News roundup, 22 May 2024

- The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) is suspending its operations in the city of Rafah, saying that they do not have the supplies or security necessary. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Israeli soldiers have been taking it upon themselves to tip off the settler mobs regarding the location of aid convoys.

- A major donor to the University of Manitoba is in high dudgeon about the Faculty of Medicine valedictorian's speech daring to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The donor, Ernest Rady, accuses the valedictorian of "hateful lies" and "calling for the destruction and elimination" of the Jewish people (to my knowledge he didn't, but when you donate $30 million to a university I guess they aren't going to question what you say). He's demanding, among other things, that the university edit the speech out of the official convocation video recording. The recording is apparently no longer on the university website, so I guess Rady's donation paid off.

- Justin Trudeau has come out with an expression of concern that the ICC is moving to prosecute both Likud and Hamas leaders. He says he's troubled by what he sees as the "sense of an equivalency" between the two. Of course no equivalency is being declared, merely that both Hamas and Likud leaders appear to meet the threshold for prosecution - but don't expect Trudeau to draw a distinction like that. The Biden administration, meanwhile, is moving to potentially sanction ICC officials in response.

- Evacuees from the Cranberry Portage area are returning to their communities, though not everyone has a home to return to. In Fort Nelson, BC a number of homes have been lost as well.

- The fact that a former (and possible future) US president is undergoing a criminal prosecution for the first time in history is making far less of an impact on the public consciousness than you might expect.

- Russia has begun conducting drills simulating the use of tactical nuclear weapons; this was motivated in part by French President Emmanuel Macron musing about the possibility of sending European troops. Unfortunately, this illustrates very well why NATO powers can't send troops - the risk of escalation is just too great.

- A passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore was killed and several others injured when turbulence unexpectedly struck the flight. The victim was a 73 year old UK citizen. It's suspected that climate change is making turbulence worse; I guess it would be impolite to point out that it's pretty much certain that excessive air travel is making climate change worse, though.

- The Manitoba NDP has selected nurse Carla Compton to be the party's candidate in the Tuxedo byelection.

- Shop owners in Winnipeg are reporting that shoplifters are becoming "more brazen" and more likely to threaten store staff.

News roundup, 6 May 2024

- Three men, all Indian citizens, have been arrested in connection with the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey last year. Police are investigating links with three other homicides as well, including the death of an 11 year old boy in Edmonton.

- The Israeli government has shut down all of Al Jazeera's operations in the country and raided its offices. They accuse the broadcaster of "incitement" and "working with Hamas", which the broadcaster denies. Notably, the BBC was not allowed to film the raid. The UN's Human Rights office as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists are condemning the decision. In other Israel news, many Bedouin citizens of that country are unable to build bomb shelters to protect themselves from Hamas-launched missiles - because even though they live in villages that predate the founding of Israel, the communities have never been officially recognized, and thus do not have the ability to issue building permits. So the Israeli state considers any shelters they build to be unauthorized structures, and demolishes them. Then they cry a few crocodile tears at best, or smile smugly at worst, when Bedouin citizens die in the attacks. Meanwhile the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman warns supporters of both sides of the confllict against reducing the matter to simple slogans.

- It's increasingly apparent that one of the biggest barriers to effective climate action is the agricultural sector. In the European Union, rioting farmers have been doing their damnedest to undermine efforts to make Europe a leader in sustainable agriculture. No wonder farmers have been downgraded, in the minds of a lot of people, from "salt of the Earth" to "necessary evil". On a related note, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has just signed a bill outlawing the sale of cultured meat in the state. He also  spouted conspiracy nonsense about the supposed global elite's plans to force everyone to eat it, even as he signed legislation taking away his own citizens' freedom to eat it if they so choose.

- A federal appeals court in the US has ruled that a lawsuit by an organization called Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 young Americans lacks standing and must be dismissed by the US district judge hearing the case. The judges who made the ruling are Trump appointees, but this was an "emergency" petition filed by the Biden administration's Justice Department, who claimed that the government could be "irreparably harmed" if it were forced to waste resources litigating the case.

- The Manitoba government will be using funds from an out-of-court settlement with the tobacco companies to pay for the building of a new headquarters for CancerCare.

- Following the report of a woman being punched in a Winnipeg grocery store by an employee who suspected her of shoplifting, other members of the community say that this is not the first time something like this has happened at that store - nor even the second.

- Use of the "Community Connections" service in the lobby of Winnipeg's Millennium library are on the increase, even as the city prepares to shut it down so that Evan Duncan's constituents don't have to look at poor people when they use the library.

- In something worthy of the Piranha Brothers, a man in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland suffered potentially life-altering injuries after having his hands nailed to a fence. This has apparently happened before; there have been no official statements regarding responsibilty but many locals suspect Loyalist paramilitaries.

News roundup, 13 March 2024

- This past winter (the meteorological winter ends on the 1st of March, not the equinox), was the warmest winter in the US in over a century of records. The Lower 48 had an average temperature of +3.1°C (37.6°F); that's 3°C above average. Those numbers don't fully convey the story, though. Leaves are budding on trees weeks earlier than normal, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have been essentially ice-free all winter, and mosquitoes were biting in Michigan as early as February.

- Since Paris moved to triple parking costs for SUVs, other cities are looking to follow their example. It's almost as if everybody knew it was a good idea, but nobody had the nerve to go first until Anne Hidalgo did.

- Manitoba's minimum wage will be going up to $15.80 an hour this fall. It did not go up this past fall because the deadline to make a decision on the matter came too soon after the election, and the new government, rightly or wrongly, was reluctant to make a snap decision on the matter. In the long run they want to bring it up to a "living wage", currently pegged at $19/h by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

- The interim leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, Wayne Ewasko, is following the standard rightwing playbook, calling for parents to be notified when their kids request to be addressed by different pronouns at school. I'm sure that the life of a trans kid in, say, the RM of Hanover would not be made any easier by this (not that it's easy in any case, of course) but it seems the PCs don't care and are doubling down on the far-right messaging that contributed to their defeat last fall.

- Manitoba Public Insurance has suspended the sale of "special risk extension" coverage for truckers that operate outside the province. The Tories are trying to make political hay with this by accusing the NDP of "abandoning" truckers; funny thing is, though, MPI says that they made this move in August, while the Tories were still in power.

- The City of Winnipeg's Executive Policy Committee has voted 5-1 in favour of moving ahead with reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians. It will not be surprising to anyone that North Kildonan councillor Jeff Browaty was the holdout.

- Loblaws, like many grocery companies, has been pushing hard on self-checkout, but they're having to take measures to combat theft, like setting up gates with receipt scanners at the exits. Many customers find this to be an alienating experience, of course. Interestingly, Loblaws claims that this is largely driven by "organized crime", even as many studies find that self-checkout makes thieves of previously honest people (and that's not even counting the number of people who accidentally fail to scan an item). In other places, many chains are abandoning it entirely, finding that it's not even cutting down on their labour costs.

- Many people think of opioid addiction as a big city problem. In fact, in Canada at least, when municipalities are sorted by population, the ones with the highest incidence of hospitalization from overdoses are small cities between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and the next worst are municipalities with less than 10,000. Hospitalizations were actually least common in large cities over half a million.