News roundup, 3 July 2026

- The Bank of England has announced that fossil fuel companies' debt will be downgraded from October onwards. Other central banks are taking similar measures; some 40 of them use a statistic called "weighted average climate intensity" (WACI); notably one of the easiest ways to improve that statistic is to sell US Treasuries. The fact that it's the Telegraph (aka the "Torygraph") reporting this is particularly interesting, given that paper's general hostility to things like renewable energy. Unfortunately, the changes that result probably won't happen in time to stop the collapse of the Thwaites glacier and the resulting sea level rise (possibly up to 2 metres by the end of this century), but it might buy some time to adapt to the rise.

- Spain has banned state-owned enterprises from entering into new contracts with Palantir on national security grounds. Other places are taking measures as well; London's mayor Sadiq Khan recently blocked a £50 million contract that the Metropolitan Police had negotiated with the company. Palantir intends to sue over the matter.

- Wally Daudrich, the former Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership candidate who was disqualified from running in the Turtle Mountain constituency, has left the party in favour of the far right Keystone Party. He will be running for the latter party in the upcoming byelection in The Pas-Kameesak.

- Edmonton seems to be making excellent use of the land formerly occupied by the decommissioned City Centre Airport. The new neighbourhood, called Blatchford, is being developed with a lot of mixed use midrise buildings with retail on the main floor. This is something that many would see as simply good sense, but it's been difficult to build in much of North America for many decades due to archaic zoning laws. The buildings will be heated and cooled by a shared geothermal system and be well served by the city's LRT.

- A recent study in BC has found that life expectancies in the province are diverging. As of 2024, the provincial average has increased since 2004, and in most of Metro Vancouver (with the stark exception of the Downtown Eastside and vicinity) as well as the Victoria area, people can be expected to live substantially longer. A resident of Richmond born in 2024, for instance, should have an average life expectancy of 89.4 years. The Downtown Eastside itself, not surprisingly, has the lowest life expectancy in the province, but notably the province's interior is doing badly as well - and the farther inland you live, the worse your life expectancy is on average. It's not simply that the interior isn't gaining, it's actually retreating - the life expectancy there actually rose between 2000 and 2014 and has been declining since.

- Nine monks on a pilgrimage walk in Thailand were killed when they were hit by a pickup truck driven by an 11 year old boy. The child is in custody.

News roundup, 2 July 2026

- Russia, despite being one of the world's largest oil producers, is experiencing fuel supply issues as a result of the latest wave of Ukrainian strikes on refineries. The Putin regime has outlawed the export of gasoline and jet fuel and is considering importing these products from elsewhere. The impact on public opinion in Russia may be significant, but the extent to which this will matter is unclear. Even many critics of the regime remain in favour of the war, they just don't think Putin is doing a good enough job fighting it. Russia has, of course, retaliated on a large scale for the latest intrusions, killing 18 people and causing widespread damage in Kyiv.

- Still on the subject of great powers getting in over their heads, the US attack on Iran has led many of America's allies to question whether it's such a great idea to host bases that might become targets of counterattacks. This could significantly impact their ability to "project power".

- A tornado struck in the Rural Municipality of Rossburn in western Manitoba on Sunday night, destroying a house. The next day, another tornado struck in the affluent suburban Winnipeg neighbourhood of Whyte Ridge on Monday evening, also destroying one house and damaging several others. Torrential rain also caused some flooding in Brandon and Dauphin; the latter city has declared a state of emergency, as has the town of Swan River. No injuries have been reported, however.

- Brian Mayes, who has represented St. Vital on Winnipeg's city council since 2011, has announced that he is not running again this fall. He leaves behind a mixed legacy; he was progressive in some ways, and definitely very responsive to his constituents' wants, but that latter point is also part of what was wrong with him; whenever there was a tension between the desires of his NIMBY constituents and the needs of the city as a whole (e.g. on infill housing), the NIMBYs tended to win out.

- Establishment Democrats are less than pleased with the recent success of leftwingers in Democratic primaries. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York State, went so far as to claim that some of the candidates endorsed by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani "do not understand the politics of New York City"; if that were true, though, you wouldn't expect them to have been as successful as they in fact have. Meanwhile Democratic House member Greg Meeks said that "if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat". Ironically, people like James and Meeks are the first to get angry at third party campaigns (not without some cause given how badly locked in the two-party system is in that country), but in their mind such people should only work within the party so long as they don't actually succeed there. The most charitable interpretation of these bleatings is that they're scared that leftwing Democrats might gain a national profile that will scare off swing voters, but that seems like a stretch. More likely they're scared of what will become of AIPAC funds.

News roundup, 30 June 2026

- Federal heritage minister Marc Miller is bothered by the fact that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights' exhibit on the Nakba does not describe Hamas as a terrorist group. Perhaps he needs to do some brushing up on his history; the Nakba took place in 1948 and Hamas was not founded until 1987. I guess Miller is more concerned about virtue signalling to those who might donate to his campaign (or to his opponents) than actual history.

- Politicians in the US are starting to lose elections over their support of AI data centres. The president of Utah's state senate and a county commissioner were defeated in primaries; both believe that this resulted from their support of Stratos, a large data centre planned for near Great Salt Lake that was backed by Dragon's Den and Shark Tank investor (and former Conservative leadership candidate) Kevin O'Leary.

- The attorneys general of 17 Republican-dominated states are suing California over that state's Plastic Act. The legislation requires an immediate 25% reduction in single use plastics for packaging and requires all packaging to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. The Republican AGs claim that California's law will significantly increase product prices in their own states, and that this constitutes a violation of the US Constitution's "Commerce Clause".

- A data breach at Crime Stoppers has aroused fears that the lives of informants could be at risk. The breach occurred several months ago; the Canadian branch of the organization says that it's unsure if tipsters' info was part of the breach, but there are allegations that this information has been offered for sale on the dark web. Canadian Crime Stoppers Association president David Forster declined an interview and told board members across the country to do the same. Reports from the US say that decades worth of information was stolen, and Portland's police service is warning people not to submit tips using the organization's platform while the matter is being investigated.

- Manitoba's Hanover School Division, which covers Steinbach and surrounding area, has introduced a new policy on student activism that it claims is meant to support "age-appropriate activism". Given that the division keeps getting hauled into the minister's office over possible censorship, this bears close watching.

- Courts are seeing an increase in the use of phony, AI-generated case law. This happens most often with people representing themselves, but actual lawyers have been taken in by this as well.

News roundup, 29 June 2026

- A New York woman who shared an Instagram post naming Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was visited at her workplace by the agency. She says the agents told her to remove the post or face prosecution, and attempted to get her to sign a document admitting to breaking federal law by naming him (she called their bluff and refused). And it's not like there's a publication ban or anything (which might be justified if there were a chance of Ross facing prosecution, but that's kind of moot right now).

- Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York State governor, is evidently not fond of Brad Lander, the winner of the Democratic primary for New York's 10th congressional district. In an interview with Newsmax he said that Lander, who like Blakeman is Jewish, "would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could". 

- The Carney government has entered into a partnership with David Eby's government in BC to buy unsold condos and convert them into affordable housing. Predictably, Pierre Poilievre called the plan a bailout for developers; Poilievre does have something of a point, given that if the governments were to simply wait for said developers to go broke, they could potentially buy the units much more cheaply. Of course, there's a problem with that; federal housing minister (and former Vancouver mayor) Gregor Robertson is decidedly uncomfortable with the idea that housing prices in general need to come down. This is no surprise given that the idea that housing is an investment (rather than, you know, somewhere to live) has been the mantra of governments for decades, and the people whose houses and condos are now worth many times what they paid for them don't want to see them devalued even slightly. This puts governments who want to make housing affordable in a bind, since people who own their own homes tend to skew older and are thus more likely to vote than those who would benefit from a drop in prices. So rather than deal with the fundamental issue, governments pursue suboptimal solutions like this one.

- A letter signed by medical directors of four Winnipeg hospitals in March warned that physicians are having to make grim decisions about who gets care first due to low staffing levels and that patient deaths are inevitable unless something changes. Health minister Uzoma Asagwara says that staffing has improved since then thanks to new incentives, however.

- Although southern Manitoba has gotten a lot of rain in recent weeks, the northern part of the province hasn't fared so well. The town of Lynn Lake and nearby Marcel Colomb First Nation are being evacuated due to wildfire threats.

- Valery Fabrikant, the former engineering instructor at Concordia University who killed four of his colleagues in 1992 after not getting tenure, has died in prison at the age of 86. 

News roundup, 26 June 2026

- Chinese automakers BYD, Chery, and Geely say they are "willing to explore" the possibilities of joint ventures to enable the production of their vehicles in Canada. This would enable them to sell cars far in excess of current import quotas, while creating jobs in this country. The devil is always in the details with such things, of course; the biggest question is whether they will actually hire locally, or if they'll just bring in workers from overseas who might not know what their labour rights are in this country. For instance, when HD Mining posted their job requirements for a mine in BC a number of years ago, one of them was fluency in Mandarin, and they used the temporary foreign worker program to import labour after not getting enough applicants meeting that requirement. It remains to be seen if that will happen here.

- China has introduced new "ethnic unity" legislation that creates a shared identity among different ethnic groups in the country. What is alarming about this is that it includes a clause saying that groups and individuals outside the country can be held legally accountable for "inciting ethnic separatism" or "undermining ethnic unity"; this is particularly concerning given the country's history of running covert overseas police stations. Of course China is far from the only country to claim the right to enforce their laws outside their borders (the US is guilty of that practice too, most famously in the Meng Wanzhou case).

- The captain of an Air Canada Q400 flying from Newark to Halifax experienced a medical emergency, apparently a seizure, while in command of the aircraft. The aircraft was safely landed in Boston by the first officer; passengers say that the captain was "kicking and flailing" as flight attendants dragged him out of the cockpit.

- The greenhouse emissions from City of Winnipeg operations rose last year; the biggest factor, interestingly, was not heating buildings or the city's substantial fleet of vehicles but methane emissions from the Brady Road landfill. The city hopes to have an organic waste composting program in place in a few years, but it would be nice to be able to do something about the stuff already in the landfill, such as using landfill gas to generate electricity (as Waterloo has been doing since 1999).

- An arrest warrant has been issued for a former correctional officer who was the case manager for a convicted murderer who escaped from a prison in Port Coquitlam, BC. Naila Sheikh is wanted for breach of trust; it's unclear if the charges are directly related to the escape.

- The former finance director for Jesuits in Canada has been ordered to repay $8.8 million after stealing from the organization for many years. I seem to recall there being something about that kind of behaviour in the Bible. No criminal charges have been filed, interestingly.

News roundup, 25 June 2026

- Oil prices have dropped back to the prewar baseline following the memorandum of understanding signed between the US and Iran that has led to a resumption in traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Wholesale prices of fertilizer are coming down as well, though many farmers say they have yet to see any real relief at the retail level.

- At least 164 people were killed and 971 injured after two earthquakes struck within a minute of each other in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.

- The Red River Co-op has plans for a badly needed downtown grocery store at Portage Place. The 22,500 ft² facility is expected to open in 2029.

- Winnipeg city councillor Janice Lukes, who represents the suburban Waverley West ward, has announced that she is not running again in this fall's election. Folks on the r/Winnipeg subreddit are mostly rejoicing, though some warn that you should be careful what you wish for. As one person says, "I wasn't a fan, but progressives/urbanists may need to face up to the fact that she was possibly the best we were going to get out of Waverley West." River Heights-Fort Garry councillor John Orlikow isn't running again either; to date Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt has not ruled out running again despite facing sexual assault charges.

- Calgary's chamber of commerce has released a report concluding that secession could cost Alberta's economy $62 billion a year. They also surveyed their members; as this was a self-selecting survey it isn't definitive, but among those who responded more than 75% thought that the very discussion around separation was negatively affecting the province's economy.

- The heatwave in Europe continues, with temperatures hitting the low forties in parts of France yesterday. Even in the normally moderate UK, the town of Gosport recorded a temperature of 36.1°C, and it could get even hotter today.

- A mosque in Regina that got approval from the city to play their call to prayer from a speaker atop the building over the noon hour is getting threats from members of the public. I'd bet you donuts to dinars that the people doing this do not make similar threats to churches that ring bells.

News roundup, 24 June 2026

- Donald Trump, having previously fulminated about the tolls that Iran had imposed on the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict, is now threatening to impose his own tolls on the strait unless a peace deal can be signed within 60 days. This worries many who fear this could set a precedent that could encourage other countries to impose tolls on what were previously accepted as international waterways, including the Malacca Strait in Indonesia and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Djibouti. This comes as Marco Rubio says that "no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway"; no doubt Rubio will be forced to clarify this and say that "no country but America is allowed to charge tolls or fees".

- The heatwave sweeping Europe continues. Highs of around 40°C are expected in western France today while Belgium and the Netherlands are getting temperatures in the high thirties. Even in Ireland temperatures may edge into the thirties, something almost unheard of there. Two children died after being left in a hot car in the French town of Carpentras; some 40 people have also drowned in France since the start of the heatwave.

- Several leftwing candidates have scored victories in Democratic primaries in New York. Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier had all been endorsed by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani. Lander defeated congressman Dan Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune (and staunch Israel supporter); Lander, Valdez, and Chevalier have all accused Israel of genocide. The party's leadership have expressed concerns that this will be alienating to swing voters (but are probably more worried about donors than voters).

- The city of Waterloo is looking at allowing churches to build housing on their properties as a way of expanding the housing supply. Predictably, local NIMBYs are bleating about notions such as "neighbourhood character" (which generally means "keeping the poors out", of course).

- The Manitoba NDP has nominated Jennifer Flett as their candidate in the upcoming byelection in The Pas-Kameesak. The byelection was called after incumbent Amanda Lathlin died in March. Flett's background includes serving as a band councillor in OCN as well as working for the Correctional Service of Canada.

News roundup, 23 June 2026

- The Trump regime has turned its sights on the EU again, this time looking at Germany's regulation of pharmaceutical prices. Trump claims that this practice forces drug makers to charge higher prices in the US in order to make up the difference.

- The Manitoba government is still looking at Sio Silica's bid to open a sand mine in the Rural Municipality of Springfield, but Premier Wab Kinew has dropped hints that the mine will not be approved. In an interview with radio station CJOB, Kinew indicated that the fact that the company's last bid for this is the subject of an upcoming public inquiry into the previous government's actions could impact the decision.

- The Toronto Star has an interesting take on Carney's pipeline deal with Alberta - they suggest that the proposal is not economically viable and will likely never be built. If this is true, I have to give some credit to Carney for moving to placate Danielle Smith while not doing real damage to the climate. However, as the article points out, such a move could backfire if the idea collapses before this fall's referendum.

- A blind woman was apparently denied service by the Stella's restaurant chain in Winnipeg due to her guide dog. The chain has a long history of questionable practices (including sexual harassment and union busting) so this is entirely in character for the company. That said, the article does touch on an issue with the legislation surrounding service animals - there's no standard certification process for the animals, leaving the door wide open to abuse by the kind of people who claim their dog is an "emotional support" animal. If I were to guess, I'd say someone involved in drafting the legislation thought that requiring disabled people to prove the legitimacy of their service animals constituted a "microaggression" of some sort; while this was no doubt well-intentioned, it fails to take into account the realities of human behaviour.

- A Russian journalist who reported in 2008 that Putin planned to divorce his wife in favour of Olympic gymnast Alina Kabaeva has died. Grigory Nekhoroshev had been living in exile in Latvia for a number of years, and allegedly died from eating poisonous mushrooms foraged from his front yard. I guess that has more plausible deniability than polonium.

News roundup, 22 June 2026

- Keir Starmer is has announced that he will be resigning as the UK's prime minister. This follows Andy Burnham's byelection victory, as more than 50% of Labour's caucus now support Burnham for leader, making Starmer's position untenable. He will stay on until the party chooses a new leader this summer.

- A jury in Birmingham has refused to convict four activists who admitted breaking into a Wolverhampton factory owned by US manufacturer Moog Inc. Among other things, the company manufactures components used by the Israeli military, leading to the protest. The four had been charged with criminal damage over £5,000, having caused substantial damage to the facility. This contrasts with the fate of four other activists who broke into a plant in Filton, near Bristol, which is owned by Israeli company Elbit Systems. The latter company manufactures drones as well as land-based equipment for that country's military. Three of them were given sentences of around five years, while one of them, Samuel Corner, got seven (to be fair, he had also severely injured a cop with a sledgehammer as she attempted to arrest one of his colleagues). What's especially problematic here, though, is that a decision was made after the conviction to make a "terrorist connection" an aggravating factor in the sentencing, while the jury was only told that the activists other than Corner were on trial for criminal damage with no mention of terrorism. The judge in the Elbit case also tried to have one of the defense lawyers prosecuted for contempt of court for having the audacity to remind jurors in his closing speech of their right to acquit if they believed that the actions of the accused were moral, regardless of the letter of the law.

- An environmental activist who organized a team of volunteers to clean up a river in England is being threatened with prosecution by the UK's environment agency. The agency says that they are concerned that enough material may have been removed from the river to constitute dredging, which requires a permit from the agency, and that this could have potential flood impacts downstream. It's hard not to wonder, though, if the agency isn't also a bit embarrassed by the fact that a bunch of volunteers did what they'd been stalling on for years.

- Abelardo de la Espriella, the Trump-backed candidate in Colombia's presidential election, appears to have scored a narrow victory over left-leaning candidate Iván Cepeda. De la Espriella has vowed a military crackdown on armed groups, the construction of "mega-prisons" in the jungle, and to shrink the state (except for the military and those mega-prisons, presumably).

- Europe is enduring another severe heatwave, with temperatures expected to reach the mid-40s in parts of Spain and France. Even in the UK, an extreme heat warning has been issued for southern England and parts of Wales, with temperatures as high as 38°C expected.

News roundup, 19 June 2026

- Labour Party dissident Andy Burnham won a resounding victory in the byelection in the constituency of Makerfield, winning nearly 55% of the vote compared to 34% for the Reform UK candidate. His vote share was almost double that of Josh Simons, whose resignation triggered the byelection in the first place. Burnham, who until now served as the mayor of Greater Manchester, says that this represents Labour's final chance to reverse its current direction; it remains to be seen whether this will push the party to dump Kier Starmer, much less whether the party could win the next general election by doing so.

- NDP house leader Heather McPherson posted (I'd say tweeted but this was on Bluesky rather than Twitter/X) a quip that billionaires shouldn't exist and trillionaires should be put in jail. This has thrown the folks at Juno News into a tizzy, ranting about a "leftwing hate fest" and misrepresenting the post to boot (McPherson didn't actually call Musk a Nazi, she just reposted someone else's post calling him that, not that I could fault her if she had). Juno News is just a rebranding of the True North Centre for Public Policy, so they shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it's kind of amusing to see what snowflakes they are when you pick on one of their heroes.

- Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on Moscow and some other Russian targets on Thursday. Among the targets hit was the capital's main oil refinery; some 17 people were injured in the attacks, and Moscow's four airports were shut down for most of the day. Meanwhile the Kyiv Post alleges that authorities in a town near the capital refuse to disclose the location of civil defense shelters out of fear of causing panic, saying that this information will only be made public "during mobilization and in wartime". And of course, this conflict is officially just a "special military operation", and calling it a war can get you put in jail or thrown out a window, so...

- The board of directors of the South Winnipeg Community Centre has disbanded and handed control of the facility back to the city. The board had been accused of financial irregularities and other governance-related issues by some members of the community, but an independent audit found no evidence of financial wrongdoing, and the General Council of Winnipeg Community Centres' own investigation found similar results. Despite this, board members continued to receive online harassment, and when you're a volunteer you're only going to put up with so much of this. I haven't been able to find much background on this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of culture war nonsense bubbling underneath all this.

- Selkirk has become the first city in Manitoba to take advantage of funding the province is offering to provide free bus passes to youth aged 12-21. They will need proof of enrollment to be eligible, however. The province is still working with other cities, including Winnipeg as well as Brandon, Winkler, and Flin Flon, to get the program in place in time for next fall; it would be nice if the program covered university and community college students as well, at least in Winnipeg and Brandon, as that would probably lead to a reduction in impaired driving.

- Researchers are reporting that some AI systems are really good at finding loopholes in rules. This should give pause to anyone who hopes that some kind of constraints like Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics could be made to work in the real world.

News roundup, 18 June 2026

- The White House says that the memorandum of understanding signed between the US and Iran is now in effect. Under the deal, Iran agrees never to develop a nuclear weapon, and a $300 billion fund is to be created for the "reconstruction and economic development" of Iran - though the US is not obligated to contribute to the fund. Iran also agrees to allow traffic through the Strait of Hormuz at no charge. It's also supposed to eventually end the sanctions against Iran, but no timeline is provided for this.

- The NAACP has filed a lawsuit to shut down natural gas-fired turbines that power Elon Musk's Grok AI, on the grounds that they not only lack the required permits under the Clean Air Act but will disproportionately harm residents of black communities. The Trump regime's Department of Justice is arguing that the move threatens national security and must be dismissed for that reason.

- The Bank of England is considering the introduction of a state-backed cryptocurrency called Britcoin. Nigel Farage, who until now has never seen a cryptocurrency that he didn't like, is vehemently opposed, and in fact has told a crowd of supporters that he's "prepared to go to prison" to stop it. Probably the fact that he's received donations from a huge crypto baron who stands to lose money if a state-backed cryptocurrency takes off has something to do with this.

- Liberal MP Ruby Sahota, who serves as the government's Secretary of State for Combatting Crime, claims that the people who fired shots at synagogues as well as the US consulate in Toronto were hired by a foreign entity. Toronto police have not confirmed the connection.

- A Conservative MP, Corey Tochor, has introduced a private member's bill to legalize psilocybin for the treatment of some psychiatric conditions. Tochor, who represents the riding of Saskatoon-University, says he was motivated to introduce the bill after one of his constituents was dropped from a pilot study allowing the drug to be prescribed on a limited basis. I have to say I can't fault Tochor on this, even if it is a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

- A new poll from Probe Research finds that nearly 50% of respondents do not want Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham to win another term. Confusingly, more than 90% also believe that electing someone else won't make a difference, and Dan Lett cites other polling that suggests that people actually understand that a lot of the problems the city is experiencing need to be solved by other levels of government - yet they want to reflexively vote out incumbents anyway. It all seems to suggest that people increasingly see voting as an act of spite rather than one of hope.

- Police in Senatobia, Mississippi killed a toddler when they opened fire on his mother's car, allegedly after someone in the vehicle was suspected of shoplifting. Notably, the boy's mother has not been charged with a crime, which you'd expect the cops to be quick to do if they had a leg to stand on.

 

News roundup, 17 June 2026

- Israel launched a series of new strikes on Lebanon, in defiance of Donald Trump's request. I think the real issue here is that the two leaders have different priorities - Trump wants the war to end in the hope that gas prices will come down in time for the midterms in November, while Netanyahu wants the war to continue until October to maximize his chances of winning the election and thus avoiding a corruption trial that could send him to prison.

- Savneet Talwar, a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), has been suspended and placed under investigation after giving students an assignment that made a passing reference to Palestine. The student who complained had a history of making similar complaints, and the school warned Talwar that the assignment could be seen as constituting "discrimination, harassment and/or retaliation".

- The yearbooks at two different Canadian high schools, one in Toronto and one in Bedford, NS, published quotes from students that appeared to question the Holocaust. Apparently it was worded in such a way as to question the number who died without making direct reference to the event; the exact wording isn't included in the article so it's hard to say how subtle it was. The Bedford school has asked students to return the yearbook for a reprint with the offending quote removed, while the Toronto school has offered to do the same. Interestingly, a school in the Pittsburgh area had a similar thing happen, but has not recalled the yearbook, saying it wasn't feasible to republish.

- A proposed mixed-use development called the Waters Urban Village would add nearly 3,000 housing units in a largely industrial area of east Winnipeg. The development would be a mix of multi-family and commercial. Seems pretty reasonable, but Transcona councillor (and sex assault suspect) Russ Wyatt is up in arms about the matter. Mayor Scott Gillingham called Wyatt a "desperate man", suggesting that he might be looking for a distraction from his legal issues.

- The town of Sundre in central Alberta has an annual rodeo, and normally there is an accompanying parade. This year, however, the parade was cancelled after organizers were subjected to severe harassment from Alberta separatists who were angered after being denied a float in the parade.

News roundup, 16 June 2026

- The Trump regime claims that the memorandum of understanding signed with Iran will see the Strait of Hormuz "open to all" by this coming Friday. The actual details of the MOU have yet to be released, however, so this claim should be taken with several kilograms of salt.

- The Carney government is suspending several certificates of citizenship that were sent out to people who applied after becoming eligible under the "lost Canadians" law. The suspensions are claimed to be justified based on the supporting documents not being original source material; those receiving the notice are being told that their applications may be reinstated if they provide satisfactory supporting evidence. Some 4,000 people around the world, around half of them American, had been sent certificates under the new legislation; it's not clear how many of these people are affected by this.

- Last week new regulations from Canada's telecommunications regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), took effect, prohibiting telecoms from charging extra fees to activate, change, or cancel cellphone plans. Shortly before the regulations came into force, Bell Canada and Telus rebranded these fees as a "handling fee" in the case of Bell, and a "SIM card fee" in Telus' case. The CRTC sent stern letters to the companies suggesting that these new fees may still be illegal; whether they take more concrete action than this remains to be seen.

- A man suspected of murder in the death of a 61 year old woman in the township of Greater Madawaska, Ontario was arrested in Winnipeg after police investigating the killing discovered threats that the suspect had made to a local business here. When captured he was found in possession of a shotgun as well as three jerry cans full of gasoline.

- In 2022, it was claimed by Russia that several public health facilities in Ukraine, which had received funding from the US, were actually biological warfare research facilities. The official story is that facilities were working to secure Soviet-era bioweapons and then turned into general purpose public health labs once this had been done. Russia's claims were denied by the US at the time. Of course, one could reasonably ask whether the Americans can be trusted to tell the truth about this, but notably these claims have also been dismissed by the UN as well as by some actual Russian scientists (who had best keep a safe distance from windows for the foreseeable future). However, a Canadian blogger, Patrick Armstrong, now claims to have new evidence supporting Russia's assertions. The source for this information is Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has released what she calls declassified information that allegedly supports the claim. Those convinced of Russia's righteousness in the conflict are naturally pleased with this report; whether information put out by the Trump regime can be trusted to be truthful on this matter (or any other) is left as an exercise for the reader.

News roundup, 15 June 2026

- The US and Iran have signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war. The full text of the agreement has not yet been made public, but Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who oversaw the negotiations, says that they have declared "immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon". Whether the Israelis will cooperate on that last point is another matter; indications are that they won't. Regarding Iran's nuclear program, the agreement allegedly 60-day timeline for "technical discussions" on the matter. That sounds like a comedown from the Americans' previous demands; I have to assume that the regime desperately wants to get gas prices down in time for the midterms this fall.

- Russian drone strikes on Kyiv have killed at least 10 people and severely damaged an 11th century cathedral that is part of a larger group of buildings called the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a UNESCO world heritage site. The Russians are also accused of a "double tap" strike in which another wave of attacks comes after first responders have arrived; four emergency workers are among the dead.

- Last week's storm could set a record for insurance claims in Manitoba. MPI reports that they have received some 20,000 claims for vehicle damage so far, and home insurers are also seeing potentially unprecedented damage for such things as basement flooding.

- The rise of e-bikes has led the Netherlands to consider a 20 km/h speed limit for bike lanes and are conducting a two week trial in the municipality of Houten. Many naturally question whether such a rule needs to apply to regular, non-assisted bikes; after all, the real problem is the fact that an e-bike allows an inexperienced cyclist to reach speeds normally only reachable by an experienced cyclist.

- A study in the US has found that more than 50% of parents of young adults (18-25 years old) are using cellphone tracking apps to keep an eye on their kids. 

News roundup, 12 June 2026

- The US military attacked another Palau-flagged tanker, the Settebello, in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday, two days after a similar attack, in the name of enforcing its blockade of Iranian ports. This time, three crew members, all Indian nationals, were killed. Trump says, though, that he's cancelled further strikes in anticipation of a ceasefire; we'll have to see how seriously that can be taken.

- Following Tuesday night's storm in southern Manitoba, some people are raising concerns that the emergency alerts sent to cellphones about severe weather such as tornadoes could have a "cry wolf" effect if too many people outside the danger zone get alerts. The alerts are sent based on connection to a cellphone tower in the affected area, but sometimes that means further away than expected (according to someone in this Reddit thread, cellphones can sometimes connect to a tower much further away than normal). Some people report getting as many as 20 alerts that night; meanwhile only a single tornado is confirmed, and that was over 30 km from Winnipeg where many people got these alerts. Environment Canada say that they are working on a more targeted system.

- This week's storms are also expected to have a devastating effect on agriculture in parts of Manitoba. The storms follow a late planting season, meaning that the plants haven't grown long enough to be as resilient against flooding as in a normal season.

- Authorities in Nova Scotia are using civil forfeiture laws, more often used against drug traffickers, to seize equipment from the site of an illegal landfill on the outskirts of Halifax. The owner of one of the pieces of equipment seized claims that he had nothing to do with the operation and was just leasing the land, however documents filed in the provincial supreme court include drone footage showing the equipment being loaded with topsoil adjacent to one of the dumping locations.

- A group of independent musicians, songwriters, and producers are suing Google for copyright infringement, alleging that the company's AI music generator Lyria 3 was trained on their works without permission. Google has filed a motion to dismiss, saying that the artists agreed to this under the terms of service when they uploaded their material to YouTube.

- The SpaceX IPO being launched today is expected to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. 

News roundup, 11 June 2026

- Manitoba was hit by severe storms on Tuesday evening and overnight. This included at least one tornado, which touched down near the town of Ste Anne but fortunately didn't injure anyone; there are unconfirmed reports of several more. Winnipeg got 122 millimetres of rain, while the town of Stonewall got 229. Power was out for some 32,000 Manitoba Hydro customers across the province, including almost 20,000 in Winnipeg (including me, hence the lack of a post yesterday). It was still out for some 15,000 as of last night. Many report sewage in basements, and given the gigantic hailstones that fell in several places it's a safe bet that MPI will take a significant hit for vehicle damage.

- Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time, in a test conducted by Ukraine's military against the Russians. While I can certainly sympathize with the Ukrainians' willingness to do anything to get rid of the invaders, I have to agree with UN Secretary-General António Guterres' view that this sort of thing needs to be banned.

- A new poll in BC has the Conservatives tied with the NDP in popular support. This comes despite the fact that Premier David Eby's approval rating, while below 50%, is still considerably higher (48%) than that of new Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay (32%). In case there was any doubt about what kind of conservative Findlay is, she was a supporter of the clownvoy, and was photographed with a white nationalist influencer (she denies knowing who he is, but then she would say that, wouldn't she).

- A Toronto man named Zack Giacomelli was having ongoing problems with a BMW that he'd purchased used from a dealership in 2023. He submitted an online inquiry, and got a message from someone from the dealership calling themselves Quinn. After some discussion, Quinn made what was supposed to be a firm buyback offer, sufficient to cover what he still owed on the car - but then a sales consultant called to revoke the offer, saying that "Quinn" was in fact an AI chatbot and had made the offer in error. The dealership quickly reversed this after they were contacted by the CBC, however, and there's already a legal precedent in this country that makes the owner of a chatbot potentially liable for its promises. Giacomelli certainly doesn't disagree with this; as he says, "If they're going to be replacing their employees' jobs with AI, then they need to be honouring what that AI says".

- Musician Elvis Costello has altered the lyrics of his 1979 song "Oliver's Army". The song, which is about the UK's rather troubled history with Ireland, originally contained the phrase "white n***er", which Costello says was a historically accurate description of what the Irish were often called by the Brits, but he stopped playing the song live in 2022 and asked radio stations not to play it, saying that outrage over the use of the N-word was detracting from the actual meaning with the song. Naturally, his rewrite has led some people to complain about "wokeness", to which Costello responds "Go fuck yourself".

News roundup, 9 June 2026

- Around 150 people in the Swan Valley area of western Manitoba were evacuated due to flash flooding after the area got 72 millimetres of rain in only a few hours on Sunday night. 

- A BC man could be facing up to 20 years in a Georgian prison after a border search turned up a bottle of Adderall. Simon Rovensky had been prescribed the amphetamine cocktail to treat ADHD, and had brought along a receipt from when he had purchased the drug, but that wasn't enough for the authorities, and his family apparently weren't given enough time to send supporting documentation before a court hearing. He is set to be sentenced later this month.

- A Palau-flagged oil tanker, the MT Marivex, was attacked by an American fighter off the coast of Oman. Fortunately the crew, all Indian nationals, were successfully rescued by Omani forces, and there was no oil in the ship's tanks at the time of the attack. The US says the ship was attacked for attempting to sail to an Iranian port.

- China has built an undersea data centre off the coast of Shanghai. Besides using wind power to generate the 24 megawatts of power it consumes, it is cooled by seawater. If you're going to have AI data centres that's probably the least bad way of doing it, but I suspect the heat it generates will be considerable and could have a significant effect on the local ecology.

- A former Air Canada pilot is facing fraud charges after it was discovered that he did not have the proper license to serve as a captain, which he did for several months before getting caught.

- Over 300 migrants attempting to make their way to the UK were kidnapped in Libya last summer and threatened with having kidneys harvested if their families didn't pay up. Apparently some of them did end up having a kidney removed, and at least one has died.

- A Somali soccer referee who was set to officiate at the World Cup has been dropped after the US denied him entry. Omar Artan had been honoured as Referee of the Year by the Confederation of African Football last year, but we all know what Donald Trump thinks of Somalis.

News roundup, 8 June 2026

 - Some members of Toronto's Jewish community have got their knickers in a knot over a promotional jersey put out by the TTC. Apparently the jersey has an upside down red triangle somewhere on it, and certain people say it makes them "uncomfortable" due to its resemblance to a symbol used by Hamas. The National Post, never a paper to turn down such an opportunity, interviewed Talia Klein Leighton, president of an organization calling itself "Canadian Women Against Antisemitism", who thinks they should have run the symbol by an AI before using it, and specifically listed Elon Musk's Grok as an example of something they could have used. As someone in this Reddit thread says, "I mean if there is an AI that knows racism..." Meanwhile Toronto city councillor James Pasternak, who represents York Centre, actually suggests, as a serious possibility, that "a member of the anti-Israel mob inside the TTC or one of its suppliers played a sick trick". Beyond the ridiculous level of paranoia displayed here, there's another peculiarity. There's a school of thought among some anti-racism activists that the intent of an action is irrelevant to whether it's a racist act or not; if someone from an oppressed ethnic group feels threatened or uncomfortable as a result of the act, it's racist, end of story. That seems to underlie a lot of the positions taken by the pro-Israel crowd about whether something is antisemitic, but I'd wager you donuts to dinars that they would not want to apply this principle more broadly, and moreover that those who do want to apply it more broadly would tie themselves in knots to carve out an exception for this example.

- A CBC investigation has found that 14 Facebook accounts actively promoting Alberta separatism are not actually operated by Canadians but rather come out of the US, Indonesia, and the south Asian countries. Some of these influencers are among the top posters to Alberta-focused discussion groups. An earlier investigation also found that some YouTube channels promoting separatism operate out of the Netherlands. As far as anyone can tell, this doesn't seem to be an orchestrated conspiracy as such; rather, the influencers have found that activity of this sort leads to more engagement, and social media platforms pay them based on engagement.

- Nick Clegg, the former leader of the UK's Liberal Democratic Party, who later served as Meta's head of global affairs, says that by the time he left the company in March of last year there were clear signs that Meta as well as other Silicon Valley companies had embraced MAGA. Their motives are not discussed, but I suspect that they believe that the Trump regime is their best chance of avoiding heavy regulation of AI, and against that such piddly matters such as social justice, much less decorum, are insignificant.

- Five researchers were ejected from the annual general meeting of the American Diabetes Association after handing out reprints of an editorial from the journal Diabetes Care that was highly critical of the Trump regime's attacks on scientific research. The reprints were distributed outside a room where National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak (he cancelled at the last minute, though it's not clear if the cancellation was connected to this). ADA officials claimed that this was a violation of the organization's code of conduct for conferences, which among other things prohibits "disorderly or disruptive conduct such as protesting". Most likely, though, they're just terrified of doing anything that might antagonize the Mango Mussolini.

- Conservation authorities in several US states are removing catch limits for anglers on certain reservoirs - because drought conditions are so bad that the reservoirs are expected to dry up anyway.

News roundup, 5 June 2026

- Mark Carney is backing away from plans to roll back a wide range of environmental regulations. The government had planned to create "federal economic zones" where various developments were pre-approved, and to give the cabinet the power to exempt projects from endangered species legislation. Following condemnation from First Nations as well as environmental activists, though, the government seems to be backing down.

- Wab Kinew is putting the kibosh on a proposal by a company called Consensus Core to build a gigantic data centre in the Rural Municipality of Ritchot, south of Winnipeg. The facility would have used so much electricity that they planned to power it with natural gas turbines because they couldn't divert enough from the power grid, not to mention the amount of water these things often use for cooling. It's not like it would have created a lot of permanent jobs anyway - in fact part of the point of AI is to not have to hire so many people. Meanwhile a recent study suggests that by 2030 AI could consume as much electricity as Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan combined - with carbon emissions equivalent to that of the UK. And for cooling it could consume as much fresh water as 1.3 billion people. 

- Following Doug Ford's ban on municipalities' use of photo enforcement cameras, a study at eight former camera locations in Ottawa has found that less than half of drivers passing the locations were obeying the posted speed limit. At one of the locations compliance was down to 20%, down from 86% in the last month that the cameras were allowed to operate.

- Two Chinese automakers, Chery and Geely, have begun shipping electric and plug-in hybrid cars to Canada. Some are being sold under the Lotus marque; Geely bought a majority stake in the British automaker in 2023. Buyers of these vehicles might be prohibited from driving them across the border, though, if a bill introduced by two Michigan legislators makes it through the US Congress. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Senator Elissa Slotkin claim that this is a matter of "national security", claiming that the vehicles will record critical information about their drivers and surroundings. I wouldn't be surprised if they do, but this isn't something limited to Chinese cars - GM has already gotten a talking to for spying on their users via their OnStar system. The people who might have a legitimate reason to fear surveillance by China would mostly be Chinese expats living overseas - but nobody's forcing them to buy the cars. And if the Chinese state wants to spy on them, they can probably just buy the info from their cellphone providers and social media companies anyway. Of course, the fact that the sponsors of the bill come from Michigan probably has something to do with the matter...

- The European Parliament has made European-based Qwant, rather than Google, the default search engine on its in-house systems, as part of the EU's efforts to achieve "tech sovereignty". The company, founded in France in 2013, bills itself as a "privacy-first" alternative to Google. The article reporting this doesn't link to the search engine (perhaps Politico doesn't want their articles to be deindexed) but you can find it here.

News roundup, 4 June 2026

- Far-right extremists rioted in Southampton, England on Tuesday over the death of a young man last year. The family of the victim, Henry Nowak, had asked for his death not to be politicized, but given the circumstances (he'd been stabbed to death by a Sikh man, and police initially suspected that he had instigated the fight) Nigel Farage couldn't pass up the opportunity to do so. Farage claimed that there was "two tier policing" in the UK, and that the killing was a result of "mass immigration" (despite the fact that the killer was born and raised in the country). Foreign agitators, including Elon Musk, have been quick to add fuel to the fire, and Farage's brownshirts responded as you'd expect. Farage seems unapologetic about the matter, but then his kind don't believe in backing down.

- The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a result of the US/Israel attack on Iran has so far not led to quite as dramatic a spike in oil prices as some had feared, as countries around the world have relied on oil reserves. This is set to change, though, as these reserves are rapidly depleting with no sign of an end of the war. Prices of over $150 per barrel are expected in the coming weeks. Airlines are downplaying the situation; Air Canada and Lufthansa have both made statements to the effect that there is absolutely no risk of a shortage that could strand passengers. Of course they have to say that or people might be reluctant to buy flights to faraway destinations.

- The US House of Representatives has passed a resolution to end the Iran war.  Four Republicans voted with the Democrats on the resolution. The vote had been scheduled to be held two weeks ago but was delayed by Republican leaders, presumably in the hope of bullying their party's dissidents into opposing the resolution. Of course it would also have to pass the Senate, and would inevitably be vetoed by the Mango Mussolini if it got that far; the Democrats presumably hope that it will give them ammunition to call the war illegal in this fall's election campaign.

- The Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party has blocked Wally Daudrich from running in the constituency of Turtle Mountain after incumbent Doyle Piwniuk announced that he will not be running in the next election. The party has not given a reason, but presumably they consider his hardcore positions to be a liability in suburban Winnipeg, where the party has to do well in order to have a chance of winning an election.

- Pride Winnipeg has caused a stir by prohibiting military personnel from marching in uniform in the upcoming Pride parade. The organization says that this was based on "community feedback", saying that the community was "hurting" due to conflicts around the world. Many LGBT* veterans are understandably less than pleased with the decision, however.

News roundup, 3 June 2026

- Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen has finally managed to put together a functional coalition government after drawn-out negotiations since the election in March. Frederiksen's Social Democrats won the largest share of seats in the country's parliament, but this was still their poorest showing in over a century. Besides her party, the coalition will include the leftwing Socialist People’s Party, the centre-left Radikale Venstre (Social Liberals), and the centrist Moderates; this means that the coalition will still be a minority government with a total of 82 seats in the 179 seat parliament and will be dependent on the Green Left and other parties to maintain confidence of the house.

- The war (or, as it's officially known, "special military operation") in Ukraine is apparently starting to sow seeds of doubt among Russia's establishment. Putin, of course, is unwavering, but things are starting to slip out in the country's press such as an article in a pro-Kremlin newspaper which quoted a political commentator saying that "the worst-case scenario is not even defeat, it's an endless special operation" as well as quoting someone else saying that, from a historical perspective, "major geopolitical losses were sometimes more useful than brilliant victories". The article was subsequently removed from the paper's website, though, and I'd say those quoted in the article should keep a safe distance from windows for the foreseeable future.

- The family of a nine year old girl from O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation, Manitoba who died after apparently being turned away twice from the hospital in Dauphin without adequate treatment for a broken arm is still looking for answers. According to the family they asked about getting a cast (which would seem to be the most basic thing imaginable) but nothing was done, and the child was sent home with nothng but a note saying she would need to be away from school for two weeks. The death is still under investigation from the province's chief medical examiner, but it sounds like staff at that hospital are going to have a lot of explaining to do.

- A proposed wind farm development in St. Leon, Manitoba is triggering some local residents who worry that it could somehow mess with their "rural way of life". The location would be developed by Swan Lake First Nation in cooperation with Quebec-based Innergex Renewable Energy. It's not clear exactly how it would affect their way of life, other than vague bleatings about "flickering" and sounds from the turbines. The thing is, there is an existing wind farm nearby and the sky hasn't fallen. I'm pretty sure that if you pressed these people about exactly what's wrong with the proposal they'd either come up with some "crabs in a bucket" complaint about the farmers who lease land to the wind farm getting an unfair advantage over their neighbours due to getting a steady income, that green energy is "woke", or, if you got them drunk enough, they'd start ranting about the involvement of the First Nation.

News roundup, 2 June 2026

- Manitoba Public Insurance is ordering its managers and directors back into the office full time. CEO Satvir Jatana justifies this with a bunch of platitudes about how being in the office "creates opportunities for quick conversations", ignoring the fact that a good chunk of the conversations that happen in the workplace have little or nothing to do with the actual work, as well as "faster alignment and more effective problem-solving" (with no actual proof of course). It's widely suspected that the corporation plans to do the same with its regular, unionized staff at some point in the near future. The heffalump in the room, though, is that forcing the corporation's roughly 2,000 employees back into the office five days a week is going to lead to more traffic, and hence likely more accidents, something that a public auto insurer ought to know. Whether Jatana has just been drinking too much of the corporate Kool-Aid, or whether this is an order that came straight from the government (either to placate voters whose jobs actually have to be onsite, or to prop up the commercial real estate industry) is unclear.

- The council of the United Counties of Prescott-Russell in eastern Ontario has passed a resolution to deny access to county land for the Crown corporation studying a possible high speed rail corridor, even to simply do an environmental assessment on the project. This follows an open letter in April from 12 municipalities (11 townships and the small city of Quinte West) opposing the project. They've made some vague bleatings about "rural character" and somewhat more concrete concerns about expropriation of land. They claim not to be opposed to high speed rail in principle. I suspect that they may be lying about that, though, and that their real fear is that their communities will become even more irrelevant than they already are if fewer people are driving through them. Or maybe it's just that trains are too woke for their liking.

- Robotaxis are starting to spread beyond Silicon Valley, and opposition to them is significant. There are real issues with them - they often can't cope when traffic signals aren't working, they sometimes get confused by construction and don't know how to reroute (even driving in circles), and they've been known to drive onto flooded streets and get swamped, stranding their passengers. Notably, their overall safety record is currently very good, but if they become dominant this could lead to more traffic overall (as instead of parking they will tend to drive around looking for passengers) which could lead to inefficiencies as well as undermining the gains in the safety department. Not to mention the number of people they could put out of work.

- Taxi drivers in Quebec are suing the provincial government for the abolition of the taxi permit system in order to allow "ride sharing" companies like Uber and Lyft to operate in the province. Previously, the permits often served as an investment that drivers could sell or rent out when they retired; while the province's move included a compensation package, the drivers say this is insufficient and that the abolition of the permits was a form of "disguised expropriation". The drivers won the first round, and lost on appeal; they now hope to have their case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

- Scientists are tracking subtle changes in the ecology of lakes in the far north in the face of climate change. As the surfaces of these lakes become warmer, the lakes become more stratified, which makes some species of diatoms (a group of algae) more viable and others less so. The ones that are favoured are smaller (larger ones are more likely to sink to the bottom of a more stratified lake, going too low to photosynthesize) and lower in nutrient value, with potential implications for the rest of the food chain.

News roundup, 1 June 2026

- A court in BC has ruled that forcing employees back into the office can constitute "constructive dismissal" under some circumstances. The case involved an employee of a real estate development company who had been working under a flexible arrangement since returning from maternity leave in 2013; she had gone fully remote along with the rest of the office staff in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and had continue to do so with the approval of successive supervisors until the arrangement was revoked in 2023. The court concluded that a longtime remote work arrangement can become an essential term of employment, though one lawyer suggests that the court might have ruled differently had she not already been working in such a manner before 2020. The company in question has a pretty big state in commercial real estate, which might be why they're so keen to stamp out WFH.

- US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening to pull Customs and Border Patrol officers from "sanctuary cities" that limit cooperation with immigration officials, meaning that these airports couldn't take international flights. The idea, is that these flights would be redirect such flights to other cities, presumably in red states. The FAA and others (including Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy) warn that this would lead to chaos, because the airports in more pliant cities are already near capacity and numerous flights would simply have to be cancelled. We'll have to see how much longer Mullin and Duffy can remain in the same cabinet, and who will prevail.

- Manitoba is holding a "virtual town hall", by telephone, for residents of the Southern Health Region, the epicentre of the measles outbreak in the province. The province will be cold calling residents in advance to let them know of the meeting, and then called again at the start of the event. Dr. Melissa MacKay, a professor of public health at the University of Guelph, suggests that the uptake might be higher if the event is well-advertised, so that people are less disinclined to answer a call from an unfamiliar number. I think, though, that there's a deeper problem here - the kind of people who refuse to get vaccinated are also the kind of people who aren't going to answer when "the gummint" calls.

- The CEO of WiseTech Global, a logistics software company, was speaking at an investment conference and remarked that it's "stupid to be paying $100 for labour when you can pay $2 for the AI". Once his comments leaked to the public, this landed very poorly given that his company had already announced that it would be eliminating 30% of its global workforce, representing some 2,000 jobs. Predictably, this lead to threats of violence against him and his family; while I don't endorse that (certainly not bringing his family into the matter) nobody should be surprised at this.

- The Great American State Fair, an event organized by Trump-backed nonprofit Freedom 250, has announced a musical lineup. Almost immediately afterwards, several of the musicians on the bill, including country singer Martina McBride, rapper Young MC, and glam metal band Poison cancelled saying that they didn't realize it was a partisan event. Now it's easy to be a bit cynical about the supposed naïveté of these people, but several of them allege that there was an element of bait-and-switch; the name sounds innocent enough (many of these artists have played at numerous actual state fairs) and some claim that they were never told it was a Trump-affiliated event. On the other hand, it would be fair to ask if there was any plausible way that an event in DC celebrating the 250th anniversary of US independance would not have the Mango Mussolini's fingerprints on it. In any case, those who were hoping to get a breath of nostalgia at the event needn't despair - Vanilla Ice as well as Milli Vanilli (or rather, Fab Morvan and some other dude, Rob Pilatus having died in 1998) have both said that they will be playing. In in the case of Milli Vanilli, though, the people who did the actual singing on the recordings have also made it clear that they will not be there. Yes, for those who thought nothing could be more fake than Milli Vanilli, there's now a fake Milli Vanilli. In any case, the whole thing might well be cancelled anyway.

News roundup, 29 May 2026

- Just in case you needed another reason to think twice about taking an international flight, numerous people have fallen victim to "baggage tag switching", in which airline insiders switch the tags on baggage filled with drugs or other contraband with those of innocent passengers in case they get searched. The airlines are refusing to cover the huge expenses people have incurred in order to be exonerated. Maybe just stay home and read a book or play a video game; it's safer as well as greener.

- A Russian drone involved in the attack on Ukraine strayed across the Romanian border and crashed into an apartment building, injuring two people.

- Manitoba's health minister, Uzoma Asagwara, just returned from the UK where they have been recruiting healthcare workers. Asagwara says that as many as 24 doctors and 29 paramedics may be on their way to the province soon. Reportedly several of them almost didn't show up to the recruitment sessions because they thought it sounded too good to be true.

- The Unifor locals representing about 5,000 employees at TransLink, which provides transit services in Metro Vancouver, have voted 99% in favour of strike action. Affected services include buses as well as the SeaBus ferry service, though not the SkyTrain which is a different bargaining unit.

- Manitoba removed Tesla from the electric vehicle rebate program last year as part of efforts to "Trump-proof" the economy. The company is now threatening legal action in response. An awkward fact is that the province had previously signed IT contracts with SpaceX, and the amount was increased last year, although the province says that this was an emergency procurement related to last year's wildfire season.

- Ferrari has launched its first fully electric vehicle on Tuesday. In response, stock in the company dropped 8.4%. Evidently investors think that the kind of person who would buy a Ferrari won't be satisfied to just go fast, they want everyone around to hear how fast they're going.

- A daycare in southwest Winnipeg had to shut down due to the heat on Wednesday because its air conditioning system had been disabled over the winter by someone stealing copper wire. Some are calling for provincial legislation on scrap dealers to apply the same requirements for accepting wire as for accepting catalytic converters, something that has significantly reduced converter theft.

- The moribund town of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, whose population has declined from 1,500 in the 1970s to no more than 250 today as a result of a mine closure, is losing its only grocery store. The local co-op is heavily indebted to Federated Co-operatives and seems not to be viable anymore. Employment and Income Assistance is offering to help welfare recipients move out of there, but many don't see that as a satisfactory solution, especially those who have lived there all their lives. I don't know what can realistically be done, though; the town is 1,000 kilometres from Winnipeg and over 200 kilometres from Thompson, and it's hard to salvage such an isolated community that has lost its raison d'être.

- The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has released its report on a 2023 accident in Smithers, BC in 2023 in which a helicopter undergoing ground tests suddenly rotated violently, causing the tail rotor to strike two workers, killing one and severely injuring the other. The TSB has concluded that the pilot skipped parts of a checklist because he was distracted by his cellphone, resulting in the antitorque pedals not being deactivated, and evidently he bumped one of the pedals, causing the rotation. I daresay this was not a good career move on the pilot's part.

News roundup, 28 May 2026

- The Carney government will be buying a fleet of Saab GlobalEye reconnaissance planes from Sweden instead of the Boeing E-7. The GlobalEye is actually a modification of Bombardier's Global 6500 business jet; the E-7 is derived from the Boeing 737. No word on what the Americans have to say about this yet. There are also indications that Canada is interested in ordering four submarines from Germany's ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, who say they can deliver them by 2036. However, South Korea's Hanwha claim they can deliver a year earlier, in time for the scheduled retirement of Canada's current fleet of Victoria-class subs.

- Liberal MP Steven Guilbault, who served as environment minister under Justin Trudeau, will be resigning his seat when the House of Commons rises for the summer. He say that Canada is backsliding on climate, citing the Carney government's efforts to negotiate with Danielle Smith's government in Alberta. Guilbault also warns that this is "rewarding bad behaviour" on the part of Alberta and that this is the sort of thing that could "fan the flames" of Quebec separatism.

- An apartment building in inner city Winnipeg is being converted to a mix of transitional and long-term affordable housing with the assistance of St. Boniface Street Links. Existing tenants will be allowed to stay; however the owner and the organization have had to remove squatters from the building and hire 24 hour security.

- The number of hate crimes reported to Winnipeg police in 2025 was more than double that of the previous year. The majority of these crimes would be considered simple mischief in the absence of the hate component, but these also included criminal harassment, threats, and assault.

- A man working on a uranium exploration site in Saskatchewan was killed by a black bear earlier this month. Hrishikesh Koloth, 27, was experienced in mixed martial arts, but that was evidently no match for a bear. This was only the fourth fatal bear attack in the recorded history of the province; it's noteworthy, though, that the third happened only six years ago.

- A large wooden play structure was stolen from a schoolyard in Headingley, Manitoba by thieves who apparently drove a vehicle through the school's fence. The structure was later recovered from a home in Winnipeg, along with an RV that had also been reported stolen; a 35 year old man has been arrested.

News roundup, 27 May 2026

- When Trump was first reelected in 2024, European leaders tried their darnedest to please him. Happily, they're starting to wake up to reality - they're finally realizing that the Americans can't be trusted to keep them safe and that it's time for them to stand on their own. More governments are making efforts to procure European military hardware, for instance. And a "coalition of the willing" including 35 states, mostly European but also including such countries as Canada, Japan, and Australia, is coming together on the goal of European security - as Mark Carney said recently, "the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe". This is undoubtedly a good thing from a global perspective, but could be devastating for the US given how dependent many American jobs are on military spending - if Europe and Japan aren't going to be reliable customers anymore, they might have a hard time making up the slack.

- The federal government has concluded that the Clarity Act, which lays down conditions for a province to hold a referendum on secession, will not apply to Alberta's upcoming referendum, since the question on the ballot is not technically about separation per se but is "a question about a question".

- The unprecedented rise in fuel prices has driven many Americans to do something that they previously considered unthinkable - use public transit. This is especially true in California, where gas is topping $6 per US gallon, or about $1.60 a litre, but it's happening in many other places. It's even driving state governments to actually provide some funding to transit - the Chicago Transit Authority, facing a deficit of $770 million, was set to make a 40% cut in services until the state legislature bailed them out.

- Homelessness advocates are concerned that Winnipeg's encampment policies, which among other things enforces prohibitions against encampments within 50 metres of bus shelters, schools, daycares, playgrounds, pools, recreation complexes, and adult care facilities, are leaving very few places where it's still possible, especially in the inner city where many of the supports that might help get them off the street are located. Organizations like Sunshine House say that they have lost track of a number of regular clients as a result. 

- Despite the fact that Manitoba is one of the sunniest provinces in Canada, solar power has not been a priority. The fact that Manitoba Hydro could start to run short of generating capacity as soon as 2030 has driven the province to expand wind farms to an extent, and although there have been some investments in wind power, solar power has not been a priority and the latest plans call for the electricity shortfall to be made up for by burning natural gas. A pilot project introduced during the twilight days of the Selinger government in 2016 showed a lot of promise; it's no surprise that it wasn't renewed by Brian Pallister's Conservatives, but it's kind of a mystery why the Kinew government isn't more interested, especially given that solar is booming in other provinces. Hydro claims to be concerned about our short days during the winter (questionable given the huge amount of storage capacity inherent in a mostly hydroelectric grid) and solar panels getting covered with snow (which hasn't been a huge problem in other areas). I can't help but wonder if the NDP still has illusions about winning back rural voters and is afraid to introduce something highly visible that would be triggering to such voters.

- A UFC fighting cage is being erected on the White House lawn in preparation for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Because nothing stirs the patriotic heart of good red-blooded Americans than watching two guys beat the living crap out of each other. Yet another example of why publications like The Onion have a hard time competing with reality.

News roundup, 26 May 2026

- A poll of Albertans conducted by Angus Reid has found that the majority of respondents would vote no to Danielle Smith's revised referendum - but by a narrower margin than a straight up yes or no on separation. Respondents were also critical of Smith's handling of the affair. The thing is, all of this needs to be taken with substantial quantities of salt, given the "shy Tory factor". In particular I think the kind of person who would vote to secede from Canada would also be reluctant to answer pollsters at all for fear of getting on some kind of "gummint list". For his part, Mark Carney has called the referendum plan a "dangerous bluff" and is drawing parallels to Brexit; it's worth noting that polls in the UK failed to predict the outcome of that referendum.

- Uber drivers in Victoria have successfully unionized. More than 1,000 drivers in the city voted to approve a contract negotiated by the United Food and Commercial Workers local 1518. Notably, this wouldn't have been possible without changes in provincial legislation that classifies rideshare drivers as employees rather than independent contractors, limiting their ability to do this in other provinces.

- Russia is warning foreign nationals, including diplomats, to leave Kiev as they threaten a fresh waves of "systematic strikes" against the city. Strikes on the capital have been pretty much incessant, but this new warning suggests that they plan to escalate. Most recently they tested out one of their new hypersonic missiles over the weekend as part of a heavy wave of attacks that killed four people and injured over 100. Meanwhile the US is claiming self-defense in their latest wave of attacks on Iran.

- A powwow organized with Mountain View School Division in western Manitoba created a stir after a table set up by the Sexuality Education Resource Centre, a Brandon organization, distributed materials that some parents considered sexually explicit to younger kids. One parent claims that her eight year old son was given condoms and other items by the table, and that this made him "uncomfortable". I daresay that may be a bit of projection on the part of the mum. There were also documents such as this one handed out. The school division and the SERC have apologized for the incident.

- Competition was halted at the World Surf League in New Zealand, and jet skis were dispatched to get competitors out of the water as quickly as possible, after a photographer covering the event was bitten by an unseen sea creature.