News roundup, 27 March 2026

- France's foreign minister, Roland Lescure, says that at least 30% of the Gulf's refining capacity has been taken out of commission by Iranian retaliatory strikes. This means that fuel prices aren't likely to come down any time soon; while this may accelerate electrification of such things as transportation, I fear that given the average person's attention span, many will forget the reason for the high prices and blame their own leaders, voting reflexively for opposition politicians who, in many cases, are hostile to the very measures that could limit the impact.

- On the positive side, there are indications that Donald Trump's excesses may be hurting the electoral chances of the far right, at least in Europe. The recent municipal elections in France were a disappointment for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement Nationale, and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni just lost a referendum on stacking the judiciary. Perhaps most encouraging is the fact that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán may be headed for defeat.

- Polish prime minister Donald Tusk says that Lithuania warned as far back as 2019 that Hungary posed a security risk to the EU and NATO. There are allegations that Hungary's foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, was briefing his Russian counterpart during breaks at EU meetings; Szijjarto initially denied this, calling it "fake news", but later admitted that he "consulted" with Russian as well as American, Turkish, and Israeli officials before and after these meetings.

- The UK government has vetoed a plan by Scotland to build a wind turbine manufacturing plant in cooperation with a Chinese manufacturer. The central government cited vague concerns about national security, but Scotland's deputy premier says the government has failed to explain their reasoning to her satisfaction.

- Former Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who is often cited by media outlets as an expert on gas prices, has been making strange claims such as saying that building more pipelines would "insulate Canada from price shocks", in spite of the fact that the country is already a net exporter. McTeague is currently the president of a fossil fuel advocacy group whose website has called Chinese EVs, a potential shelter from such price shocks, a "Trojan horse". It's worth noting that while he served as a Liberal during his parliamentary career, he voted against a same-sex marriage bill and opposed the induction of Dr. Henry Morgantaler into the Order of Canada; it looks like McTeague was the real Trojan horse. 

News roundup, 26 March 2026

- The last shipments of oil to make it out of the Strait of Hormuz are expected to reach their destinations over the next 8-10 days. Since there isn't expected to be any more for the foreseeable future, expect dramatic increases in fuel prices, and outright shortages in some places. Even if the strait is reopened, it will take time to restore oil reserves; whether voters will understand who to blame for this has yet to be determined, but Trump seems to be desperately looking for a way out.

- Polls in Hungary continue to show the opposition Tisza party widening its lead over Viktor Orban's Fidesz. An election is set to take place on the 12th of April, unless Orban finds some excuse to cancel it.

- A building formerly owned by Providence University College and Theological Seminary is being converted into transitional housing for formerly homeless people. When complete it will have 118 units; critics say that more is needed. Meanwhile the college that used to own the building is laying off staff due to the cap on international students.

- A CBC investigation has found that the RCMP conducted intensive spying operations on indigenous organizations across the country, including the Manitoba Metis Federation and the National Indian Brotherhood (now known as the Assembly of First Nations).

- Russ Wyatt, who represents Transcona on Winnipeg's city council, has been charged with sexual assault after a man claimed Wyatt drugged and assaulted him after meeting him on social media. While mayor Scott Gillingham is urging Wyatt to go on leave, council has no mechanism to suspend a member facing criminal charges.

- A committee of Winnipeg city council has voted to revoke a conditional use permit that allowed a West End family to keep pigeons. This follows concerns from neighbours about the impact of feces, but also fears about aviation safety due to the proximity to the airport. For their part, the family say that the pigeons are important therapy animals for their autistic child.

News roundup, 25 March 2026

- The investigation into the fatal accident at New York's LaGuardia Airport is focusing on the role of ATC, specifically how a controller could have cleared a fire truck to cross an active runway shortly after clearing an airliner to land on it. The fire truck was responding to a previously declared emergency, namely a report of fumes in the cabin of another aircraft; there are reports that the same controller was handling both ground and tower communications. No doubt investigators will be looking at the role of fatigue and understaffing here.

- The Trump regime is warning the EU not to delay passage of a trade deal, lest they lose "favourable access" to liquefied natural gas from the US. Europeans are naturally a bit suspicious of signing such a deal with a regime that keeps threatening to steal territory from one of their member states, of course. One hopes that this spurs Europe to abandon their reluctance to electrify transportation and heating, rather than just kowtow to the Americans, but this remains to be seen.

- The Public Service Alliance of Canada is calling on the federal government to allow its employees to work from home in order to dampen the impact of rising fuel prices resulting from the war in Iran. Several countries are already doing this; whether the obvious benefits will be enough to outweigh concerns in this country about commercial real estate values, the desire of middle managers to micromanage, and the fear of populist fury from people who don't have the option of working from home remains to be seen.

- The Federal Communications Commission has prohibited the import of new routers for home internet use. Existing models are grandfathered in, but any new model to hit the market must be designed and made in the US. This move is being justified on the grounds of security, with fears that foreign-made products might grant hostile governments (such as China) undue access; presumably the grandfathering is necessary because there aren't enough domestic-made routers to satisfy the market.

- A jury in New Mexico has found Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, liable for $375 million in damages for its failure to protect children from sexual predators and warn users about hazards of that sort. The company plans to appeal of course, presumably hoping that they'll get a judge who's friendly to the tech industry.

- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was the technical genius in the early days of the company while Steve Jobs served as the marketing guy, says he seldom uses AI, and generally is disappointed with the results when he does.

- Crispin Blunt, who served as the UK's parliamentary undersecretary of state for prisons and youth justice under David Cameron, has pleaded guilty to possession of several illegal drugs, including methamphetamine (as well as cannabis, as befits someone named Blunt).

News roundup, 24 March 2026

- New York's LaGuardia Airport has reopened after Sunday's fatal collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck. The NTSB is investigating the accident; they are expected to scrutinize the role of the air traffic controller who cleared the truck onto an active runway as well as staffing levels that may have led to the controller being overworked.

- The funding shortfall for the Department of Homeland Security continues, with TSA workers still not receiving paycheques. Trump has insisted that any funding deal has to allow his "SAVE America Act", which complicates voter registration for many voters (significantly, those whose current legal name differs from that on their birth certificate, such as the majority of married women in the country) to move ahead. However, some Republicans in the Senate are getting antsy as more people's flights down to resorts get delayed or cancelled, fearing that said voters might turn on them.

- The European Union and Australia have signed a trade agreement. Negotiations on the agreement had been going on for eight years, but the rise of the Trump regime seems to have focused their minds on getting a deal.

- The Carney Liberals continue to lead the Conservatives by a significant margin. Of course, voters are a fickle lot, and this could change easily based on outside factors (e.g. high fuel prices resulting from the war in Iran).

- Amanda Lathlin, who represented The Pas-Kameesak in the Manitoba legislature for the NDP, has died at the age of 49. She was the first First Nations woman to serve in the legislature.

News roundup, 23 March 2026

- An Air Canada CRJ-900 collided with a vehicle on the runway while landing at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night. The pilots were killed while 41 people were injured, nine of them seriously enough to remain in hospital as of this morning. There are reports that a controller cleared the vehicle to cross the runway, then abruptly tried to cancel the clearance before the collision.

- Iran is warning that if the US goes ahead with threats to target the country's power plants, there will be retaliatory strikes on water and energy infrastructure across the Middle East and that the Strait of Hormuz will be completely closed until Iran's power plants are rebuilt.

- South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is calling on Donald Trump to close bases in countries that won't allow them to be used in the attack on Iran.

- The International Energy Agency is recommending several measures for governments to take in order to deal with potential fuel shortages as a result of the war in Iran. These measures include lowering highway speed limits, allowing people to work from home where possible, and encouraging public transit use. The UK government is considering several of these measures, including reducing speed limits and even limiting where and when people can drive. Notably, there seems to be particular resistance to reinstating work from home; a representative of large British companies cited COVID-related "workplace friction between shopfloor staff and white-collar colleagues who could work remotely" as a reason for not wanting to allow it. Meanwhile China is expecting fewer disruptions than most countries, thanks to years of efforts to electrify transportation and build up strategic fuel reserves.

- Alberta separatists gathering signatures for an independence referendum have reportedly been claiming to be affiliated with Elections Alberta. They've also been accused of using food and family entertainment to induce people to attend signature-gathering events, which is illegal.

- The Socialist Party's Emmanuel Grégoire has won Paris' mayoralty race, beating rightwing candidate Rachida Dati in a runoff. Grégoire previously served as deputy mayor under outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo. This is reassuring news to those who want to see Paris' recent transformation continue. The left also scored wins in other major cities but lost out to the far right in smaller communities. The right's failure to gain traction in big cities despite the best efforts of a billionaire donor is reassuring.

- A Georgia woman has been charged with murder after taking abortion drugs to terminate her pregnancy.

- A Polish court has ruled that the country must recognize the union between two Polish men who married in Germany. The rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) is apoplectic at the ruling, with the party's parliamentary leader Mariusz Błaszczak calling it "an attack on the family". The party will be filing an appeal with the country's Constitutional Tribunal.

News roundup, 20 March 2026

- Iran's retaliatory measures seem to have escalated. A strike on natural gas facilities in Qatar has reportedly wiped out 17% of the country's export capacity for at least three years. Whether the MAGAts will be able to draw a connection between their Dear Leader's war and the inevitable increase in the cost of home heating is an open question. While a handful of those people might actually change their ways, the best possible outcome for most of them would be for them to become sufficiently disillusioned that they don't bother to vote anymore. And some will stubbornly keep voting for Trump and his associates out of sheer spite, taking consolation in the fact that it's directly hurting people that they hate - assuming that there are even meaningful elections by then.

- Generally, in a functioning democracy law enforcement is supposed to get a warrant to access private information such as cellphone location data. But what if this data is already being sold by data brokers? The FBI under Kash Patel has been buying data from said brokers in order to track people; defenders of the practice argue that this is publicly available information and thus a warrant should not be necessary. Maybe the real question we should be asking is whether this sort of data should be allowed to be sold on the open market in the first place. For instance, if the authorities can buy this data, then presumably so can a stalker.

- London mayor Sadiq Khan is calling on Labour to campaign on rejoining the EU in the next general election. Certainly some recent polling suggests that this might be a good move; the extent to which this would translate into actual votes is far from clear, though.

- The war in Iran has helped to focus the minds of European leaders on renewable energy. Trump wants to export more American natural gas to Europe, but the spike in prices instead incentivized Europeans to try to replace natural gas with renewables.

- In some parts of the world, you can buy solar panels that just plug into a regular outlet and feed power back into your house's wiring. In some US states, electric utilities are trying to keep them out, claiming that it's a safety concern for their lineworkers (suggesting that it could still lead to power being supplied to a line that a worker thinks is dead because it's not being powered by the utility). Advocates say that this hasn't been a problem in other places and suspect that what the utilities are really concerned about is the "safety" of their shareholders' investments.

- Russia has issued new guidelines for physicians, calling on doctors to ask women how many children they want and to refer them to psychologists if they give "zero" as an answer. The country has already imposed restrictions on abortion and prohibited "childfree propaganda", but evidently those measures aren't doing the job in bringing the birth rate up to a level acceptable to Putin.

- Two Texas-based scientists have found a way to make usable soil from simulated lunar surface material, by combining it with vermicompost and certain fungi which are effective at sequestering heavy metals so they aren't taken up by plants so much. They've managed to grow chickpeas to the point of producing seed, though the success of those seeds in producing new plants remains to be seen.

News roundup, 19 March 2026

- Opponents of Avi Lewis in the federal NDP leadership race have focused on the Leap Manifesto and Lewis' involvement in its creation. Former Alberta environment minister Shannon Phillips, who has endorsed Heather McPherson, has gotten worked up about a video from 2020 in which Lewis and his wife Naomi Klein read out and ridicule negative tweets people had made about them. Along with the usual rightwing suspects, there is one from Phillips in which she calls Lewis a "radical ecoterrorist" who will "send Alberta's economy off a cliff". Interestingly that detail was omitted from the CBC article, which was happy to report how Klein and Lewis made fun of her in response to it. Phillips also accuses Lewis of "writing off Alberta New Democrats". Similarly, candidate Rob Ashton has accused him of being "divisive". The brutal truth, though, is that any even remotely satisfactory action on climate is going to be divisive, and some people are going to see themselves as being left behind. When you need to treat a cancer, you can't afford to lose too much sleep over the damage the chemo and radiation do to adjacent, non-malignant tissue. Oh, and let's not forget who else Phillips has endorsed; there are few topics more divisive among left-leaning folks in this country than tactical voting.

- Ontario premier Doug Ford is urging BC and Quebec to drop their electric vehicle targets, fearing the impact on auto manufacturing in his province. Both province have scaled back their targets, but not enough to satisfy Ford.

- After Ontario's Information and Privacy Commission (IPC) learned that Doug Ford had used his personal cellphone for government business, apparently to avoid scrutiny, the commission ordered the premier to release records related to this. In order to avoid having to comply with the ruling, the government has introduced a bill to retroactively change the law governing the commission to exclude any communication by the premier, cabinet, and their staff.

- Two teens, one in Rivers, Manitoba and another in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, have been arrested after allegedly planning coordinated attacks on schools in their respective communities. 

- Scotland's parliament has voted down a bill that would have legalized assisted dying. So no MAID in Fife for the foreseeable future.

- A staff member at the Pioneer Ridge Long Term Care Home in Thunder Bay, Ontario has been charged with criminal negligence for allegedly causing the death of an 86 year old resident. The care home itself faces the same charge, as well as one of obstructing justice.

- Jeremy Frimer, a psychology professor at the University of Winnipeg who came very close to being fired following a complaint against him by a student, is suing the university along with the faculty union for allegedly giving him complex PTSD. The union is included in the suit because he says they didn't go to bat for him adequately; he's representing himself after 21 different law firms declined to take the case. How credible his case is, I leave as an exercise for the reader.