News roundup, 4 June 2025

- The Manitoba government has announced that around 1,000 hotel rooms have been made available for evacuees from the north. Some of this is the result of the cancellation of a conference that was being held in Winnipeg for Manitoba and Saskatchewan courtroom staff. Some evacuees are still having to go further afield though; hundreds are now as far away as Niagara Falls. In other wildfire news, much of the the village of Denare Beach, Saskatchewan was destroyed on Monday. Flin Flon is still intact but faces potential threats from all directions. And the chief of Pimicikamak Cree Nation is calling for the RCMP to help round up residents who are refusing to leave.

- A lawsuit filed in a Calgary court alleges that the Red Deer Public School Division, upon hearing a report that a Czech exchange student attending one of their schools had sexually assaulted a teenage girl, got the suspect out of the country before police could investigate, and even destroyed evidence. One might hope that there would be pressure for criminal charges against school division officials for this, but the locals are no doubt too busy trying to keep the drag queens out of their city to deal with people who actually aided and abetted a sexual offender. And in this Reddit thread it is alleged that the chair of the school board is an ex-cop who describes herself as a "proud Conservative". Wonder why she's so soft on crime then?

- Alberta now has 710 cases of measles; of these, six are in the Edmonton region and 13 in Calgary. In other words, it's not that Albertans per se are backward and unenlightened, it's just that rural Albertans are backward and unenlightened. I suspect you could draw a pretty direct line to the increased political polarization in that province; a lot of people who are of a broadly conservative bent would previously have gone along with such things as vaccination because it's what you're supposed to do, but now defying any kind of measures for the common good is such a part of the conservative identity that they follow the blue shepherds all the way to the slaughterhouse.

- Elon Musk is now calling Trump's "one big, beautiful bill" an abomination due to its impact on the deficit. Some think this could motivate some Republican senators to vote against the bill, but that remains to be seen.

- An Idaho woman who was jailed for two months for her involvement in the Jan 6 putsch has apparently had a significant change of heart. She declined the presidential pardon she was offered, saying that she and her co-conspirators were guilty and that the pardons are just an attempt to push a false narrative about what happened on that day.

- The sheriff's office in Johnson County, Texas obtained data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reading cameras across the US in order to investigate whether a woman left the state to get an abortion.

- Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is suing interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba for false arrest and malicious prosecution following his arrest on a trespassing charge after he attempted to accompany three Democratic members of Congress for an oversight tour of an immigration detention facility.

- A number of US states have amended their building codes to require roofs on new builds to be reflective, in order to limit heating. This did not sit well with the manufacturers of the synthetic rubber traditionally used for making some kinds of roofs - and they successfully lobbied Tennessee to repeal the new rule. 

- Actor Jonathan Joss, best known for his voice role in the animated series King of the Hill, was shot dead in an apparent anti-gay hate crime on Saturday.  

News roundup, 15 April 2024

- Iran launched a number of missiles and drones at Israel over the weekend, stating that this was retaliation for the attack on Iran's embassy in Damascus earlier this month. The attack had little effect owing to Israel's advanced air defense systems.

- Jury selection for Donald Trump's first actual criminal trial, regarding the hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, begins on Monday. Finding twelve jurors who are sufficiently impartial about Mr. Trump will be a challenge, though. Some are hoping that the details that come out during the trial will be "mortifying" for Trump, but that makes the questionable assumption that he is capable of feeling shame. In other Trump news, shares in Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, are down by about 20% for the week and over 47% so far this month.

- Six people were killed and several others wounded in a stabbing attack in a mall in a suburb of Sydney before the attacker was shot to death by police. The attacker was known to police and wasn't a well fellow by the sound of it.

- Despite the fact that pretty much everyone in a position of authority knows better, new coal plants continue to be built and places that are phasing them out aren't doing it near fast enough. I hate to advocate for geoengineering given all the risks, but they're making it harder and harder to avoid that.

- Four out of the five councillors in the Rural Municipality of Armstrong, in Manitoba's Interlake region, have resigned citing a "toxic work environment" and leadership problems. Details of these issues have not been made public so far, but rural and small town politics can be a pretty nasty business (see for instance the case of St Andrews mayor Joy Sul).

- Danielle Smith hopes that Red Deer will grow tenfold from its current population of 106,000. Many locals aren't so keen. Setting that aside, one wonders if Smith is really thinking things through on this matter, since the rise of a third huge city in the province would probably require a lot of people to move there from outside the province, and this would probably not favour the UCP electorally.

- Former Thunder Bay police chief Sylvie Hauth has been charged with obstruction and breach of trust, becoming the third employee of the force to face criminal charges in the last few months. Meanwhile in Durham Region the police force there released personal information about a woman who had complained about being threatened by cyberstalkers directly to said cyberstalkers in response to a freedom of information request.

- A new law in Florida, just signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, effectively prevents civilian boards from investigating police misconduct.