- The Kinew government is reevaluating the outsourcing of Manitoba's park reservations and hunting and fishing licenses by the previous government, which has handed over $5 million to a Texas based company.
- Former Tory cabinet minister Rochelle Squires thinks that when the NDP's honeymoon period is over, it is the Liberals, rather than her own party, that stand to make gains. She attributes this to the Tories' hard right turn in the election campaign.
- Following a spike in 2020, violent crime rates in the US have dropped considerably. When you ask people, though, they tend to think it's still increasing; in a poll released in November, 77% of respondents believed that there was more crime in the US than the previous year. That said, some specific crimes, such as carjacking, have increased in recent years.
- The US Senate has approved a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 22 Republican senators voted along with the Democrats on the matter. Whether it will make it through the House of Representatives is more doubtful. After all, if the government manages to get anything done in the next seven months, Biden might get credit for it.
- A PAC called Fairshake is pulling out all the stops to try to stop Democrat Katie Porter from getting elected to the Senate. The PAC is backed by the cryptocurrency industry; she has not made much in the way of specific statements about crypto, but she is in favour of consumer protections and is an ally of Elizabeth Warren, so I guess that spooks the techbros.
- The MAGA crowd are claiming, as expected, that the Super Bowl was rigged in order to shine a spotlight on Taylor Swift so that she can encourage young people to vote. I guess most young adult Americans hadn't heard of her before the game. In any case, Trump has had a hate on for the NFL for some four decades, dating back to his ownership of the New Jersey Generals of the rival USFL. That league collapsed within a few years, a collapse for which he has been partly blamed.
- Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, as well has her state secretary and the Lithuanian culture minister, have been put on a wanted list by Russia, over the removal of Soviet era war memorials that were considered to excessively glorify the USSR.
- Two Al Jazeera journalists were seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike. Both were apparently clearly identifiable as media; they were relatively lucky compared to the 85 journalists (78 of them Palestinian) who have been killed in the conflict so far.
- The woman killed after opening fire at that megachurch in Houston had a lengthy criminal and psychiatric history, but somehow was able to get her hands on an AR-15. There are some indications that she may have been partly motivated by the church's open support of Israel.
- A legislator in Idaho has introduced a bill to amend the state's existing cannibalism law (yes, they have one) to make it an offense to "willfully provide the flesh or blood of a human being to another person to ingest without such person’s knowledge or consent". Fair enough I guess, but I don't think cannibalism is a major problem even in Idaho; apparently she was motivated by Washington's recent legalization of "human composting" and imagined that the compost resulting from this would turn up on the shelf at her local Home Depot (spoiler: it won't anyway) as well as a decade-old clip from a TV show in which someone was pranked into thinking they'd consumed human flesh, which led her to believe that cannibalism was going to be somehow "normalized" any day now.
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