News roundup, 5 Oct 2026

- The first officer accused of attacking the captain of FlyDubai Flight 1073 was reportedly banned from flying commercially in his home country of Oman due to extremist views. Details about the specifics of these views have not been made public, and it is not known if Oman attempted to warn other countries about him. It appears that the weapon used in the attack was a crash axe of the sort carried in the cockpit of all airliners in case of an emergency; unfortunately in this case the axe was used to cause an emergency.

- Winnipeg mayoral candidates Mike Vogiatzakis and Kevin Klein are accusing each other of offering inducements to withdraw from the race. Vogiatzakis says that Tim Diack, a supporter of Klein, offered him a position at city hall, later stated by his campaign manager to be the chair of the police board. Diack says that he did call Vogiatzakis but did not make such an offer, and that Vogiatzakis is in fact ineligible for the position due to a criminal record (he has convictions for contempt of court as well as assault). Klein's campaign manager also says that Diack has no official position in the campaign team. Klein claims that Vogiatzakis offered him an inducement of his own, though no details were provided. Such inducements are of course prohibited. Meanwhile Klein is facing criticism after the Winnipeg Sun, of which he is CEO, called into question the significance of the deaths of indigenous children in residential schools.

- Far right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, has come out on top in the first round of Brazil's presidential election, winning 47.1% of the vote compared to 45% for incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The election will now go to a runoff, but Bolsonaro is expected to win unless Lula is able to rally people who abstained in the first round.

- Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap election after his coalition partners Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) voted alongside rightwing parties to defeat two bills intended to increase tenants' rights.

- A 12 year old girl was killed in Baltimore and another person wounded in the crossfire as two men opened fire on each other in a dispute over a parking space.

News roundup, 21 Sept 2026

- New polling gives Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham a significant lead for this fall's municipal election. Notably, however, 51% of voters say they are undecided; 20% said they would vote for Gillingham with Kevin Klein at 8% and 4% for Mike Vogiatzakis. 13% said that they would not vote at all. While it may be a reassuring sign that Klein and especially Vogiatzakis don't seem to be making much of an impact, there's a caveat in that the kind of person who would vote for Vogiatzakis might also the sort of person to not answer pollsters' questions about the matter.

- Kerry-Lynne Findlay has resigned as leader of the BC Conservative party, mere hours after Surrey-Serpentine River MLA Linda Hepner became the 14th MLA to resign or be expelled from the party's caucus since August. It is widely suspected that premier David Eby is considering a snap election call in order to take advantage of the Conservatives' disarray. 

- BC's efforts to improve rural healthcare by requiring foreign trained doctors to spend a few years working in remote areas before being able to practice in major cities was struck down by the province's top court.

- The far-right AfD has won the largest share of the vote in elections in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, winning 38% of votes cast. Fortunately the Social Democrats were a close second at 36% and are expected to gain the support of enough of the remaining parties to form a government; unfortunately AfD are not likely to go away anytime soon. In Berlin, which also held an election for its combined state/municipal government, the leftwing Die Linke (which has its roots in the East German Communist Party, though it is considered a democratic socialist party today) won a plurality and may be able to form a government with the support of the Greens and Social Democrats. The real losers in both elections were the centre-right Christian Democrats, who appear to have gotten less than the 5% threshold needed to win seats in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania legislature; they don't seem to have done very well in Berlin either.

- Donald Trump has announced in a caps-laden Truth Social post that he is banning reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW (the former MSNBC) from the White House grounds.

- Sleep medicine experts continue to weigh in on Manitoba's move to permanent daylight saving time. The consensus among them continues to be that ending the time change is good, but leaving it on DST is the wrong way to go about it. The main concern has to do with the impact of a lack of morning sun on circadian rhythms, which they say teenagers in particular are susceptible to.

- The FBI has issued a warning to ICE agents that they should be wary of "tradwife" dating site profiles, saying that these could be honeypot accounts set up to dox the agents. Details about whether this has actually happened are sparse at best. Some posters in this Reddit thread thinks that the real purpose of this warning is to instill a general sense of paranoia and distrust of the agents among outsiders, and/or to make people forget about Kash Patel's rather embarrassing public statements of late. In any case, the story has spawned the best description I've seen of "tradwives" in this article - "conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss".

News roundup, 1 Sept 2026

- Three federal byelections were held yesterday, in the ridings of Vancouver-Capilano, Beaches-East York, and Chicoutimi-Le Fjord. All three were won by the Liberals. In the case of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, the byelection was necessitated when the Conservative incumbent Richard Martel was "kicked upstairs" earlier this year, so this is a net gain for the Liberals.

- Kevin Klein, a former councillor and Tory MLA (and current CEO of the Winnipeg Sun's parent company) has entered the race for mayor of Winnipeg. Hopefully this means there will be a split in the rightwing vote between him and Mike Vogiatzakis (and maybe also Brad Gross) but this remains to be seen.

- Russia has responded to Ukraine's strikes on the warehouses of online retailers by hitting food distribution centres, leaving many grocery store shelves empty. 

- Another tornado has been reported in Manitoba. This one touched down near the community of Elkhorn in the RM of Wallace-Woodworth.

- A pedestrian was killed after walking in front of Waterloo's ION LRT over the weekend. The victim has not been identified and it is unclear if this was an accident or a suicide.

- Montreal's former anti-racism commissioner is suing the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) for defamation after the organization allegedly compared her to Hitler. Bochra Manaï says that the comparison was made in materials published by the organization; she is asking for $125,000 in damages.

- A 68 year old man has been charged with arson following a fire that destroyed a church in St. Simon, New Brunswick. Several social media posts subsequently made false allegations about the suspect, some saying that he was Israeli while others said he was Palestinian.