News roundup, 17 Sept 2026

- European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says she would like Canada to become an "associate member" of the European Union. This is not currently a formal status that a country can have, however. Mark Carney says that he doesn't want to formally join the bloc but is calling for a "deeper partnership" between Canada and the EU, saying "We are not fair-weather allies. We do not pursue zero-sum deals". No prize for guessing who he's contrasting himself with. This is alarming to Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, saying that it "doesn't help rebuild the good relationship" that Canada and the US once had. Trump is, of course, more blunt, saying that such a move could be considered a "hostile act" and has threatened to stop trading with the EU if that happens.

- The threats against the Israeli directors of the film NAZA have escalated. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will introduce new legislation to facilitate stripping citizenship from people who "smear" Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile rightwing mobs are threatening the families of directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. A large crowd of these brownshirts gathered outside the home of Szor's parents, with one speaker calling for Szor and Abraham to be executed and for their families' homes to be demolished.

- Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, sometimes called the "Godfather of AI", is expressing some optimism that the uproar over the technology will lead to restraints. He notes that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments that weren't normally inclined to take the kind of action that was needed did so when the need became obvious. Several leaders in the industry have also admitted that a "slowdown" might be needed; some observers are skeptical, however, suspecting that if the companies do allow regulation it will be done in such a way as to keep new startups from entering the industry, effectively pulling up the ladder behind them. Even if that's true, though, it might still be preferable to no regulation at all.

- A news helicopter crashed in Los Angeles on Tuesday, killing the pilot and camera operator as well as a pedestrian on the ground. The crew were covering a fatal crash involving a transit bus. The driver who had crashed her SUV into the bus has been charged with murder; this seems excessive but manslaughter would seem an appropriate charge given the degree of negligence that appears to have been involved in that crash.

- A 44 year old North Dakota man attempting to cross the border at the Emerson-Pembina crossing fled at high speed after being directed into secondary screening. He then attempted to evade the RCMP, damaging a police vehicle in the process, but was captured and found to be carrying a loaded handgun. He faces numerous charges.

News roundup, 16 Sept 2026

- Over 1,000 people protested in downtown Toronto over the Canada Investment Summit. The Carney government says this is intended to secure a trillion dollars worth of investment in Canada, but protesters fear a selloff of national resources and a loss of sovereignty. There are also concerns that many of those investments will involve fossil fuels and/or AI. NDP leader Avi Lewis accuses Carney of "selling Canadian assets to the captains of Wall Street".

- The US Supreme Court has rejected the Trump regime's plans to restrict mail-in voting for the midterms. The court ruled that it would be "arbitrary and capricious" to impose the rules now; Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had dissenting opinions.

- Some Republicans in Congress are actually pushing back against the regime over its seemingly reckless pursuit of AI with no safeguards.This follows warnings about the hazards of AI from people in the industry and reports of experimental AI systems hacking into other systems. Recent polling suggests that the vast majority of Republican as well as Democratic voters want curbs on AI; while this has motivated members of Congress to pay attention, they are apparently divided on how to proceed, with some fearing that too much intervention will simply allow other countries (such as China) to dominate the industry.

- US rapper Macklemore was dropped as a supporting act for English musician Ed Sheeran's tour of the Americas following pro-Palestinian comments he made on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The decision was apparently made by the promoter, Messina Touring Group, apparently following pressure from venue owners including Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. The Patriots' home field, Gillette Stadium, is one of the venues where Sheeran is scheduled to perform; since then, however, four other supporting acts have pulled out of the tour in protest.

- Tom Tate, the mayor of Gold Coast, Queensland, had claimed to have attended a dinner with Donald and Melania Trump during a visit to the US earlier this year, but the ABC found inconsistencies in his story, and he stormed out of a press conference after swearing at a reporter when confronted with said inconsistencies. While having dinner with the Mango Mussolini would be enough reason to write Tate off, to falsely claim to have done so moves him is not only deplorable but pathetic.

News roundup, 15 Sept 2016

- Israel's culture minister, Miki Zohar, has attempted to initiate the process to revoke the citizenship of two Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Abraham and Szor had just released a documentary in which they conducted anonymized interviews with 24 military personnel about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians during the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The film is entitled NAZA; the title is apparently a transliteration of a Hebrew acronym used by the IDF in discussing "collateral damage" from an airstrike. It's hard not to see a different allusion there, though. In any case, Israel does reserve the right to revoke citizenship of those who fail to show "loyalty". Based on the minister's move I have to assume that this applies even to people who were born there - as Yuval Abraham was. An interview with Abraham and Szor in El Pais (apparently done before the minister's move) may be found here.

- The EU's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called for the federation to treat the Israeli-occupied settlements the same way it treats Russian-occupied Crimea and ban imports from said settlements.

- Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have very little in common - but one of the few things they agree on is that restrictions on AI are needed for the good of all. The two will be among a number of people attending the "Pro-Human Assembly" in DC today. In contrast Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, says that while he supports some safeguards, he thinks those safeguards have to be put in place by companies, not governments, which is essentially a way of saying he supports no safeguards at all.

- A staffer at the US embassy in London suspected of possessing indecent images of children was apparently spirited out of the country by American officials without informing local police. Now legally it's probably true that he couldn't be prosecuted in the UK without US consent because of diplomatic immunity, but in this case it's apparent that they didn't want the question of whether to waive diplomatic immunity to even come up - and the police would no doubt have wanted to interview him, if for no other reason than to find out where he was obtaining the materials. This was all too familiar territory for Charlotte Charles, whose 19 year old son Harry Dunn was killed in 2019 by the wife of a CIA employee working at a base in the UK who was driving on the wrong side of the road and collided head-on with his motorcycle.

- The Alberta NDP won a byelection in the constituency of Calgary-Shaw, the first time the party has won the seat since 2015. 

- FIDE, the international governing body for chess, has banned a teen from official events for two years for attempted cheating after a cellphone was found hidden in his shoe at a tournament in Slovenia.

News roundup, 14 Sept 2026

- A Russian drone hit a train in Ukraine near the border with Poland, only minutes after another train passed through the area carrying several dignitaries from the EU and UK returning from a conference in Kyiv. Nobody was injured, but some Ukrainian officials think the diplomatic train was the intended target, which if true would mark a significant escalation on Russia's part.

- New polling on the Alberta referendum on moving towards independence suggests that while 64% of respondents would vote to remain in Canada, when asked to predict the outcome of the referendum, those who would vote to separate think that their side will get nearly 60% of the vote. And only 6% of them expect a defeat would settle the issue. Also interesting is that while rural parts have higher support for separation than Calgary and Edmonton, the highest rate of support for separation is among people living in exurbs around those cities. Presumably these are "white flight" types who work in the big cities but can't bring themselves to live amongst people different from themselves.

- Sweden appears to have swung to the left in yesterday's election. A coalition led by the Social Democrats is thought to be headed for a three-seat majority, though it is still too close to call at present even with over 90% of the votes counted. The incumbent prime minister Ulf Kristersson, who leads the Moderate Party, had courted controversy by allowing the far-right Sweden Democrats into his governing coalition; perhaps that was a bridge too far for the public. Let's hope so.

- Amazon's Prime Air division has suspended its relationship with leasing company 21 Air following the fatal crash in Miami last week.

- A 49 year old man was arrested after a confrontation with another man in a Calgary grocery store in which he allegedly threatened to shoot him in front of his family. The other man had been shopping in the store with his wife and child when the suspect apparently started ranting about tariffs and shouting anti-Canadian and pro-American remarks, eventually escalating to the threats. Police who attended the suspect's home found him in possession of a loaded 12-gauge shotgun; he has been charged with uttering threats, possession of a firearm without a license, and careless storage of a firearm.

- A Surrey man has been awarded $275,000 in a defamation suit after daily protests occurred for months in front of his home. Bing Chen Gao is a journalist and had written critically about Guo Wenghui, a Chinese dissident who has since been imprisoned for fraud in the US; Guo's supporters had accused Gao of being in the pay of the Chinese communist party. In fact Gao has been a longtime critic of the CCP as well, but good luck convincing Guo's supporters of this.

News roundup, 11 Sept 2026

- Some 40% of those believed to have died in the 9/11 attacks have not been tied to any remains found at the scene. Genetic genealogy is being used to identify some previously unidentified remains.

- Manitoba premier Wab Kinew, who is taking some understandable and legitimate flak after his government applied for a back-to-work order for Dynacare workers, is now suggesting that the government may take advantage of "off-ramps" in its contract with the company and bring the service back in-house. I would approve of that, but we'll have to see how that goes.

- A 13th candidate has entered the race for mayor of Winnipeg. Tracey Drexler says she was "hesitant to enter politics", though the good folks at r/Winnipeg have pointed out she's run previously for school board. She says she wants to solve the homelessness crisis, but does not make any specific statements about how she would do that; the Reddit folks point out that she proposed an "interesting" solution to dealing with protesters blocking roads:

 Mother f—er, seriously? I have 25 minutes to make it from Balmoral Hall to Westwood to take my special needs son off the bus… With the construction on portage its nearly impossible as it is. So just a heads up if you choose to block my roadway I will NOT be stopping.

The social media post where she said this was deleted, of course, when she entered the race for school board, as was another one where she responded to a story about Brian Pallister breaking his arm while on extended vacation in Costa Rica by saying his injury "literally made my day". The latter one I can at least sympathize with, but it indicates a volatility that may not make her suitable for the job.

- Two Winnipeg city councillors, Ross Eadie and Cindy Gilroy, are accusing the Main Street Project of getting in the way of other agencies trying to house homeless people. The councillors say that in multiple cases, St. Boniface Street Links has arranged housing for people in encampments, only to have MSP tell them that they don't have to leave. Maybe an agency like MSP that gets funding to help people living in the encampments shouldn't be the same agency that helps people get out of the encampments, as it potentially creates a conflict of interest.

- After California's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) installed gates to make fare evasion more difficult, fare evasion dropped by 60% and overall crime on the network dropped by 67%. This raises something I've hinted at before, namely that the transit fare issue is one where environmentalism and social justice are somewhat at odds. From a pure social justice perspective, it seems appealing to eliminate fares entirely, but if you want to get cars off the road you need to make public transit attractive to people who have a choice in the matter (i.e. those who can afford a car), and this means reducing crime (and even more so, perceived risk of crime) on public transit. And ultimately, not reducing the number of cars on the road is bad for everyone, including the poorest and most vulnerable, so rather than eliminating fares entirely as many suggest I'd advocate for a nominal fare (maybe a dollar or so) to act as a filter.

- A sign was posted on a public washroom on a trail in Victoria declaring it the "Donald J. Trump Memorial". The city says that they were not aware of the sign until Saturday and do not know where it came from; I hope they don't remove it though.

News roundup, 10 Sept 2026

- Donald Trump has promised every American adult $5,000 if the Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms this November. The effectiveness of this in winning votes, and its very legality, is far from clear.

- New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has released 170,000 previously suppressed documents regarding the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the city's air quality. This probably would be harmful to Rudy Giuliani's legacy were it not already in ruins as a result of his support of Trump.

- Canada and France are following the UK's lead in banning imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. A good move, if overdue; notably Pierre Poilievre is not mentioned at all in the article. This is rather interesting; you'd expect him to come out with an unhinged rant about the Liberals being antisemites, but maybe in these times he is counting on actual antisemites to support him and doesn't want to give them cause to reconsider their support for his party.

- The Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University has confirmed that a tornado touched down in Winnipeg's South River Heights neighbourhood over the weekend, the second to strike the city this year. While it caused substantial damage, no injuries were reported.

- One of the pilots of the Amazon Boeing 767 that overran the runway in Miami on the weekend, killing five people, reportedly recognized that they were coming in too fast well before touchdown, but his colleague did not give a "consistent verbal response" and they proceeded with the landing nonetheless. This probably will not serve the crew well at their next employee evaluation.

- Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were denied bail by a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday, concluding (not unreasonably) that they are dangerous and could pose a flight risk. The two face possible extradition to the UK, where they face numerous charges including rape and human trafficking. No doubt we'll see more of their fanboys doing pushups outside the jail as a form of protest like they did earlier this summer; unfortunately I fully expect Trump to veto the extradition.

News roundup, 9 Sept 2026

- The crew of the Amazon freighter that overran the runway in Miami on the weekend, killing five people in a vehicle, appear to have dithered on whether to abort their landing and perform a go-around. Investigators have yet to interview the pilots on the matter; I suspect that the pilots are not looking forward to this.

- Mark Carney is warning that there will be a cost for Canada's pivot away from the US, but that the costs of not doing so will be much greater. Carney also mentioned tariffs imposed by William McKinley's administration at the end of the 19th century, which he says were intended to "pressure us into dependence and eventually annexation by the United States". The Trump regime has responded to Canada's counter-tariffs with a ban on the import of motorcycles and alcohol from Canada as well as a series of new tariffs on various other products.

- UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories and has banned the import of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Predictably, his Conservative critic has warned against making Israel a "pariah state" and expressed concerns that the move will somehow lead to an increase in antisemitic violence in the UK (the fact that Miliband is Jewish is an inconvenient fact that critics will ignore, of course).

- Lab technicians and technologists with Dynacare went on strike on Tuesday morning, leading to disruptions in non-urgent diagnostic tests across Manitoba. Labour Minister Malaya Marcelino quickly filed an application with the Labour Board, requesting that the board issue an interim order that the 350 employees remain on the job in order to "ensure the provision of essential health services"; the request was quickly granted. Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, condemned the move.

- A fatal stabbing in Winnipeg in 2022 was solved after the killer's DNA was found on a beer can in the victim's home. The suspect was subsequently arrested on another matter and confessed to the killing; she has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison.