Monday, April 29, 2024

News roundup, 29 April 2024

- Pro-Palestinian protests at university campuses have lead to hundreds of arrests across the US. 

- The UK's Home Office is detaining refugee claimants weeks earlier than planned in preparation to ship them to Rwanda; it is suspected that the change in timing is to enable the Tories to look tough on immigration as municipal elections are held across the country.

- The legislation to ban TikTok in the US unless parent company ByteDance sells it within 9 months is now awaiting Joe Biden's signature. India has already banned the platform; how American courts will react to the ban remains to be seen, though.

- The spread of avian influenza through wildlife continues to cause alarm.

- A new bill in the Alberta legislature would give the province considerably more power over municipalities, including the power to remove councillors and repeal bylaws.

- Manitoba's Hanover School Division, which serves the eponymous RM as well as the city of Steinbach, has just passed a policy giving the school board a direct say into the hiring of gym and music teachers. The stated reason for singling out those two teaching areas specifically is that they're "faces of the division at sporting events and concerts"; a parent group called the Hanover Parent Alliance for Diversity fears that the real motivation is "to reduce the number of diverse and 2SLBGTQ+ staff in the division".

- South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, considered a possible choice as Trump's running mate, is bragging about shooting a dog and a goat on her farm. Now granted, that might be the sort of thing that often happens on farms, but the reason for shooting the dog was simply that she had judged it "untrainable" and "dangerous" (no indication that she consulted any experts on the matter). And even if it was necessary, it's kind of telling that she's talking openly about it as a way of signalling to the MAGA crowd that she's their kind of person.

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