Friday, March 1, 2024

News roundup, 1 March 2024

- The Center for Renewing America, a think tank with ties to Donald Trump, is overtly calling for a Christian nationalist revamp of government. Funny thing is, Christian nationalists are really getting their knickers in a knot about the fact that someone had the audacity to report on this.

- A lawyer who has previously worked with Trump says that the former president is very embarrassed about his inability to come up with the bond money in the E. Jean Carroll case. Assuming Trump is actually capable of shame, it would make sense that not being as rich as he's supposed to be would be the thing to bring it on. Potentially even better news, though, is the fact that his party is worried about their fundraising prospects for the fall election.

- A bill working its way through the Kentucky legislature will, if passed, do away with many basic rights that workers have, including the right to lunch and rest breaks, the right to overtime pay if you work seven days in a row, and the right to be paid for the time taken to get to a job site. It also decreases the statute of limitations for the violation of whatever remaining rights workers have.

- A report commissioned by the City of Winnipeg has concluded that the repairs necessary at Portage and Main would cost some $73 million if the present pedestrian-free configuration is to be maintained, as well as creating several years of traffic disruption that would likely be far worse than any disruption that might result from reopening it to pedestrians. Faced with this, Mayor Scott Gillingham now says that he favours reopening it and closing down the underground concourse, which the report says would cost only around $60 million. Suburbanites who only encounter the intersection on their commutes will not be happy, but oh well.

- A community meeting on Toronto's cycling plan was held in the suburban district of Etobicoke (the Ford brothers' home turf), hosted by the local city councillor, Stephen Holyday. The meeting devolved into chaos after a presenter went into an unhinged anti-cyclist rant, to a chorus of cheers from the audience, and then said "Personally, I'd like to run them [cyclists] over". Reportedly city staff were berated at the meeting as well, and some members of the general public who attended were also a bit uncomfortable with these antics. Despite this, Holyday apparently made no attempt to stop the speaker from rousing the rabble. Everything I hear about Etobicoke, in fact, makes it sound like the worst that Canadian suburbia has to offer.

- A group of young adults who got lost while trying to find the party to which they'd been invited in rural New York state turned into the wrong driveway. The resident of the property, like any good red-blooded rural American would, opened fire with a shotgun as the vehicles were leaving, killing a 20 year old passenger in one of the vehicles. Unfortunately for him, the victim was a white girl, and he was therefore convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison.

- A number of Indians who answered an ad from a Dubai-based recruitment agency thinking they were going to get jobs in the UAE learned to their dismay that they had been duped into joining the Russian army and sent to Ukraine instead. Well, I guess they both begin with U...

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