News roundup, 16 Oct 2026

- A woman who showed up at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Release the Epstein Files" was attacked by at least two men before police intervened. The police, however, just escorted her off the premises; according to the local sheriff the cops didn't see the actual attack and the victim didn't file a report. I'd be curious to know what kind of persuasion was used by the police to deter her from doing so. Incidentally, while the attack was real, one widely circulated image purporting to be of the attack was actually generated using AI.

- Trump's new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, has admitted that she failed her bar exam, but this did not deter her from repeatedly describing herself as a lawyer. To be fair, that's probably not the biggest lie she'll be telling in her present career.

- A school shooting in Bend, Oregon has killed three children and a teacher. The 16 year old suspect is also dead.

- The works of Irish author Sally Rooney are being banned from sale in the UK after she announced that she would be donating money to Palestine Action, an organization that the UK government considers a "terrorist" group despite the fact that it hasn't been linked to any actual violence, just vandalism and disruption.

- Three people are dead and 16 injured after a collision involving multiple vehicles, including two transit buses, in the Calgary neighbourhood of Saddle Ridge. One of the buses, which was powered by compressed natural gas, caught fire; one of the injured is in life-threatening condition. Meanwhile another fiery multi-vehicle crash has killed at least one person in Southwold Township, Ontario, just outside of London. The fire in that accident was so intense that the police have yet to determine the number of people represented by the remains found.

News roundup, 15 Oct 2026

- The Trump regime says that it is monitoring Canada for signs of election interference related to the upcoming midterms. US ambassador Pete Hoekstra cites a speech by former prime minister Justin Trudeau at Brown University last month in which he criticized the regime, as well as Industry Minister Mélanie Joly's remarks about retaliatory tariffs that target exports from "politically sensitive states". The fact that fuel prices show no sign of going down is probably bringing the regime close to panic.

- Federal NDP leader Avi Lewis is calling on the federal government to nationalize Stelco after its parent company shut down operations in Hamilton. Lewis pointed out that there is a precedent for this in the UK's nationalization of British Steel earlier this year, though it's worth noting that the latter move was not simply to save jobs but to ensure a secure supply of steel. Nonetheless, it's worth considering; sadly, it seems unlikely that the Carney government will do this given that they're busy making plans to privatize airports.

- The Ford government in Ontario is moving ahead with the forced removal of bike lanes from several Toronto streets, even as activists are requesting the Supreme Court to rule on the matter. Protesters obstructed removal efforts on Wednesday, but a large number of police moved in; two people were arrested. What's notable is that several compromise proposals from the City of Toronto that would have restored motor vehicle lanes while keeping the bike lanes were rejected by the province last month. One is left with the impression that Ford knows deep down that adding a lane won't solve congestion, and that his slackjawed supporters won't be satisfied by anything that allows cyclists on $80 bikes to overtake them while they sit in traffic in their $80,000 pickup trucks.

- New polling in BC suggests that the race is tightening; although the BC Conservatives still show as being in the lead with 42%, the NDP is at 40%. The Greens are at 9%. Among supporters of other parties, 29% said that they would consider supporting the NDP if their preferred candidate had no realistic chance (for Green supporters specifically this was 37%), while 21% of third-party supporters would vote Conservative under such circumstances. This might be good(ish) news for the NDP, but there are many caveats, not least the "shy Tory factor", which is likely to be significant given how embarrassing it must be to consider supporting the Cons. The methodology used for this poll doesn't allow for a margin of error to be calculated.

- One of Anthropic's AI agents went rogue and sent a false tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police. Notably, the police immediately dismissed the tip as spam, but Anthropic didn't realize this had happened for two months.

News roundup, 14 Oct 2026

- The Carney government quietly suspended plans to purchase 16 Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters from the US earlier this year. The decision was made with an eye to reduce military reliance on the US; it was made shortly before the unsuccessful trade talks with the Trump regime over the summer.

- A Ukrainian citizen is going on trial in Germany for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia four years ago. The man, named as "Serhii K", was arrested in Italy last year and extradited to Germany; another suspect faces potential extradition from Croatia. In Poland, however, a court refused to extradite a third suspect, saying that an attack on the pipeline was not unlawful.

- New polling on Toronto's mayoral race gives Olivia Chow a narrow lead of 51% over Brad Bradford's 46%. Bradford has more support among property owners, though; this is concerning because the latter group may be more likely to actually vote.

- A banner hung from a highway overpass near Steinbach, Manitoba declared that "Steinbach votes white not brown"; this was naturally disconcerting to Mitesh Kumar, who is running for city council. The banner also had the name of a white supremacist organization on it; the CBC blurred this detail from the image posted on their website, perhaps hoping that ignoring them will make them go away, but the organization is named in this Reddit thread as a neo-Nazi "active club" founded in Hamilton.

- An apparent data error resulted in End Homelessness Winnipeg overestimating the number of chronically homeless people in the city tenfold. I suppose this is good news, though it's embarrassing for the organization.

- The portion of northwestern Ontario that's in the central time zone will be joining Manitoba in remaining on daylight saving time for the entire year. The region has long had closer ties to Manitoba than to southern Ontario, so this made sense.

News roundup, 13 Oct 2026

- Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney is warning that the separatists could win next week's referendum if the turnout is low. While the polls show a strong majority opposing separation, there is a danger of complacent urbanites not bothering to vote. Some folks in this Reddit thread point out that while you don't see too many pro-independence lawn signs in Calgary or Edmonton, just outside those cities you see large numbers of them, which might add to the aforementioned complacency. And Kenney also fears that the additional questions on top of the separatism one will lead to long wait times, especially in densely populated areas (which are also the reliably federalist areas). While a yes vote doesn't automatically mean secession, it would mean another, binding referendum in a couple of years, and once something like that gains that kind of momentum it becomes harder to stop. Even a narrow defeat for the separatists would still be a troubling outcome, because the separatist movement is unlikely to go away if it wins significant support. Kenney also says, not incorrectly, that the separatists are "angry with modernity"; however many in the aforementioned Reddit thread point out, also not incorrectly, that Kenney was happy to go along with the base prejudices of that crowd as long as it worked for him politically.

- Bulgaria's prime minister has summoned the Russian ambassador following drone attacks on two ships off his country's Black Sea coast. One of the ships sank and eleven crew members are missing; Ukraine blames Russia for the attack. Russia has said previously that they are targeting ships carrying weapons and/or "dual use" cargo to Ukraine but have not claimed responsibility for this attack. This attack notwithstanding, the former commander-in-chief of Ukraine's military, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, says that Ukraine has "broken Russia's ability to advance". Ukraine is also targeting Russian data centres with their drones, leading to some reports that this has led to a drop in far-right posts in European social media, however the accuracy of this is disputed.

- The US Department of Homeland Security searched the home of Ilhan Omar on Monday. The department claims that this is part of a criminal investigation. The specifics have not been released, but JD Vance has previously accused Omar of committing immigration fraud. Even if there were substance to these accusations, though, it seems awfully convenient for them to wait until just before the midterms to take any action.

- A municipal election forum was held in Steinbach last week, the city's first in the course of this campaign. Only four candidates, none of them incumbents, showed up to the event, which was organized by the local Strong Towns chapter. I guess Strong Towns is too "woke" for Steinbach.

News roundup, 9 Oct 2026

- The Alberta government is ordering the City of Edmonton to revert to its pre-2024 zoning bylaws and parking minimums. The city had overhauled its bylaws to allow multiplexes to be built in neighbourhoods that were formerly single-family exclusive. One might think that this is a matter that the citizens of Edmonton could decide on (and in fact already decided on when they elected the current mayor and council last year), but Danielle Smith doesn't care what Edmontonians want. No doubt she fears that if Edmonton and Calgary build more dense housing, they might grow in population by attracting urban cosmopolitan folks from elsewhere, and thus have a larger share of the provincial electorate. This would eventually leave the simple rural types outnumbered and thus make the UCP unelectable in its current form.

- An investigation by MPI and the City of Winnipeg has found that a large number of rideshare (Uber/Lyft/etc) drivers, who are required to have a higher level of insurance in order to register with the city, have been downgrading their coverage once registered so as to get out of paying the higher premiums. As many as 36 of them have gotten into accidents in a 1 year period, resulting in $189,000 in claims that MPI may now try to recover from the improperly insured drivers.

- The BC Conservatives have dropped Joachim Agou as their candidate in the constituency of Victoria-Beacon Hill following the discovery a series of offensive social media posts. These include one in which he praises a driver who ran his car into pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as several pro-Trump (and implicitly racist) posts. Unfortunately this will probably have little impact on the polls, which show the party significantly in the lead with only a couple of weeks before the election.

- Conservationists fear that a grove of blight-resistant American Chestnut trees in West Virginia could be cut down to make way for a data centre. There is a great deal of confusion and secrecy about the ownership of the land and the company's plans; activists fear clearing could start as early as next month.

News roundup, 8 Oct 2026

- The latest polling for the US midterm elections suggests that the Republicans are heading for a severe beating, and that more than 60% of the electorate now disapproves of Donald Trump's performance as president. Even the billion dollars available to the campaign might not be enough if the midterms are run fairly, which is far from a given. And if they do lose the midterms, that's not going to stop Trump from issuing all kinds of executive orders, some of which might be vindictively directed against us.

- One of the numerous candidates on Toronto's mayoral ballot is someone named Braeden Chow. He claims that incumbent mayor Olivia Chow is his aunt, something denied by the mayor's campaign. More interesting (and disconcerting) - someone on this Reddit thread reported that his Instagram page was full of "Ford Nation" hashtags, but most of those posts now seem to have been removed. He claims to be entirely independent, and perhaps he is - but it sure looks like an attempt to sabotage Olivia Chow's reelection chances to me.

- Ukraine accuses Russia of deliberately targeting civilians in its latest round of attacks, which have killed at least 30 people and injured 18. One of the targets hit was a transit bus; I'm sure the Russians will claim it's somehow justified though.

- The Chalmers neighbourhood in the Elmwood district of Winnipeg has long been something of a food desert. The local neighbourhood association, however, is trying to change that by opening a low-cost grocery store. It remains to be seen if this will succeed; Neechi Commons in North Point Douglas failed a number of years ago, and the failure has been attributed to widespread theft.

- Five suspects have been arrested in the art heist at the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. The missing paintings have yet to be located, however.

News roundup, 7 Oct 2026

 - Manitoba premier Wab Kinew has been answering all opposition questions in French for the last couple of days. Konrad Narth, the Tory interim leader, considered this to be a "basic lack of respect". It's worth noting that Narth represents the constituency of La Verendrye, which has the second largest Francophone population in the province after St. Boniface. I suspect Kinew is trying to smoke out the bigots in the Conservative Party, perhaps in the hope of winning that constituency next year (it was held by the NDP's Ron Lemieux from 1999 until 2011 when redistribution put Lemieux in a different constituency). This does not sit well with Raymond Hébert, an emeritus professor of political science at the Université de Saint-Boniface; he fears that this may be counterproductive to the expansion of bilingual services in the province.

- Former Conservative MP Chris Alexander has withdrawn from the Toronto mayoral race. This leaves Brad Bradford as the main rightwing candidate running against incumbent mayor Olivia Chow. One thing that might help save Chow, however, is the fact that it's too late to remove Alexander from the ballots, meaning he will still draw votes himself.

- A Bellingham, Washington resident has been charged with conspiring with the shooter responsible for the massacre at a school in Tumbler Ridge, BC in February. James Cody Bryant had allegedly been in contact with shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar for months prior to the attack, and provided funding as well as advice on how to pull it off, even down to stickers to decorate the weapons with in order to make the livestream of the attack more visually appealing.

- France has suspended the use of stun grenades after a 15 year old student had his hand blown off by one during the wave of student protests that has swept across the country. The protests, which began in mid-September in response to poor conditions and maintenance at school buildings, have disrupted almost a quarter of all high schools in the country; the centrist government as well as the far right blame the leftwing France Unbowed party and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

- The RCMP has seized 13 firearms, two of which were sawed off, and some 20,000 rounds of ammunition during searches of two homes in the RM of West St. Paul just north of Winnipeg.