News roundup, 29 Oct 2025

- Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica today, packing winds of up to 295 km/h. Three deaths have been reported in the country, in addition to three in Haiti and at least one in the Dominican Republic. The storm has since been downgraded to a Category 4 storm as it advances on Cuba.

- The Netherlands is holding an election today. Far-right leader Geert Wilders is facing a significant decline in support; it is expected that Wilders will be unable to form a government even if he manages to win a plurality of seats. 

- US ambassador Pete Hoekstra cornered Ontario's trade representative, David Paterson, at a Canadian American Business Council event in Ottawa, and went into a tirade full of obscenities about the anti-tariff ad that Ontario ran in the US over the weekend.

- A cruise ship left an elderly passenger behind on a small island off the coast of Queensland. The ship returned several hours later after the crew realized their mistake and a search party was sent out; she was found dead, so the ship returned to its itinerary as if nothing had happened.

- A Toronto woman says that her 12 year old son was interacting with the Grok AI chatbot, asking it questions about soccer, when the chatbot suddenly asked him, "Why don't you send me some nudes?" The chatbot was automatically installed into Tesla cars this fall. When CBC asked xAI, the Musk-owned company that developed the chatbot, about this, the only response they got was a terse "Legacy media lies".

- OpenAI is developing quite a track record for intellectual property violations. Each time, they apologize and say they won't do it again - at least not with the specific piece of intellectual property being complained about. It seems that they figure that there's no point in following the rules until lawyers get involved.

- A landlord in Vancouver used AI to look up information he used to defend himself in bylaw trials and civil proceedings, and presented arguments full of fictitious case law that the AI had generated. The joke may be on him, however, as he may have to pay the costs related to the provincial assessment authority's search for the non-existent cases.

- A Winnipeg Transit driver was taken to hospital after being assaulted by a passenger on Monday afternoon. The suspect remains at large; police are investigating.

News roundup, 28 Oct 2025

- The Alberta government is legislating striking teachers back to work and imposing a collective agreement. The government limited debate on all three readings of the bill, and the notwithstanding clause is being used to ensure that the legislation can resist a court challenge.

- Hurricane Melissa is bearing down on Jamaica. The hurricane is a Category 5 storm, with winds of up to 280 km/h; if it retains that strength when it reaches the country it will be the strongest to hit the island since detailed records began in 1851. Parts of the country could see up to 760 mm of rain.

- Germany's far-right AfD party is being accused of espionage. Georg Maier, the interior minister of the state of Thuringia, alleges that the party is using its parliamentary privileges to gain access to sensitive information about the country's infrastructure and handing the information over to Russia.

- Canada is on the verge of losing its status as a country where measles is not endemic. Of course, there's an obvious reason for it; whether the political will exists to overcome it is another question. It wouldn't be hard to bring back the idea of "vaccine passports" as used at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic - or at least it wouldn't in theory. Of course, enforcement would be challenging, and it might push some of the more extreme antivaxxers to violence - though it's an open question whether that violence would outweigh the harm done by measles itself. And some would feel uncomfortable on bodily autonomy grounds - except that the unvaccinated are potentially interfering with the bodily autonomy of everyone around them, so that argument falls flat even if you consider that principle to be fundamental. Myself, I frame this sort of thing as "what would do the greatest good and/or the least harm to humanity as a whole"; with that as the most fundamental principle, it's a lot simpler to argue for vaccine passports. Unfortunately, as we saw with the clownvoy a couple of years ago, the antivaxxers can get together enough support to make life difficult for a lot of people, and governments are often unwilling to take the necessary measures to contain such a disruptive force.

- Former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has asked authorities in Switzerland, where he currently lives, to investigate death threats made against him in response to his, um, tone deaf response to the tragic death of US grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky (not to mention his behaviour towards Naroditsky when he was still alive). I can't condone that sort of thing, of course, but Kramnik shouldn't be surprised that some people are taking it badly. A side note - while Kramnik has been accusing just about everyone of cheating, he had a scandal of that sort himself a while back,