News roundup, 27 July 2026

- The US and Iran paused their attacks against each other over the weekend. The US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, claims that this is being done to "give talks some space", and was dismissive of the idea that the US stockpile of interceptors is running low.

- The federal government has rejected the proposed expansion of Billy Bishop Airport on the Toronto Islands. The plan called for a runway extension to allow jets to use the airport; the decision followed consultations in which nearly 87% of respondents opposed the expansion.

- A national survey of emergency room physicians has found that 1 in 10 have left the specialty (some of them leaving medicine altogether) and most others are reducing their hours to avoid burnout. While things are definitely worse since 2020, the study's authors say that this should not be considered a "pandemic phenomenon"; unfortunately the CBC article didn't dig into what they did mean by this but I assume they mean that the pandemic simply laid bare existing weaknesses in the system.

- The Asper family is pausing donations to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights over the Nakba exhibit. Family spokesperson Gail Asper admits that parts of the exhibit are compelling, but says that important context is missing. Strangely, one of the things she thinks needs to be part of it is the fact that Hamas is listed by the Canadian government as a terrorist entity - but the Nakba happened in 1948 while Hamas wasn't founded until 1987. Of course, the founding of Hamas was a consequence of the Nakba, but including that context probably wouldn't make Asper any happier.

- The parents of a five year old child who was expelled from a Winnipeg daycare after multiple instances of violent behaviour towards other children as well as staff are appealing to the provincial government for his reinstatement. The child's behaviour had been so violent that a workplace safety and health officer was sent to check on the situation at the daycare; given that I would hope that the province will not force the daycare to take him back. While something needs to be done this is well above the average daycare worker's pay grade. Not surprisingly, some of the reaction on Reddit lacks nuance; one person responded by saying "fuck inclusion". I'd say a better way to word that would be "there are limits to inclusion", rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

- Longtime Progressive Conservative MP Elmer McKay has died at the age of 89. I didn't realize he was still alive actually; I'd assumed that he must have died of shame after his son Peter sold the party out to the Canadian Alliance in 2003.

News roundup, 31 March 2026

 - Executives in Canada's federal civil service will be required to return to the office five days a week as of the 4th of May, and all other civil servants will be have only a single remote day per week. This comes despite the recommendation by the International Energy Agency that people "work from home whenever possible" to mitigate the risk of oil shortages as a result of the Iran war; the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, which represents some civil servants, is calling for the return to office order to be reversed. And Manitoba Hydro is also requiring its employees to be in the office four days a week as of this fall. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a similar fight is brewing as the Public and Commercial Services Union is calling for an end to the current policy which requires employees to be in the office 60% of the time. Plenty of other countries aren't waiting for it to become a real crisis; Thailand is not only allowing WFH but mandating it for those who can do so; Pakistan and Bangladesh are taking similar measures. It's worth noting that those countries are more dependent on oil imports than Canada and the UK are, and I suspect that commercial real estate, not to mention the kind of culture wars we see in the West, are not as big a factor there as in richer countries either.

- The Financial Times has reported that a broker at Morgan Stanley with ties to Pete Hegseth tried to make large investments in a defense fund in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iran. The deal apparently fell through because the fund had not yet been made available to Morgan Stanley brokers. The Pentagon is vehemently denying this, and is demanding a retraction from the newspaper.

- New legislation in Israel makes the death penalty the default sentence for certain kinds of terrorism - but the death penalty can only be used if the intent of said terrorism is intended to "negate the existence of the state of Israel". Presumably that provision is there to make sure no future government decides to use the law against West Bank settlers, some of whose actions against Palestinians could legitimately be called terrorism.

- The Ford government in Ontario has announced its intention to expropriate the City of Toronto's share in Billy Bishop Airport in the Toronto islands. They plan to extend the runway to allow jets to use the airport - something long resisted by Toronto - and to declare it a "special economic zone" so as to be able to exempt it from any municipal or provincial legislation that gets in the way of those plans. Prime Minister Mark Carney has diplomatically called the idea an "interesting vision" but has stopped short of endorsing it so far.

- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania decided to test how much trust people put in AI chatbots. Subjects were asked to answer a number of questions, and had the option of using ChatGPT to do so. More than 50% of the subjects across all the experiments blindly parroted the answers given by the chatbot. In one study, with a sample size of 359, subjects followed the advice of the chatbot almost 93% of the time when its advice was correct - but nearly 80% of the time when it was wrong. This is alarming given that these things are wrong far more often than many people realize - a study last fall concluded that these things misrepresent news content nearly half the time, for instance. Even more alarming is that there seems to have been an increase in the incidence of AIs deceiving people and disregarding instructions in the last six months. In one example, an AI agent that was instructed not to make any changes in code instead created a new agent to do it instead.

- China has introduced legislation that will ban the use of apartments to store cremated remains as well as the burial of corpses or the construction of tombs anywhere except public cemeteries. Apparently rental apartments are often cheaper than cemetery plots, so people just rent an apartment to store Grandma's ashes.