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, 22 Oct 2025

- Arizona's attorney general is suing to try to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Adelita Grijalva, who was elected in a special election last month. Of course, the fact that Grijalva would be the key vote needed to force a full House vote on releasing the Epstein files is widely assumed to be the reason for not seating her. Johnson says he will not swear her in while the House is adjourned; the adjournment, of course, was also his choice. The lack of a codified deadline by which a member-elect has to be sworn in is an unfortunate oversight in the system; it's almost as if the system were designed by someone who thought of political disputes as simply disagreements among people of good will, and who couldn't imagine any true American wanting to undermine democracy. Reality seems to be running up against this model, though.

- A poll indicates that more Americans blame the Republicans than the Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown. Paradoxically, though, Donald Trump's personal approval rating is increasing at the same time. Of course, the poll question specifies Democrats or Republicans in Congress, and members of Congress tend not to get the same level of adulation from their supporters as an actual president. Additionally, the question could be skipped, so some people who skipped it may have been among those who said they approve of Trump. This does lend support to the idea that much of MAGA's success comes from Trump's own personality and that the movement might falter if they lost him somehow; on the other hand, by the time he's out of the picture American democracy might be so damaged that charisma is no longer needed to retain power and even the likes of JD Vance could hold office with no effective opposition.

- Part of the East Wing of the White House, which was added in 1902, is being demolished to make way for a huge ballroom that Trump wants to construct. Given what we know about the president's sense of style, the ballroom will probably have a very high cost to aesthetics ratio. The work being done is visible from the offices of the US Treasury, whose employees have been told not to share photos of the work, ostensibly for security reasons.

- The federal Liberals' house leader, Steve MacKinnon, is expressing concerns about the prospects of getting the upcoming budget through the House of Commons. The Liberals only have 169 seats in the House, with 172 constituting a majority; neither the NDP nor the Bloc have shown enough willingness to suport the budget for MacKinnon's comfort. My guess is that enough NDP MPs will be come down with "diplomatic flu" and be absent from the House on the day of the vote for the budget to pass; I don't see them wanting to hold an election right now given that they only have an interim leader right now.

- Daniel Naroditsky, an American grandmaster and chess streamer, has died suddenly at the age of 29. A cause of death has not been disclosed but Redditors are reading between the lines, citing in particular the unfounded accusations of cheating against Naroditsky by Russian grandmaster (and former world champion) Vladimir Kramnik.

- Marvin Winans, pastor of the Perfecting Church in Detroit, has gone viral in a way he probably didn't want after criticizing a parishioner for tithing "only" $1,235 instead of the $2,000 he had asked for. Unfortunately for him, the service was livestreamed, and the clip was copied to various video sharing sites.

News roundup, 8 Oct 2025

- The growth in renewable energy has been so strong that despite growing demand for electricity, all of the additional demand has been met by renewables based on global averages. This has not been spread evenly, however; in the US and even the EU renewables haven't been enough and those countries have increased their fossil fuel consumption. Meanwhile China, despite building some new coal plants, has reduced its overall emissions from electricity production by 2% even as demand for electricity has skyrocketed. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, sees some reason for optimism, although emissions are still increasing from other sources. One thing remains clear, though; change isn't going to come soon enough for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. There's going to be a lot more migration in the near future, even if many of the affected people will probably die in place.

- Adelita Grijalva, elected in September to serve as the representative in Congress for Arizona's 7th congressional district, has still not been sworn in. She is hinting at what many others have also suggested - that Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to delay her taking office until the couple of Republican holdouts on the Epstein files can be browbeaten into changing their minds. If nothing changes, once she takes her seat she will be the crucial 218th signature needed to force a vote in the House to release the files. It has also emerged that Johnson's recent adjournment of the House (roughly equivalent to a prorogation in Westminster systems) came mere hours after the House received Epstein-related financial records from the US Treasury. The adjournment, combined with the government shutdown, also has the convenient effect of preventing the Treasury from delivering any more records.

- Former Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson has been fined $18,000 for violation of the province's conflict of interest law. This follows Stefanson's use of the "caretaker period" between the Tories' electoral defeat and the new government being sworn in to make efforts to get a mining project approved. The fine had to be voted on by the legislature, and it's telling that even the Tories voted with the government to impose the fine. I do have to question the propriety of having to decide something like this by a vote in the House rather than by a court, though in this case the penalty seems more than warranted.

- Doug Ford's plan to ban Ontario municipalities from using speed cameras looks kinda fishy in light of the fact that several of his ministers have gotten tickets recently, and that one of the Tories' political staffers got nailed for using a government vehicle to drive at speeds up to 162 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. The staffer has apparently been allowed to keep their job after promising not to do it again (at least until the speed camera ban is in place, presumably). To be fair, at least Ford doesn't want the cameras going to waste - he's musing about repurposing them for crime surveillance.

- Clownvoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were both given conditional sentences on top of time served following their convictions for public mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order. The prosecution had called for severe sentences (8 years for Barber and 7 years for Lich) while the defense had called for an absolute discharge.

- Ted Cruz is demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, provide documentation to show how they assess the merit of sources. Cruz considers Wikipedia to have a leftwing bias, citing that the site's "reliable sources" list which describes CNN and MSNBC as "generally reliable" sources for science and politics while deprecating Fox News.

News roundup, 26 April 2024

- Former premier Heather Stefanson is resigning her seat in the legislature, as many had expected. Worth noting is that Stefanson only held onto that seat by 263 votes, so the byelection is going to be interesting.

- The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a scathing report on the sale of Lions Place, calling it a "targeted dismantling of community for older adults" and saying that it constitutes "organizational elder neglect and abuse". For their part, Lions Club calls the report "slanderous" and claim that they had no choice but to sell the building due to the rising costs of maintaining it.

- US House Speaker Mike Johnson is calling on Joe Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University after pro-Palestine protesters accosted him when he visited the campus and told him that he sucks. No doubt he's hoping for a repeat of the Kent State shootings of 1970. In any case, some universities aren't waiting; they're calling in the local police to disrupt the protests.

- The Speaker of the Ontario legislature has kicked independent MPP Sarah Jama out of the chamber for the rest of the day, as a result of her refusal to remove a keffiyeh.

- A Chinese exchange student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston has been sentenced to nine months in prison for stalking another Chinese student who had put up pro-democracy fliers on campus and threatening to chop her hands off.

- One of Harvey Weinstein's sex crime convictions has been overturned on appeal. He's not a free man, though, since his conviction in California still stands, and New York is going to retry their own case as well.

- The British Cactus and Succulent Society is in a state of turmoil; the organization's chair has resigned following the reaction to a new policy saying that succulents that had been removed from the wild cannot be exhibited or awarded prizes at the organization's shows.