News roundup, 25 Aug 2025

- The Trump regime is deploying National Guard troops to New York City and Chicago, ostensibly in order to crack down on the rampant crime that their sheeple believe to be found in those cities. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois governor JB Pritzker are condemning this as an abuse of power, but of course Trump isn't letting that stop him and reportedly plans to declare a national emergency so as to be able to extend the 30 day time limit for the deployment.

- A judge has ordered the closure of the Trump regime's "Alligator Alcatraz" in the Everglades for environmental reasons. Naturally, the state of Florida, which has partnered with the regime on the facility, is appealing the decision.

- The Carney government is removing retaliatory tariffs on all American goods covered by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), ostensibly for the benefit of Canadian industry. Manitoba premier Wab Kinew doesn't think this is going to be helpful; for his part he thinks a better move would be to remove tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in the hope of reversing China's tariffs on Canadian canola. From Manitoba's point of view, as well as from an environmental point of view, that makes perfect sense. From a human rights point of view, trading with China doesn't look too good, but neither does trading with the US, so it's pretty much a wash. Unfortunately, Carney doubtless has bigger fish to fry; he has to be seen to be doing his utmost to save the Canadian auto industry, and removing tariffs on Chinese EVs would probably be a bridge too far in that regard.

- The Trump regime's firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer is raising alarm bells among investors. Trump had accused McEntarfer of manipulating statistics to make him look bad; his appointment of a partisan as her replacement has led to fears that future statistics actually will be manipulated. Of course it's harder for investors to bet against the US than it was for them to bet against Greece and Argentina after it came out that those countries were manipulating data, but there will presumably come a point when they can't pretend that the US is a good investment anymore.

- Connie Hedegaard, who served as the EU's first climate commissioner, is very concerned about the federation's backsliding on environmental issues in recent years. The Green Deal promoted by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is under heavy attack from rightwing populists; Hedegaard warns that the harms of climate change will ultimately fuel populism in the long run, so better to face it now than later. She's right, of course, but whether Europe's leaders have the courage to listen and stand up to the populists now is another question.

- Companies of all sorts are jumping on the AI bandwagon, but only 5% of those doing so are seeing any significant increase in their revenue according to a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nonetheless they keep investing in the technology, presumably because their investors expect them to and will fear that they won't be sufficiently innovative if they don't keep doing so.

- An engineer in Brighton, England was arrested for expressing support for a terrorist organization by wearing a T-shirt that the police initially thought said "Palestine Action". He was released when they looked closer at the shirt and saw that it actually said "Plasticine Action"; he admits that the design was deliberately meant to confuse the cops and is selling the shirts to raise money for a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians (which hasn't been labelled a terrorist organization, at least not so far).

News roundup, 23 July 2025

- Pierre Poilievre is in a tizzy about the fact that the ballot in the byelection he's running in has over 150 candidates. The Longest Ballot Committee, which was responsible for recruiting most of the candidates, is doing it as a protest against the first past the post electoral system; Poilievre is calling for legislative changes to make it harder to get a candidate on the ballot in response. Some independent and fringe party candidates in the byelection actually agree with Poilievre on this point, saying that they are facing a backlash from people who think they're part of the protest.

- Tom Van Lent, a hydrologist with the Everglades Foundation, resigned from the nonprofit in 2022 in a dispute over water management related to a new reservoir for Palm Beach County, and went to work for another nonprofit that he said "puts facts over politics". The Everglades Foundation responded by suing Van Lent for "theft of trade secrets"; a court ordered him to turn over all his computers and other electronic devices to the Foundation. He did so, but only after removing his and his family's personal information from the devices; the Foundation then asked a court to hold him in criminal contempt, which it did. He has been sentenced to 10 days in jail; in addition he has declared bankruptcy after being ordered to pay $178,000 in legal fees.

- A Swiss woman who entered the US on a tourist visa in April, hoping to celebrate her birthday with friends in New York City, was detained by officials who suspected that she planned to work in the US. She was shipped to a privately owned detention facility in New Jersey where she was held for 24 hours before being deported.

- Winnipeg city council is debating a motion introduced by Coun. Cindy Gilroy, which would prohibit homeless encampments in places used by children. That much might be reasonable, but suburban councillor Jeff Browaty thinks it needs to go further - he advocates banning encampments along "image routes", i.e. major traffic thoroughfares. Complicating matters is the fact that the Supreme Court has previously ruled that blanket bans on encampments are unenforceable until enough shelter beds are available. A ban on camping specifically in places used by children might be justifiable on public safety grounds, but a ban based essentially on aesthetics, as Browaty is calling for, seems like a bridge too far.

- Winnipeg police seized two homemade Tasers when they arrested a man in North Point Douglas. 

- A correctional officer in Manitoba has been charged with two counts of sexual assault following complaints from two separate prisoners who he was escorting to Winnipeg for medical treatment. One of the victims reportedly suffered an injury in the assault.

- A double-decker bus in the Manchester suburb of Eccles took a wrong turn and collided with an overpass. Twenty people were injured, three of them seriously; the driver has been charged with careless driving.

- Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76, which is probably about half a century later than anyone, including him, would have expected.

News roundup, 26 June 2025

- Banks in the US have been reversing decisions made during the Biden administration and reinvesting in fossil fuels. Notably, this is disproportionately an American trend; most of the banks offering financing in this sector are US-based, suggesting that these moves may be motivated by other considerations than the objective quality of those investments. Perhaps the fact that states like West Virginia and Texas are actively punishing institutions for divesting from the sector has something to do with it.

- The Trump regime's "One Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that charges a tax on investment income paid to residents of countries that the US considers to have "unfair or discriminatory" taxes, such as Canada's digital services tax. Of course, this has the potential to cause investors from such countries to invest elsewhere, potentially driving millions in investments out of the US.

- The proposal to put a build a migrant detention centre in the Everglades, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz", is going ahead; construction on the facility has begun at an old airport despite concerns from environmentalists as well as human rights activists.

- Hedge funds are buying subrogation claims from insurers, often at steep discounts, in the hope of profiting in the event that the fires are deemed to have been caused by Southern California Edison's equipment. California has a fund in place to pay out such claims and protect utilities from bankruptcy; essentially the state is getting all the downsides of public ownership with none of the upsides.

- Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian AI researcher who won the Nobel Prize in physics for work on neural networks, is warning that Canada needs to regulate the technology more stringently. He will be meeting with AI and digital innovation minister Evan Solomon to discuss the matter but there is a lot of resistance to the idea, and Solomon himself has said that he has no plans to reintroduce legislation that died on the order paper when the last election was called.