News roundup, 5 Oct 2026

- The first officer accused of attacking the captain of FlyDubai Flight 1073 was reportedly banned from flying commercially in his home country of Oman due to extremist views. Details about the specifics of these views have not been made public, and it is not known if Oman attempted to warn other countries about him. It appears that the weapon used in the attack was a crash axe of the sort carried in the cockpit of all airliners in case of an emergency; unfortunately in this case the axe was used to cause an emergency.

- Winnipeg mayoral candidates Mike Vogiatzakis and Kevin Klein are accusing each other of offering inducements to withdraw from the race. Vogiatzakis says that Tim Diack, a supporter of Klein, offered him a position at city hall, later stated by his campaign manager to be the chair of the police board. Diack says that he did call Vogiatzakis but did not make such an offer, and that Vogiatzakis is in fact ineligible for the position due to a criminal record (he has convictions for contempt of court as well as assault). Klein's campaign manager also says that Diack has no official position in the campaign team. Klein claims that Vogiatzakis offered him an inducement of his own, though no details were provided. Such inducements are of course prohibited. Meanwhile Klein is facing criticism after the Winnipeg Sun, of which he is CEO, called into question the significance of the deaths of indigenous children in residential schools.

- Far right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, has come out on top in the first round of Brazil's presidential election, winning 47.1% of the vote compared to 45% for incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The election will now go to a runoff, but Bolsonaro is expected to win unless Lula is able to rally people who abstained in the first round.

- Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap election after his coalition partners Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) voted alongside rightwing parties to defeat two bills intended to increase tenants' rights.

- A 12 year old girl was killed in Baltimore and another person wounded in the crossfire as two men opened fire on each other in a dispute over a parking space.

News roundup, 2 Oct 2026

- Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now spinning the attempt to crash FlyDubai flight 1073 as a terrorist attack aimed at Israelis, saying that the first officer had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination". While it's entirely possible that this is true, and the UAE is considering this in their investigation, opposition leader Yair Lapid says that nothing of the sort was mentioned in the security briefing he was given. It seems that Netanyahu is trying to turn this into a boost for him in the upcoming parliamentary election, which recent polling suggests that Netanyahu may be at risk of losing. And given that as soon as he's no longer prime minister he'll be in danger of going to jail for past corruption, he's naturally pulling out all the stops to win. Happily Captain Smit Machchhar, who was instrumental in saving the aircraft by getting the cockpit door open, is recovering in hospital in Abu Dhabi.

- A proposed pipeline from Alberta to the BC coast, now officially named the Pacific Link, has become the first project designated to be a matter of "national interest". Under the Building Canada Act this means that the approval process will be fast-tracked, although its approval and construction is still not guaranteed. The government claims that the pipeline will reduce Canada's "emissions intensity" (i.e. emissions per unit volume of oil produced), but environmentalists warn that it will mean more oil in total will actually be extracted and burned, outweighing the benefits from a reduction in intensity.

- The Manitoba Labour Board has ruled that the work done by workers at Dynacare labs constitute an essential service and that limits must thus be placed on their right to strike. A strike might still be legal under some circumstances, but an essential services agreement must be made beforehand that sets minimum staffing levels. The company and the union had previously agreed on treating their work as non-essential because there are also public labs that do the work, but the province intervened in this, most likely because a widespread strike and the resulting slowdown in medical tests would be politically difficult for the government.

- In most jurisdictions, e-bikes and e-scooters are supposed to be speed limited, generally to 32 km/h (some provinces limit the scooters and lightweight e-bikes to 25 km/h). However, the motors in the bikes are generally capable of more than that and the limits are put in afterwards; these are often quite easily hacked to allow much higher speeds. A CBC Marketplace investigation has found that some stores, including big box stores like Best Buy, Canadian Tire, and Costco as well as specialty bike shops, have been selling the bikes with the limiters disabled and/or telling buyers how to hack them to go faster than they're supposed to. An employee at one shop in Richmond Hill told an undercover reporter that their bikes are capable of 120 km/h. Some have also marketed them as suitable for children younger than the legal age limits.

News roundup, 1 Oct 2026

- A FlyDubai Boeing 737 Max on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv had a very close call after the first officer apparently stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane. The aircraft lost around 14,000 feet of altitude in about 30 seconds before the wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door, enabling passengers  to overpower the first officer, and one of the passengers managed to pull the aircraft out of its dive. He later said that while he wasn't a trained pilot he knew something about aviation from watching a lot of Mayday episodes (you really can't make this stuff up). Then two deadheading pilots, reportedly a Russian and a Ukrainian, took over and flew the plane to a safe emergency landing at the Saudi city of Tabuk. One noteworthy fact - since 9/11 more passengers have been killed by pilot suicide than by terrorism (though this incident is still under investigation and may turn out to have been both of those things). More info in this video.

- Beyond destroying whatever trust potential allies had in the US, the Trump regime is eroding the one thing that America still has above all other countries - its military might. The war against Iran has caused serious damage to US military facilities across the Middle East - some of which might not even be worth fixing due to their continued vulnerability. They also have had to move assets from other areas - such as the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, normally based in Japan, which was sent to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf. And many of their consumable assets, like missiles, have been depleted.

- Environmentalists are concerned that the Carney government's Bill C-39, an omnibus bill dubbed the Building Canada Strong Act, will excessively weaken environmental protections. The bill could allow the government to grant permits for preliminary work before an impact assessment is complete if the work is deemed to be sufficiently in the public interest; while the work could theoretically be stopped if a serious concern is found, many have doubts that such a power would be exercised in time. The bill also appears to dilute provisions of the Species at Risk Act.

- Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries got a boost from increased cannabis sales as well as casino revenue, but this was not enough to make up for a decline in alcohol sales. The Crown corporation still made an overall profit of $724.1 million in the last fiscal year, but this represents a drop of $6 million from the previous year.

- Scott Aitchison, the Conservative MP for the central Ontario riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka, has announced that he will be stepping down once the fall sitting of Parliament ends. I have my doubts that anyone other than another Conservative will win the ensuing byelection, but that remains to be seen.

- The only road access to New Brunswick's Campobello Island is by a bridge connecting the island to Lubec, Maine. This is becoming a problem due to the US ban on imports of certain goods from Canada - a truck delivering supplies to the island was turned back at the border despite being tagged as being destined for the community. Given that dairy products are part of the Trump regime's import ban, this is causing considerable concern for community members. I suppose if we wanted to be really mean and petty we could do the same to the Northwest Angle, Minnesota and Point Roberts, Washington, but given that those two places have less than 1,500 people between them it wouldn't have much effect.

News roundup, 27 June 2025

- A 49 year old Canadian citizen has died in ICE custody in Florida. He had been a permanent resident since 1991 and was in custody pending deportation, having been convicted of drug offenses; he suffered from epilepsy and needed a medication to control his seizures, though it is not yet known if this is the reason for his death.

- Even as the IDF continues to demolish Gaza, their irregulars (the nominally civilian West Bank settlers) held a vicious pogrom in the town of Kafr Malik. When the locals responded by throwing stones at the attackers, the official wing of the army opened fire, killing three people. It's stuff like this that has led many to question whether the settlers should be considered to be civilians (and thus whether killing them counts as terrorism).

- The so-called "revenge tax" provision of the "One Big Beautiful Bill", which would have taxed US investment income for residents of countries that had annoyed Trump, has been removed by Republican senators following a recommendation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Evidently the prospect of foreign investors divesting from US securities en masse didn't seem like such a good thing after some consideration.

- New York City's establishment, including the likes of hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, are freaking out over Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary for mayor, and are getting in line behind incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent. Better a crook than a lefty in their minds, I guess.

- Winnipeg's most famous intersection, Portage and Main, is reopening to pedestrian traffic after 46 years. 

- A report submitted to Winnipeg's Public Works Committee has recommended the installation of bike lanes and the lowering of the speed limit to 40 km/h on the part of Wellington Crescent where a cyclist was killed last year. The proposal is for the changes to be in place by next spring, to give time for consultations; activists think a better approach would have been to provisionally make the changes and then see what people think of the reality of it rather than the idea of it, but that would make too much sense I guess.

- Trump Mobile, the president's venture into cellphone services, has removed the phrase "made in the USA" from its website, though they still insist that the phones are "brought to life" in the US, and that there will be "American hands behind every device". A cynic might wonder if the hands in question are the users' hands; if that were the case it would probably be technically accurate (who but an American would be fool enough to buy one?)

- Chinese authorities have declined a request for information about the crash of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 in 2022 that killed 132 people, citing "national security". Based on information that has already leaked out about the crash, there are suspicions that it may have been a case of pilot suicide; perhaps the authorities don't want to have to answer any hard questions about that.