News roundup, 14 July 2025

- Elizabeth May is calling for the federal government to impose a potash embargo on the US. As this would devastate the Canadian potash industry if done in isolation, she is calling for the government to buy the potash that would otherwise have been exported to the States and set it aside as a strategic reserve. She is also calling for them to reinstate the digital services tax, since removing it doesn't seem to have done any good. Seems like a good idea; whether Mark Carney will take the advice remains to be seen however.

- Solar power now has the largest share of Europe's electricity generation, narrowly topping nuclear and far above fossil fuels.

- A farm worker was killed and several hundred were arrested in an ICE raid on a farm in California. The worker had climbed to the roof of a greenhouse in the hope of avoiding the raid and fell to his death.

- A US District Court in California has requested that the LAPD please stop shooting journalists, even if it's just with rubber bullets. 

- Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has acknowledged what many of us already recognize - that Israel actually is guilty of war crimes and that not everyone who points that out is an antisemite.

- The MAGA crowd are losing whatever remained of their minds over the latest Superman movie, calling it "super woke" and accusing it of attempting to indoctrinate viewers. Their concerns centre partly around the fact that Superman/Clark Kent is explicitly called an immigrant.  This is of course true, but then the guy is from another planet, what else are you going to call him? And the pro-Israel crowd is incensed over a plot point in the film - a conflict between two fictional nations, one of which is brutally occupying the other. The countries aren't directly based on Israel and Palestine, of course (the occupier seems to be imagined as a former Soviet republic while the other is some unspecified west Asian one) but it's kind of telling that ultra-Zionists feel threatened by any fictional presentation of a brutal occupation.

- A radio station in Swan River, Manitoba was destroyed by fire on Thursday; investigators have concluded that it was arson. The incident follows a heated discussion on a social media account run by the station owner. Following the death of a passenger in the car that also killed two much loved members of the Winnipeg arts community, a post made reference to the dead passenger's criminal history. Given that he's dead there's not much of a public interest in the details of said history unless it was really weird or interesting (which it isn't), so a lot of people thought that it was needlessly hurtful to his family to dwell on the matter. That said, torching a radio station does seem like an excessive response.

News roundup, 4 March 2025

- The 25% tariffs on nearly all imports from Canada and Mexico ware going ahead. Canada, along with China who are being hit with 20% tariffs, are imposing a number of retaliatory measures in response; stock markets on both sides of the border have taken a beating. Doug Ford is vowing to cut off electricity exports to the US if this goes ahead. Perhaps an even more effective measure would be a potash embargo - they can find other sources of electricity a lot more easily than potash. Some also think that American fast food franchises could be replaced by Canadian ones; whether patriotism is enough to overcome marketing in the case of things like McDonalds or KFC remains to be seen, though.

- Following remarks by Volodymyr Zelenskyy that an agreement to end the war is "very far away", Trump has announced that he is pausing all military aid to Ukraine until Zelenskyy is able to satisfy him that Kyiv is "committed to good faith negotiations for peace". This will apparently be assessed entirely on Trump's subjective perceptions, just like every other judgment he makes.

- Trump has issued an executive order expanding logging on federal lands, and wants to use emergency powers to get around the habitat protection provisions of the Endangered Species Act.

- There was apparently a conspicuous lack of political expression at the Oscars over the weekend. Given that in the past people like Michael Moore often weren't shy about what they said while accepting their awards, it's kind of strange, if this report is accurate. And unsettling - it's a sign of how scared they are.

- WWE co-founder Linda McMahon has been appointed Secretary of Education by the Trump administration. They don't leave a whole lot left for the satirists to do, do they?

News roundup, 4 Feb 2025

- Donald Trump has agreed to defer the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for another month, following talks with Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum in order to give time for more negotiations. The 10% tariffs on China are still going ahead on schedule; in addition he also has the EU in his sights. The chaos of the on-again, off-again tariff threats has spooked markets; presumably Trump, Musk, and their cronies are buying on the dips. In Manitoba, the Kinew government is reciprocating with a pause on the removal of American liquor from stores. Meanwhile in BC, David Eby is considering a more substantive move (assuming the tariffs come back) - he wants to ensure that sales of energy and critical minerals are directed towards other markets.

- If the current uneasy truce fails to hold, one possible target of export restrictions could be potash. The US imports around 80% of their supply, and Canada controls some 40% of global reserves of this crucial fertilizer. The prospect of this worries Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had requested that potash be exempted from the Trump tariffs.

- The Inspector General of the US Department of Agriculture, Phyllis Fong, was escorted from her office by security after refusing to leave voluntarily after Trump fired her. I'm sure the fact that her office had investigated one of Elon Musk's companies is totally coincidental...

- After the World Federation of Advertisers suspended advertising on Twitter/X, Elon Musk launched a lawsuit last year claiming that the federation and its members were unlawfully conspiring to deprive Musk's platform of revenue. He is now expanding the lawsuit to target several companies whose ads were removed from the platform.

- The European Union is continuing with a piecewise rollout of legislation to minimize the risks from artificial intelligence. Apps with certain kinds of functions, including cognitive behavioural manipulation, classifying people based on personal characteristics, and biometric identification and categorization of people, is banned outright. Sounds eminently reasonable, but there's a lot of hand-wringing from techbros in this Reddit thread about allegedly stifling innovation (mixed in with slightly more valid concerns that more harmful uses of AI will just be developed elsewhere anyway).

- An AI chatbot created by the Israelis to disrupt online discussion of the country's policies towards Palestinians has gone rogue, at times attacking the Israeli and American governments.