News roundup, 21 Sept 2026

- New polling gives Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham a significant lead for this fall's municipal election. Notably, however, 51% of voters say they are undecided; 20% said they would vote for Gillingham with Kevin Klein at 8% and 4% for Mike Vogiatzakis. 13% said that they would not vote at all. While it may be a reassuring sign that Klein and especially Vogiatzakis don't seem to be making much of an impact, there's a caveat in that the kind of person who would vote for Vogiatzakis might also the sort of person to not answer pollsters' questions about the matter.

- Kerry-Lynne Findlay has resigned as leader of the BC Conservative party, mere hours after Surrey-Serpentine River MLA Linda Hepner became the 14th MLA to resign or be expelled from the party's caucus since August. It is widely suspected that premier David Eby is considering a snap election call in order to take advantage of the Conservatives' disarray. 

- BC's efforts to improve rural healthcare by requiring foreign trained doctors to spend a few years working in remote areas before being able to practice in major cities was struck down by the province's top court.

- The far-right AfD has won the largest share of the vote in elections in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, winning 38% of votes cast. Fortunately the Social Democrats were a close second at 36% and are expected to gain the support of enough of the remaining parties to form a government; unfortunately AfD are not likely to go away anytime soon. In Berlin, which also held an election for its combined state/municipal government, the leftwing Die Linke (which has its roots in the East German Communist Party, though it is considered a democratic socialist party today) won a plurality and may be able to form a government with the support of the Greens and Social Democrats. The real losers in both elections were the centre-right Christian Democrats, who appear to have gotten less than the 5% threshold needed to win seats in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania legislature; they don't seem to have done very well in Berlin either.

- Donald Trump has announced in a caps-laden Truth Social post that he is banning reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW (the former MSNBC) from the White House grounds.

- Sleep medicine experts continue to weigh in on Manitoba's move to permanent daylight saving time. The consensus among them continues to be that ending the time change is good, but leaving it on DST is the wrong way to go about it. The main concern has to do with the impact of a lack of morning sun on circadian rhythms, which they say teenagers in particular are susceptible to.

- The FBI has issued a warning to ICE agents that they should be wary of "tradwife" dating site profiles, saying that these could be honeypot accounts set up to dox the agents. Details about whether this has actually happened are sparse at best. Some posters in this Reddit thread thinks that the real purpose of this warning is to instill a general sense of paranoia and distrust of the agents among outsiders, and/or to make people forget about Kash Patel's rather embarrassing public statements of late. In any case, the story has spawned the best description I've seen of "tradwives" in this article - "conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss".

News roundup, 18 Sept 2026

- Manitoba is the latest province to do away with semi-annual clock changes. The province will remain on daylight saving time rather than switching back to standard time in the fall. This follows a survey which found that 92% of respondents wanted to eliminate time changes; 58% preferred DST while 34% preferred standard time. Notably, health experts generally agree with permanent standard time rather than DST, though most of them also consider permanent DST to be preferable to changing twice a year as the time change itself leads to more sleep disruption, resulting in an increase in heart attacks and strokes as well as more accidents on the road and in the workplace.

- Tamara Lich, one of the leaders of the so-called "Freedom Convoy", has been stymied in her attempt to get an exemption to the house arrest she has been under since her conviction for mischief in other offenses as a result of her role in the protest. She has previously been granted exemptions to visit her grandchildren, and has also been allowed to travel to other provinces for the job she holds with the far-right Rebel News, but this time she was trying to get permission to leave the country in order to do several things she claims are related to the job; these included attending press conferences at the White House as well as going on a week long cruise. Evidently that was a bridge too far.

- The BC Conservative Party apparently hired a private investigator to spy on a number of people, including several sitting MLAs (current as well as former caucus members) as well as a former party president and an NDP staffer. This and other upheavals in the party has added to suspicions that Premier David Eby plans to call a snap election to take advantage of a divided opposition.

- Newly unsealed evidence has revealed details of an investigation into corruption in the Toronto Police Service. Besides drug trafficking, officers are alleged to have met with criminals to enable them to access secret databases; among other things this led to an attempted assassination of a corrections officer, apparently at the request of a man currently held at the Toronto South Detention Centre who has been linked to suspected drug lord (and former Olympian) Ryan Wedding.

- Australians appear to be going all-in on electric cars. Sales of electric vehicles there exceeded those of gas powered cars in August for the first time. The surge in fuel prices as a result of the US/Israeli war on Iran is a big factor, though if we're honest the fact that the country no longer has an auto industry of its own probably adds to their willingness to buy imports from China, since it won't cost them any jobs.

- Israeli communities near the border with Gaza are facing an invasion of rats from the territory. The devastation has created ideal conditions for rats to do well; they have bred prodigiously (as they are wont to do) and have caused significant damage to agriculture, with some locations losing 70% of their harvest to the animals.

- A 13 year old Maryland boy was hospitalized after being attacked by a rabid beaver while swimming. Besides needing rabies vaccinations he required surgery to repair nerve damage from the attack.

- FBI director Kash Patel is defending his agency's decision to relax some of its hiring restrictions. Notably, under the new rules, having committed bestiality is no longer an automatic disqualification. Perhaps they want to do a lot of recruiting in the rural South.