- Houthi rebels in Yemen have apparently joined the fray in Israel, attempting a drone attack on the city of Eilat. Meanwhile Israel has bombed a refugee camp in Gaza, killing over 50 people. For their part the Israelis say that there was a "very senior" Hamas commander in the area.
- Grim signs have been found at yet another former residential school, this one in Kenora.
- A picketer in the MPI strike was assaulted this morning; no official statement on motive, though some folks on Reddit are suggesting that the cause was more psychiatric than political. In other local labour news, Winnipeg Transit workers have voted to reject a temporary agreement.
- A technical consultant for an agriculture-related company, whose job involved driving to various agricultural facilities in BC's Lower Mainland, tried to take her employer to the province's Human Rights Tribunal for not properly accommodating what she claimed was a "contact high" from visiting a cannabis farm.
- The US Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing to roll out a climate disclosure rule, which would require publicly traded companies to report their greenhouse emissions. Sounds perfectly reasonable; even the banks are on board (presumably they know that there is a lot of potential liability looming, and they want to prepare for it). Predictably, rightwing populists are claiming (falsely) that individual farmers and ranchers would be impacted by this.
- The Biden administration has allocated $1.3 billion to improvements in the power grid. Such investments are very much needed in order to make the grid work properly with more renewables; in fact, limitations in the grid are already being blamed for policies that slow the deployment of solar and wind power.
- Lawyers for Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Lindell have withdrawn because their fees weren't being paid. Funny that Trump doesn't help them out with all the money he supposedly has.
- Norway has been very successful in switching over to electric cars; the problem is, though, that they're still cars. They are, however, looking to go further and try to actually reduce car use; it'll be an uphill battle though.
- GM is suspending their autonomous vehicle operations after their robotaxi division, Cruise, was ordered off the road in California for safety reasons.
- Researchers in the UK are developing robot guide dogs for blind folks. Hopefully they'll work better than GM's driverless cars.
- Facial recognition software is not always reliable, especially if you don't look like someone in Silicon Valley where the software tends to be trained. A guy in Detroit was wrongfully arrested because of this sort of thing.
- A rightwing TV host in France blamed Paris' bed bug outbreak on immigration, even as an actual pest control expert disagreed (tourism, as well as pesticide resistance, are at least as big a reason as immigration, but that presumably doesn't have the same "red meat" value to his viewers). Meanwhile, a post made to a French web forum a couple of years ago has resurfaced, in which the poster claimed to have caused the problem themselves by mailing bed bugs around the country. Hopefully this person is just a troll...
- Poutine magnate Ryan Smolkin has died following complications of a surgery. He started a chain of poutine restaurants, as well as founding the World Poutine Eating Championship (a participant in that competition once consumed almost 13 kilograms of poutine in 10 minutes). No word on what kind of surgery Smolkin was undergoing, but I'm guessing it was a coronary bypass.
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