News roundup, 17 April 2026

- The continued war in Iran is causing serious concern for commercial aviation. Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency warns that Europe has "maybe six weeks or so [of] jet fuel left" and that flight cancellations may start to occur if the situation isn't resolved soon. And John Gradek of McGill University calls the situation the "worst crisis we've had in aviation, ever", pointing out that with 9/11 and the pandemic there was never an issue with supply.

- Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 10 day ceasefire, with the possibility of extension if progress is made in the meantime. 

- Canada's federal government is considering acquiring more office space in order to accommodate the employees that they're forcing back to the office. Anything to prop up the commercial real estate sector I guess...

- Residents of Winnipeg's West Broadway neighbourhood are creating a community land trust which will buy up land and rent it out at affordable rates.

- The RCMP detachment in Thompson evidently did a rather substandard job of searching a teen they'd taken into custody in December 2024. It seems that they somehow overlooked the fact that he was carrying a gun; fortunately the firearm was not used and was later discovered hidden behind a toilet while the suspect was in court.

- Former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax killed his wife and then himself on Wednesday night. The two were going through what was describe as a "complicated" divorce.

- Some residents of Peguis First Nation may need to evacuate as early as this weekend due to flooding.

- The singer D4vd has been charged with murder following an investigation into the discovery of the remains of a teenage girl in a car he owned. Why it took as long as it did to press charges is an interesting question.

News roundup, 16 April 2026

- Donald Trump is once again threatening to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates, even though it's far from clear that he has the authority to do that unilaterally. The regime is also pursuing a criminal investigation regarding alleged cost overruns for renovations at the central bank's headquarters; a judge has already given the legal opinion that the overruns are a mere pretext and that the government wants to intimidate the bank. The strange thing is, Powell's term is set to expire in May, although he would stay on until a successor is found. 

- Hospitalization rates for vaccine-preventable respiratory infections, including flu and RSV as well as COVID-19 and other conditions, have doubled since the start of the pandemic. Evidently enough people went down the antivax rabbit hole that they stopped getting the vaccinations that they previously went along with.

- To the surprise of nobody with any sense, speeding has increased in Ottawa school zones since the Ford government banned municipalities from using speed cameras.

- More information has emerged about Jeremy Frimer, the psychology professor who is suing the University of Winnipeg for allegedly giving him complex PTSD and the faculty union for not backing him up. It seems that Frimer made some highly questionable claims about race, intelligence, and crime; despite his protestations, the general consensus among most scientists is that human races are so ill-defined that it's pretty safe to assume that such claims are nonsense. As to what could have motivated to make such claims, well...

- Travis Patron, a Saskatchewan man who once served as the leader of a now defunct far right fringe party, has been charged with wilful promotion of hatred for some online posts. He has previous convictions for the same offense, as well as for assault, harassment, and impersonating a police officer.

- Remember the story a few years back about the programmer whose best friend was killed by a hit-and-run driver, so she trained a chatbot on all the texts he'd sent to her so she could still feel like she was talking to him? Whatever you think about whether that's psychologically healthy or not, at least she knew what was going on. A more recent case, though, is a bit more problematic. After a man died in a car accident last year, his family decided to keep the news from his mother, fearing that the shock would harm her health. So they got together all the audio and video they could find of him and trained an AI on it. The AI has brief conversations with her on screen but then apologizes saying that he has to go back to work because he's very busy, and that he will be sure to move back to her city to be with her once he has earned enough money. As some folks in this Reddit thread have remarked, this might be justifiable if she had severe dementia (the only thing worse than having to tell her that he'd died would be having to tell her that over and over again), but there's no mention of this in the article, and I can't see things going too well if the AI has some sort of glitch that reveals its true nature or if she finds out the truth in some other way.

News roundup, 15 April 2026

- Donald Trump is threatening to revoke the trade deal he made with the UK last year if relations between the two countries don't improve. Trump accuses the UK, as well as numerous other countries, of being "not there when we needed them" for the war on Iran. To his credit, PM Kier Starmer says he will not give in. Meanwhile Trump is suggesting that peace talks with Iran could resume in the coming days, after breaking down over the weekend. 

- Along with the war, Trump's feud with the Pope and circulation of an AI-generated image of himself as a Christlike figure may be among the few things he's done that could significantly cut into his support. He's drawn a lot of support from conservative Catholics, but there seem to be limits. On the other hand, his followers are extremely good at compartmentalization, especially when he causes people they dislike to suffer.

- The Carney government is temporarily suspending the excise taxes on gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel. I still say a better way of providing relief, if you're going to reduce taxes, would be to reduce the GST by a revenue-equivalent amount, thus helping everyone rather than just those who drive or fly. This just incentivizes people to keep driving. And this sort of thing tends to develop a momentum; already Manitoba's opposition is calling on the province to scrap its gas tax permanently. This needs to be nipped in the bud.

- Communities in Manitoba's Interlake region are concerned about the flooding situation this spring. Peguis First Nation as well as the town of Arborg are watching anxiously to see if it's as bad as it's been in some recent years. Even in Winnipeg the floodway is being operated to protect low lying properties. This isn't entirely bad news, since it means some relief for Manitoba Hydro from the impacts of the drought we've seen over the last few years.

- An American influencer who calls himself Johnny Somali has been sentenced to six months in prison for public order violations in South Korea. He had caused public outrage by filming himself kissing a statue commemorating wartime sex slaves, referred to as "comfort women" by Japan. He has previously created a stir by taunting Japanese commuters about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

News roundup, 14 April 2026

- Mark Carney's Liberals have swept three byelections held yesterday, giving them a slight majority of 174 seats in the 338 member House of Commons.

- There are already predictions being made about how the defeat of Viktor Orbán will impact the global right. Certainly it's a sign that Trumpism isn't popular on the international scene, but before we get our hopes up too much, it's worth noting that the incoming prime minister,  Péter Magyar, is right of centre himself and was a member of Orbán's Fidesz party until 2024.

- German chancellor Friedrich Merz is the most unpopular head of government across 24 democracies. Only 19% of Germans approve of his performance, while 76% disapprove; Emmanuel Macron had a lower approval rating (18%) but also a lower disapproval rating (74%). The margin of error for the survey isn't given, though, so it's questionable how meaningful the ranking is for those two. Meanwhile Donald Trump's approval rating is still 38% in spite of everything, and his disapproval rating is only 57%. Leaders of Spain, Italy, and Argentina also fall into that mid-range; the most popular leaders among the countries surveyed were Indian PM Narendra Modi (70%), South Korean president Jae-myung (63%) and Czech PM Andrej Babiš (55%). From that it's probably safe to say that there's no correlation in either direction between how popular a leader is and how good they are.

- Electric vehicles are getting cheaper; even in the US they're increasingly competitive with conventional cars. Combine that with the impact of Trump's war on fuel prices and Americans just might find themselves dragged into the EV era, no matter how emasculating it might be to not hear that V8 roar when you press the accelerator.

- Two people have been arrested after allegedly opening fire on the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This comes only two days after someone else tried torching the place. Nobody was injured in either incident. Meanwhile a survey of  2,400 "knowledge workers" found that 29% of those surveyed admitted to taking actions to sabotage their companies' rollout of AI. Of course the way AI gets introduced is often pretty haphazard; some of the accounts given in this related Reddit thread are pretty telling:

"The majority of AI rollouts that I've seen have been 'Please guys, find any problem that we can solve with AI. Anything, please. Just do something, the executives don't have any ideas either but we need AI.' and then they blame the workers when there's not any useful use case."

"My wife's company had that. Find a way to build it into your workflow. Then suddenly someone changed they mind and they're requiring you NOT to use it. I think someone just found out how shit it can be. So now, weeks after being aggressively pushed to use AI whenever possible, it's now pause all AI use." 

I think in a lot of cases companies have been sold on the idea that investors want you introducing AI as soon as possible and that your stock value depends on this, so executives push people to find some use, any use, for the technology so that they can include metrics about how much they're using it in their annual reports. Certainly that's what the AI companies themselves would have you believe. And I guess day traders don't hold onto the stock long enough to see the technology fail to deliver anyway.

News roundup, 13 April 2026

- Following the breakdown of peace talks in Pakistan, Donald Trump has announced that if the US can't use the Strait of Hormuz, nobody else can either. He says the US navy will "hunt down and interdict" vessels that have paid the toll being charged by Iran to use the strait.

- In January, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican's ambassador to the US, was summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon in response to papal criticism of American foreign policy. According to one report, US officials told Pierre that due to the US' enormous military strength the country can do "whatever it wants…and that the Vatican, and Leo, better take its side". They allegedly invoked the Avignon papacy as a warning. The Pentagon has denied that the meeting went as reported, of course.

- Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has been soundly defeated in Hungary's general election on Sunday. The opposition Tisza, led by Péter Magyar, is projected to win 138 out of 199 parliamentary seats; if these results stand it means that Tisza will have the supermajority needed to undo some of the constitutional changes made by Orbán over the years.

 - Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of Denmark's Moderate party, is refusing to enter into a coalition with PM Mette Frederiksen's Social Democrats unless Frederiksen talks to centre-right parties. Frederiksen has been trying to bring in more left-leaning parties, but has paused those negotiations, apparently in response to pressure from Rasmussen. I imagine Rasmussen doesn't want to be the most rightwing member of any coalition, and/or is further to the right than he presents himself to voters. 

- BMW is retooling their 104 year old assembly plant in Munich for the construction of electric vehicles. They say that by next year it will be the company's first plant to produce EVs exclusively.

- France's government is trying to move away from Windows on desktop computers; they have plans to convert many such systems to Linux in order to reduce dependence on American companies. 

News roundup, 10 April 2026

- Several anonymous sources interviewed for an upcoming book report that in a series of Situation Room meetings earlier this year, various Trump advisors dropped hints that going to war with Iran would be a bad idea - but none of them except JD Vance pressed the issue. You know it's a mess when JD freaking Vance is the voice of reason.

- The American Automotive Policy Council, which represents the US automakers, is concerned about new EU vehicle safety standards that could limit the importation of gigantic pickup trucks. Andrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, suggests that this could breach the spirit of a trade deal with the US that the EU has signed but has not yet ratified.

- People who have worked with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say that he barely knows how to code and has a "surprisingly shallow" knowledge of how AI actually works. Then again, to do what he does you don't have to know how it works. You don't even have to know if it works, so long as you have plausible deniability about what you know or don't know when you issue an IPO. You just have to know how to sell stuff, and evidently Altman is very good at that.

- Conservative-turned-Liberal MP Marilyn Gladu was welcomed with open arms at the Liberal party convention in Montreal. When Mark Carney was asked about her rather sketchy past (which includes opposition to abortion, opposition to bans on conversion therapy, and support for the Freedom Convoy and other antivaxxers), he stated that Gladu has agreed to vote with the government on those issues. I guess she's flexible, if nothing else. Perhaps Gladu believed, rightly or wrongly, that she had to take such positions to run for office in a place like Sarnia even if she didn't actually believe in them. I'm guessing that she doesn't intend to run again and wants to end her career on the winning side. 

- Solar farms in the UK generated a record 14.1 gigawatts of power on Monday. That's pretty impressive for a country that's not exactly known for being sunny.

- Representatives of 85 countries will be meeting in Colombia at the end of this month for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Unlike UN-run climate summits, this will be governed by majority vote rather than consensus, preventing a small number of countries from sabotaging plans like Saudi Arabia and other petrostates did at COP30. The countries plan on putting together a workable plan for the transition; what could be promising is the fact that put together, the countries participating have enough economic heft to force investors to reconsider whether it's still worth investing in new fossil fuel reserves.

News roundup, 9 April 2026

- An Israeli bombardment of Lebanon on Wednesday has killed over 250 people and injured hundreds more. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, says that the inclusion of Lebanon in the ceasefire with the US is essential, but JD Vance is urging Iran to throw Lebanon under the bus. Meanwhile, uncertainty arising from the conflict is driving banks to raise their lending rates, which could have significant implications for those who have to renew their mortgages soon.

- Marilyn Gladu, until now the Conservative MP for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, has become the latest to cross the floor and join Mark Carney's Liberals. This brings the Liberals up to 172 seats, one short of a majority.

- A study at Tufts University on how to increase election turnout among students has been halted by a federal order, ostensibly because the feds are concerned about the privacy of students. I think we all know the real reason though.

- The Manitoba government is warning that the flood situation in the Interlake region could be severe this spring, possibly as bad as 2014 when much of Peguis First Nation had to be evacuated. In other parts of the province, conditions are drier - so dry, in fact, that people are already getting anxious about the coming wildfire season.

- A referendum in the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington to restrict the construction of data centres in the city has passed by a large margin. It will require any future data centres to win the approval of voters. A regional business organization is fighting the initiative in court, fearing that it will set a precedent for other forms of development.

- Danhao Wang, a semiconductor researcher at the University of Michigan, has died after falling from a campus building, apparently intentionally. This came shortly after he was subjected to "hostile questioning" by authorities. Wang is not the first Chinese-born researcher to die in this manner recently; Jane Wu of Northwestern University killed herself in 2024 while under investigation by federal authorities.