News roundup, 10 Sept 2025

- The US and the EU have tentatively agreed on a "Framework Agreement" on trade; what's disconcerting is what Europe seems prepared to give up in order to continue their trade relationship with the Americans. Buried in the document is a statement that the countries "intend to accept and provide mutual recognition to each other’s standards" with regard to motor vehicles; in other words, the EU is prepared to accept gigantic hulking American trucks and SUVs on their streets in order to satisfy the current US regime. The European Transport Safety Council has issued a statement condemning the move; whether it can be reversed, though, is a good question. I suspect that most European leaders know that it really isn't a good idea but are preparing to move forward due to fears about the economic impact of tariffs. Unfortunately they're in a tight spot, because much of the voting public takes a very short-sighted, immediate view of such matters and are willing to accept a worse future in order to avoid a pay cut in the present.

- Israel bombed Doha on Tuesday, attempting to justify the attack by saying that they were targeting Hamas leaders who were in the Qatari capital for peace negotiations. The Israelis were at one point claiming that the attack was greenlighted by the Trump regime, but later retracted the statement, saying that they had acted alone. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the attack "an intolerable expansion of violence"; even Trump seems to think it may not have been a good idea. It's definitely not good for the peace negotiations. Presumably that was Netanyahu's goal, since what he seems to want is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza so he can just annex it to Israel, and that would be a hard thing to justify even to his own people if the negotiations were still active.

- Poland says that they have shot down Russian drones that had strayed into their airspace in the course of a Russian attack on Ukraine. 

- The Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles caused a stir with an Instagram post that read "Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews". There was an instant backlash as the museum's social media followers thought about who else the post might be referring to, and the post was removed with a grovelling apology.

- Manitoba's Minister of Health, Uzoma Asagwara, has announced that two police officers will be stationed at the emergency ward of Health Sciences Centre at all times, and weapon detection equipment will be installed at all entrances. This follows the "greylisting" of HSC, the province's largest hospital, by the Manitoba Nurses' Union. The union's president isn't sure this is the best way to do it, favouring more funding for specialized safety officers rather than tying up police resources. It might be a necessary evil, though.

- Federal Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald, encouragingly, has not ruled out lifting the tariffs on Chinese EVs in the hope of getting Chinese restrictions on Canadian canola lifted. On the other hand, he also says that the government wants to "ensure any changes wouldn't jeopardize other industries or sectors"; that suggests that we shouldn't get our hopes up, though, since those autoworker votes are important.

- The mayor of Barrie, Ontario, Alex Nuttall, has declared a state of emergency in the city in order to address concerns about homeless encampments. Ontario's emergency management law empowers the city to create a new task force to oversee the response to encampments, as well as hiring contractors and consultants to assist them in the matter.

-Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm warns that the Trump regime has "basically destroyed what capacity we had to respond to a pandemic" since taking office the second time around. On the bright side, if we get a big enough pandemic it will do wonders for the fight against climate change.

News roundup, 9 Sept 2025

- An analysis by The Narwhal has found that the recent changes to Winnipeg Transit's network have disproportionately affected less affluent areas. Overall, there was a reduction in the number of stops from 11 per km² to 7 per km², but neighbourhoods in the North End and downtown lost 2-3 times as many stops as the city average, while suburban ones lost the fewest. Now admittedly, there's a kind of logic to that if you want to use Transit's limited budget to minimize the number of people who drive - more North End residents will continue to lump it, simply because they can't afford a car. Even more cynically, one might reason that reducing the number of stops in poorer neighbourhoods will reduce the number of people who use the bus as a shelter, thus making it more attractive to suburbanites. Urban planning professor Orly Linovski pretty much admits this when she says that Transit has two distinct goals - to better serve those who already use it and to encourage people with other options to take the bus, and that those two goals "can be in conflict"; nonetheless, she questions whether the approach taken is good social policy. There's also the fact that there's a tradeoff between fast service and having a lot of stops. And indeed, on the major routes with frequent service, there really has been an improvement - but this comes at a cost to people with mobility issues, and will also not seem so attractive when it's -30°C out, or if you have to walk through a sketchy neighbourhood to get to your bus stop. And the cuts to late night service have also disproportionately affected poorer areas.

- Winnipeg's city council is considering strict limits on where homeless encampments will be tolerated. Among the prohibited locations will be within 50 metres of schools or children's recreational facilities, which is fine, but it also includes anywhere within 30 metres of a transit shelter, bridges, docks or piers and within 50 metres of a rail line; those restrictions seem a lot harder to justify (prohibiting encampments in a transit shelter might be fair game, but near?) and when you combine all the restrictions it becomes an interesting question about where such people will still be allowed to exist. We'll have to see how the courts deal with it; an Ontario court has previously ruled that municipalities can't have blanket prohibitions if there isn't enough shelter space for all the encampment residents. Even site-specific restrictions have been struck down.

- Brazil's Supreme Court is set to rule today on the fate of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is being tried for his version of Jan 6 that occurred following his electoral defeat in 2022. Among the other accusations he faces is that he was aware of a plot to assassinate the legitimate president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Donald Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and has imposed personal sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, calling the trial "political persecution". The country, of course, is deeply divided over the issue.

- A WestJet Boeing 737-800 from Toronto was substantially damaged following a collapse of the right main landing gear upon landing at Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten. Passengers and crew escaped without major injury. Most of the news stories have described this as a "hard landing", which implicitly sounds like it's blaming the pilots (i.e. they landed too hard and broke the airplane), but according to Juan Browne (blancolirio) there's a history of similar failures in that aircraft type, including one involving an Alaska Airlines flight in 2023, and nothing about the WestJet flight's approach seemed to suggest that the crew were doing anything wrong.

- A man in Prince George, BC was pulled over while driving a child-size Barbie jeep along one of the city's major routes to go to the 7-11 for a Slurpee. He was arrested after failing a breathalyzer test and already had a suspended license. 

News roundup, 8 Sept 2025

- The agriculture sector in both Canada and the US is taking a beating due to the ongoing trade dispute with China. In the US, corn and soybean prices have collapsed; in Canada there's a similar situation with canola. In both countries, governments are trying to pick up the slack by incentivizing more biofuel production. Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe is calling for the removal of tariffs on Chinese EVs as these tariffs are widely seen as being part of the reason China has sanctioned our canola in the first place. I hate to agree with Moe on anything, but he's right about this. Unfortunately there's no way in hell that the federal government will throw auto workers under the bus.

- Suicide is now the number one cause of death in the EU for people between the ages of 15 and 29, accounting for nearly 19% of all deaths in that age group. This represents a reversal of a previous downward trend for suicide.

- Air Canada's flight attendants have rejected the latest wage offer from their employer. The union argues that even with the increase offered, flight attendants would still effectively be making less than the minimum wage for federally regulated industries.

- A consumer advocacy group in Australia has found that 16 out of 20 brands of sunscreen don't provide the level of protection claimed on the label. This in the country with the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world.

- Former Winnipeg Blue Bombers running back Willard Reaves is running for the leadership of the Manitoba Liberal Party. I guess he figures that if Obby Khan can lead a party, so can he.

- In France, the government led by prime minister François Bayrou is expected to lose a non-confidence vote. Bayrou had called the vote himself, hoping to "shock" politicians into getting their act together, but it doesn't seem to be working. Meanwhile the bleating masses are lining up behind Jordan Bardella, leader of the far-right National Rally, because he seems like "someone you could get a drink with". You'd hope that a democracy could choose its leaders based on something more substantial than that, but I guess not.

- Erin Patterson, who poisoned several of her husband's relatives with death cap mushrooms, killing three, has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 33 years.

News roundup, 5 Sept 2025

- At least 16 people were killed on Wednesday and 21 injured, five seriously, when one of Lisbon's funicular trams went out of control and derailed, colliding with a building. Two Canadians are among the dead. Initial reports suggest a problem with the cable; a full investigation of an accident like this can take quite some time, however. As an odd side note - in the course of browsing Wikipedia about funicular railways, I learned that the classic Italian song "Funiculì, Funiculà" was written to celebrate the opening of such a railway in 1880.

- A stabbing rampage and ensuing police chase in Hollow Water First Nation has left two people dead, including the suspect, and eight people, including an RCMP officer, with serious injuries.

- The Norwegian government, along with a consortium of oil companies, has launched the world's first large scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation, injecting CO₂ into the seabed 2,600 metres beneath the North Sea. I'm not opposed in principle, but even if it works as well as advertised it's a stopgap, not a solution; the storage capacity may well run out before fossil fuels do.

- While condos are a good idea in principle, a disproportionate number of condos built in Canada in recent decades were built as something to invest in more than something to live in. As a result, many of them aren't really good to live in for the long haul, and sales have cratered recently to the point where many investors are now underwater on their mortgages. Not mentioned in the article, but suggested by folks in this Reddit thread, is the role of the short-term rental industry in the whole matter; apparently many condos built since the advent of Airbnb were built more like hotel rooms than actual apartments.

- Donald Trump intends to sign an executive order that will rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War. To be fair, there was a time when most countries gave their defense ministries such a name, but that was mostly before WWII, after which it became less fashionable to treat war as if it were some kind of goal (or at least to advertise yourself as doing so by naming an entire government department after it). For a while, at least; now that the Americans are going back that way we'll have to see if the rest of the world follows their lead.

- Self-styled "Queen of Canada" Romana Didulo was released without charges on Wednesday, only to be rearrested on Thursday for violating conditions of her release. The owner of the decommissioned school where she and her followers were based was also rearrested; the two had been ordered not to communicate with each other.

- Human remains found in Algonquin Provincial Park in 1980 have been identified using genetic genealogy as being from a Cleveland man who disappeared in 1973. Eric Singer had fled the US after being drafted.

News roundup, 4 Sept 2025

- The RCMP raided the compound of self-proclaimed "Queen of Canada" Romana Didulo in Richmound, Saskatchewan on Wednesday. Didulo and 15 others were arrested following a firearms investigation; charges are pending.

- Calgary lawyers John Carpay and Jay Cameron, of the so-called "Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms", have been disbarred by the Law Society of Alberta after hiring a private investigator to put Manitoba judge Glenn Joyal, who was presiding over their case against pandemic restrictions, under surveillance.

- The Manitoba government is backing away from a plan to open a supervised consumption site near the Disraeli overpass. The government still plans to open a site, but strident opposition from local residents is forcing them to reconsider the location.

- A proposal to build supportive housing in Winnipeg's Grant Park neighbourhood is getting a lot of pushback from residents in neighbouring River Heights. An unsigned leaflet is being distributed to stoke fear of crime and mental illness.

- The Quebec government has rejected an offer of federal money that would have helped address systemic racism in the justice system. Presumably they feared that accepting the money would be an admission that the province has a problem with racism.

- The states of Washington, Oregon, and California are creating a new public health agency in response to the Trump regime's takeover of federal agencies. They will be issuing their own public health recommendations with regards to vaccines and the like.

- A long-lost painting, Giuseppe Ghislandi's "Portrait of a Lady", painted in 1710, has been recovered in Argentina, some 80 years after it was stolen by the Nazis. The painting was discovered by accident in photos on a real estate agent's website; it was hanging on the wall of a house being sold by the daughter of the late Friedrich Kadgien, an advisor to Hermann Goring.

News roundup, 3 Sept 2025

- Berlin police are investigating after a pro-Palestine demonstrator was beaten up by an officer last Thursday. Another activist was quoted as saying that German police are particularly brutal in dealing with such activists. Germany is also apparently standing in the way of the EU imposing sanctions on Israel. It seems that the Germans are trying to atone for the Holocaust by giving the Israeli leadership whatever they want.

- Russian opposition activists are urging Canada to give asylum to several hundred dissidents who applied for asylum in the US but now are at risk of being sent back to Russia 

- The City of Winnipeg is running out of deltamethrin, the insecticide that it has used to fog for mosquitoes approval for malathion fogging was withdrawn some years back. As a result, they're looking at expanding their larviciding program; this would require an expansion of the city's helicopter base in Elmwood (or an entirely new facility). In truth, larviciding (much of which is done with a bacterial agent) is not only safer from a health and environmental point of view, it's much more effective; fogging is what they do to show the public that they're doing something to control mosquitoes more than anything.

- Winnipeg police took out a search warrant to investigate a suspected bicycle chop shop at a homeless encampment by the Red River along Waterfront Drive. Legal experts are calling this a smart move to maximize the chance that charges stick; on the other hand the local residents' association is worried about the precedent that this could set by treating the encampments as legitimate housing.

- The fourth floor of Winnipeg's Millennium Library has been reopened to the public following the installation of construction fences as a temporary measure to stop people from jumping. Many are saying that what's really needed is the restoration of the Community Connections services on the main floor; as one witness to last month's suicide pointed out, if the service had been available at the time, the unfortunate chap might have gotten help before it was too late.

- Online clothing retailer Shein is investigating after an image used by one of the vendors listing on their platform showed Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, wearing one of their shirts. The image, thought to have been AI generated, has been removed.

News roundup, 2 Sept 2025

- Donald Trump's pretext for deploying the National Guard in the District of Columbia was to deal with rampant crime. In actual fact, though, the troops have mostly been deployed in tourist areas and metro stations, not high crime neighbourhoods. There have, however, been a number of what locals believe to be police from out of town sent to those places, often making a big show of arresting people for petty offenses such as smoking pot or fare evasion.

- The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has identified 12 instances in which large supermarket chains have mislabeled foreign produce as Canadian. The CFIA has the power to levy fines of $15,000 per offense, however so far they have elected to simply say "please do not do this again".

- Yves Veggie Cuisine, a popular Canadian-founded brand of meat substitutes, is being shut down by its American owner, Hain Celestial Group. Hain claims that the sector has been declining for several years; it's possible that they want to take Linda McCartney Foods (which they also own) across the Atlantic and don't want Yves to compete with it. It also has to be admitted that while their veggie dogs are excellent, many of their other products such as veggie burgers are mediocre at best, especially when compared with things like Beyond Meat.

- The hamlet of Fort Providence, Northwest Territories is the latest to be evacuated as a result of wildfires, after a fire came within a kilometre of the community. Evacuees are being sent to the town of Hay River.

- Postal services of 25 countries have suspended outbound postal service to the US in response to tariffs. 

- US Customs and Border Patrol searched almost 15,000 cellphones at the Canadian border between April and June. In many cases the data from the phones was downloaded and archived for reasons unknown. One cybersecurity expert suggests that while you can always take a "burner phone", the very absence of data on the phone could itself be seen as a red flag. I guess the best choice would be a flip phone that you couldn't put apps on at all; maybe don't try that if you're young, though. Actually better still - don't visit the US at all.

- Two years ago, Taco Bell introduced AI-driven drive-thrus at over 500 US locations. They're now rethinking things after it failed to reduce errors or speed up service. Many report that their requests have confused the system; one guy managed to crash the entire system by ordering 18,000 cups of water.

- A teacher in Idaho has been forced to resign after refusing to remove a poster from her classroom. The poster had the slogan "Everyone is welcome" with outlines of hands of different skin tone; she was explicitly told that while the slogan itself would have been tolerable, showing the hands was not. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud...

- Residents of a trailer park on the outskirts of Winnipeg have been targeted with graffiti and with an anonymous letter sent to the trailer park's office warning residents of the park to stay out of the adjacent suburban neighbourhood.