- Earth just experienced the hottest 12-month period ever recorded. This does not stop the fossil fuel industry from shamelessly filling up international climate conferences with their representatives, in an effort to sway things in their (short term) favour. A slightly more positive sign is that solar power is really taking off despite the dinosaurs' efforts; it is expected that it will produce a bigger share of America's electricity than hydropower next year. And Australia has offered to resettle the residents of Tuvalu when rising sea levels make their country uninhabitable.
- A chemical used in the manufacture of automobile tires, which is released into the environment as the tires wear, is quite toxic to aquatic life. This is now being investigated by the US Environmental Protection Agency, so hopefully it will be banned soon (though the problem of microplastics from tire dust will remain).
- Gaza's largest hospital is now without power, and the lives of patients (including newborns in incubators) are in grave danger. Some may recall from the first Gulf war back in 1991 how a false story was spread alleging that Iraqi soldiers ripped babies from incubators in a Kuwait hospital. Now something rather similar to that has actually happened, but it probably won't get the same amount of exposure in Western media.
- A Winnipeg woman says that police harassed and threatened her family, including her 11 year old niece, after they were pulled over on the way back from a pro-Palestine protest. Meanwhile in Florida, a Republican state legislator, when asked how many dead Palestinians would be enough, replied "All of them".
- Donald Trump is now openly saying that since he considers the legal measures being used against him to be nothing but a Democrat witch hunt, he will be doing the same if he regains the presidency. Worryingly, some recent polling favours Trump in a two way race between him and Biden, although if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs as an independent he will likely pull more votes from Trump than Biden despite his family's strong Democratic heritage; the conspiracy nutters love him. That said, if no candidate has a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives will decide the presidency, and that could still put Trump back in.
- Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi has been forced out of his post as deputy leader of the BC Green Party after he clicked the "like" button on a social media post which included a reference to Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry as "#QueenBonnie 'Mengele' Henry". Now obviously comparing Dr. Henry to Mengele is way, way out of line, and probably originated in far-right circles. Interestingly, though, the account that the post came from doesn't really fit the profile, and the offending post consists primarily of a screenshot of a letter to the editor of a Victoria newspaper accusing the government of mismanaging COVID-19 (which is presumably what Dr. Gandhi was responding to) and just makes the Mengele reference in passing. And I think almost anyone who uses social media has thoughtlessly clicked "like" on something without properly reading it. Nonetheless, in this political climate anything that could be seen as having even the slightest whiff of antisemitism is too much for a political party to ignore.
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