News roundup, 23 May 2025

- A new study suggests that even if the increase in global temperatures is limited to 1.5°C (which seems increasingly unlikely), it's not going to be enough to prevent sea levels from rising by a centimetre per year by the end of the century. If the present course is maintained, it will be far worse - an eventual rise of up to 12 metres. For perspective, about 230 million people live no more than a metre above the current sea level, and a billion are within 10 metres. This would lead to a lot of migration, and the brutal truth of the matter is that if this migration can't be prevented by cutting emissions, it will be stopped with guns. That said, every fraction of a degree still matters, not least because it will mean fewer people getting shot at borders than there otherwise would be.

- On a somewhat more positive note, the deforestation rate in Brazil dropped by over 30% in 2024 compared to the previous year. Note, however, this only factors in intentional deforestation; losses due to wildfires reached record levels last year.

- The Trump regime is prohibiting international students from enrolling at Harvard University because the institution refuses to hand over information about some current students to the Department of Homeland Security.

- The US Senate's parliamentarian, a nonpartisan staffer tasked with the interpretation of Senate rules, has been overruled after advising that the revocation of California's waiver that gives it the power to regulate vehicle emissions was probably illegal. The last time the parliamentarian has been overruled was in 1975. Now I must admit to be a bit torn here, because the specific decision had to do with the body's filibuster rules, which I've generally thought should be scrapped as they often stop progressive initiatives. And seeing that these rules don't seem to be stopping reactionary initiatives, they should probably still be scrapped (or rather not re-adopted if and when the US becomes a functioning democracy again).

- TD's chief economist, Beata Caranci, is predicting that Canada will go into recession this year, and that some 100,000 jobs could be lost as a result.

- The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has opted for a work-to-rule campaign rather than a strike, for the time being. Significant service disruptions are expected to result simply as a result of workers refusing overtime.

- The Rural Municipality of Prairie Lakes in southern Manitoba has introduced a "one lake, one boat" policy, which will require visitors bringing boats to Pelican Lake to have the boats inspected for zebra mussels for a $40 fee. Naturally businesses are complaining, but such measures are sometimes necessary.

- Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, has started injecting its answers with propaganda about "white genocide" in South Africa - even when the question had nothing to do with South Africa or race. This certainly underscores the need for regulation of AI; unfortunately in the US the prospects for that have dimmed as legislation to prevent the regulation of AI for at least 10 years has cleared the House and moved on to the Senate.

- Recycling collection in Winnipeg was disrupted yesterday due to an unexpected closure of the material recovery facility where recyclables are taken. The plant was closed for a police investigation after plant staff found a dead guy on the premises.

News roundup, 30 Jan 2025

- A Bombardier CRJ-700 operated on behalf of American Airlines, carrying 60 passengers and 4 crew, has collided in midair with a US military UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with a crew of 3 over the Potomac River near Washington, DC. Numerous fatalities have already been reported, and folks on Reddit who listen to scanners are saying that a few if any survivors are expected; EMS workers were apparently heard saying things like "Going to the firehouse to make sure the big refrigerator is turned on".

- Donald Trump has ordered his administration to look into the creation of a "national digital asset stockpile". This falls short of what the hardcore crypto bros were hoping for, which was the immediate creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve; nonetheless, the price of bitcoin briefly surged following the announcement before dropping again.

- The Trump administration, who had earlier ordered a temporary pause in a lot of federal funding, has now rescinded this following a court order. They still plan to review spending, however, and it's a safe bet that they will still make a lot of cuts, while telling people whose programs didn't get cut how lucky they are.

- Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany's Christian Democrats, has managed to push a motion on immigration through the country's parliament with the support of AfD. The motion is nonbinding, but has aroused great concern about the precedent set by cooperating with the far right. Chancellor Olaf Sholz called the move "an unforgivable mistake"; in any case, Sholz's Social Democrats as well as the Greens say that implementing the policy would violate German as well as EU law on refugees.

- Americans are souring somewhat on some of Donald Trump's policies, according to a new poll. Unfortunately, it's a bit late for that now.

- Parks Canada has concluded that it's probably too late to eradicate Zebra Mussels from Clear Lake in Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park. As a result, the watercraft ban that had been placed on the lake will be lifted, albeit with under a "one boat, one lake" policy. How this policy is to be enforced is not clear.

- Former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting gifts from foreign governments; said gifts included a brand new Mercedes-Benz as well as cash and gold bullion. Menendez represented New Jersey, a place that makes Quebec look like Norway in comparison.

- A brawl broke out at a meeting in Thornton Township, IL on Tuesday night. One of the combatants was the mayor's boyfriend, who had recently been hired by the municipality to run a youth program but had been put on leave as a result of a motion put through by a newly elected trustee.

News roundup, 23 July 2024

- Kamala Harris has come out swinging in the campaign, having raised a record $81 million in campaign donations in a 24-hour period. This may bode well for her chances in the fall, though even if she gets the votes in the necessary states it remains to be seen if she'll get the electors. The members of the Electoral College, one of the more bizarre things you can find in a modern democracy, are not constitutionally bound to vote the way the citizens want them to. In some states "faithless electors" can be legally punished, but even in that case their votes still count. And nothing will necessarily stop a Trump-friendly state legislature from appointing their own electors in place of the ones chosen by the citizenry, especially with a Trump-friendly Supreme Court waiting to hear any challenges. And whatever else happens, it will be a nasty campaign. The Republicans are trying to argue that Harris is not entitled to money that was donated to the Biden campaign. Most experts argue otherwise, saying that since she was going to be on the same ticket anyway she is entitled to the money. It might be more problematic if someone else is chosen, but that seems to be academic now that Harris has enough delegates to secure the nomination.

- Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are calling on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign following the failure to stop the attempt on Trump's life. So far she has stood firm, but I suspect her days in the position are numbered.

- Given continued greenhouse gas emissions, many are looking more closely at geoengineering. This is raising considerable alarm, as the possibilities for unintended consequences are significant, and is also a potential distraction from better solutions... but if those better solutions aren't forthcoming for political reasons, it might nonetheless be necessary.

- A wildfire has forced a last-minute evacuation of Jasper National Park in Alberta, including the Jasper townsite.

- The Executive Director of St. Boniface Street Links, Marion Willis, was fined for trespassing after visiting that North End apartment building whose tenants who were evicted en masse last week. Willis, who was working to assist the tenants, says this resulted after her organization's lawyer contacted the landlord's, and the latter attorney responded by saying that all Street Links staff and volunteers were banned from the premises; Willis attended anyway and was fined. She plans to fight the ticket. One would think she has a good case if she was attending as a guest of a tenant. Meanwhile, tenants returning to their units following the province's order are finding almost nothing in the units - in at least one case, even the appliances were removed.

- The City of Winnipeg's recent push to take action against the owners of vacant buildings is not going unopposed. Lawyer John Prystanski, a former city councillor who never met a slumlord he didn't like, is representing three of them, and is demanding that the city cancel invoices issued to his clients for the costs of fighting fires, claiming that the vacant building bylaw is not being properly applied.

- Besides the developing zebra mussel situation at Clear Lake, the invasive molluscs have been found at the St. Malo Reservoir south of Winnipeg.

- Two Alberta men are being charged with uttering death threats against Justin Trudeau; one of them is also accused of similar threats against Jagmeet Singh and Chrystia Freeland.

News roundup, 22 July 2024

- Joe Biden has abandoned his bid for reelection and endorsed Kamala Harris. European leaders are praising him for his decision (even if it comes a bit late in the game) as well as for his actions as President. One thing is clear - you likely won't see much talk about the candidates' ages coming from the Republicans anymore.

- Many Republican strategists fear that their legislative agenda will alienate women. Many Democrats hope for that very thing; certainly if Harris becomes the candidate as expected she is expected to put this front and centre. And there are promising signs that the Republicans may have peaked too early; hopefully a relatively fresh and young candidate will be able to take advantage of this.

- While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly made statements about the need for caution with AI, whistleblowers from his company say that in actual practice he is using the traditional Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" approach.

- Over half of Turkey's power grid is now supplied by renewables, though they have a long way to go to catch up with places like the EU. The shift has been recent, and seems to be primarily motivated by a desire to reduce dependence on Russia, who supplies most of their fossil fuels.

- The zebra mussel situation at Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park is not looking good. Parks Canada is still looking at what measures they can take, but this ship may well have sailed. In other invasive species-related news, some lakes in Manitoba seem to have been illegally stocked with largemouth bass (a popular species with sport anglers). This is a potential problem for native trout and pickerel species.

- Manitoba's Residential Tenancies Branch has ordered the owners of that North End apartment block to reverse the eviction of all their tenants. Still not a good look, especially given that the landlord threw out some tenants' possessions without warning. The province warns that additional orders, and charges, may be pending. In other somewhat promising Winnipeg housing news, a long-vacant block in the Riverview neighbourhood has been purchased by Fisher River Cree Nation and may well be up and running by next year.

- CO₂ levels are now comparable to what they are thought to have been in the middle of the Pliocene epoch, around 3 million years ago. At that time the mean global temperature is estimated to have been about 3°C above present levels; this can be expected to happen over the next few decades unless dramatic changes are made right quick (and possibly even then). Much of Greenland was ice-free at the time; sea level may have been close to 10 metres above current levels. For an idea of what that might look like, check out this site.

- It's so hot in parts of the US that pop cans are under significantly more pressure than usual. When carried in airplanes, they're sometimes bursting as a result. In 20 cases, injuries have resulted.

- A former Ukrainian MP was fatally shot on Friday. She had been a member of an ultranationalist party and had drawn criticism for not considering Russian-speaking Ukrainians to be properly Ukrainian; nonetheless, this is not the optimal way of dealing with people with problematic views.

- Thefts of catalytic converters have dropped significantly in the past year. Some of this may be attributable to legislation that makes it harder for thieves to sell them, but a big part of it is simply that the precious metals in them aren't worth as much as they were before.

- At least 12 Russian soldiers died after eating poisoned watermelons in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

News roundup, 28 May 2024

- The IDF bombed a refugee camp in Rafah, killing at least 45 people. They then followed it up by hitting the city's hospitals. The camp was not in one of the places where civilians had been ordered to evacuate, and was full of people who had been forced out of other parts of Gaza. One has to say that when you herd people into a small part of their homeland, and then bomb that area, the optics are very bad.

- The US House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce has requested a briefing from their National Intelligence Director Avril Haines regarding the firing of two Chinese-born scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

- Parks Canada is sticking to their guns regarding the recreational watercraft ban at Clear Lake in the hope of nipping an outbreak of zebra mussels in the bud. I have to respectfully disagree with the provincial government here; while a unilateral decision might seem heavy handed, you need to be heavy handed when dealing with something like this if you want any chance of stopping the spread. I do agree that measures should be taken to help businesses harmed by the decision, though.

- A Canadian senator has introduced a bill, known as the Climate-Aligned Finance Act, which would force financial institutions as well as pension funds to move their investments out of emissions-intensive sectors of the economy. In addition it would require lending to fossil fuel companies to be treated as higher risk. The bill is not expected to pass; nonetheless, the mere fact that it's being discussed is sending the likes of the Canadian Bankers' Association into conniptions. Now what did Ken Livingstone say about bankers again?

- The troubles at the Food Fare on Portage Avenue seem to be escalating, as cars belonging to the store's co-owner and a relative were torched in the store parking lot. The people seen lighting the fire in the surveillance video had apparently been kicked out of the store for shoplifting the previous day.

- The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT), the provincial police watchdog, recommended that three Lethbridge police officers involved in spying on an NDP MLA should face criminal charges, however provincial prosecutors have declined to take up the case.

- A company run by former Tory cabinet minister Kevin Klein is buying three newspapers, including the Winnipeg Sun, from Postmedia.

- The Beautiful Plains School Division in southwestern Manitoba is suing a Carberry woman for defamation after the woman made multiple allegations on social media about teachers at the schools her children attend.

- Upon seeing a distraught man walking along Highway 407 in Brampton, two drivers for Purolator put on their four-ways and drove slowly behind him to keep him from getting run over. Hopefully he'll eventually be thankful rather than angry that they foiled his apparent suicide attempt. 

News roundup, 10 May 2024

- Solar and wind power are the fastest growing electricity sources in history. Renewables now represent 30% of global electricity production. Meanwhile Danielle Smith continues to make a fool of herself on this issue (and numerous others).

- Drought conditions have resulted in Lake Winnipeg's water level being the lowest it's been in 35 years, and the second lowest since Manitoba Hydro's Jenpeg control structure began regulating the lake level.

- Police moved in to forcibly clear a protest camp from the University of Calgary yesterday, using flashbangs (they claim that this was a response to aggressive behaviour by the protesters). The encampment at the University of Manitoba remains and has stayed peaceful, though the university has cited the existence of the encampment as a reason to cancel a public event on campus.

- Parks Canada has banned watercraft from Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park in the hope of containing a potential zebra mussel outbreak. Interestingly, there has been some speculation among cottagers that the appearance of zebra mussels may have been a deliberate attempt at sabotage; on this Reddit thread a poster attempts to draw a link to an activist who was accused of planning an armed blockade in the park in 2022, though no actual evidence is presented and it's hard to say if this is something real, or just an attempt to poison the proverbial well.

- Legislation introduced in Ontario in 2022 which changed the fees paid to municipalities by developers led to a backlash from several municipalities. In response, the provincial government launched audits to determine the impact - only to cancel them (presumably because they had the potential to make the government look bad).

- Tim Hortons is testing new fibre coffee cup lids at some locations. Conservative MP Lianne Rood is up in arms about the new lids, which she considers to be "woke" because they aren't made of plastic.

- The town of Oakville, Ontario has voted to turn down money from the federal government because they don't want to densify their neighbourhoods. Some important context - despite officially continuing to call itself a "town", Oakville is larger than many cities in the province, at over 213,000 people. Apparently the residents want to continue to delude themselves into thinking that they're simple, small-town folk who don't want none of that big city stuff, and certainly nothing like apartments or fourplexes that might bring those darned poors to town. They also famously banned clotheslines until a previous government prohibited municipalities from banning them.

- The former CAO of the Rural Municipality of North Cypress-Langford has pleaded guilty to diverting about $30,000 to the Carberry Curling Club to replace money she'd stolen from the club while serving as their treasurer. I'm guessing that a gambling problem was involved; that seems to be how this sort of thing usually happens.

- Rex Murphy (or "Nervous Rex", as the good folks at CODCO called him) has died, though not before spouting a lot of rightwing propaganda in recent years.

News roundup, 10 April 2024

- The City of Winnipeg is still considering the possibility of a pedestrian scramble somewhere, though probably not at River and Osborne thanks to the report that concluded that the price of pedestrian safety could be as much as 30 extra seconds on suburbanites' commute. On a related note, at a meeting of Winnipeg's Standing Policy Committee on Public Works yesterday, Mark Cohoe, executive director of Bike Winnipeg, was presenting on behalf of the organization regarding the proposals for the intersection of Osborne and River when Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt showed up late and berated Cohoe and other delegations, calling them "bike Nazis". The organization is outraged, and is calling for Wyatt to be removed from the committee. Based on that and other aspects of his character I have to assume that if he follows through on his threat to run federally in Elmwood-Transcona he'll run for the Tories.

- At Manitoba's largest hospital, University of Manitoba medical and nursing students have better security than working nurses at the same institution. The security guards employed by the university are equipped with batons and pepper gel, but those employed by the hospital itself (e.g. in the emergency room) are not. The nurses' union is naturally lobbying for changes following a number of incidents including the stabbing of a security guard in February; the union wants weapon scanners and armed security. Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says that the training of additional security is a top priority but is uncomfortable with some aspects of the union's demands, saying "Some people maybe feel nervous or anxious or have a reaction based on their trauma when they see people who look like security or look similar to police". Now the minister is not wrong about that, however in order to properly evaluate this it's necessary to also factor in the fact that some people may be made more comfortable, especially given what's been going on there of late, and to choose a course of action that leads to the lowest overall amount of anxiety - not that it's necessarily easy to do that, of course.

- In the US, a federal court has upheld the right of California to set its own emission rules that are stronger than federal standards, following a challenge by several Republican-held states.

- Toronto is now less affordable than New York City or Miami. At the same time, commercial landlords are freaking out about the high vacancy rate for offices in the city. It seems to me that the second problem could be turned into a solution to the first, although converting an office building to an apartment building isn't always easy.

- Arizona's Supreme Court has reinstated an 1864 law that outlaws abortion in nearly all cases. You might expect Republicans to be rejoicing at this, but in fact they're freaking out, with even Sen. Kari Lake having suddenly changed her mind on the merits of this old law. Trump also says that the law goes too far. Of course in Trump's case it's likely partly because he's no doubt been spared huge amounts of money in child support payments by the availability of abortion, but the fact that there's going to be a referendum on abortion in the state in November probably has a lot to do with it too, given the potential increase in Democratic turnout that could result. The fact that shortly before the court ruling a Republican legislator brought in a delegation to pray and speak in tongues probably doesn't help their image either.

- Parks Canada is considering a temporary ban on boating on Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park in order to limit the spread of Zebra Mussels. The premier is uncomfortable with that due to the popularity of the lake, but it seems like it may be a necessary evil to protect the lake.

- There was a big spike in Google searches for the phrase "my eyes hurt" following Monday's eclipse. Whether this is a result of people actually damaging their eyes from not following precautions, or just psychosomatic pain due to people second-guessing whether their precautions were adequate, is not clear.