News roundup, 13 July 2026

- Reform UK is panicking about the possibility of Nigel Farage losing the byelection resulting from his resignation stunt. The party had been hoping to win the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, where polls showed them within striking distance after the position was vacated by Andy Burnham, but are now desperately shifting resources to Farage's riding of Clacton in the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of losing to Count Binface. Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph seems a bit worried too. Unfortunately it looks like the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is running a spoiler candidate. Kind of like one of the races in Monty Python's Election Night Special, except that this time it won't be the Sensible Party that benefits from the split.

- A recent poll of Canadian manufacturers found that 40% of them have either moved some of their operations to the US or are planning to do so in response to ongoing tariffs, while 11% plan to move their headquarters there. This isn't an exclusively Canadian problem, of course; Toyota is expanding its plant in Texas while reducing operations in Mexico, but voters tend not to care about such niceties - in fact they don't care if the people they vote in are worse than the people they vote out, because they're voting out of vengeance, not out of hope of improvement. So naturally this puts Carney in a tough spot. If he wanted to be really bold he could expropriate any plant closed in such a move at current market value, with the proviso that the compensation will not occur until relations are normalized with the US. I wouldn't count on him doing that, though; I don't think he's made of that kind of stuff (he is, ultimately, still a neoliberal at heart, even as he recognizes that neoliberalism doesn't seem to be working anymore). Maybe the NDP should start loudly pushing for that sort of thing; it's not like not being radical has done them much good at the federal level of late.

- South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham has died at the age of 71. On the other hand Mitch McConnell seems to be in better shape than many suspected, assuming of course that it was actually him that made the statement in question and not a staffer.

- A 37 year old man has been arrested after allegedly delivering a hateful and threat-filled tirade against two hijab-wearing women in a Costco in Halifax and assaulting someone who filmed his rant. He had to be Tasered after reportedly brandishing a weapon at police; he has been charged with assault, public incitement of hatred, and four counts of uttering threats to cause bodily harm or death.

- An economics professor at Brown University announced one year that one of his classes would use a take-home exam format. The class then had a surge of enrollments compared to previous years; when the midterms were marked, the average grade was 96% and 40 students got a 100% grade. Not surprisingly, the people who marked the exams found answers with a wording that was uncannily similar to the way ChatGPT answered the questions. At this point he decided to change the format for the final exam, making it an in-person test and warning the class that if the grade distribution was substantially different from the midterm, only the final would count towards the actual grade in the class. 27 students dropped out of the class by the time the final rolled around, of whom 22 had scored 100% in the midterm.

News roundup, 23 March 2026

- An Air Canada CRJ-900 collided with a vehicle on the runway while landing at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night. The pilots were killed while 41 people were injured, nine of them seriously enough to remain in hospital as of this morning. There are reports that a controller cleared the vehicle to cross the runway, then abruptly tried to cancel the clearance before the collision.

- Iran is warning that if the US goes ahead with threats to target the country's power plants, there will be retaliatory strikes on water and energy infrastructure across the Middle East and that the Strait of Hormuz will be completely closed until Iran's power plants are rebuilt.

- South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is calling on Donald Trump to close bases in countries that won't allow them to be used in the attack on Iran.

- The International Energy Agency is recommending several measures for governments to take in order to deal with potential fuel shortages as a result of the war in Iran. These measures include lowering highway speed limits, allowing people to work from home where possible, and encouraging public transit use. The UK government is considering several of these measures, including reducing speed limits and even limiting where and when people can drive. Notably, there seems to be particular resistance to reinstating work from home; a representative of large British companies cited COVID-related "workplace friction between shopfloor staff and white-collar colleagues who could work remotely" as a reason for not wanting to allow it. Meanwhile China is expecting fewer disruptions than most countries, thanks to years of efforts to electrify transportation and build up strategic fuel reserves.

- Alberta separatists gathering signatures for an independence referendum have reportedly been claiming to be affiliated with Elections Alberta. They've also been accused of using food and family entertainment to induce people to attend signature-gathering events, which is illegal.

- The Socialist Party's Emmanuel Grégoire has won Paris' mayoralty race, beating rightwing candidate Rachida Dati in a runoff. Grégoire previously served as deputy mayor under outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo. This is reassuring news to those who want to see Paris' recent transformation continue. The left also scored wins in other major cities but lost out to the far right in smaller communities. The right's failure to gain traction in big cities despite the best efforts of a billionaire donor is reassuring.

- A Georgia woman has been charged with murder after taking abortion drugs to terminate her pregnancy.

- A Polish court has ruled that the country must recognize the union between two Polish men who married in Germany. The rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) is apoplectic at the ruling, with the party's parliamentary leader Mariusz Błaszczak calling it "an attack on the family". The party will be filing an appeal with the country's Constitutional Tribunal.

News roundup, 10 March 2026

- The bombing of a girls' school, killing 150 students, during the first salvo of attacks on Iran may have resulted from the US military's use of AI to select targets. I daresay that the use of a poorly tested technology for something so consequential is not a good idea.

- Republican senator Lindsey Graham has warned Saudi Arabia of unspecified "consequences" if the Saudis don't join the US/Israel attack on Iran. Graham was reportedly one of the biggest proponents of the attack in the first place, having been pushing Trump on the issue for months.

- An autonomous vehicle owned by Waymo blocked a street and delayed the arrival of an ambulance at an emergency scene in Austin until a cop was able to gain access and move the vehicle. Although this particular incident probably didn't make a difference in anyone's survival, stuff like this has understandably made people question the wisdom of letting the company operate; unfortunately Texas banned municipalities from regulating such vehicles back in 2017.

- A plan to build what would be Canada's largest data centre in Olds, Alberta has run into a snag - due to its enormous energy requirements (equal to the entire city of Edmonton), the centre would need its own dedicated natural gas power plant. The Alberta Utilities Commission, which among other things regulates power plants in the province, has rejected the proposal due to a lack of consultation and general secrecy. I assume the next step will be for the Smith government to pass legislation to overrule the commission.

- The spike in oil prices resulting from the attack on Iran has led to a significant increase in interest in electric cars in the US. It's too soon to tell how permanent this is going to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise buy an EV will get one as a second car and then discover that they work better than the talking heads on Fox say. Once that happens, they might not be eager to go back to gas.

- The Game Developers Conference, a huge week long convention, is being held this week in San Francisco as it has been every year since 1988 (except 2020 of course), but many developers from outside the US are planning to skip the event, saying that they don't feel safe entering the country right now. International attendance had declined since 2020 anyway, with one developer remarking that the value of in-person events had declined anyhow due to the workarounds developed for the pandemic, and with the current political situation in that country many just don't want to risk it.

- School divisions in Alberta have pulled dozens of graphic novels from their shelves, including graphic novel adaptations of 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale and a historical work about the Trojan War as well as the more expected ones (e.g. the stuff with LGBT* content). Possibly the school boards just want to err on the side of caution, though there may be an element of malicious compliance here as well.

News roundup, 26 Nov 2024

- Donald Trump says that he will impose a 25% tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods at the first opportunity, unless the flow of drugs and migrants across the borders is controlled. Whether this is his actual intention, or whether it's just a negotiating tactic, remains to be seen.

- South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is warning US allies that any cooperation with the International Criminal Court on the indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies will lead to sanctions; even more unhinged is the response of Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who suggested that the US could invade the Netherlands if Netanyahu is brought to The Hague for trial. Of course in order to actually do that the Americans would likely need the cooperation of other NATO allies, which seems unlikely. There are rather a lot of countries that could potentially arrest Netanyahu; we'll have to see if they get the chance (and if they do, whether they cave to American pressure).

- Denver mayor Mike Johnston suggested that his city would not comply if the incoming Trump administration were to attempt a mass deportation, and drew comparisons to Tiananmen Square in terms of the resistance the federal government could expect from such a move. Subsequently, however, he has backed away from this stance; I think we can unfortunately expect a lot of similar reversals in the near future from Democratic politicians who initially make bold statements against Trump but then are cowed into retracting them.

- Elon Musk has admitted that X (the former Twitter) is deprioritizing tweets that contain links, making it harder to effectively share news stories on the platform.

- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has admitted that his organization Children's Health Defense (CHD) helped to promote and fund the film Plandemic, a widely circulated pseudo-documentary that alleged that COVID-19 was engineered by da gummint and dem big city libtard ay-leets in order to... well I'm not sure what exactly, because I can't be bothered to watch such a piece of garbage. Oh, and he's really big on raw milk too... just as we're finding out that avian influenza (H5N1) can turn up in raw milk. Now I'm not saying he's trying to engineer a new pandemic (I don't think he is) but he could very well end up being partly to blame for one.

- A man was shot to death by Winnipeg police outside Unicity Shopping Centre, apparently after stabbing an officer in the throat.

- A couple in Massachusetts tried to sue the local school district after their son was penalized for the use of AI to do an assignment. The generated text apparently cited non-existent sources. Fortunately, reason and good sense seems to be prevailing.

- A church in Lucerne, Switzerland has placed an AI chatbot in a confessional booth to stand in for Jesus pending his return. They call it an "experimental art installation" and say that it "shouldn’t be considered the Sacrament of Confession", however.