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.

News roundup, 2 July 2026

- Russia, despite being one of the world's largest oil producers, is experiencing fuel supply issues as a result of the latest wave of Ukrainian strikes on refineries. The Putin regime has outlawed the export of gasoline and jet fuel and is considering importing these products from elsewhere. The impact on public opinion in Russia may be significant, but the extent to which this will matter is unclear. Even many critics of the regime remain in favour of the war, they just don't think Putin is doing a good enough job fighting it. Russia has, of course, retaliated on a large scale for the latest intrusions, killing 18 people and causing widespread damage in Kyiv.

- Still on the subject of great powers getting in over their heads, the US attack on Iran has led many of America's allies to question whether it's such a great idea to host bases that might become targets of counterattacks. This could significantly impact their ability to "project power".

- A tornado struck in the Rural Municipality of Rossburn in western Manitoba on Sunday night, destroying a house. The next day, another tornado struck in the affluent suburban Winnipeg neighbourhood of Whyte Ridge on Monday evening, also destroying one house and damaging several others. Torrential rain also caused some flooding in Brandon and Dauphin; the latter city has declared a state of emergency, as has the town of Swan River. No injuries have been reported, however.

- Brian Mayes, who has represented St. Vital on Winnipeg's city council since 2011, has announced that he is not running again this fall. He leaves behind a mixed legacy; he was progressive in some ways, and definitely very responsive to his constituents' wants, but that latter point is also part of what was wrong with him; whenever there was a tension between the desires of his NIMBY constituents and the needs of the city as a whole (e.g. on infill housing), the NIMBYs tended to win out.

- Establishment Democrats are less than pleased with the recent success of leftwingers in Democratic primaries. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York State, went so far as to claim that some of the candidates endorsed by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani "do not understand the politics of New York City"; if that were true, though, you wouldn't expect them to have been as successful as they in fact have. Meanwhile Democratic House member Greg Meeks said that "if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat". Ironically, people like James and Meeks are the first to get angry at third party campaigns (not without some cause given how badly locked in the two-party system is in that country), but in their mind such people should only work within the party so long as they don't actually succeed there. The most charitable interpretation of these bleatings is that they're scared that leftwing Democrats might gain a national profile that will scare off swing voters, but that seems like a stretch. More likely they're scared of what will become of AIPAC funds.

News roundup, 30 June 2026

- Federal heritage minister Marc Miller is bothered by the fact that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights' exhibit on the Nakba does not describe Hamas as a terrorist group. Perhaps he needs to do some brushing up on his history; the Nakba took place in 1948 and Hamas was not founded until 1987. I guess Miller is more concerned about virtue signalling to those who might donate to his campaign (or to his opponents) than actual history.

- Politicians in the US are starting to lose elections over their support of AI data centres. The president of Utah's state senate and a county commissioner were defeated in primaries; both believe that this resulted from their support of Stratos, a large data centre planned for near Great Salt Lake that was backed by Dragon's Den and Shark Tank investor (and former Conservative leadership candidate) Kevin O'Leary.

- The attorneys general of 17 Republican-dominated states are suing California over that state's Plastic Act. The legislation requires an immediate 25% reduction in single use plastics for packaging and requires all packaging to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. The Republican AGs claim that California's law will significantly increase product prices in their own states, and that this constitutes a violation of the US Constitution's "Commerce Clause".

- A data breach at Crime Stoppers has aroused fears that the lives of informants could be at risk. The breach occurred several months ago; the Canadian branch of the organization says that it's unsure if tipsters' info was part of the breach, but there are allegations that this information has been offered for sale on the dark web. Canadian Crime Stoppers Association president David Forster declined an interview and told board members across the country to do the same. Reports from the US say that decades worth of information was stolen, and Portland's police service is warning people not to submit tips using the organization's platform while the matter is being investigated.

- Manitoba's Hanover School Division, which covers Steinbach and surrounding area, has introduced a new policy on student activism that it claims is meant to support "age-appropriate activism". Given that the division keeps getting hauled into the minister's office over possible censorship, this bears close watching.

- Courts are seeing an increase in the use of phony, AI-generated case law. This happens most often with people representing themselves, but actual lawyers have been taken in by this as well.

News roundup, 29 June 2026

- A New York woman who shared an Instagram post naming Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was visited at her workplace by the agency. She says the agents told her to remove the post or face prosecution, and attempted to get her to sign a document admitting to breaking federal law by naming him (she called their bluff and refused). And it's not like there's a publication ban or anything (which might be justified if there were a chance of Ross facing prosecution, but that's kind of moot right now).

- Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York State governor, is evidently not fond of Brad Lander, the winner of the Democratic primary for New York's 10th congressional district. In an interview with Newsmax he said that Lander, who like Blakeman is Jewish, "would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could". 

- The Carney government has entered into a partnership with David Eby's government in BC to buy unsold condos and convert them into affordable housing. Predictably, Pierre Poilievre called the plan a bailout for developers; Poilievre does have something of a point, given that if the governments were to simply wait for said developers to go broke, they could potentially buy the units much more cheaply. Of course, there's a problem with that; federal housing minister (and former Vancouver mayor) Gregor Robertson is decidedly uncomfortable with the idea that housing prices in general need to come down. This is no surprise given that the idea that housing is an investment (rather than, you know, somewhere to live) has been the mantra of governments for decades, and the people whose houses and condos are now worth many times what they paid for them don't want to see them devalued even slightly. This puts governments who want to make housing affordable in a bind, since people who own their own homes tend to skew older and are thus more likely to vote than those who would benefit from a drop in prices. So rather than deal with the fundamental issue, governments pursue suboptimal solutions like this one.

- A letter signed by medical directors of four Winnipeg hospitals in March warned that physicians are having to make grim decisions about who gets care first due to low staffing levels and that patient deaths are inevitable unless something changes. Health minister Uzoma Asagwara says that staffing has improved since then thanks to new incentives, however.

- Although southern Manitoba has gotten a lot of rain in recent weeks, the northern part of the province hasn't fared so well. The town of Lynn Lake and nearby Marcel Colomb First Nation are being evacuated due to wildfire threats.

- Valery Fabrikant, the former engineering instructor at Concordia University who killed four of his colleagues in 1992 after not getting tenure, has died in prison at the age of 86. 

News roundup, 26 June 2026

- Chinese automakers BYD, Chery, and Geely say they are "willing to explore" the possibilities of joint ventures to enable the production of their vehicles in Canada. This would enable them to sell cars far in excess of current import quotas, while creating jobs in this country. The devil is always in the details with such things, of course; the biggest question is whether they will actually hire locally, or if they'll just bring in workers from overseas who might not know what their labour rights are in this country. For instance, when HD Mining posted their job requirements for a mine in BC a number of years ago, one of them was fluency in Mandarin, and they used the temporary foreign worker program to import labour after not getting enough applicants meeting that requirement. It remains to be seen if that will happen here.

- China has introduced new "ethnic unity" legislation that creates a shared identity among different ethnic groups in the country. What is alarming about this is that it includes a clause saying that groups and individuals outside the country can be held legally accountable for "inciting ethnic separatism" or "undermining ethnic unity"; this is particularly concerning given the country's history of running covert overseas police stations. Of course China is far from the only country to claim the right to enforce their laws outside their borders (the US is guilty of that practice too, most famously in the Meng Wanzhou case).

- The captain of an Air Canada Q400 flying from Newark to Halifax experienced a medical emergency, apparently a seizure, while in command of the aircraft. The aircraft was safely landed in Boston by the first officer; passengers say that the captain was "kicking and flailing" as flight attendants dragged him out of the cockpit.

- The greenhouse emissions from City of Winnipeg operations rose last year; the biggest factor, interestingly, was not heating buildings or the city's substantial fleet of vehicles but methane emissions from the Brady Road landfill. The city hopes to have an organic waste composting program in place in a few years, but it would be nice to be able to do something about the stuff already in the landfill, such as using landfill gas to generate electricity (as Waterloo has been doing since 1999).

- An arrest warrant has been issued for a former correctional officer who was the case manager for a convicted murderer who escaped from a prison in Port Coquitlam, BC. Naila Sheikh is wanted for breach of trust; it's unclear if the charges are directly related to the escape.

- The former finance director for Jesuits in Canada has been ordered to repay $8.8 million after stealing from the organization for many years. I seem to recall there being something about that kind of behaviour in the Bible. No criminal charges have been filed, interestingly.

News roundup, 25 June 2026

- Oil prices have dropped back to the prewar baseline following the memorandum of understanding signed between the US and Iran that has led to a resumption in traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Wholesale prices of fertilizer are coming down as well, though many farmers say they have yet to see any real relief at the retail level.

- At least 164 people were killed and 971 injured after two earthquakes struck within a minute of each other in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.

- The Red River Co-op has plans for a badly needed downtown grocery store at Portage Place. The 22,500 ft² facility is expected to open in 2029.

- Winnipeg city councillor Janice Lukes, who represents the suburban Waverley West ward, has announced that she is not running again in this fall's election. Folks on the r/Winnipeg subreddit are mostly rejoicing, though some warn that you should be careful what you wish for. As one person says, "I wasn't a fan, but progressives/urbanists may need to face up to the fact that she was possibly the best we were going to get out of Waverley West." River Heights-Fort Garry councillor John Orlikow isn't running again either; to date Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt has not ruled out running again despite facing sexual assault charges.

- Calgary's chamber of commerce has released a report concluding that secession could cost Alberta's economy $62 billion a year. They also surveyed their members; as this was a self-selecting survey it isn't definitive, but among those who responded more than 75% thought that the very discussion around separation was negatively affecting the province's economy.

- The heatwave in Europe continues, with temperatures hitting the low forties in parts of France yesterday. Even in the normally moderate UK, the town of Gosport recorded a temperature of 36.1°C, and it could get even hotter today.

- A mosque in Regina that got approval from the city to play their call to prayer from a speaker atop the building over the noon hour is getting threats from members of the public. I'd bet you donuts to dinars that the people doing this do not make similar threats to churches that ring bells.