News roundup, 18 April 2024

- Opinions continue to pour in about Canada's federal budget. Bill Morneau, who served as finance minister under Trudeau until 2020 (and seems to have left his position on bad terms) is condemning the increase in the capital gains tax, fearing that it will discourage investment. That's pretty standard fare for Morneau's kind of Liberal. The real problem with this budget, though, is not what's in it but the fact that it's not going to save the government anyway and thus the good parts won't be followed through with long enough to have a beneficial effect.

- Ukraine scored a series of hits on a Russian airfield in Crimea; on the other hand they suffered a number of fatalities from a Russian attack on the city of Chernihiv. Looking at the big picture, though, things are starting to look pretty bleak for Ukraine; while the Russians have lost around 50,000 troops so far, Ukraine has also lost over 31,000, and Russia simply has more reserves. Some think Ukraine's defenses could collapse as early as this year; in any case, though, it seems unlikely that Russia's victory will be complete. Perhaps the least bad realistic scenario is that Russia gets bogged down in a long, drawn out guerilla campaign that saps their resources and kills any possibility of them attacking other countries; maybe Ukraine can do to Putin's Russia what Afghanistan did to the USSR. No doubt Ukraine deserves better than to serve as Europe's sacrificial anode, but that's how it goes I guess.

- The situation in the Middle East has gotten more awkward for Joe Biden following Iran's retaliation for Israel's attack on their embassy in Damascus. Unfortunately Israel has been spoiling for a fight with Iran for years now, so long as they can get the Americans to back them up. And if the Americans don't back them up after strikes on their own soil, I'm sure the folks at AIPAC would have something to say about that.

- Red River College Polytechnic's medical lab technologist program only filled 28 of 40 available spots for their newest cohort of students. This is likely to lead to problems down the line for the healthcare system, especially in rural areas that have a harder time attracting educated and skilled workers anyway.

- Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee are voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers. VW themselves don't seem particularly bothered by this; then again, all of their other plants are already unionized. State politicians, though, are freaking out at the example this might set for other workers in the state if it goes through.

- Several people, including two former Air Canada employees, have been arrested in connection with a huge gold heist that happened at Pearson airport last year.

- A developer who built two condo towers in San Jose, California was not able to sell all the units in the towers. Since they remained the owners of the units, they were supposed to pay condo fees for those units - but they fell behind on their payments, and the condo association decided to auction off the units to cover the delinquent fees. They sold for an average of $30,000 each, a very low price anywhere, but unheard of in the Bay Area. The developer isn't taking this lying down, though; they're suing the trustee who auctioned off the units, as well as the buyers of the units.

- Tim Hortons emailed a number of people indicating that they had won a boat worth $55,000. The company attributes this to a "technical error"; the people whose hopes were raised are less than impressed.

- A school bus driver in western Manitoba was arrested for driving a busload of kids with a blood alcohol content double the legal limit. I can't say that sounds like a good career move.

News roundup, 17 April 2024

- A whistleblower is calling for the grounding of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, alleging that production issues could make the aircraft susceptible to in-flight breakup.

- Jury selection in Donald Trump's trial for the hush money allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels is progressing better than might be expected, with seven jurors already selected.

- Back in Canada, federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has delivered this year's budget to Parliament. Notably, this includes $8.5 billion for housing (better late than never certainly), as well as a national disability benefit (albeit less than what advocates were hoping for). There will be a deficit of $40 billion; predictably, the deficit hawks are getting antsy, and some worry that this could worsen inflation. Some others point out that this is a simplistic view of things and that austerity could do a lot more harm than a deficit (citing the basket case that the UK has become as an example). Then again, it may not matter what the fundamentals are if big economic interests lose confidence. It may be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

- The Manitoba PCs are going to stick with interim leader Wayne Ewasko until next year. Interestingly Ewasko is being touted as a potential candidate for the full job; many parties prohibit an interim leader from running for the main prize, due to them enjoying an unfair advantage due to their higher profile. Other potential candidates include MLA Obby Khan, former MLA Kevin Klein, and East St. Paul Mayor Carla Devlin.

- Emergency departments in rural Manitoba experienced some 80,000 hours of closures due to being shortstaffed. Three ERs (in Shoal Lake, Teulon, and Winnipegosis) have been closed indefinitely for several years. The Tories did a lot of complaining about this kind of thing the last time they were in opposition, and no doubt the NDP will happily point out that the Tories were in power as the current situation developed. What neither party will likely want to say, though, is that the problem may be as much a cultural problem as a fiscal one. To put it bluntly, most people who spend years at university to become doctors and nurses don't want to move out to a small town, and the growing hostility in many of those communities towards those edumacated big city folks with their electric cars and rainbow flags isn't going to make the situation any easier.

- The US House of Representatives is holding separate votes on aid packages for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Originally this was planned as a single vote, but given the willingness (or even desire) of many Republicans to throw Ukraine under the bus, I guess AIPAC and their ilk decided that the possibility of the whole package being defeated meant that the votes had to be separated, or else. On a related note, some of the Republicans are trying to oust Speaker Mike Johnson for not being sufficiently extreme for their liking (even though he's pretty darned extreme).

- A fire has devastated the historic building that once housed Copenhagen's stock exchange. Happily there were no fatalities, and a lot of the artworks stored there were rescued, but the building itself is likely to be a total loss.

- The US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, who had been held liable by a lower court for injuries that a police officer sustained when a protester at a rally organized by Mckesson. A previous Supreme Court decision in 1982 had ruled that protest leaders cannot be held liable for the violent actions of a protest participant, unless there was evidence that the leaders had actually directed or incited the violence, but I guess the present court didn't want to do the legal gymnastics needed to say that the Mckesson case is somehow different.

- The University of Southern California has cancelled their valedictorian speech, citing "safety concerns". No doubt they're particularly concerned about their donor base, since the valedictorian has been highly critical of Israel on social media.

- A former US Marine has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for the firebombing of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Costa Mesa, California in 2022. He had also admitted to planning other attacks.

- Julian Assange's prospects of avoiding extradition to the US are diminishing after the Americans assured the High Court of England and Wales that he will not face the death penalty if convicted.

- A debate over a controversial bill requiring NGOs that accept money from abroad to register as "foreign agents" turned into a punch-up in the Georgian parliament.

News roundup, 16 April 2024

- The US Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation last month against Boeing over their handling of their latest safety issues. Mentour Now has just put out a highly detailed video on the topic; Boeing really seems to be testing the limits of "too big to fail". They probably still are, but are they too big to fail in the civil aviation market? I dunno, but if I were the sort of person to invest in that sector (which I wouldn't) I'd be looking at Embraer stock.

- An abortion rights referendum is going to be on the ballot in Florida this fall. Could it give Biden a chance at winning the state? That remains to be seen, but it probably won't hurt. Meanwhile a Republican operative in that state has admitted to recruiting a third party candidate with the same surname as Democratic incumbent José Javier Rodríguez, in order to siphon votes away from him. The scheme worked; Rodríguez lost by a scant 32 votes while the other Rodríguez drew over 6,000. One is reminded of a similar scandal in Manitoba in the 1990s.

- Donald Trump's trial in the Stormy Daniels hush money case has commenced. Jury selection is underway; there is an extensive list of questions to screen prospective jurors. The trial itself is expected to last about six weeks.

- One of the biggest barriers to solving the housing crisis is the fact that in order to solve the problem you need to drive down property values - and a lot of people don't like that since they've been conditioned to see houses not as a place to live but as an investment. Meanwhile, in Innisfil, Ontario, a guy seems to be trying to unlock the master slumlord achievement by charging people to camp on his property.

- Parti Quebecois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon expects to form government in 2026, and is vowing that the province will see a third referendum on independence by the end of the decade.

- Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara has given the direction for the institutional safety officers at Health Sciences Centre to be provided with pepper gel, however this has not yet happened as the necessary training has not yet occurred. Shared Health and the WRHA have expressed concerns that "some patients who might be uncomfortable around armed, uniformed security personnel chose not to seek needed medical assistance"; this is not an invalid concern but it has to be weighed against the fact that some patients who might be uncomfortable at an ER with inadequate security might also not seek assistance, or, more seriously, that staff recruitment and retention could be more difficult.

- Following the mass stabbing in metro Sydney's Bondi Junction, massive amounts of disinformation about the attacker circulated on social media. Some falsely implicated a student at Sydney University, while others claimed, equally falsely, that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant (one of the victims was, but that's another story). In actual fact, the attacker seems to have been a follower of the incel movement.

- In yet another stabbing incident in the Sydney area, a bishop and three others were wounded at an Assyrian Orthodox church; following the incident the police got a less than friendly reception from parishioners and two were injured. I guess the parishioners wanted to take the law into their own hands.

- A senior officer in the Australian Federal Police has pleaded guilty to having a blood alcohol content nearly three times the legal limit when she crashed her car into a tree on the way home from a work-related function.

- The spectacular crash in East St. Paul last week appears to have resulted from an online sale that came to a dispute when the people met to transfer the item. The driver of one of the trucks now faces charges of dangerous operation of a vehicle causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon.

- A man in Guelph was charged with possession of an explosive device after showing up at the local hospital with hand injuries.

News roundup, 15 April 2024

- Iran launched a number of missiles and drones at Israel over the weekend, stating that this was retaliation for the attack on Iran's embassy in Damascus earlier this month. The attack had little effect owing to Israel's advanced air defense systems.

- Jury selection for Donald Trump's first actual criminal trial, regarding the hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, begins on Monday. Finding twelve jurors who are sufficiently impartial about Mr. Trump will be a challenge, though. Some are hoping that the details that come out during the trial will be "mortifying" for Trump, but that makes the questionable assumption that he is capable of feeling shame. In other Trump news, shares in Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, are down by about 20% for the week and over 47% so far this month.

- Six people were killed and several others wounded in a stabbing attack in a mall in a suburb of Sydney before the attacker was shot to death by police. The attacker was known to police and wasn't a well fellow by the sound of it.

- Despite the fact that pretty much everyone in a position of authority knows better, new coal plants continue to be built and places that are phasing them out aren't doing it near fast enough. I hate to advocate for geoengineering given all the risks, but they're making it harder and harder to avoid that.

- Four out of the five councillors in the Rural Municipality of Armstrong, in Manitoba's Interlake region, have resigned citing a "toxic work environment" and leadership problems. Details of these issues have not been made public so far, but rural and small town politics can be a pretty nasty business (see for instance the case of St Andrews mayor Joy Sul).

- Danielle Smith hopes that Red Deer will grow tenfold from its current population of 106,000. Many locals aren't so keen. Setting that aside, one wonders if Smith is really thinking things through on this matter, since the rise of a third huge city in the province would probably require a lot of people to move there from outside the province, and this would probably not favour the UCP electorally.

- Former Thunder Bay police chief Sylvie Hauth has been charged with obstruction and breach of trust, becoming the third employee of the force to face criminal charges in the last few months. Meanwhile in Durham Region the police force there released personal information about a woman who had complained about being threatened by cyberstalkers directly to said cyberstalkers in response to a freedom of information request.

- A new law in Florida, just signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, effectively prevents civilian boards from investigating police misconduct.

News roundup, 12 April 2024

- In Israel, a decision of their Supreme Court a few years ago calls on the government to end the exemption from conscription that the ultra-orthodox community has enjoyed. This is rather awkward for Netanyahu since his governing coalition depends on the support of parties from that community, who would love their country to regain lands that they consider to have been promised to them by God, while wanting to ensure that it's other people's kids who have to risk their lives doing it. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, a mob of Israeli settlers stormed a Palestinian village, setting fire to homes and shooting at residents, killing at least one and wounding 25. And in Ireland, the government is making noises about possibly recognizing a Palestinian state. More alarmingly, following the bombing of Iran's embassy in Damascus, apparently by Israel, and the resulting threats of reprisals from Iran, many countries are issuing travel warnings for Israel, Iran, and in some cases the entire Middle East.

- Following his failure to provide a financial statement required for his bond in the New York civil fraud trial, Donald Trump submitted documents indicating that the company backing him is itself backed by a company based in the Cayman Islands, leading to concerns that the money may not be collectable if he loses his appeal.

- It's looking more and more like there will be a very bad wildfire season in much of Canada this year.

- The US has issued permits for 25 gigawatts of clean energy, a year earlier than anticipated.

- There's still some concern about vacancy rates in downtown Winnipeg office buildings. I still say get to work on retrofitting as many of them as practical for residential use.

- Two dogs that killed an 11 year old in Edmonton last week had been reported to the city's animal control department for previous attacks, including one in which a woman was seriously injured a mere two months ago. In spite of this, the city says that it had no lawful basis to seize the dogs until the fatal attack; if true that suggests that the city's animal control bylaws need a bit of work.

- A man in Stony Plain, Alberta has been getting numerous unwanted pizza deliveries to his home and workplace. Initially they were coming from a company called Pizza 73, but after he called the company's head office and asked them to cancel any orders coming from him, the orders started coming from Domino's instead. He suspects a disgruntled former coworker.

- An astrology influencer on the former Twitter, after warning her followers that Monday's eclipse was "the epitome of spiritual warfare", apparently stabbed her partner to death, then threw her two children from her car, killing one of them, before fatally crashing the vehicle into a tree.

News roundup, 11 April 2024

- Following criticism for his "bicycle Nazi" remark the other day, Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt has apologized for his choice of words, but defends the substance of what he was saying. He insists that he's not against all cycling; fair enough, but this is kind of telling:

"A number of us councillors have been advocating for bike paths to be built," including the Transcona Trail and the North Winnipeg Parkway, said Wyatt.

"What's frustrating is to hear Bike Winnipeg not necessarily representing those projects when they come forward, but want to represent closing of lanes to cars, such as closing Assiniboine Avenue at Main Street, or removing the slip lane in Osborne Village."

Now there's nothing wrong with the bike paths Wyatt says he's advocating for, but those paths are better suited to recreational cycling than commuting (though the North Winnipeg Parkway is doubtless useful for some). And what is really needed is to get people out of their cars, not merely have them riding around when they don't have anywhere in particular to go.

- Hawaii's aquifers are being depleted at a dangerous rate. And that's not even considering what will happen as sea levels rise and cause wells to go salty.

- Israel has faced international criticism for its actions before, but even its staunchest supporters are starting to wonder.

- Apparently the starting wages for new FBI agents, who have no say in where in the US they are assigned, are inadequate to comfortably cover the costs of living in many cities (New York, San Francisco, and others). That sounds like something that a spy, terrorist, or gangster could take advantage of.

- A lawyer who formerly worked for the Thunder Bay Police Service has been charged with several offenses related to the Ontario Provincial Police's investigation of the force's numerous problems.

- The owners of the Winnipeg Jets are considering going into the charity business by creating transitional housing. Obviously part of the motivation is the fact that the area around the Canada Life Centre has a lot of highly visible homelessness, but it's still a good thing if done well.

- Kathleen Cook, the Manitoba Tories' advanced education critic, raised the issue of the cyberattack at the University of Winnipeg in the legislature last week in an attempt to throw shade on the Kinew government. What she doesn't understand (or at least hopes that you don't understand) is that the condition of public institutions doesn't magically change overnight when a government changes - it can take years for this to happen. Which means that the state of such institutions in this province right now is more a reflection of Tory policy than NDP policy.

- A planned residential development in Waterloo, Ontario is less than 500 metres from an LRT station - but separated from it by the Conestoga Parkway. There were plans to build an active transportation bridge across the freeway, but unfortunately the involvement of a provincial highway meant that the Ministry of Transportation needed to approve its construction, and Doug Ford's government never misses an opportunity to fire a shot in the culture war against getting around by some means other than private cars.

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.