News roundup, 13 July 2026

- Reform UK is panicking about the possibility of Nigel Farage losing the byelection resulting from his resignation stunt. The party had been hoping to win the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, where polls showed them within striking distance after the position was vacated by Andy Burnham, but are now desperately shifting resources to Farage's riding of Clacton in the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of losing to Count Binface. Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph seems a bit worried too. Unfortunately it looks like the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is running a spoiler candidate. Kind of like one of the races in Monty Python's Election Night Special, except that this time it won't be the Sensible Party that benefits from the split.

- A recent poll of Canadian manufacturers found that 40% of them have either moved some of their operations to the US or are planning to do so in response to ongoing tariffs, while 11% plan to move their headquarters there. This isn't an exclusively Canadian problem, of course; Toyota is expanding its plant in Texas while reducing operations in Mexico, but voters tend not to care about such niceties - in fact they don't care if the people they vote in are worse than the people they vote out, because they're voting out of vengeance, not out of hope of improvement. So naturally this puts Carney in a tough spot. If he wanted to be really bold he could expropriate any plant closed in such a move at current market value, with the proviso that the compensation will not occur until relations are normalized with the US. I wouldn't count on him doing that, though; I don't think he's made of that kind of stuff (he is, ultimately, still a neoliberal at heart, even as he recognizes that neoliberalism doesn't seem to be working anymore). Maybe the NDP should start loudly pushing for that sort of thing; it's not like not being radical has done them much good at the federal level of late.

- South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham has died at the age of 71. On the other hand Mitch McConnell seems to be in better shape than many suspected, assuming of course that it was actually him that made the statement in question and not a staffer.

- A 37 year old man has been arrested after allegedly delivering a hateful and threat-filled tirade against two hijab-wearing women in a Costco in Halifax and assaulting someone who filmed his rant. He had to be Tasered after reportedly brandishing a weapon at police; he has been charged with assault, public incitement of hatred, and four counts of uttering threats to cause bodily harm or death.

- An economics professor at Brown University announced one year that one of his classes would use a take-home exam format. The class then had a surge of enrollments compared to previous years; when the midterms were marked, the average grade was 96% and 40 students got a 100% grade. Not surprisingly, the people who marked the exams found answers with a wording that was uncannily similar to the way ChatGPT answered the questions. At this point he decided to change the format for the final exam, making it an in-person test and warning the class that if the grade distribution was substantially different from the midterm, only the final would count towards the actual grade in the class. 27 students dropped out of the class by the time the final rolled around, of whom 22 had scored 100% in the midterm.

News roundup, 10 July 2026

- The ceasefire in the US-Iran war is in ruins after Donald Trump accused Iran of attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and launched airstrikes on the country, killing at least 14 people and destroying a bridge on a key trade route with Russia and China. Iran in turn launched strikes on Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Iran admits to firing on the ships, which it says ignored warnings about taking a non-approved route through the strait.

- Andy Burnham appears set to be the UK's next prime minister after winning the support of 322 out of 403 sitting Labour MPs. If nobody steps up to oppose him he will be declared party leader next week and take office later this month.

- The "Water Not Coal" campaign, an initiative by country singer Corb Lund which sought to ban coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Alberta (or force a referendum if the government wanted to push ahead), was deemed by Elections Alberta to have not gotten the necessary 177,732 signatures in order to be deemed valid. Lund's campaign had submitted over 200,000, but staff at the agency attempted to contact a small sample of the signatories in order to determine how many could be deemed valid and deemed enough of them illegitimate to cancel the initiative. A statistician at the University of Toronto, however, believes that Elections Alberta's methodology was suspect and that the initiative likely had enough legitimate signatures to proceed.

- The BC government is suing OpenAI for its role in the Tumbler Ridge shooting that left nine people dead. The government believes that there were plenty of warning signs in the shooter's interaction with the platform that could have prevented the tragedy; OpenAI had banned her but had not notified the police.

- A Texas woman who was fired by her employer after video of her unhinged rant at two Muslim women went viral has raised over $100,000 in donations on GiveSendGo (which is, as I've called it before, the GoFundMe for deplorables). The women she harassed were doxed and have faced death threats.

- Two teenagers in Greensboro, NC were arrested after allegedly using a device described as a "homemade plasma cannon" to break into a school. The term may be technically accurate but makes it sound way more sci-fi than it actually is; it's not that dissimilar to the potato cannons that teens have been making for decades.

- A student pilot in Argentina was forced to land the aircraft by herself after her flight instructor suddenly opened a door and jumped to his death. While shaken, the student landed the Cessna 150 without further incident. I suppose if nothing else it was a good test of the student's ability to handle an emergency.

News roundup, 9 July 2026

- Flooding as a result of recent storms has resulted in the evacuation of the Dauphin Regional Health Centre. The city got 115 millimetres of rain in a two day period, and the hospital's basement was flooded, knocking out power to the facility and causing substantial damage. Patients were sent to other hospitals across the province, the largest share being sent to Brandon. It may be months before full service is restored. Also in Dauphin, a huge commercial greenhouse was flooded, destroying vast amounts of crops. While the Parkland region, which includes Dauphin has gotten the worst of it, more than 50 municipalities across the province have declared local states of emergency due to recent storms.

- The federal government is cutting funding to a weather radar research group, even as the incidence of tornadoes is increasing in this country. More than a little short sighted, I'd have to say.

- Jesse Wheatland is accused of setting numerous fires across Winnipeg, including at the constituency offices of ministers Bernadette Smith and Nahanni Fontaine as well as several downtown businesses and an addictions treatment centre. He was reportedly in possession of a list of potential targets when he was arrested; these included the office of Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara and the CBC. Another list found following searches mentioned a proposed location for a supervised consumption site; he is also accused of having attempted to start a fire there as well. He had previously posted concerns about that site on a community Facebook group; other targets appear to have been former employers.

- The Rural Municipality of East St. Paul is refusing to publicize the names of registered candidates in this fall's municipal election until the deadline to register has passed in September. The policy has been in place since 2022; the practice is anomalous and the province has urged the municipality to be more transparent, but there is no legislation to actually prohibit such secrecy. The motivation for the policy has not been made public; none of the council members would address the matter with the CBC. I suspect it may have something to do with councillors and/or the mayor hoping to get in by acclamation and not wanting it to be known that they're running unopposed until it's too late to do anything about it. Certainly some community activists fear that this could be a consequence of the policy.

- Graham Platner, the winner of the Democratic primary for the Maine Senate seat that's up for grabs this fall, is withdrawing from the race following sexual assault allegations. Platner had been seen as a progressive compared to the establishment candidate Janet Mills who he'd defeated in the primary. The party must now select a new candidate by the 27th of July in order to contest the seat, which is critical in gaining control of the Senate.

- Mark Zuckerberg, whose company just laid off thousands of people to replace them with AI, admits that it isn't working as well as he had hoped. In his words, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected". Other companies are facing similar issues; Ford has had to rehire many engineers and technicians. The company's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, Charles Poon, is trying to spin this as bad timing, saying that the experienced workers left before they could transfer their knowledge to the AIs. This comes as Ford had more recalls than any other US automaker so far this year. I have to assume all this folly is driven by investors.

News roundup, 8 July 2026

- A new bill before the US Congress would direct the US Trade Representative to investigate the bans on American alcohol by most Canadian provinces. In the modern American tradition of contrived backronyms, the bill is called the Combating Attacks on our National Alcoholic Drinks by Allies (CANADA) Act. It was introduced by Claudia Tenney, who represents a large part of rural and small-town New York State and who is a rabid Trump supporter. Curiously, the bill makes no mention of the annexation threats and tariffs that led to the bans in the first place.

- Markus Chambers has become the latest Winnipeg city councillor to announce that he will not be running again this fall. Chambers, who represents the suburban St. Norbert-Seine River ward, says that he wants to spend more time with his family, which is fair enough. However, the sheer number of veteran councillors who are quitting is significant - Janice Lukes, John Orlikow, and Brian Mayes are also not running again. One thing all those councillors have in common is that they represent suburban (or largely suburban) wards; I wouldn't be surprised if they know darn well that continuing to insist on car-centric design and exclusively single-family neighbourhoods is financially unviable (you just don't have enough taxpayers per kilometre of street, water main, etc to properly maintain the infrastructure) but for these councillors to acknowledge this in front of their constituents would be politically unviable.

- Mark Carney has appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel to the Senate. This creates a vacancy in the riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, which Martel narrowly won in the last election.

- The leader of a rightwing fringe party, the Freedom Party of BC, has been charged with vandalizing a Pride crosswalk in Surrey. Amrit Birring, 58, was arrested along with a 67 year old man and charged with mischief over $5,000.

- Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has resigned his seat and announced that he will run for reelection in the resulting byelection. Some may remember when Canadian Liberal MP Sheila Copps did that in 1996; she had promised in the previous election campaign to resign if the GST wasn't abolished, but then ran again, winning without difficulty. In Farage's case, his critics believe this is a way of distracting the public from an investigation into his finances; all the other parties, from the Greens and Labour on the left, to the Liberal Dems in the centre, to the Conservatives and Restore Britain on the right are refusing to contest the seat and give him the attention he seems to crave. He won't be acclaimed, though; comedian Jon Harvey, aka Count Binface, has said that he will contest the seat.

News roundup, 7 June 2026

- Another severe storm hit southwestern Manitoba on Sunday night. No tornadoes have been confirmed, but strong winds and hail caused substantial damage to property and cut power to about 6,000 customers. Floodwaters also came dangerously close to breaching dikes in the community of St. Lazare.

- The mayor of St. Andrews, Manitoba is suing her own municipality to recover legal fees incurred during her ultimately successful fight to regain powers that the RM's council had stripped from her. The episode began within a year of her election in 2018, after she clashed with five council members over a wastewater treatment project.

- Several centrist Democrats (who, it should be noted, are only "centrist" in the American context; they'd be considered moderate rightwingers in most countries) are running scared at the success of left-leaning candidates in several recent Democratic primaries. In an open letter called "The Promise to America" they explicitly declare themselves "capitalist, not socialist" and talk about "extremes on right and left". Well, they're  half right there, I suppose, in that the present day right really is extreme. But to imply that people like recent primary winners are just as extreme as the MAGA crowd one has to be either disingenuous or delusional.

- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has been in hospital since mid-June and very little information about his condition has been made public, at least at an official level. However, NBC has apparently gotten hold of a recording of EMS communications indicating that CPR was performed on a person at an address associated with McConnell on the day that the senator was hospitalized. The lack of information from his office since then has led some to speculate that he's being kept on life support to avoid forcing a special election (i.e. byelection); Kentucky law requires one if a vacancy occurs more than 3 months before the next election. Since McConnell's seat is one of those up for grabs in November, this would mean he'd have to be kept alive till August in order to avoid the kind of awkwardness that might result if, say, recently primaried representative Thomas Massie were to run for the seat. Speculative for sure, but not implausible.

- Far right fundamentalist Christian nationalist pastors/podcasters Wesley Todd and Joel Webbon called for churches that display Pride flags to be seized by the state and transferred to more pliant churches and their pastors defrocked and prosecuted. What's perhaps more interesting is that they warned allies who are running for political office to refrain from saying things like that out loud, because the voters aren't ready for such overtly totalitarian messaging. Webbon has said some other "interesting" things, such as telling parents that they're failing in their duty if they don't warn their kids to stay away from black people and that women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

- Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino after Team USA striker Folarin Balogun was given a red card during the match against Bosnia-Herzgovina; subsequently, FIFA then reversed the suspension in time for the Americans' match against Belgium. It wasn't enough to stop Belgium from giving them a 4-1 thrashing and eliminating them from the World Cup, though.

News roundup, 6 July 2026

- Germany's Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (also known by the German acronym BSW) is a nominally leftwing party (it's a splinter group from Die Linke, and its leader/namesake was once a member of the East German Communist Party). So it's rather odd to see them publicly expressing a willingness to make a deal with the far-right AfD should they hold the balance of power following elections in the East German states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt. This violates a longstanding taboo in European politics. It's worth noting that while superficially leftwing on economic issues, BSW is quite socially conservative, and moreover opposes efforts to get Europe off of fossil fuels. Like AfD, BSW is also quite pro-Russian, which might provide an explanation for the latter position.

- A new poll from Nanos has found that Canadians are approximately evenly split on whether or not the proposed high speed rail link between Toronto and Quebec City should be a priority. Curiously, while the poll data is broken down by age, gender, and region, it does not differentiate between urban and rural respondents, which is probably where you'd find the biggest divide.

- Residents of Winnipeg's Whyte Ridge neighbourhood are concerned that they didn't get emergency alerts on their phones in advance of the tornado that struck last week. Environment Canada says that they had a lot less warning of tornado conditions than they did for the storm in early June, but residents would understandably like to see something done about that.

- Germany's centre-right chancellor Friedrich Merz has introduced legislation to tighten up sick note requirements for workers. Currently, employers can't require a note unless a person is off for at least three days, but under the proposed legislation they would be able to require one for even a single sick day. The measure is opposed not only by unions but by doctors; the German Association of Family Physicians predicts that they "would be flooded with patients who don’t need in-person care and would be better off in bed". Merz, though, claims that Germany "can no longer afford the competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work". Perhaps he believes that work will not only make you free, but also healthy.

- The cities of Steinbach and Winkler, in the heart of Manitoba's bible belt, will be holding plebiscites on whether to allow cannabis stores to open inside their boundaries. The councils of both cities had rejected a request for this to go on the ballot, but enough signatures were obtained from residents to override this. The vote (perhaps it should be called a "reeferendum") will coincide with this fall's municipal elections.

News roundup, 3 July 2026

- The Bank of England has announced that fossil fuel companies' debt will be downgraded from October onwards. Other central banks are taking similar measures; some 40 of them use a statistic called "weighted average climate intensity" (WACI); notably one of the easiest ways to improve that statistic is to sell US Treasuries. The fact that it's the Telegraph (aka the "Torygraph") reporting this is particularly interesting, given that paper's general hostility to things like renewable energy. Unfortunately, the changes that result probably won't happen in time to stop the collapse of the Thwaites glacier and the resulting sea level rise (possibly up to 2 metres by the end of this century), but it might buy some time to adapt to the rise.

- Spain has banned state-owned enterprises from entering into new contracts with Palantir on national security grounds. Other places are taking measures as well; London's mayor Sadiq Khan recently blocked a £50 million contract that the Metropolitan Police had negotiated with the company. Palantir intends to sue over the matter.

- Wally Daudrich, the former Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership candidate who was disqualified from running in the Turtle Mountain constituency, has left the party in favour of the far right Keystone Party. He will be running for the latter party in the upcoming byelection in The Pas-Kameesak.

- Edmonton seems to be making excellent use of the land formerly occupied by the decommissioned City Centre Airport. The new neighbourhood, called Blatchford, is being developed with a lot of mixed use midrise buildings with retail on the main floor. This is something that many would see as simply good sense, but it's been difficult to build in much of North America for many decades due to archaic zoning laws. The buildings will be heated and cooled by a shared geothermal system and be well served by the city's LRT.

- A recent study in BC has found that life expectancies in the province are diverging. As of 2024, the provincial average has increased since 2004, and in most of Metro Vancouver (with the stark exception of the Downtown Eastside and vicinity) as well as the Victoria area, people can be expected to live substantially longer. A resident of Richmond born in 2024, for instance, should have an average life expectancy of 89.4 years. The Downtown Eastside itself, not surprisingly, has the lowest life expectancy in the province, but notably the province's interior is doing badly as well - and the farther inland you live, the worse your life expectancy is on average. It's not simply that the interior isn't gaining, it's actually retreating - the life expectancy there actually rose between 2000 and 2014 and has been declining since.

- Nine monks on a pilgrimage walk in Thailand were killed when they were hit by a pickup truck driven by an 11 year old boy. The child is in custody.