News roundup, 20 June 2025

- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now over budget by as much as a billion dollars and could run out of funds as early as July. This would run afoul of the law and raises obvious concerns about the sustainability of the current crackdown. Trump's "big beautiful bill" includes an additional $75 billion for the agency over the next five years, and the current situation may add to the pressure on Republicans to pass the bill. In related news, Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, has called for ICE to build a detention centre in the middle of the Everglades, so that escapees would have to contend with alligators. It sounds like something inspired by the children's prison in Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang that's surrounded by a moat full of sharks and crocodiles.

- The American Chestnut was driven to near extinction over a century ago by a fungal disease. Now, selective breeding (including hybridizing with a Chinese species) has produced blight-resistant trees, giving some hope for the reintroduction of the species to the wild.

- A Dutch environmental consulting firm has concluded that a tax on air travel could raise over €100 billion a year, which would hopefully be allocated towards efforts to limit climate change and its effects. It might be a hard sell, though; even many people who are otherwise progressive and well-informed seem to be in a state of denial about just how bad air travel is for the climate.

- Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, has called for disinformation about climate change to be criminalized. Some might feel uncomfortable about this, but it's worth considering that Holocaust denial is already criminalized in many countries, and climate change has the potential to make the Holocaust look like a picnic in comparison, so it seems justifiable.

- Honda has successfully tested a reusable rocket. Given that SpaceX's latest efforts on this front have not gone so well, it's probably a good thing for the space industry that another player is entering the field.

- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is accusing the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, of fathering a child, in contravention of his vows. Pashinyan has also accused one archbishop of having an affair with his uncle's wife. This is just the latest chapter in the feud between Pashinyan and the Church, who have been calling for his resignation since the country's defeat in the 2020 conflict with Azerbaijan. Things like this probably will not help restore unity to a deeply divided country.

News roundup, 14 April 2025

- A recent Angus Reid poll has found that 53% of respondents across Canada believe that Alberta premier Danielle Smith has betrayed her country by engaging with the likes of Ben Shapiro, who supports the Trump regime's desire to annex Canada. The article doesn't give a regional breakdown; I'd be interested to see what percentage of Albertans think Smith is a traitor. Notably, 67% of those who still plan to support the Conservatives think she is "defending her country by keeping an open dialogue with Americans".

- The UK parliament has passed emergency legislation that compels British Steel's parent company to keep the furnaces burning even if they aren't making money, or face criminal penalties for their executives. Despite this, there is still no guarantee that the two facilities in Scunthorpe will be kept open; a shortage of raw materials looms. And due to the nature of the process, it's extremely difficult to restart a blast furnace once it's gone cold. The company that manages the country's railway tracks has already been making contingency plans; they've been stockpiling rails for the last year just for this eventuality.

- Billionaires are all of a sudden uncomfortable about what Donald Trump is doing to their investments. Of course, they were fine with everything else he's done, or at least not sufficiently bothered to think the other stuff outweighed the wealth that they thought Trump was going to bring them.

- ChatGPT is supposed to have safeguards to limit its ability to make fake images of real people. CBC journalists tested this on Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre, though, and found that the right prompt can trick the AI into generating stuff that it's not supposed to, including potentially harmful disinformation.

- The daughter of Deepak Obhrai, who served as a Conservative MP from 1997 until his death in 2019, is running for the Liberals in Calgary East. Priti Obhrai-Martin says that her father spoke very highly of Mark Carney's work as a central banker during the 2008 economic crisis and she has decided to join his team.

- New information on the Hudson River helicopter crash calls the mast bumping theory into question. A new video shows the aircraft in straight and level flight before suddenly yawing to the right and breaking up; it also shows something, perhaps part of the main rotor gearbox, hanging from the rotor assembly as it spins downwards. More details, including an interview with a Bell 206 test pilot, here. I wouldn't want to be the last mechanics to work on that helicopter, that's for sure.

- A Toronto woman was meditating next to Peru's Pachitea River, which is heated by natural geothermal heating to around 90°C, when she apparently passed out and fell into the river; she got out but sustained severe burns and died in hospital.

News roundup, 3 Dec 2024

- The US has promised another $725 million in aid to the Ukrainian military before the end of Biden's administration in January. Unfortunately at this point it's not so much about saving Ukraine as about making Russia's probable victory more costly to them.

- It now appears that Donald Trump didn't quite win a majority of the popular vote nationally, not that it matters to the outcome. With 96% of the votes now counted, Trump has 49.97% and Harris 48.36%. This remains, however, the highest percentage of the vote that Trump has received. Turnout was about 63.8%, slightly lower than in 2020 but still the second highest in a century.

- In most provinces it is prosecutors, not police, who make the decision to lay criminal charges. In Ontario this is not the case; as a result, the backlog in their courts is considerable. The justice ministry is looking to change this, but not surprisingly the police don't want to give up that power.

- The Manitoba government is considering a ban on disinformation about election workers and the electoral system. Justice Minister Matt Wiebe cites the rise in "deepfakes" and similar AI-driven techniques that have been quite effective in weakening democracy elsewhere. Of course this is double edged (there are grey areas about what constitutes disinformation, not to mention when someone should be assumed to be "knowingly" circulating it), but it should be noted that the provincial Elections Act already has similar prohibitions regarding disinformation about candidates, so maybe a similar prohibition regarding election officials isn't a big step.

- A long-term care home in Windsor, Ontario has barred a man from visiting his mother at the facility; he says that this occurred after he expressed concerns about how his mother was being cared for. The management of the facility claim that this is justified because he had "demonstrated anger" and behaved in a "threatening and abusive manner". Without knowing the specific nature of his conduct it's hard to say if he was actually threatening or abusive. I don't doubt that he demonstrated anger, but that by itself doesn't seem like enough reason. This isn't the first time something like this has happened, either.

- Manitoba has recorded 323 overdose deaths in the first 7 months of 2024, including 105 in June and July alone.

- A woman in Fannin County, Georgia was arrested on a reckless endangerment charge after her 10 year old son walked to a nearby dollar store unaccompanied.