the race after some of her comments came to light, is trying to sue the news outlets that reported on said comments, including the CBC, the Toronto Star, and Press Progress. A lawyer for the Broadbent Institute, which operates Press Progress, has pointed out that "you cannot be defamed by your own words". I should hope the courts will agree, but don't worry about Ford, she should be fine; all she needs is a GiveSendGo campaign to raise enough money from the rubes to more than cover her legal bills.

News roundup, 13 March 2026

- Mark Carney has finally come out and said that Canada will not participate (directly at least) in the attack on Iran, while still saying that "Canada supports the necessity to prevent Iran’s nuclear program and the export of terrorism". 

- A man is dead after ramming a vehicle into a synagogue in Detroit and exchanging gunfire with a security guard, who was wounded. Authorities say that the attacker was a 41 year old US citizen who was born in Lebanon. They say they haven't found a motive yet, but this probably has something to do with it.

- FBI director Kash Patel gutted a counterintelligence unit specialized in monitoring potential threats from Iran mere days before the US-Israeli attack on the country. One wonders what the motivation for this might have been - had the unit not gathered enough evidence of a threat to justify the attack? Or, more ominously, are they hoping that a major attack will occur that could serve as the "Reichstag fire" that Trump could then use as justification to cancel the midterms, and that the unit might actually foil such an attack?

- The Pentagon has banned press photographers from briefings on the war after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took exception to photos that he deemed unflattering to him.

- Bill C-9, the "Combatting Hate Act", was forced through committee by the Liberals with the assistance of the Bloc Quebecois, against the objections of both the NDP (who along with civil liberties organizations are concerned about the implications for freedom of protest) as well as the Conservatives (who are afraid about possible impacts on freedom of religion). It's kind of telling that the Globe and Mail glosses over the differences between the reasons for the two parties' objections.

- The Alberta Prosperity Project seems to be having difficulty getting enough signatures to force a referendum on independence, judging from the fact that they're now canvassing snowbirds in Arizona and Mexico. They have until May to get enough signatures, 

- Bob Gale, who was appointed by the Ford government as the chair of the Regional Municipality of Niagara, Ontario last December following the death of the previous regional chair, Jim Bradley, has resigned following revelations that he went to the effort (and considerable expense) to obtain an autographed copy of Mein Kampf. The fact that he was heavily pushing amalgamation of the lower tier municipalities in the region probably made him some enemies who might have blown the whistle on his rather curious collection habits.

- A Tennessee woman who was misidentified by facial recognition software was held for six months without bail and hauled off to North Dakota, a state where she says she's never been, over a bank fraud case in Fargo. Apparently they never checked to see if she had an alibi until she was brought there; perhaps it didn't occur to them that the software could get anything wrong. After it was shown that she couldn't have committed the crime they just turned her loose in a strange city until a volunteer with a prison-related nonprofit drove her to Chicago so that family could pick her up from there.

News roundup, 26 Feb 2026

- Anthropic AI, which has generally tried to position itself as the AI company with a conscience, has announced that it has abandoned its promise to never train AI systems unless adequate safety measures could be guaranteed in advance. The company was founded by people who left other AI companies that they believed weren't taking safely seriously; the reversal comes immediately after Pete Hegseth threatened to cancel the company's contract with the Pentagon if they didn't lift the limits placed on the military's use of their technology. Meanwhile, it has come out that AIs used in wargame simulations by the US military are way too quick to recommend nuclear escalation for comfort.

- A data centre under construction in Olds, Alberta is expected to consume as much electricity as Edmonton, a city of over a million people. And of course, Alberta being Alberta, it's going to be powered by natural gas.

- A Florida-registered speedboat entered Cuban territorial waters and its occupants apparently exchanged gunfire with the country's military. Four people from the boat were killed and six injured; one Cuban soldier was also wounded.

- Following a pilot study conducted in four neighbourhoods in 2023, City of Winnipeg staff have recommended that the default speed limit on residential streets be reduced from 50 to 40 km/h. This would require changes to provincial legislation to allow it, however. More promising, perhaps, is the fact that Coun. Janice Lukes, of all people, now claims to believe that a permanent bike lane on Wellington Crescent is warranted. Many of the folks in this Reddit thread are skeptical whether she's really onside, though. Given her suburban ward and sensibilities, some skepticism is probably warranted.

- A Hamilton police officer has been charged with possessing and distributing child pornography. He's been suspended without pay, something pretty rare in the police world, so I have to assume the evidence against him is pretty damning. I daresay he's not going to enjoy his time in jail. 

- When the US men's Olympic hockey team was invited to the White House, five members of the team declined the invitation. Probably no coincidence that all five have strong ties to Minnesota.

- Three people face charges of uttering threats after a series of hoax calls targeting Winnipeg schools. Two of them are teenagers, who probably thought it would be a clever way to get a day off school; oddly enough the third is a 30 year old woman from Toronto.

News roundup, 25 Feb 2026

- The Starmer government in the UK is refusing to allow the US to make use of bases at Fairford, Gloucestershire as well as at Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory in any impending attack on Iran. In response, Donald Trump is withdrawing his support for a prospective handover of the BIOT to Mauritius, not that it's supposed to be up to him of course. This could actually lead to something resembling justice for the Chagos Islanders, though only for a few decades at best because the islands only rise a few metres above sea level.

- The US Department of Justice removed several documents from the Epstein files that draw connections between Epstein and their Fuhrer. Others, some of which suggest that Trump may have abused a child, were withheld entirely despite legal direction from Congress, but NPR got their hands on them anyway. Not that Trump loyalists will listen to NPR anyway...

- A man has been charged with assault following a confrontation with striking municipal employees in the Rural Municipality of Tache, Manitoba. The man allegedly aggressively drove through a picket line at the municipal office, then shoved a union leader and took his phone after the union leader took video of his actions. The suspect is a 68 year old man from the neighbouring RM of Ste Anne.

- Conservationists as well as hunters are concerned about a federal proposal to amend migratory bird regulations to allow the hunting of Tundra Swans and Mourning Doves in the Canadian prairie provinces. In the case of the swans, there are fears that misidentified Trumpeter Swans, which are not allowed to be hunted anywhere in North America. In the case of the doves, there are concerns about the impact on the public perception of hunters, as they're the sort of birds that join songbirds at feeders.

- US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to blacklist Anthropic AI from working with the Pentagon because the company has ethical standards such as not allowing their products to be used to control weapons or for mass surveillance.

News roundup, 7 Jan 2026

- A widely circulated video that purports to show Venezuelans celebrating the ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro appears to be an AI-generated hoax. In other related news, the BBC has ordered its journalists not to use the word "kidnapped" when talking about Maduro's abduction. They can say "seized" or, when quoting US sources, "captured", but I guess they're afraid of not sounding impartial enough or something.

- The Pentagon is moving to cut the military retirement pay of former US Navy captain (and current senator) Mark Kelly. Pete Hegseth justified the move on the grounds that Kelly's reminder to active servicepeople that they have the right to refuse illegal orders constitutes "reckless misconduct".

- Federal NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis says that he wants to implement a "Green New Deal". The plan is ambitious, to say the least - a complete ban on new fossil fuel projects (not that his opponents won't still claim he wants to forcibly shut down all existing ones) and creating large numbers of new high quality manufacturing jobs making renewable energy infrastructure, electric buses, trucks, and farm equipment, and the like.  He probably won't become prime minister, of course, but I kind of doubt any of the other candidates in the race will be either. Certainly someone has to keep banging the climate gong to the masses, and Lewis is better qualified than most to do so.

- The push to force workers back into the office continues apace. Naturally, the employers justify this partly on the grounds of productivity (despite the fact that some studies suggest the opposite); CTV didn't cite those studies, though, they just quoted a couple of civil servants who "think" that you're more productive in the office, while quoting a human resources professor claiming otherwise. To be fair, the proponents of the return to office gave other reasons as well (vague platitudes about "collaboration" and "organizational culture" as well as some hand-wringing about downtown businesses), but there was no mention of the idea that the valuation of commercial real estate could be a factor. In the case of public sector employers, there's also straight up populism - a sizeable chunk of the electorate consists of people who can't work remotely due to the nature of their jobs - and they think it's "unfair" that others are able to, and vote for rightwing populists like Doug Ford. This resentment is shortsighed, of course - if more people worked from home, the people who can't would face much less traffic on their commutes.

- European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde is concerned about the lack of progress in the development of a "digital euro" to enable Europeans to continue to conduct e-commerce while distancing themselves from the American banking industry. The big barrier to this is a Spanish MEP, Fernando Navarrete Rojas of the centre-right European People's Party, who thinks that for a government to do this is an affront to the sanctity of the private sector and has been doing everything in his power to hold up the implementation bill for the currency. Not surprisingly, the big banks don't like it either, presumably because it would also enable Europeans to cut them out of the loop along with their American counterparts.

- A ban on the use of cellphones by students in New York City schools has been getting very good reviews, but it has revealed the rather awkward fact that many students don't know how to read an analogue clock. This isn't really a new phenomenon, of course; I heard anecdotes about that some 25 years ago, but I guess the fact that everyone had a digital clock in their pocket has masked that until now.

- Police in Heber City, Utah were caught in the awkward situation of having to explain why a report written with AI-driven report-writing software stated that an officer had been polymorphed into a frog. The cops believe that the situation arose when their bodycams, which apparently fed data directly into the software, picked up part of the film The Princess and the Frog playing in the background at a location they attended.

News roundup, 9 Dec 2025

- The US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are refusing to agree on an official summary of the findings of the UN's latest Global Environment Outlook, due to the report coming down too strongly for their liking on fossil fuels and plastics.

- Canada's Department of National Defense is trying to distance itself from the US attacks on boats in the Caribbean. However, this is not as simple as it might seem because of Canada's involvement in Operation Caribbe, a longstanding joint mission with the US Coast Guard. While it is the US Air Force and not the Coast Guard that has been conducting the attacks, both are under the command of US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, which limits the amount of political cover that can be provided by this. France has already condemned the attacks, and the UK and Columbia are suspending intelligence-sharing with the US in the region; so far Canada has not followed suit.

- Former cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault doubts that it will be possible to meet Canada's emissions targets due to recent moves by the government.

- A Canadian court has ordered French cloud provider OVHcloud to turn over customer data that is stored in Europe. Problem is, under French law it is illegal for the company to hand over the data. Penalties can be up to €90,000 and six months imprisonment.

- Despite fears of gridlock, the reopening of Winnipeg's Portage and Main intersection to pedestrians has had minimal impact on traffic. 

- In recent years the majority of fraud cases in Ontario have been dropped or stayed due to a lack of resources for prosecutors. The problem has gotten considerably worse since 2020 due to backlogs in the courts related to the pandemic.

News roundup, 2 Dec 2025

- The Kinew government's plans for a 72 hour detox facility in Winnipeg are a a source of concern for Ontario senator Kim Pate. While she believes the government has good intentions, she believes it to be an "ill-considered" response that will further traumatize already troubled people, and moreover believes that it might be open to a Charter challenge. On the other hand, some parents in BC want this sort of thing to enable their own addicted children to be treated.

- The Ontario coroner's office is calling for the legal definition of an e-bike to be tightened in the wake of several fatalities. Under current law, to be considered an e-bike a vehicle has to be speed limited to 32 km/h but can weigh up to 120 kg; the coroner is proposing that the weight limit be reduced to 55 kg. This would mean that many e-bikes, such as the ones that look like a Vespa with a couple of useless pedals added, would be considered motorcycles or mopeds and would require licensing. This would doubtless come as a shock to people who bought such e-bikes after losing their drivers' licenses.

- Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man suspected of shooting two West Virginia National Guard members in Washington, had worked with CIA-backed units in Afghanistan before being brought to the US. Unfortunately upon arrival his mental health began to unravel and even Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem admitted that he appears to have been radicalized after his arrival.

- US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordered a second strike on a Venezuelan vessel that was suspected of smuggling narcotics. Hegseth allegedly wanted to ensure that there were no survivors.

- Sales of electric, hybrid, and plug-in hybrid vehicles exceeded those of conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles in Europe in October. The devil in the details is the non-plug-in hybrids, whose emissions really aren't that much lower than non-hybrid gas cars.

- Australian children's entertainers The Wiggles were alarmed to find a song making reference to ecstasy (MDMA) played over one of their clips on TikTok. The group has made it clear that they do not condone drug use.

News roundup, 17 Oct 2025

 - In addition to the surviving hostages they have released, Hamas has released the bodies of 10 others, but say that they'll need specialized equipment to recover the rest due to them being buried in rubble. The Israelis also claim that one of the bodies they returned was not one of the hostages. Hamas also accuses Israel of violating the ceasefire by killing at least 24 people since Friday. It's almost as if Netanyahu doesn't really want the ceasefire to last (not that Hamas likely does either).

- The US Supreme Court is hearing a legal challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limits states' ability to gerrymander based on race. Not surprisingly, it is widely expected that the court will rule in favour of the challenge. The potential impact of this is hard to overstate - in parts of the country the Democrats could be virtually shut out. On the other hand, some are pointing out that blue states could play the same game. This could conceivably work in the Democrats' favour - but at a cost of reducing the diversity of Congress overall. Ultimately, though, I think that debate is pretty much academic - I don't see any scenario in which next year's midterms are sufficiently free and fair for the Dems to have any real chance of regaining control of either house of Congress no matter what some blue states try. Heck, I'm not 100% certain if there will be any midterms. I'd like to be proven wrong on that; I guess we'll know in just over a year.

- As of next month, the most populous and wealthiest US state will no longer be using coal to generate electricity. Some of this capacity is being replaced by natural gas, and some by hydrogen of unspecified origin (note that a lot of hydrogen is produced using carbon-heavy techniques), but a lot of it is because of huge improvements in renewables. California is also the first state to prohibit the use of AI to replicate real people. And Hollywood is having second thoughts about the technology given its implications for their intellectual property.

- Nearly every news media outlet in the US has refused to agree to new rules set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, despite being told that they will have to turn in their Pentagon press passes if they don't sign on. This includes not only those you'd expect such as the New York Times, CNN, and NBC but also rightwing outlets like Fox News and Newsmax; only the One America News Network agreed. The rules prohibit reporters working at the Pentagon from using any "unauthorized" material for their work, even if it is not classified material.

The Centers for Disease Control has lost some 25% of its workforce to the Trump regime's purges. Damage from a loss of expertise like that could take decades to repair, if ever.

- The antivaxxer, far-right activist, and multiple times failed political candidate Patrick Allard has lost his defamation suit against the Manitoba NDP. Allard had sued after the party described him as someone who spouts "racist rhetoric" during the 2022 byelection campaign in Fort Whyte. The judge acknowledged that the statements the NDP was referring to were sufficiently vague to have some plausible deniability, but concluded that the doctrine of "qualified privilege" applies here. The judge also noted that Allard had breached a court rule by leaking texts that had surfaced during the trial to the Winnipeg Sun.

News roundup, 2 Oct 2025

- US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a meeting on Tuesday with the military's top leaders, and told them to "prepare for war". He also fulminated about "woke" culture in the military and said that he doesn't want to see "fat generals and admirals" or efforts to contain bullying and hazing.

- An open letter from over 200 prominent politicians and scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, was presented to the UN General Assembly calling for binding international measures to contain hazardous uses of artificial intelligence. Given the pace of AI development, they're calling for an agreement to be reached by 2026. This is probably a bit much to hope for, especially given the current US regime's hand's off approach to the technology. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is particularly concerned about possible military uses of AI such as autonomous drones.

- Marjorie Taylor Greene, long one of Donald Trump's staunchest allies, is not backing down on the Epstein issue. She is refusing to take her signature off the petition calling for Congress to vote on the release of the files, even after an official said that any support for the petition by Republican representatives would be viewed as a "hostile act".

- One of the owners of the house on the outskirts of St. Thomas, Ontario that had a swastika mowed into its lawn worked as a nurse at Homewood Health Centre in Guelph until she was suspended by the College of Nurses of Ontario following a disciplinary hearing for multiple racist, homophobic, and other hateful statements made on the job. The swastika was added the same day by her partner. Both of them are now facing charges for criminal harassment and incitement of hatred; neighbours report that the couple frequently "blared loud white supremacist music" from the house.

- A staffer with the BC Conservative Party has been fired after calling a flag honouring residential school survivors a "fake flag" after it was flown at the legislature for National Truth and Reconciliation Day. The staffer, Lindsay Shepherd, has a history; she's the former teaching assistant who created a stir by playing Jordan Peterson clips for a communications class at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2017.

- A radio station in Surrey that serves the south Asian community was hit by gunfire on Tuesday; nobody was injured. The station had covered extortion threats in the community; Surrey, like numerous other cities across the country, has had a big problem with this of late.

- Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91. 

News roundup, 26 Sept 2025

- Former FBI director James Comey has been indicted on charges of making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. The basis of the indictment is a claim by his former deputy Andrew McCabe that Comey authorized a leak of information about the FBI's investigations into Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, something Comey denied in hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The indictment comes just days after Trump publicly called for it. 

- Tech billionaire Peter Thiel allegedly gave a lecture in San Francisco in which he warned that regulating AI could hasten the arrival of the Antichrist. His reasoning is not entirely clear, except that he apparently said that people's fear of existential threats could give them an appetite for the kind of leadership the Antichrist would provide. A curious side note from the article - apparently the UK office of Thiel's company Palantir is headed by Louis Mosley, grandson of 1930s British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley.

- Hundreds of senior American military officers have been ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to attend a meeting in Quantico, Virginia next Tuesday. The subject of the meeting has not been disclosed, leading some to speculate that a mass firing is in the works, especially given Hegseth's disdain for much of the current leadership of the military.

- The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has gone on strike in response to the federal government's proposed reforms to Canada Post, which include the elimination of home delivery and the closure of a number of post offices.

- An RBC employee has been charged with gaining unauthorized access to the accounts of Mark Carney and someone named Justin Trudeau - though in the latter case it turned out not to be the former prime minister but someone else with the same name. He allegedly told police that he was lured into the scheme by someone on the social media platform Telegram. Police believe organized crime is behind this, though I have to wonder if it was "regular" organized crime, or some kind of "gotcha" attempt sort of like when lawyers with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms hired a private investigator to spy on a judge hearing their case in the hope of catching him being hypocritical about the laws he was enforcing.

- Marchers in Fredericton's Take Back The Night rally were harassed by several young men on motor scooters on Friday. Police are investigating but no charges have been laid so far.

- The Kinew government is considering changes to the Intoxicated Persons Act to allow people to be detained for more than 24 hours if intoxicated. While 24 hours might be enough to come down off most drugs, including alcohol, it sometimes isn't enough for meth, leading to situations in which people have to be released when they're in no condition to be out on the street. The Main Street Project is not opposed to this so long as adequate supports and medical supervision are provided, something the government is looking at.

- Doug Ford has announced the intention to ban municipalities in the province from using speed cameras, for which he uses the usual populist slogan "cash grab". Setting aside the fact that there's a very simple way to avoid getting your cash grabbed (namely, pay attention to your speed and the signs on the road, both things you should be doing anyway), one might think that if people in the cities that use such cameras were sufficiently bothered by them, they could decide at the municipal level not to use them. Of course, the people Ford is serving here are people in the suburbs and exurbs around big cities, who refuse to live in an actual urban centre but need to go there for work and are always running late.

- The owners of a house outside St. Thomas, Ontario with a swastika mowed into its front lawn have been charged with criminal harassment and other offenses.

News roundup, 26 March 2025

- So it appears that the risks associated with Trump regime's use of the Signal app are not limited to inadvertently sending sensitive information to the wrong person. Apparently the Pentagon is now warning that the app is not as secure as it's supposed to be anyway; it seems that the end to end encryption can be bypassed by clever hackers, potentially including state actors.

- Besides the entirely justified anger at the US for electing a guy who is threatening to invade his neighbours and is in the process of tanking the world economy and making climate change even worse than it was going to be already, there is another factor keeping tourists away - fear. Fear that an innocent mistake regarding the terms of your visa could get you shackled and hauled off to some hellhole prison for an indeterminate period, even if you had previously thought you were immune to that sort of thing due to being a white person from a well-off country. That suits the regime just fine, of course; I suspect that they want to reduce the amount of contact between their own citizens and the rest of the world as much as possible. After all if an impoverished little country like the DPRK can survive almost total isolation, they must figure it should be a cinch for a wealthy country like the US. Especially if they can pick up some Lebensraum (not to mention resources) in the form of Canada and Greenland. 

- The Canadian Security Intelligence Service says Pierre Poilievre's campaign for the Conservative leadership received assistance from the Indian government. While CSIS is careful to say that it hasn't been shown that Poilievre knew about said assistance, this might go some distance to explain why he refuses to get a security clearance.

- China has freed employees of an American corporate due diligence firm who had been detained two years previously, apparently as a way of attracting new investment. What's interesting, though, is the circumstances of their detention - their employer had been "conducting unauthorized statistical investigations". It seems they may have feared that this would reveal a bit too much about human rights abuses.

- Just as surely as the fossil fuel industry, the beef industry knew decades ago that their industry is a major contributor to climate change - and like the fossil fuel industry, they did their darnedest to keep this information hidden from the public. 

- Joe Rogan, who a few days ago was saying that the Trump regime's behaviour towards Canada was "ridiculous", has now fallen in line. He had been scheduled to work as a commentator at a UFC event in Montreal in May, but now says he'd "rather go to Russia". I guess the MAGA crowd made enough threats to his livelihood - and his life - to get him to reconsider his views on Canada.

- The former CAO of Gilbert Plains, Manitoba had an arrest warrant issued after failing to appear in court on charges of faking a cyberattack in order to defraud the municipality of more than half a million dollars. I guess her lucky VLT didn't come through in time to pay the money back.

News roundup, 25 March 2025

- The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs is calling for the search of Prairie Green Landfill to continue, in the hope of finding the remains of the woman known as Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe ("Buffalo Woman"). This may be a tall order, since the information publicly available only gives the approximate time of her murder (mid-March 2022) and the approximate location where she was dumped (a bin behind a business on Henderson Highway, though it's possible that the police know which business and haven't made it public). But it's definitely worth looking further into. 

- Danielle Smith is coming under considerable criticism for the interview she gave to far-right news site Breitbart, in which she asked that Trump hold off on the tariffs until after the election so as to improve the Conservatives' chances. Whether the publicity over this interview will help the Cons is another question. It's not likely to help Smith, but she isn't up for reelection for a couple more years so maybe she hopes Albertans will have forgotten by then.

- Democratic Congresswoman Jamine Crockett made a statement in support of the "Tesla takedown" rallies, which happen to coincide with her birthday on the 29th of March. But when she said that "all I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down", this led to a statement by Attorney General Pam Bondi that Crockett should "tread very carefully" with such statements. 

- Jeffrey Goldberg, who writes for the Atlantic, got added to a Signal discussion group that included several prominent figures in the Trump regime, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He ended up becoming privy to secret plans for bombing in Yemen in advance of the raid after Hegseth casually spilled the beans in the discussion group. One wonders if Hegseth is keeping his promise to quit drinking if appointed.

- Prepac, a manufacturer of ready-to-assemble furniture founded in Delta, BC in 1979 has shut down its Canadian manufacturing, citing "an altered economic environment" for the move. Unifor, which represented the workers at the Delta plant, is calling for a nationwide boycott of the company. Prepac was family-owned until Torquest, a private equity company, snapped it up in 2019; two years later it opened a plant in North Carolina, which will become their main site.

- DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, having apparently been unable to recover from the bad publicity resulting from a data breach two years ago. This has led to fears that people's genetic data might fall into the hands of folks who might have other things in mind than people's wellbeing (like, say, health insurance companies). The company's privacy policy says that any company buying the company's data is bound by the same policy; the only problem is, when they adopt 23andMe's privacy policy, they adopt the line in said policy that says it can be changed at any time. That doesn't sound reassuring. California's attorney general has even released a consumer alert complete with instructions on how to delete your account.

- The concept of a "Dyson swarm", in which vast numbers of solar collectors are placed around the Sun to form a huge spherical shell, has been around for a long time. The question of what that would do to the Earth's climate hasn't really been looked at until recently. But it seems that if such a swarm were placed just outside Earth's orbit, it would heat the planet's surface by an average of 140 K (or 140°C), enough to boil the oceans. If it were placed further out, say just past Mars, it would still heat the Earth by about 3°C, and building all those solar collectors would require about 10²³ kg of silicon, meaning a heck of a lot of asteroid mining.

- A woman was run down in the parking lot of a kids' recreational facility in suburban Winnipeg over the weekend, after standing in an open parking spot to hold it for another person. Apparently a 40 year old woman became so incensed at this that she ran her over, then backed out and fled the scene.

News roundup, 21 Feb 2025

- Given that many of Donald Trump's policies and appointments have been utterly ridiculous even by Republican standards, the question has to be asked about where the non-crazy Republican members of Congress are. Part of it is that they're afraid of being defeated in primaries, of course, but another possible reason has been mooted - they're afraid of being killed by Trump supporters. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was considering voting against confirming Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, but then turned around and provided the key vote to enable Hegseth's appointment to proceed. He has reportedly said in private conversations that the FBI has warned him of "credible death threats", though he publicly denies this, perhaps to avoid becoming a target anyway. He's apparently not the only one to privately express fear of harm at the hands of Trump's brownshirts either. Some are saying that Trump's betrayal of Ukraine might be a bridge too far, but I'll believe that when I see it.

- Hot on the heels of Trump's "border czar", Tom Homan, trying to get AOC arrested for allegedly "impeding" ICE's operations by informing people of their legal rights, we now have a Trump-appointed prosecutor investigating Chuck Schumer for comments he made about Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch in the leadup to the Roe v. Wade decision. Apparently he addressed them by name on the steps of the Supreme Court, saying "You have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price". I suppose one could conceive of that as being a threat, but it's a stretch. The most likely reason, of course, is that the Trump regime is doing their darnedest to find any way of getting rid of enough Democrats so that they have a supermajority that could allow them to, say, successfully impeach liberal and moderate Supreme Court justices.

- Jesse Rothstein, who served as chief economist of the US Department of Labor during the Obama administration, warns that the massive civil service layoffs and cancellation of government contracts that Elon Musk's DOGE is pushing through are likely to cause a serious recession. If this is correct, it's just one more incentive for the regime to ensure that the 2026 midterms (not to mention the 2028 presidential election) are not free or fair, something they seem to be working on already.

- Elon Musk is now saying it's time to deorbit the International Space Station. After all, SpaceX already has a $843 million contract to do it in 2030, and he doesn't want to leave all that money just sitting there until then.

- One thing about Trump acting like a dictator is that all kinds of people and corporations are coming out of the woodwork with things they'd like him to dictate. For instance, Facebook parent company Meta is warning the EU that they're going to sic big daddy Trump on them if they dare to do such things as enforcing their own laws regarding privacy, protecting children, and the like. And a bunch of California Republicans are trying to get Trump to look into stopping the construction of a high speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, something he seems happy to oblige.

- Sweden's centre-right prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is bleating that Europe risks becoming a "museum" unless they stop regulating artificial intelligence. I guess we know who most of the techies in that country vote for.