News roundup, 6 May 2024

- Three men, all Indian citizens, have been arrested in connection with the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey last year. Police are investigating links with three other homicides as well, including the death of an 11 year old boy in Edmonton.

- The Israeli government has shut down all of Al Jazeera's operations in the country and raided its offices. They accuse the broadcaster of "incitement" and "working with Hamas", which the broadcaster denies. Notably, the BBC was not allowed to film the raid. The UN's Human Rights office as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists are condemning the decision. In other Israel news, many Bedouin citizens of that country are unable to build bomb shelters to protect themselves from Hamas-launched missiles - because even though they live in villages that predate the founding of Israel, the communities have never been officially recognized, and thus do not have the ability to issue building permits. So the Israeli state considers any shelters they build to be unauthorized structures, and demolishes them. Then they cry a few crocodile tears at best, or smile smugly at worst, when Bedouin citizens die in the attacks. Meanwhile the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman warns supporters of both sides of the confllict against reducing the matter to simple slogans.

- It's increasingly apparent that one of the biggest barriers to effective climate action is the agricultural sector. In the European Union, rioting farmers have been doing their damnedest to undermine efforts to make Europe a leader in sustainable agriculture. No wonder farmers have been downgraded, in the minds of a lot of people, from "salt of the Earth" to "necessary evil". On a related note, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has just signed a bill outlawing the sale of cultured meat in the state. He also  spouted conspiracy nonsense about the supposed global elite's plans to force everyone to eat it, even as he signed legislation taking away his own citizens' freedom to eat it if they so choose.

- A federal appeals court in the US has ruled that a lawsuit by an organization called Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 young Americans lacks standing and must be dismissed by the US district judge hearing the case. The judges who made the ruling are Trump appointees, but this was an "emergency" petition filed by the Biden administration's Justice Department, who claimed that the government could be "irreparably harmed" if it were forced to waste resources litigating the case.

- The Manitoba government will be using funds from an out-of-court settlement with the tobacco companies to pay for the building of a new headquarters for CancerCare.

- Following the report of a woman being punched in a Winnipeg grocery store by an employee who suspected her of shoplifting, other members of the community say that this is not the first time something like this has happened at that store - nor even the second.

- Use of the "Community Connections" service in the lobby of Winnipeg's Millennium library are on the increase, even as the city prepares to shut it down so that Evan Duncan's constituents don't have to look at poor people when they use the library.

- In something worthy of the Piranha Brothers, a man in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland suffered potentially life-altering injuries after having his hands nailed to a fence. This has apparently happened before; there have been no official statements regarding responsibilty but many locals suspect Loyalist paramilitaries.

News roundup, 13 Feb 2024

- 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.