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, 18 March 2025

- The second set of remains found at the Prairie Green Landfill have been identified as having been Marcedes Myran, another victim of serial killer Jeremy Skibicki. In other news, a woman from Buffalo Point First Nation who was severely injured in a hit and run in Winnipeg last Friday believes that she was hit intentionally - she says a van followed her as she walked down Osborne Street, then as she crossed the street she made eye contact with the driver, only for the van to strike her, reverse over her, and drive over her again.

- A poll by Leger Marketing suggests that Canadians' sense of national pride is increasing overall - but has decreased by 10% in Alberta. There is also a slight (2%) decline in Atlantic Canada; whether this is statistical noise is hard to say, since the poll was conducted online and doesn't give a margin of error. The Alberta thing, though, is probably real (and would probably be much worse if you didn't include Calgary and Edmonton).

- The Canadian government is seriously reconsidering whether it's a good idea to buy any more F-35 fighters beyond the 16 we've already paid for, especially given that we'd be dependent on the (possibly hostile) US for maintenance and software upgrades. Defence Minister Bill Blair is suggesting that the remainder of the fleet could be made up of the Saab Gripen; as a bonus, Saab has promised that assembly and maintenance of the aircraft could be done in Canada under license, potentially bringing a lot of jobs.

- Canadians crossed the US border by car 23% less last month than they did the previous February. Air travel dropped as well, albeit by only 2.4%. I suspect if you don't count non-discretionary (e.g. job related) crossings, the drops would be considerably higher.

- In his most recent "state of the city" address, Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham mused about ending remote and hybrid work. CUPE Local 500 has filed a grievance on the matter; the local's president Gord Delbridge points out the fact that remote work has been beneficial for employee retention and has not significantly harmed productivity. Gillingham says that bringing workers back into the office will help downtown businesses; no doubt that is the real motivation here, especially since a decline in the value of commercial real estate will be bad for the city's revenue stream. Delbridge, however, questions the benefit to downtown businesses; he says some of his members are vowing to boycott downtown businesses if forced back into the office.

- The Canadian woman who was detained in an immigration facility in Arizona has been released and has returned home to BC. Most of her fellow inmates are not so fortunate; to her credit, she recognizes that.

- The metaphor of the "dumpster fire" has been used to describe a number of things, including Trump's first term. Now, in Brandon we finally have something worthy of comparison to Trump's second term - a whole landfill is burning.

News roundup, 11 March 2025

- Various fake images of Mark Carney with such despicable people as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are being circulated on social media. The images show signs of having been generated with AI.

- Donald Trump apparently has his eyes on the Columbia River Treaty, which regulates the flow of the eponymous river for hydroelectricity and flood prevention. Trump apparently listed the treaty among his grievances against Canada in discussions with Trudeau.

- While interim Manitoba PC leader Wayne Ewasko has belatedly apologized for his party's stance on the landfill search in the last provincial election, leadership candidate Obby Khan isn't so sure; while he eventually came around to supporting the apology (presumably after sniffing the wind) he is not prepared to say that the Stefanson government made a mistake in its decision not to conduct a search at the time. For his part, the other leadership candidate, Wally Daudrich, is now saying that he's in favour of a search but that he thinks it should be paid for by private sector donations (like that's ever going to happen).

- X (the former Twitter) was hit with a massive distributed denial of service attack that shut down the platform several times on Monday. Musk has hinted that it might be a country who's responsible due to the scale of the attack, however a hacker organization called Dark Storm Team is claiming responsibility for the outage.

- A&W Canada, which has long been independent of its American former parent company, may be reaping the benefits of Canadians' rage against the US. The fact that the food is considerably better than McDonalds fare is a bonus.

News roundup, 10 March 2025

- Mark Carney has won the leadership of the federal Liberals in a landslide, and will be sworn in as prime minister shortly. He will become the first person to hold the office of prime minister while not yet having a seat in the House of Commons.

- The Hudson Bay Company has filed for creditor protection. The company intends to restructure; they cite the trade issues with the US as one of the problems, but another one cited is "post-pandemic declines in downtown store traffic". This seems questionable, though; these days most of their stores aren't in downtown locations. The downtown store in Winnipeg closed early in the pandemic (and the writing had been on the wall well before); all remaining locations in the city are in suburban malls.

- Human remains found in the Prairie Green Landfill in Rosser, Manitoba have been identified as having been Morgan Harris, one of four women killed by a Winnipeg serial killer. Moreover, there appear to be remains from another, as yet unidentified person. That person could be Marcedes Myran, or the woman known provisionally as Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe (Buffalo Woman). Or it could be someone else entirely; time will tell.

- Mere hours after declaring another pause in the tariffs on Canada, Trump is now threatening new ones on lumber and dairy products. For her part, Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt openly declared that if Canada wants to avoid tariffs, it should accept American rule. And four different anonymous sources, apparently with insider knowledge of the recent discussions between Trump and Trudeau, report that Trump does not accept the legitimacy of the 1908 treaty that settles the boundary between Canada and the US. Trump also wants to eject Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement, presumably so that the US can spy on Canada with impunity, but other members of the agreement now want to limit what they share with the US. So do Saudi Arabia and Israel - and if those two countries don't fully trust the US with their intelligence secrets, I doubt anyone else will either.

- Trump is blaming "globalists" for the decline in stock markets in response to his erratic tariff behaviour. Of course that term tends to be a bit of a dog whistle among his ilk, kind of like "rootless cosmopolitans" was for an earlier generation.

- Investigators into the death of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, have concluded that Arakawa died of hantavirus, a disease carried by deer mice. Hackman, who was in an advanced state of dementia, may not even have realized that she was dead, much less been able to seek help, but lingered on for another week or so before dying of heart failure.

- A Florida man has been arrested after making multiple calls to 911 to ask them for assistance in assassinating Donald Trump. He also claimed to have hacked into a missile system that would enable him to destroy New York City, and that the missiles were "attracted" to Trump Tower. He reportedly has a history of mental health issues.

News roundup, 12 March 2024

- Knowing that he can't hope to get a progressive budget that adequately taxes the wealthy and big corporations through Congress, Joe Biden appears to be trying to get the Republicans to publicly oppose such measures, hoping that they'll harm their own popularity in so doing. Worth a try, certainly, though it's hard not to think of the aphorism paraphrasing John Steinbeck, that "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

- Given that Great Salt Lake is in danger of becoming the American version of the Aral Sea, some hard decisions are likely to be necessary. Local farmers would have us believe that they support solutions to the problem, but given that extraction of water for agriculture is a big part of the problem, their protestations have to be taken with more than a few grains of the lake's namesake.

- A former longtime Boeing employee who had raised concerns about quality control issues in the production of its aircraft has apparently shot himself.

- The Youth For Christ skatepark in Winnipeg is having a hard time getting staff and volunteers as a result of negative publicity over their policies towards the LGBT* community. I dunno, maybe it should be turned over to the city, or another nonprofit, if YFC can't keep it open enough to serve it's function.

- Recent fires in apartment blocks have caused serious difficulties for the displaced tenants as they try to find new accommodation in a tight rental market. Meanwhile a commercial building is a total loss after a fire last Friday.

- Community activists are concerned with the pace of action on a potential search of the Prairie Green Landfill. The premier is being coy about the matter; presumably there are complex negotiations involved, but one can understand the activists' frustration.

- A 27 year old woman in Alberta, who has autism, is trying to access MAID, and her father is trying to get a court to stop her. She was scheduled to be put to sleep last month, but an injunction halted the process. It's an ugly scene no matter how you slice it, and I don't envy the judge who has to make a decision on this.

- In South Korea, where addressing the country's low birth rate by increasing immigration is anathema to most of the population, they're now deploying talking AI dolls to keep lonely seniors company. Some studies indicate that this has reduced depression among seniors.