News roundup, 3 July 2025

- A severe heatwave is sweeping through much of Europe as it has so often in recent summers. Temperatures in the Spanish town of El Granado hit 46°C, and a municipal employee in Barcelona collapsed and died shortly after completing her shift operating a street sweeper.

- Having cleared the Senate, Donald Trump's "one big beautiful bill" is expected to be passed in the House of Representatives by tomorrow. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly had to make some unspecified concessions to get compliance out of a few Republicans; the exact nature of the concessions is not public, but probably something like "we won't back your opponent in the primary".

- Trump is now musing about revoking the citizenships of people he doesn't like, including New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and possibly also Elon Musk.

- Ukraine successfully carried out a drone attack on a military factory in the Russian city of Izhevsk, killing three people. The operation was carried out from 1,300 km away, some 300 km inside the Ukrainian border.

- Edward Kelley, a man who participated in the Jan 6 putsch, was of course pardoned by Trump along with all his co-conspirators. Unfortunately for him, that pardon probably doesn't apply to crimes committed since his arrest on those charges, such as his involvement in a conspiracy to attack an FBI office with car bombs and drones, for which he was just handed a life sentence. Of course, Trump could very well pardon him for that too if the case manages to hold his attention long enough.

- Two Alberta MLAs now sitting as independents after being kicked out of the UCP caucus for dissent are petitioning to restore the old Progressive Conservative party. In order to accomplish this they will need to collect signatures representing 0.3% of eligible voters, or 8,819 people. Amusingly, two other splinter parties are trying to use the Wildrose name as well. I wish all of these little parties a modest amount of success; not too much though.

- Brendan Berg, the bassist for Winnipeg band Royal Canoe, was killed in a car accident along with his partner Olivia Michalczuk on Highway 10 near Duck Mountain Provincial Park. Their vehicle was stopped on the side of the road when a vehicle coming in the other direction crossed the centre line and hit them at high speed. Berg would have turned 43 the following day.

News roundup, 2 July 2025

- The feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk continues, as Musk condemns the huge increase in the US deficit that will result from the "One Big Beautiful Bill", which has just made it through the Senate. Trump is now hinting that he might cancel contracts with Musk's companies; others are questioning the feasibility of this given the Pentagon's dependence on SpaceX. And now Musk is threatening to form a new political party to challenge the Republicans. Meanwhile China is watching the feud with great interest.

- Manitoba is considering increasing the markup on cannabis. Glen Simard, the minister responsible for Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries (which serves as the wholesaler for cannabis in the province) says this will bring Manitoba in line with other provinces and will help to fund measures to combat impaired driving and the like, however some in the industry fear that this will simply make it harder to compete with the black market. The industry is more hopeful, however, about a proposal to eliminate the requirement that cannabis stores cover their windows; other provinces have already done away with similar rules due to fears that it made it easier to rob them.

- A Sikh activist in the UK died suddenly two years ago after being admitted to hospital; while the official story is that he died from acute myeloid leukemia, some are calling for further investigation, especially given that his death occurred around the same time as the shooting death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and the attempted murder of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the US.

- The revamp of Winnipeg Transit's routes is getting mixed reviews; many are not happy that more transfers are needed and there are fewer stops; others say that the more frequent service of the major routes outweighs the downsides. Transit officials expect that service will improve for 60% of passengers, get worse for 10-20%, and stay about the same for the rest; we'll have to see.

- Noted televangelist Jimmy Swaggart has died at the age of 90. Swaggart, a cousin of musician Jerry Lee Lewis, was one of the most successful televangelists in the US, despite several embarrassing transgressions.

News roundup, 26 June 2025

- Banks in the US have been reversing decisions made during the Biden administration and reinvesting in fossil fuels. Notably, this is disproportionately an American trend; most of the banks offering financing in this sector are US-based, suggesting that these moves may be motivated by other considerations than the objective quality of those investments. Perhaps the fact that states like West Virginia and Texas are actively punishing institutions for divesting from the sector has something to do with it.

- The Trump regime's "One Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that charges a tax on investment income paid to residents of countries that the US considers to have "unfair or discriminatory" taxes, such as Canada's digital services tax. Of course, this has the potential to cause investors from such countries to invest elsewhere, potentially driving millions in investments out of the US.

- The proposal to put a build a migrant detention centre in the Everglades, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz", is going ahead; construction on the facility has begun at an old airport despite concerns from environmentalists as well as human rights activists.

- Hedge funds are buying subrogation claims from insurers, often at steep discounts, in the hope of profiting in the event that the fires are deemed to have been caused by Southern California Edison's equipment. California has a fund in place to pay out such claims and protect utilities from bankruptcy; essentially the state is getting all the downsides of public ownership with none of the upsides.

- Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian AI researcher who won the Nobel Prize in physics for work on neural networks, is warning that Canada needs to regulate the technology more stringently. He will be meeting with AI and digital innovation minister Evan Solomon to discuss the matter but there is a lot of resistance to the idea, and Solomon himself has said that he has no plans to reintroduce legislation that died on the order paper when the last election was called.