News roundup, 14 Aug 2026

- Count Binface came a distant second to Nigel Farage in the byelection held yesterday in the constituency of Clacton. The byelection was necessitated by Farage resigning as a political stunt; due to the boycott by serious parties there were some hopes that the satirical candidate could get enough protest votes to put him over the top, but in the end Farage secured just over 63% of the vote. Binface did get over 22,000 votes, or just under 27%, which is far more than he has received in any other campaign in which he's run. It seems, though, that the people of Clacton are too far gone to understand what they're voting for.

- Several Conservative MPs are apparently privately expressing concerns about holding onto their seats if Pierre Poilievre remains leader. And Larry Brock, the MP for Brantford-Brant South, is resigning, triggering a byelection that will be an interesting test for the party in a riding they've held since 2008.

- The Ford government in Ontario is resisting calls for a moratorium on large data centres. Ford does say that the centres will need to cover the full cost of their electricity usage, but Green Party leader Mike Schreiner is calling for a ban on all AI data centres until more is known about their impact. In contrast, New York State enacted a ban last month on data centres requiring over 50 megawatts of electricity, and will be reviewing tax incentives previously given for such facilities. Maine's legislature also passed such a ban earlier this year but it was vetoed by the governor.

- The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party spent nearly $3,000 to send someone to a resort in Jamaica to keep an eye on Bonnie Crombie, who was the leader of the Ontario Liberal Party at the time. Doug Ford claims to have had no knowledge of the spying when it was occurring.

- Three bouncers have been charged with assault after Winnipeg Sea Bears player Teddy Allen was severely beaten at a nightclub. The police statement doesn't identify the club, saying merely that it was "on Main Street between Portage and William Avenues" but it's generally known to be the Palamino Club. The folks on Reddit say that bouncers there have long had a reputation for excessive force, but it seems beating up a local sports star was going too far.

News roundup, 13 July 2026

- Reform UK is panicking about the possibility of Nigel Farage losing the byelection resulting from his resignation stunt. The party had been hoping to win the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, where polls showed them within striking distance after the position was vacated by Andy Burnham, but are now desperately shifting resources to Farage's riding of Clacton in the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of losing to Count Binface. Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph seems a bit worried too. Unfortunately it looks like the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is running a spoiler candidate. Kind of like one of the races in Monty Python's Election Night Special, except that this time it won't be the Sensible Party that benefits from the split.

- A recent poll of Canadian manufacturers found that 40% of them have either moved some of their operations to the US or are planning to do so in response to ongoing tariffs, while 11% plan to move their headquarters there. This isn't an exclusively Canadian problem, of course; Toyota is expanding its plant in Texas while reducing operations in Mexico, but voters tend not to care about such niceties - in fact they don't care if the people they vote in are worse than the people they vote out, because they're voting out of vengeance, not out of hope of improvement. So naturally this puts Carney in a tough spot. If he wanted to be really bold he could expropriate any plant closed in such a move at current market value, with the proviso that the compensation will not occur until relations are normalized with the US. I wouldn't count on him doing that, though; I don't think he's made of that kind of stuff (he is, ultimately, still a neoliberal at heart, even as he recognizes that neoliberalism doesn't seem to be working anymore). Maybe the NDP should start loudly pushing for that sort of thing; it's not like not being radical has done them much good at the federal level of late.

- South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham has died at the age of 71. On the other hand Mitch McConnell seems to be in better shape than many suspected, assuming of course that it was actually him that made the statement in question and not a staffer.

- A 37 year old man has been arrested after allegedly delivering a hateful and threat-filled tirade against two hijab-wearing women in a Costco in Halifax and assaulting someone who filmed his rant. He had to be Tasered after reportedly brandishing a weapon at police; he has been charged with assault, public incitement of hatred, and four counts of uttering threats to cause bodily harm or death.

- An economics professor at Brown University announced one year that one of his classes would use a take-home exam format. The class then had a surge of enrollments compared to previous years; when the midterms were marked, the average grade was 96% and 40 students got a 100% grade. Not surprisingly, the people who marked the exams found answers with a wording that was uncannily similar to the way ChatGPT answered the questions. At this point he decided to change the format for the final exam, making it an in-person test and warning the class that if the grade distribution was substantially different from the midterm, only the final would count towards the actual grade in the class. 27 students dropped out of the class by the time the final rolled around, of whom 22 had scored 100% in the midterm.