News roundup, 3 Nov 2025

- The noted American lawyer and rabid Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz is calling for Trump to impose additional tariffs on Canada as punishment for recognizing a Palestinian state, and potentially other sanctions as well. Dershowitz became particularly incensed when Mark Carney, in an interview with British podcaster Mishal Husain, said that Canada would honour the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and arrest him if he set foot in the country.

- Judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have ordered the Trump regime to use emergency funds to get SNAP benefits flowing again. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that the program could be back up and running by Wednesday. Meanwhile, one dollar store in Columbus, Ohio had boarded up their front windows in anticipation of looting due to the interruption of the benefits.

- Police are investigating an apparent bombing at Harvard Medical School on Saturday morning. No injuries have been reported.

-  Adelita Grijalva has still not been sworn in by the US House of Representatives, more than a month after being elected. This is now the longest wait for a seat in the history of the House; speaker Mike Johnson continues to refuse to swear her in, presumably because she would provide the necessary vote to force a general House vote on the release of the Epstein files.

- A resident of the Rural Municipality of Tache set up a display with effigies of several municipal officials hanging from a gallows. The resident was apparently angry at receiving a bill from the municipality's volunteer fire department for extinguishing a fire on his property; police are investigating. In one encounter with police he described himself as a "peaceful sovereign", which suggests a possible connection with the so-called "sovereign citizen" movement. Given that movement's history of violence, one hopes that the police keep him on a watchlist even if the display doesn't meet the criteria for criminal harassment. One person in the related Reddit thread who is a volunteer firefighter says that it's uncommon for property owners to be billed under such circumstances, and that if this guy was presented with a bill there's probably "a reason worth knowing".

- The NDP is not ruling out abstentions by some or all of its caucus on the federal budget vote. Presumably this is because the party is in no shape to fight a new election campaign right now.

- Strike 3 Holdings, the owner of a number of pornography studios, is accusing Meta of pirating their intellectual property in order to train AI. Meta denies this, saying that the 2,400 movies were downloaded by their employees for personal use.

News roundup, 29 May 2025

- A provincewide state of emergency has been declared in Manitoba due to the wildfires in the north and east. Around 17,000 people have been evacuated, including the entire city of Flin Flon as well as the First Nations communities of Pimicikamak and Pukatawagan and the Northern Affairs community of Cross Lake. Most of the evacuees are being sent to Winnipeg; a reception centre has been set up at an arena in the northewestern part of the city. The military is being brought in to assist.

- Besides the various other provisions in the omnibus bill that Donald Trump has dubbed the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" such as the ban on AI regulation, the bill also effectively tears up a Canada-US tax treaty that has been in place since 1942. This is presented as a retaliatory measure against taxes that Trump considers to be unfair, such as the digital services tax introduced in 2024. The bill has yet to clear the Senate but this is expected to occur, and Trump expects to sign it into law in time for the 4th of July. More interesting, though, is the fact that Elon Musk is criticizing the bill for increasing the deficit, saying that it undermines his own work at DOGE, and is now leaving his role with the regime.

- Despite the Trump regime slapping tariffs on countries near and far, some countries are getting sweetheart deals. Among them are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which Trump presumably likes because they don't do that nasty democracy stuff and buy lots of American ordinance to drop on Yemen.

- Two Calgary lawyers with the so-called "Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms" are facing possible disbarment for dishonourable professional conduct after they hired a private investigator to spy on the judge hearing one of their cases.

- A Hamilton landlord has been fined $100,000 for four illegal "renovictions". Under the law, tenants evicted for renovations are entitled to "right of first refusal" for their old units, but the landlord immediately offered the units to other people at more than double the rents the original tenants were paying. Evidently he hoped the authorities wouldn't do anything about it; surprisingly, they did.

- Two human smugglers convicted after a family of four froze to death attempting to cross the Canada-US border in January of 2022 have received substantial prison sentences in a Minnesota court. The ringleader was given a ten year sentence; the driver sent to pick them up got 6½ years.

- Germany is offering to host a satellite campus for Harvard University so non-Americans can still attend the institution.

- The Swiss village of Blatten, population around 300, was devastated by a landslide that resulted from the partial collapse of a glacier. One person has been reported missing.

News roundup, 22 April 2025

- Donald Trump has demanded that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell be terminated for not lowering interest rates as Trump would like. Constitutionally, this isn't supposed to be doable by the president alone; however, the question of what happens if he tries anyway has yet to be answered. Certainly investors are not showing confidence in the situation.

- There has apparently been a noticeable shift, at least in the US, towards bringing one's own lunch to work rather than eating at a restaurant. This is seen by some as a worrisome economic indicator, even a harbinger of a recession.

- Pierre Poilievre is conspicuously absent from the latest round of Conservative Party TV ads. While he's mentioned in one of them, he isn't shown; instead they show old white guys playing golf. The fact that the Cons feel the need to target white male boomers suggests that they're struggling even with that demographic (or at least its urban/suburban component, whose votes they need if they are to have a hope of winning the election next week).

- A bunch of the usual far-right suspects have planned a "Referendum Rally" at the Alberta Legislature on the first of May, figuring that if Poilievre can't win the election it's time for Alberta to secede and join the US.

- Not satisfied to simply cut billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard University, the regime now appears to have directed the IRS to rescind the institution's tax-exempt status.

- A new Silicon Valley startup, Scout AI, hopes to develop autonomous military robots controlled by the latest in AI technology. I think maybe it's time for these people to watch Terminator (or watch it again, if they didn't clue into the message the first time).

- Commuter trains running between San Francisco and San Jose are now fully electric; this has led to a rapid improvement in air quality in the region, with an 89% decrease in fine carbon particulates ("black carbon").

- An American nonprofit that provides eyeglasses around the developing world is moving its operations to Manitoba due to uncertainties related to Trump's tariffs (their lenses come from places like China).

News roundup, 16 April 2025

- For a time it seemed like Donald Trump's ramblings about annexing Canada were a passing phase; after Mark Carney met with him last month he seemed to tone down his talk on the subject. However, when asked about this the other day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the president's position on Canada has not changed.

- Two ICE agents showed up to arrest a few Venezuelan refugees in New York City on suspicion of gang ties. According to Wilmer Gutiérrez, the father of one of these people, one of the agents said "No, he's not the one", but the other said "Take him anyway". The hapless 19 year old, Merwil Gutiérrez, was subsequently sent to the Trump regime's overseas penal colony in El Salvador. Meanwhile, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, has dismissed the idea of returning another wrongfully deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the regime has said they wouldn't accept him even if Bukele sent him. This despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that his deportation was illegal. Meaning that even the likes of Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas think that the regime is going too far. And the regime's response is, essentially, "Whatcha gonna do about it?"

- The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, warns that the rare earth metals upon which China is imposing export restrictions could be difficult for the US to replace and that this could lead to supply chain disruptions. China has a virtual monopoly on the processing of those elements.

- The Trump regime plans to demand that the EU distance itself from China as a condition of avoiding tariffs from the US. The thing is, the more they pull this stuff on countries, the more most other countries are going to say "to heck with you then, we'll just deal with each other and leave you out of it".

- Canada's climate limits what can be grown in this country, but vertical farming may well help to make us more self-sufficient in food. And now that the US can't be relied on for this, there's an extra incentive to move in that direction.

- Unlike Columbia University, which caved to the regime's demands regarding protests and the curriculum of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department in order to secure $400 million in funding, Harvard is standing firm. The regime is now withholding $2.3 billion in funding in response. All I can say is, fight fiercely, Harvard.

- Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have introduced a bill called the "Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act", which would order the removal of the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and for it to be shipped back to Texas to be displayed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.