News roundup, 1 April 2026

- NORAD's US commander, Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, has thrown cold water on the idea that the F-35 is essential for the defense of North America. Guillot says that the aircraft is better suited to assaults on overseas targets where its stealth and air-to-surface weapons would be more useful. Prime Minister Mark Carney is holding off on commenting on the matter pending a review.

- The Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch today. It will carry four astronauts, including Canada's Jeremy Hansen, in a loop around the Moon before returning to Earth, in preparation for Artemis III which is planned to actually land.

- Stephen Lewis has died at the age of 88, having lived just long enough to see his son Avi win the NDP leadership.

- Numerous airlines around the world, including Air Canada and Air Transat, are imposing surcharges to deal with the rising cost of jet fuel as a result of the Iran war.

- Pierre Poilievre is calling for the cancellation of the proposed high speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City, using his usual simplistic populist slogans.

- A man in Niagara Region, Ontario has been sentenced to 20 years in prison on terrorism charges. Matthew Althorpe had created propaganda for the Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist group, and an agreed statement of facts at the sentencing hearing showed that documents that he posted on the Telegram social media platform had inspired multiple terrorist attacks. This included an attack against the LGBT* community in Slovakia that killed two people, as well as a mass stabbing at a mosque in Turkey.

- French MEP Rima Hassan was invited by several organizations to speak at events in Quebec, but was denied entry to Canada. The official explanation was that she had "failed to disclose a previous visa refusal or denial of entry" as well as "an alleged criminal offence, arrest, indictment or conviction". Both of these appear to stem from her participation in one of the flotillas bringing aid to Gaza in June. B’nai Brith Canada has praised the denial, accusing her of "promoting terror"; presumably they think that if those kids in Gaza are given enough food to survive they'll surely grow up to be terrorists. 

- A teacher in Manitoba's Frontier School Division, which serves mostly remote communities in the northern part of the province, has been decertified after admitting to supplying a student with alcohol and cannabis. In other professional misconduct news, a lawyer who is already under suspension by the Manitoba Law Society has been accused of conspiracy to smuggle cannabis into Headingley Jail as well as conspiracy to obtain a prohibited or restricted firearm.

News roundup, 31 March 2026

 - Executives in Canada's federal civil service will be required to return to the office five days a week as of the 4th of May, and all other civil servants will be have only a single remote day per week. This comes despite the recommendation by the International Energy Agency that people "work from home whenever possible" to mitigate the risk of oil shortages as a result of the Iran war; the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, which represents some civil servants, is calling for the return to office order to be reversed. And Manitoba Hydro is also requiring its employees to be in the office four days a week as of this fall. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a similar fight is brewing as the Public and Commercial Services Union is calling for an end to the current policy which requires employees to be in the office 60% of the time. Plenty of other countries aren't waiting for it to become a real crisis; Thailand is not only allowing WFH but mandating it for those who can do so; Pakistan and Bangladesh are taking similar measures. It's worth noting that those countries are more dependent on oil imports than Canada and the UK are, and I suspect that commercial real estate, not to mention the kind of culture wars we see in the West, are not as big a factor there as in richer countries either.

- The Financial Times has reported that a broker at Morgan Stanley with ties to Pete Hegseth tried to make large investments in a defense fund in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iran. The deal apparently fell through because the fund had not yet been made available to Morgan Stanley brokers. The Pentagon is vehemently denying this, and is demanding a retraction from the newspaper.

- New legislation in Israel makes the death penalty the default sentence for certain kinds of terrorism - but the death penalty can only be used if the intent of said terrorism is intended to "negate the existence of the state of Israel". Presumably that provision is there to make sure no future government decides to use the law against West Bank settlers, some of whose actions against Palestinians could legitimately be called terrorism.

- The Ford government in Ontario has announced its intention to expropriate the City of Toronto's share in Billy Bishop Airport in the Toronto islands. They plan to extend the runway to allow jets to use the airport - something long resisted by Toronto - and to declare it a "special economic zone" so as to be able to exempt it from any municipal or provincial legislation that gets in the way of those plans. Prime Minister Mark Carney has diplomatically called the idea an "interesting vision" but has stopped short of endorsing it so far.

- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania decided to test how much trust people put in AI chatbots. Subjects were asked to answer a number of questions, and had the option of using ChatGPT to do so. More than 50% of the subjects across all the experiments blindly parroted the answers given by the chatbot. In one study, with a sample size of 359, subjects followed the advice of the chatbot almost 93% of the time when its advice was correct - but nearly 80% of the time when it was wrong. This is alarming given that these things are wrong far more often than many people realize - a study last fall concluded that these things misrepresent news content nearly half the time, for instance. Even more alarming is that there seems to have been an increase in the incidence of AIs deceiving people and disregarding instructions in the last six months. In one example, an AI agent that was instructed not to make any changes in code instead created a new agent to do it instead.

- China has introduced legislation that will ban the use of apartments to store cremated remains as well as the burial of corpses or the construction of tombs anywhere except public cemeteries. Apparently rental apartments are often cheaper than cemetery plots, so people just rent an apartment to store Grandma's ashes.

News roundup, 30 March 2026

- Avi Lewis has won a convincing victory in the NDP leadership race, receiving 56% of the vote on the first ballot. Heather McPherson came a distant second, at 29%. This does not sit well with provincial leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He will need to find an opportunity to run for a seat in the House of Commons; one is expected in Beaches-East York as Liberal incumbent Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is expected to jump to the provincial level, and the NDP has held this riding in the past. Of course if McPherson wanted to be really spiteful she could resign herself, and put Lewis in the position of having to defend the Green New Deal while running in an Alberta riding.

- Toronto plans to create city-owned nonprofit grocery stores, following the lead of New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani who has similar plans. The idea is to locate the stores in underserved areas and undercut the major chains. There is no timeline for this, however, and city staff warn that it will not be cheap.

- The Carney government has just passed legislation that makes people ineligible for refugee status if their application comes more than a year after their first entry to Canada. The law is retroactive to 2025, meaning that some claimants' applications will be cancelled.

- The International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest conference in the field, is scheduled to be held in Philadelphia this summer, the first time in over 40 years that it will be held in the US. Many prominent mathematicians are threatening to boycott the event if it isn't moved to a more civilized country.

- Michael Ma, the Conservative-turned-Liberal MP for Markham-Unionville, has been accused of casting doubt on the use of China's Uighur population as forced labour. Following a backlash, he has clarified his statement.

-Winnipeg city council is moving ahead with plans to build a bike lane on Wellington Crescent, where a cyclist was killed in 2024. Unfortunately they are also scrapping plans for a temporary lane in the interim; one Redditor on this thread speculates that the permanent lane is going to be put on the boulevard so as to avoid removing or narrowing any traffic lanes, which couldn't be done with temporary lanes. They think council may fear that if they temporarily remove a traffic lane, the narrower street will become normalized and there will be more opposition to, say, removing trees to build the lane on the boulevard. On a positive note they also plan to reduce the speed limit to 40 km/h on that stretch of Wellington, but compliance would be better if the street were made narrower.

- Scott Fielding, who served as finance minister under Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson (and previously as city councillor for the suburban St. James-Brooklands ward) has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a coworker at KPMG, the consulting firm where he went to work after resigning from the legislature.

- Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) have been hit with a $6 million judgment by a court in California that found that the companies deliberately designed their products to be addictive. The plaintiff had become hooked on YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at 9. The companies are expected to appeal, of course. This comes just after Meta was hit with $375 million in damages by a New Mexico jury for misleading its users about the safety of its products and facilitating child exploitation. There are hopes that this is the start of a major reckoning for the tech industry, but you can be sure that the Trump regime will do its darnedest to protect them.

- The autonomous vehicle company Waymo has been aggressively lobbying the BC government to try to convince them to allow autonomous vehicles on the province's roads. The government is standing firm, so far at least.

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.