News roundup, 6 Oct 2025

 - Israel captured the flotilla attempting to deliver aid to Gaza on Friday, and took the 437 participants, including climate activist Greta Thunberg, into custody. Many of them, including Thunberg, have now been released; she has reported mistreatment by Israeli authorities during her detention.

- Israel has ordered all Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza City, saying that those who do not leave will be considered "militants" (i.e. fair game for IDF target practice). I guess we're not supposed to call this "ethnic cleansing" when the Israelis do it, but I'm not sure what else you can call that.

- A study using data from the reinsurance giant Munich Re has confirmed what most of us already know - that wildfires are getting worse, presumably due to climate change. Of the 43 wildfires between 1980 and 2023 that did over a billion dollars in damage, half occurred in the last decade.

- The Trump regime has extended a $20 billion lifeline to Argentina, apparently with no strings attached. The reason seems to be to prop up an economy that Argentine president Javier Milei is trying to operate on the principles favoured by Trump's backers, including widespread austerity and promoting a strong currency even at the expense of exporters. The IMF and the OECD seemed satisfied with the numbers, but the Argentine people are not, and the ruling party suffered a crushing defeat in the provincial elections in Buenos Aires in September. Fearing that the country could move back to the left in upcoming elections, they acted - only for Argentina to respond by slashing their export tariffs on grains and making a big soybean sale to China. This naturally does not sit well with American farmers, who are struggling to sell their crops, but it's probably not enough to make them oppose Trump so long as he continues to hurt the people they want to see suffer.

- Teachers in Alberta have walked off the job after negotiations with the Smith government broke down. The strike affects all regular public schools as well as francophone and Catholic schools. The government, unwilling to give the teachers anything, is now offering parents $150 a week to cover childcare costs.

- US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra says that he takes "great offence" to Canadians saying that his Dear Leader President is uninformed and untrustworthy.

- The director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas has been ousted, apparently after refusing to give Trump a historic sword once owned by Eisenhower. Trump had wanted to give the sword to King Charles III on a recent state visit.

 - After a Republican representative in Homer, Alaska objected to an article in the Homer News about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, the newspaper revised the article to satisfy the representative. This sparked mass resignations at the paper and an affiliate. The original version of the article is archived here.

News roundup, 10 June 2025

- California is taking the Trump regime to court over their unilateral decision to deploy the National Guard against protesters. Governor Gavin Newsom argues that it is "illegal and immoral" for the federal government to take such a measure without consulting the governor of the state in question. And a second journalist has been shot with a rubber bullet while covering the protests.

- Israeli authorities have deported Greta Thunberg and several other activists who were captured from a vessel delivering aid to Gaza. Several others from the same boat are contesting their deportation, and have been detained pending a hearing. The Israelis seem also to be continuing their policy of shooting people lining up for aid, which is not a good look.

- In addition to the infant who died of measles after being infected in utero, five other newborns in southern Ontario have been infected in the same manner.

- The Manitoba government is urging people to avoid non-essential travel in order to keep hotel rooms free for evacuees, whose numbers have now reached 21,000 people. This currently falls short of being an actual order, though.

- Winnipeg Transit is considering upgrading the shields that protect bus drivers from unruly passengers. Currently, they do not completely enclose the driver, making attacks still possible if a bit more difficult. A full upgrade of the fleet could be costly, but it seems more than worthwhile, and the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents drivers, agrees.

- Mark Carney is promising to meet NATO's military spending target of 2% of GDP by next March. 

- Researchers at Anthropic, an AI startup, are predicting that white-collar jobs are going to go into serious decline, with more than half of entry-level office jobs disappearing. Others predict that it won't be the entry-level jobs that take the worst hit; those jobs tend to be lower pay, and new graduates with knowledge of AI should do OK, while people who have been in their jobs for a long time (especially if not unionized) might be more vulnerable.

- The Trump regime has issued an executive order lifting the longstanding ban on civilian overland supersonic flights. One company claims to have broken the sound barrier (just barely mind you, at Mach 1.1) without making a boom that was audible on the ground - but this is a small experimental aircraft that will need to be scaled up considerably in order to be economical, so there's no guarantee that the production aircraft will be tolerably quiet. And let's not get started on the potential emissions. But here's the thing - I don't think that there's any reason Canada should have to endure potential sonic booms over our own territory, as would be the case for, say, flights from the Midwest to New England or from the east coast to Asia. What if we simply refused to allow such flights over our territory?

- A school shooting in the Austrian city of Graz has killed eight people, including the perpetrator, and injured several more. 

News roundup, 9 June 2025

- Following clashes earlier this week in Los Angeles when protesters apparently interfered ICE agents' attempts at enforcing deportation orders, the Trump regime ordered the mobilization of 2,000 National Guard troops (the first time in decades that this has happened without the request of the governor of the state in question) and warned that the Marines could be next if order isn't restored soon. The legality of this is very much in question, but that question is a purely academic one unless Trump and/or his minions somehow eventually see the inside of a courtroom. In any case, the short-term effect of the move has been to intensify the protests, with thousands of people taking to the streets. A correspondent with Australia's Nine News Network was shot by police with a rubber bullet while covering the confrontations; she was not seriously hurt.

- A construction crew working at Sandy Bay First Nation in northwestern Ontario had to take shelter in a shipping container from a wildfire that swept through their work site. 

- The UK's largest water and sewer utility, Thames Water, is in financial trouble and looking for a buyer. Bidders are demanding that the government grant the company and its management immunity from prosecution for environmental offenses as a condition of buying it; if a buyer is not found it is likely to fall into administration by the government, something the Treasury wants to avoid if possible.

- The IDF stopped an aid vessel bringing food and medical supplies to Gaza and detained its crew, who included climate activist Greta Thunberg.

- Numerous people report having their Facebook accounts shut down without a satisfactory explanation. This is not limited to individual users either - the English town of North Tawton had its official page shut down. There are suspicions that this is the result of the process of scanning for inappropriate content being outsourced to artificial intelligence instead of using human moderators (which, to be fair, has a few problems of its own).