News roundup, 4 May 2026

- An outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship has killed three people so far and sickened at least three others, one of whom is now in intensive care in a South African hospital. There are plans to evacuate the other infected people as well.

- The US is withdrawing around 5,000 troops from bases in Germany; this follows a remark by German chancellor Friedrich Merz that the US was being "humiliated" in Iran. The Trump regime has also announced another round of tariffs on European vehicles, a move which will hit Germany hard. Despite all this, Merz says he is "not giving up" on working with Trump. Merz, of course, is in the awkward position of any non-crazy right-of-centre leader - it's so deeply embedded in the minds of such people that the Americans are the good guys that they have no idea what to do when it becomes blatantly obvious that this isn't true anymore (if indeed it ever was).

- A United Airlines Boeing 767 clipped a pole and a truck after coming a bit too low on its final approach to the runway at Newark. Nobody on board the aircraft was hurt; the driver of the truck was treated for minor injuries.

- Support among Albertans for secession from Canada continues to languish, with 27% saying that they would vote yes to separation (only 6% say they're undecided on the matter). Among admitted UCP supporters, however, 57% say they would vote for independence. The strongest predictor of someone being a separatist seems to be someone whose income is high but who is nonetheless having trouble meeting expenses (perhaps because they were a bit too free with credit over the last couple of decades).

- A Nova Scotia woman booked a flight to Toronto for herself and her daughter, to see a Sabrina Carpenter concert. After her daughter died, she faced a months-long fight with Air Canada to get a refund for her ticket. The airline quickly reversed their position after the CBC started asking questions, though, saying the bereavement policy was not applied correctly.

News roundup, 14 April 2026

- Mark Carney's Liberals have swept three byelections held yesterday, giving them a slight majority of 174 seats in the 338 member House of Commons.

- There are already predictions being made about how the defeat of Viktor Orbán will impact the global right. Certainly it's a sign that Trumpism isn't popular on the international scene, but before we get our hopes up too much, it's worth noting that the incoming prime minister,  Péter Magyar, is right of centre himself and was a member of Orbán's Fidesz party until 2024.

- German chancellor Friedrich Merz is the most unpopular head of government across 24 democracies. Only 19% of Germans approve of his performance, while 76% disapprove; Emmanuel Macron had a lower approval rating (18%) but also a lower disapproval rating (74%). The margin of error for the survey isn't given, though, so it's questionable how meaningful the ranking is for those two. Meanwhile Donald Trump's approval rating is still 38% in spite of everything, and his disapproval rating is only 57%. Leaders of Spain, Italy, and Argentina also fall into that mid-range; the most popular leaders among the countries surveyed were Indian PM Narendra Modi (70%), South Korean president Jae-myung (63%) and Czech PM Andrej Babiš (55%). From that it's probably safe to say that there's no correlation in either direction between how popular a leader is and how good they are.

- Electric vehicles are getting cheaper; even in the US they're increasingly competitive with conventional cars. Combine that with the impact of Trump's war on fuel prices and Americans just might find themselves dragged into the EV era, no matter how emasculating it might be to not hear that V8 roar when you press the accelerator.

- Two people have been arrested after allegedly opening fire on the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This comes only two days after someone else tried torching the place. Nobody was injured in either incident. Meanwhile a survey of  2,400 "knowledge workers" found that 29% of those surveyed admitted to taking actions to sabotage their companies' rollout of AI. Of course the way AI gets introduced is often pretty haphazard; some of the accounts given in this related Reddit thread are pretty telling:

"The majority of AI rollouts that I've seen have been 'Please guys, find any problem that we can solve with AI. Anything, please. Just do something, the executives don't have any ideas either but we need AI.' and then they blame the workers when there's not any useful use case."

"My wife's company had that. Find a way to build it into your workflow. Then suddenly someone changed they mind and they're requiring you NOT to use it. I think someone just found out how shit it can be. So now, weeks after being aggressively pushed to use AI whenever possible, it's now pause all AI use." 

I think in a lot of cases companies have been sold on the idea that investors want you introducing AI as soon as possible and that your stock value depends on this, so executives push people to find some use, any use, for the technology so that they can include metrics about how much they're using it in their annual reports. Certainly that's what the AI companies themselves would have you believe. And I guess day traders don't hold onto the stock long enough to see the technology fail to deliver anyway.

News roundup, 3 March 2026

- Along with Mark Carney, several other leaders of countries with close ties to the US are being very circumspect about what they're saying about the attack on Iran. Leaders of the UK, France, and Germany, while quick to point out that they weren't involved in the strikes, seem very reluctant to condemn them either. French president Emmnauel Macron had initially, on Saturday, called for an end to military escalation in the region, calling it "dangerous to all" but he'd evidently changed his tune by the time the joint statement with Germany and the UK came out. In contrast, Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, has not held back, calling for "immediate de-escalation and full respect for international law", while Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he was "deeply troubled" by the attack (while also condemning Iran's counterstrikes on countries not directly involved in the attack). Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has been closed by Iran; what that will do to gas prices remains to be seen, but from a more cynical (or, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, "realistic") point of view, I can see Mark Carney being privately happy, since an Alberta that's flush with oil money as a result might be less fractious than the province is currently. In the US, the Democrats are divided on the matter - while Bernie Sanders condemned what he called "an illegal, premeditated and unconstitutional war", and other such as Tim Kaine and Chris Van Hollen have also been critical, other such as Henry Cuellar and Tom Suozzi have been supportive (presumably because of Israel's involvement, though they aren't putting it in those terms of course). In other related news, Kuwait seem to have inadvertently shot down three American fighters in the confusion.

- A judge in North Dakota has upheld a $345 million judgment against Greenpeace following a lawsuit by pipeline company Energy Transfer over the organization's actions in fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. On paper, the judgment affects not only Greenpeace USA but also Greenpeace International, which is based in Europe; one hopes the latter organization can get sheltered from the verdict by the EU, but it looks like Greenpeace USA is finished.

- Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, went to great efforts to try to sell their services to the Swiss government over several years, but Switzerland rejected their advances for multiple reasons, including legal matters concerning data sovereignty as well as straight up national security concerns, a reasonable concern when you're being courted by a company with close ties to the US government. When the Swiss online publication Republik investigated the matter and asked Palantir for comment, the company sent them what Republik’s managing director called "very lengthy" counterstatements for each of a series of articles, which she says "do not fairly address or rebut the reporting". Nonetheless, Palantir is taking the magazine to court under Switzerland's "right to reply" legislation, calling the reporting "misleading", but notably they are not suing for defamation, which you'd expect they would be if the reporting actually were misleading. Perhaps Thiel has never heard of the Streisand Effect.

- Far-right independent MLA Tara Armstrong introduced a bill in the BC legislature to repeal the province's Human Rights Code. The bill was defeated, but the entire BC Conservative caucus voted in favour. Armstrong, who represents the constituency of Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream, was originally elected as a Conservative but left that party along with a colleague to form the OneBC party. She then left that party a few months later to sit as an independent; evidently she doesn't play well with others, but the Cons are all too happy to have her drop bills that they can claim need to be debated, serving as a sort of Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Avigdor Lieberman to Rustad's Putin or Netanyahu. More info about her can be found here.

- Ivermectin, the antihelminthic drug that was touted (with zero evidence) as a treatment for COVID-19, is now being used as an alternative cancer therapy, again with no evidence that it works. It's almost as if the drug has become a sort of totem or sacrament for deplorables.

News roundup, 7 May 2025

- India launched missiles into the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir, killing a child and injuring two other people in a major escalation of tensions following terrorist attacks in the Indian-controlled part of the territory last month. Pakistan claims to have shot down two Indian aircraft in retaliation.

- Mark Carney met with Donald Trump yesterday as planned. Carney was diplomatic in discussing how the talks went; he did say they were "wide ranging" and "constructive", and said that the two leaders had "agreed to disagree" on whether Canada should join the US.

- Trump is considering imposing a 100% tariff on all foreign-produced films; exactly what would count as "foreign" for these purposes is a work in progress - the status of co-productions is uncertain. This could, however, be extremely damaging to the Canadian film industry. Myself, I'd be all in favour of slapping hefty reciprocal tariffs on American films if this were to occur - though that might be a hard sell for the masses if it meant that they didn't get to see the latest Marvel superhero flick.

- The Conservatives have chosen Regina-Qu'Appelle MP (and former leader) Andrew Scheer as their interim leader in Parliament until Pierre Poilievre can get elected in the coming byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot. Whether this will spur a new burst in sales of Queen's third album in Canada remains to be seen.

- Friedrich Merz has been elected chancellor of Germany following a second vote in the Bundestag. It's not clear who changed their votes the second time around, as this election is conducted by secret ballot. The resolution of this crisis has not silenced AfD leader Alice Weidel, who is calling for a new election.

- The municipality of Oak Bay, a suburb of Victoria, has passed a bylaw limiting noise from heat pumps - and only heat pumps (not regular air conditioners, for instance). They are limited to 50 dB, and 45 dB at night; for comparison, an average conversation is 60 dB. This apparently follows a complaint from a NIMBY named Thorsten Hanisch; I haven't been able to locate any social media from the guy, but I'd wager donuts to dollars that if it were unlocked we'd see a lot of pictures of big trucks on his page - trucks that make a heck of a lot more noise than any heat pump.

- Punk band Propagandhi has announced that they are cancelling all US dates of their upcoming tour due to "circumstances beyond our control". I assume this means either they were denied visas, or else a not unreasonable fear that they could end up in El Salvador. 

- A woman in Rochester, Minnesota who was caught on video screaming racial slurs at an autistic five year old child claims to have been doxxed online and that she needs help to relocate somewhere in the hope of avoiding the consequences of her behaviour. She has gone to GiveSendGo (basically GoFundMe for deplorables) to finance her relocation; so far she's raised over $700,000.

News roundup, 25 Feb 2025

Donald Trump says that the 25% tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican imports (on top of tariffs that are already in place) will come into effect on schedule next week. This is despite the fact that even the US ambassador admits that there has been noticeable progress in limiting the smuggling of drugs and people into the US. Of course, if you assume that the drugs and migrants were a pretext and that the real goal is to break our economy to the point where we capitulate so that they don't have to suffer the inconvenience of invading us, the move makes perfect sense. Meanwhile, a substantial number of Canadian snowbirds have been cancelling their plans to winter in Florida, to the consternation of one Trump-supporting resort owner who has been coasting for decades off the money rich Quebecois spend there. He just can't understand why people don't want to visit a country whose strongman president has been repeatedly threatening to take over their homeland.

- The Trump regime has ordered the removal of 8,000 EV charging stations from federal properties, and is expected to sell off a large fleet of newly purchased vehicles. Kind of like how Reagan ordered the removal of solar panels from the White House, but on a much larger scale.

- It appears that CDU leader Friedrich Merz will be Germany's next chancellor, likely by cobbling together a very thin coalition with the SPD. To get an idea of just how divided a country he will be inheriting, scroll down to the interactive map in the article; it has an awfully familiar look to it.

- The platform variously known as X, Twitter, or (colloquially) Shitter has turned into such a wretched hive of scum and villainy under the stewardship of Elon Musk that even a conservative suburban city like Cambridge, Ontario has announced that they will no longer be using the platform due to the amount of hate-related content and general misinformation on it, and the abject failure to moderate such content. Hopefully many more will follow.

- A woman who attended a town hall meeting held by the Republicans in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho was forcibly removed from the event by private security, and then charged with battery after it was alleged that she bit a security guard. The fact that even the city's police chief doubts that the charge is warranted should say a lot about how credible the allegation is. Video of the event can be seen here. 

- A lawsuit against Greenpeace by Texas-based Energy Transfer, owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline, accuses the organization of "unlawful and violent scheme to cause financial harm" by their opposition to the project, and is demanding approximately $300 million in damages, enough to wipe the organization off the map. Both Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace International are named as defendants, though since the latter is based in the Netherlands it is interesting to consider what would happen if a European court refused to recognize the ruling in this case.

- Former city councillor Shawn Nason is running for the Tories in the provincial byelection being held in Transcona next month as a result of the death of incumbent NDP MLA Nello Altomare.

- The potentially city-destroying asteroid that some feared could be a threat in 2032 has had its orbit calculated more accurately, and the risk of an impact has now been reduced to 0.005% (earlier data had the risk as high as 3%). Some might raise their eyebrows at the changing numbers, but that's just how it works - when you get more data, you can calculate where the asteroid is going to be with greater precision, and more often than not this narrows the range of places to be to the point where it can safely be considered to be no significant risk.

News roundup, 24 Feb 2025

- The centre-right Christian Democrats under Friedrich Merz have won a plurality of seats in Germany's parliamentary election, receiving just under 29% of the vote. The far-right AfD came second, with around 21%; all parties have vowed to maintain the "firewall" and not form a coalition with AfD.

- Robert Garcia, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from California, in a session of the House subcommittee on Doge, referred to a photo of Elon Musk as a "dick pick" and referred to Musk as "President". Shortly thereafter, the Department of Justice has sent Garcia a letter that makes reference to an interview with CNN in which he said "What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy"; the DOJ is demanding clarification regarding this comment, which it indicates could be interpreted as a threat.

- Former Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla has been disqualified from her party's leadership race after an investigation concluded that she committed 10 different violations of the rules for the race. This includes campaign financing issues as well as the apparent failure to disclose the involvement of a non-citizen in the campaign.

- Manitoba PC leadership candidate Wally Daudrich is claiming that there's porn in school libraries. He claims to have seen these books but refuses to say where. While a reasonable person would respond with "put up or shut up", the kind of people Daudrich is trying to attract to his campaign are not reasonable people. 

- Despite recent cold weather, the opening of the winter road network in northern Manitoba has been delayed until the end of February, causing significant problems for northern residents.

- Because bird flu has hit the US poultry and egg industry much harder than that in Canada and Mexico (so far), there has been a rash of egg smuggling at the borders, as well as large scale thefts of eggs.

- Rebecca Marodi, a CalFire fire captain who served on the front lines in the recent Los Angeles County wildfires, was stabbed to death in her home outside San Diego. She had been the subject of online abuse for supposedly being a "DEI hire" and blamed for the fires, which led some to speculate that this was the reason for her death. However, police now say that her wife is the prime suspect and may have fled the country. Yolanda Marodi had previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter following the stabbing death of her then-husband in 2000, and served more than 13 years in prison. I daresay there may be a pattern here.

- Around 200 people who stayed at a four-star resort in Playa del Carmen suffered from a nasty sickness, suspected of being food poisoning, that caused severe vomiting, diarrhea and dehydration. Just in case being in a resort full of middle-aged suburbanites wasn't bad enough on its own.

News roundup, 27 Jan 2024

- Advisers to UK prime minister Keir Starmer were reportedly left in "tears of laughter" after hearing a phone conversation between their boss and Donald Trump. Across the North Sea, however, Danish officials were not so amused, saying that Trump was "aggressive and confrontational" in discussing the status of Greenland with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen. The Danes had previously been fairly dismissive of Trump's musings, but are described as "utterly freaked out" by the president's aggression. Some in this Reddit thread think that part of the issue is that Trump has a hard time being told no by anyone, but especially by a woman. For his part, Trump says the failure to turn the territory over to the US would be a "very unfriendly act". One thing is clear - if he does decide to use military force to take the island, there's little that could stop him - not even Article 5 of the NATO treaty, for it requires unanimity among NATO members in order to compel action. The fact that the US was the aggressor apparently wouldn't disqualify them from the vote - apparently nobody thought to consider the possibility of aggression between NATO members, so they didn't make a rule about that when they drew up the treaty.

- Trump is openly calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, suggesting "We just clean out that whole thing" and asking for Jordan to take in the territory's residents.

- Days after ordering an end to his country's membership in the World Health Organization, the president is having second thoughts about his decision. Perhaps there's still one or two people around him that can talk sense into him; how long that situation will last remains to be seen, though.

- Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany's centre-right Christian Democratic Union, wants to introduce an immigration bill and has expressed willingness to work with anyone in order to get it passed, including the far-right AfD. This is raising additional fears that the "cordon sanitaire", the unwritten rule in most of Europe that you don't work with Nazis, is breaking down and that the CDU might be willing to seek AfD support to form a government after the coming election.

- US Coast Guard Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to head any division of the US military, has been removed by the Trump administration. An official quoted by Fox News attributed her sacking to "excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion" as well as failure to address "border security threats"; just as likely, though, the MAGA crowd wanted her gone simply because she was a woman leading one of the armed services.

- The Anti-Defamation League, perhaps realizing that their initial handling of Elon Musk's Nazi salute with kid gloves was not a good look for a Jewish organization that claims to be all about promoting human rights, is now being a tiny bit more critical, calling Musk's gesture an "inappropriate and highly offensive joke". I guess that's a bit of an improvement, but I'm not so sure he was joking.

- Mark Carney seems to be the front runner in the federal Liberal leadership race, at least among MPs. He has won the endorsements of 16 cabinet members, while Chrystia Freeland has gained five. Another prospective candidate, Nepean MP Chandra Arya, has had his run blocked by the party for reasons that have not been made public.

- A Hamilton man who attempted to rob a bank, but came away empty-handed, was forced to flee on foot after the bike he had left waiting for him outside the bank was stolen; evidently there is no honour among thieves. Both the would-be robber and the bike thief remain at large.