News roundup, 31 Aug 2026

- Wildfires continue to rage in southwestern Europe. 183 houses in the French town of Le Porge were destroyed on Wednesday; its residents felt abandoned as firefighters were focused on Lège-Cap-Ferret. The national government says the decision to focus on the latter community was based on it being on a peninsula that's harder to evacuate people from, however many residents of Le Porge suspect that the affluence of the latter community was the real reason, and are planning a class action.

- At least 19 people are dead after a surge of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and clashed with authorities. Spain's interior ministry at one point said that over 49,000 people crossed the border. Some link this to a recent court ruling saying that people intercepted at sea while crossing into Ceuta and the nearby territory of Melilla cannot be summarily deported but rather need to be assessed for refugee status. Many, however, are skeptical that this information would have been known to these people, implying that new "push factors" may be in play. Italy's rightwing prime minister Giorgia Meloni is threatening to suspend Italy's recognition of Spain as part of the Schengen Area, and other rightwing leaders across the EU are taking similar stances.

- AI companies are buying rare books to scan and then destroying them. Used booksellers report that these companies are sending them extensive lists of specific hard-to-find works. In some cases they seem to be using front companies - one German bookseller reports getting a surge in orders of obscure books every night at around the same time from a Canadian -based company calling itself "Zoom Books", with each list containing numerous rare, and moreover unrelated, titles. Anthropic AI (which, it should be noted, is considered to be one of the less unethical companies in the business), has admitted that it has spent millions of dollars in the last couple of years on so-called "destructive scanning". This emerged during a copyright lawsuit; while Anthropic ended up settling that case, the judge made a ruling before it got settled that this practice constitutes "fair use" based on copyright laws, possibly implying that nondestructive scanning would not be protected in the same way. In other unsettling AI-related news, some systems designed by Anthropic and OpenAI have reportedly escaped from what was supposed to be an isolated test environment and hacked into other companies' systems.

- The leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Zack Polanski, is refusing to apologize for reposting a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a guillotine and the caption "We're only making plans for Nigel". Of course the slogan alludes to an old XTC song, but the reference to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is pretty obvious, and the party reported this to police saying this could constitute "incitement to murder". Polanski say he has not been contacted by police about the matter so far. He says the photo, one of several in the post of images from a party made by another person, was included by mistake, but accuses Reform of editing the image to make it appear that it had been posted by Polanski himself rather than reposted from someone else's post. He says he'll be happy to apologize if Farage apologizes "for all the times that he's put other people in danger".

News roundup, 10 July 2026

- The ceasefire in the US-Iran war is in ruins after Donald Trump accused Iran of attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and launched airstrikes on the country, killing at least 14 people and destroying a bridge on a key trade route with Russia and China. Iran in turn launched strikes on Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Iran admits to firing on the ships, which it says ignored warnings about taking a non-approved route through the strait.

- Andy Burnham appears set to be the UK's next prime minister after winning the support of 322 out of 403 sitting Labour MPs. If nobody steps up to oppose him he will be declared party leader next week and take office later this month.

- The "Water Not Coal" campaign, an initiative by country singer Corb Lund which sought to ban coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Alberta (or force a referendum if the government wanted to push ahead), was deemed by Elections Alberta to have not gotten the necessary 177,732 signatures in order to be deemed valid. Lund's campaign had submitted over 200,000, but staff at the agency attempted to contact a small sample of the signatories in order to determine how many could be deemed valid and deemed enough of them illegitimate to cancel the initiative. A statistician at the University of Toronto, however, believes that Elections Alberta's methodology was suspect and that the initiative likely had enough legitimate signatures to proceed.

- The BC government is suing OpenAI for its role in the Tumbler Ridge shooting that left nine people dead. The government believes that there were plenty of warning signs in the shooter's interaction with the platform that could have prevented the tragedy; OpenAI had banned her but had not notified the police.

- A Texas woman who was fired by her employer after video of her unhinged rant at two Muslim women went viral has raised over $100,000 in donations on GiveSendGo (which is, as I've called it before, the GoFundMe for deplorables). The women she harassed were doxed and have faced death threats.

- Two teenagers in Greensboro, NC were arrested after allegedly using a device described as a "homemade plasma cannon" to break into a school. The term may be technically accurate but makes it sound way more sci-fi than it actually is; it's not that dissimilar to the potato cannons that teens have been making for decades.

- A student pilot in Argentina was forced to land the aircraft by herself after her flight instructor suddenly opened a door and jumped to his death. While shaken, the student landed the Cessna 150 without further incident. I suppose if nothing else it was a good test of the student's ability to handle an emergency.

News roundup, 8 May 2026

- Elections Alberta has issued cease and desist letters to everyone known to have accessed a database compiled by the secessionist Centurion Project, which created it from illegally obtained voter lists. The lists were identified as having been legitimately issued to the Republican Party of Alberta; registered parties are legally entitled to the lists, but aren't supposed to share them. The lists were traced to the party via an interesting trick - the lists issued to each party are "salted" with a number of fake entries, and different fakes are used for each party. The potential impact on high profile individuals - such as former premier Jason Kenney who, while reliably rightwing by most standards, regularly gets death threats from extremists. And that's not even considering other criminal uses - stalking, robbery, hate crimes, etc. Meanwhile the NDP say they have obtained video evidence of two high ranking UCP members (president Rob Smith and caucus director Arundeep Sandhu) attending a Centurion meeting.

- Amsterdam's municipal government has banned public advertising of fossil fuels as well as meat. This is certainly a good move, though I'd throw airline and cruise ads into the mix as air travel is up there with meat as far as drivers of climate change go.

- The US Department of Homeland Security demanded that Google hand over information about a Canadian who has not set foot in the US in more than a decade after he criticized the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Information requested included location data and activity logs. Presumably the US authorities already know he hasn't been across the border recently, so I have to wonder if maybe they were really trying to find information on somebody else (e.g. to keep someone out of the US, or take them into custody on arrival, because they'd interacted with him).

- Air Canada is ending four seasonal routes to the American sunbelt early due to fuel prices. They currently still plan to reopen the routes on schedule in the fall, but we'll have to see how that goes.

- Manitoba has declared a public health emergency due to the high incidence of HIV in the province. The infection rate is 19.5 cases per 100,000 residents, compared to the national average of 5.5, according to chief medical officer of health Dr. Brent Roussin. He says that part of the purpose of the declaration is as an "awareness tool", however it does open more options for testing. 

- Meta is threatening to cut New Mexico off from Facebook and Instagram if prosecutors in an upcoming trial for "public nuisance" get what they are requesting. The company has already been hit with $375 million in civil penalties after it came out that they knowingly harmed kids' mental health and failed to report sexual exploitation of children that occurred on their platforms. In the nuisance trial, the prosecution is asking for the court to order the company to not allow sexual exploitation of kids, not make their apps addictive, and improve age verification. Meta claims that complying with this will be unfeasible and that they'll have no choice to leave. I do hope the court calls their bluff.

- For some unknown reason (at least none that OpenAI made public) several iterations of ChatGPT had a bizarre predilection for mentioning goblins without the subject having been brought up by the user. It also would insert unprompted references to various other creatures, both real and imaginary. This was eventually patched with a general instruction to "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query". If this actually was spontaneous, this is both impressive and unsettling. I wouldn't put it past the company to have set this up by design, though, just to get people talking.

- David Attenborough turns 100 today. 

News roundup, 14 April 2026

- Mark Carney's Liberals have swept three byelections held yesterday, giving them a slight majority of 174 seats in the 338 member House of Commons.

- There are already predictions being made about how the defeat of Viktor Orbán will impact the global right. Certainly it's a sign that Trumpism isn't popular on the international scene, but before we get our hopes up too much, it's worth noting that the incoming prime minister,  Péter Magyar, is right of centre himself and was a member of Orbán's Fidesz party until 2024.

- German chancellor Friedrich Merz is the most unpopular head of government across 24 democracies. Only 19% of Germans approve of his performance, while 76% disapprove; Emmanuel Macron had a lower approval rating (18%) but also a lower disapproval rating (74%). The margin of error for the survey isn't given, though, so it's questionable how meaningful the ranking is for those two. Meanwhile Donald Trump's approval rating is still 38% in spite of everything, and his disapproval rating is only 57%. Leaders of Spain, Italy, and Argentina also fall into that mid-range; the most popular leaders among the countries surveyed were Indian PM Narendra Modi (70%), South Korean president Jae-myung (63%) and Czech PM Andrej Babiš (55%). From that it's probably safe to say that there's no correlation in either direction between how popular a leader is and how good they are.

- Electric vehicles are getting cheaper; even in the US they're increasingly competitive with conventional cars. Combine that with the impact of Trump's war on fuel prices and Americans just might find themselves dragged into the EV era, no matter how emasculating it might be to not hear that V8 roar when you press the accelerator.

- Two people have been arrested after allegedly opening fire on the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This comes only two days after someone else tried torching the place. Nobody was injured in either incident. Meanwhile a survey of  2,400 "knowledge workers" found that 29% of those surveyed admitted to taking actions to sabotage their companies' rollout of AI. Of course the way AI gets introduced is often pretty haphazard; some of the accounts given in this related Reddit thread are pretty telling:

"The majority of AI rollouts that I've seen have been 'Please guys, find any problem that we can solve with AI. Anything, please. Just do something, the executives don't have any ideas either but we need AI.' and then they blame the workers when there's not any useful use case."

"My wife's company had that. Find a way to build it into your workflow. Then suddenly someone changed they mind and they're requiring you NOT to use it. I think someone just found out how shit it can be. So now, weeks after being aggressively pushed to use AI whenever possible, it's now pause all AI use." 

I think in a lot of cases companies have been sold on the idea that investors want you introducing AI as soon as possible and that your stock value depends on this, so executives push people to find some use, any use, for the technology so that they can include metrics about how much they're using it in their annual reports. Certainly that's what the AI companies themselves would have you believe. And I guess day traders don't hold onto the stock long enough to see the technology fail to deliver anyway.

News roundup, 10 April 2026

- Several anonymous sources interviewed for an upcoming book report that in a series of Situation Room meetings earlier this year, various Trump advisors dropped hints that going to war with Iran would be a bad idea - but none of them except JD Vance pressed the issue. You know it's a mess when JD freaking Vance is the voice of reason.

- The American Automotive Policy Council, which represents the US automakers, is concerned about new EU vehicle safety standards that could limit the importation of gigantic pickup trucks. Andrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, suggests that this could breach the spirit of a trade deal with the US that the EU has signed but has not yet ratified.

- People who have worked with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say that he barely knows how to code and has a "surprisingly shallow" knowledge of how AI actually works. Then again, to do what he does you don't have to know how it works. You don't even have to know if it works, so long as you have plausible deniability about what you know or don't know when you issue an IPO. You just have to know how to sell stuff, and evidently Altman is very good at that.

- Conservative-turned-Liberal MP Marilyn Gladu was welcomed with open arms at the Liberal party convention in Montreal. When Mark Carney was asked about her rather sketchy past (which includes opposition to abortion, opposition to bans on conversion therapy, and support for the Freedom Convoy and other antivaxxers), he stated that Gladu has agreed to vote with the government on those issues. I guess she's flexible, if nothing else. Perhaps Gladu believed, rightly or wrongly, that she had to take such positions to run for office in a place like Sarnia even if she didn't actually believe in them. I'm guessing that she doesn't intend to run again and wants to end her career on the winning side. 

- Solar farms in the UK generated a record 14.1 gigawatts of power on Monday. That's pretty impressive for a country that's not exactly known for being sunny.

- Representatives of 85 countries will be meeting in Colombia at the end of this month for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Unlike UN-run climate summits, this will be governed by majority vote rather than consensus, preventing a small number of countries from sabotaging plans like Saudi Arabia and other petrostates did at COP30. The countries plan on putting together a workable plan for the transition; what could be promising is the fact that put together, the countries participating have enough economic heft to force investors to reconsider whether it's still worth investing in new fossil fuel reserves.

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, 12 June 2025

- An Air India Boeing 787 with 242 passengers and crew on board has crashed in a residential area shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad airport on a flight to London. This is the first crash of a 787; video here.

- California governor Gavin Newsom is warning that other states may soon see troops deployed as is happening in Los Angeles.

- Teachers in Alberta have overwhelmingly approved a strike mandate. Given the Smith government's unwillingness to be reasonable (indeed, their base probably considers unreasonableness to be a virtue) it seems unlikely that a strike will be avoided. Education in the province is not in good shape in any case; one school in Airdrie has closed its library and music room in order to convert those spaces into classrooms.

- Saskatchewan is following Alberta's lead in putting American booze back on the shelves. I guess it's too traumatic for the people of those provinces to not be able to get the Jack Daniels and Jim Beam they need to drink while listening to country music. Meanwhile, the return of the booze to Alberta shelves might not get as many takers as they're hoping; demand is down.

- A new law introduced by the Ford government in Ontario holds landlords, both residential and commercial, liable for drug offenses that occur on their premises. Penalties include fines of up to $250,000 and/or up to a year in jail. There are fears about the potential impact on homelessness, if people with addiction issues are denied leases, for instance. It may also pose a risk to music venues and nightclubs.

- When the EPA introduced a rule in 2009 that required industries to report their carbon emissions, this in itself led to a drop in emissions. Of course under the Trump regime this rule is being dropped.

- In addition to consulting AI chatbots about mental health matters, people are asking them for dating and relationship advice. I daresay this isn't such a great idea either. On a related note, Canadian AI researcher Yoshua Bengio is warning that current AIs seem to be putting their own interests ahead of ours, using things like deception. One AI apparently was observed to covertly insert its own code into another system to avoid being replaced. Bengio has founded a nonprofit called LawZero which he says will build AIs that don't do that stuff. Some folks in the related Reddit thread wish to remind us that OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit, then essentially said "Just kidding!" and became a for-profit company.

News roundup, 19 March 2025

- A 19 year old Winnipeg man, who has previously been charged with spraypainting antisemitic graffiti on buildings, is now facing several terrorism-related charges; these include two counts of commission of an offence for a terrorist group (not clear if the offence in question was the graffiti or something else), as well as one count each of facilitating a terrorist activity and participating in an activity related to a terrorist group.

- Speaking of vandalism and terrorism, the Trump regime's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has declared a recent outbreak of arson and other vandalism against Tesla vehicles and dealerships to be "nothing short of domestic terrorism". The thing is, the growing distaste for Elon Musk among thinking people around the world is actually starting to become a serious threat to Tesla. Auto insurers are planning to raise insurance rates for Tesla vehicles due to the high incidence of vandalism. Meanwhile a poll in Germany found that 94% of respondents would not consider buying a Tesla. And Tesla insiders are selling large amounts of stock. The latter point is particularly telling since insiders face strong constraints on how they trade shares in the company - they potentially would need to convince the SEC that they were trading on information available to anyone, not just insiders. So basically, the insiders are admitting that anyone can see that the stock is headed in the wrong direction. And now major investors in the company are starting to call for Musk's head. Be interesting to see what, if anything, the regime does in the event that Musk loses all his money.

- OpenAI is calling for a ban on Chinese AI products such as DeepSeek in the US. I could actually approve of that if they also banned American, European, and all other AI products, including OpenAI. That might be a very good idea, if you could somehow come up with an international treaty that the relevant countries could agree to. But since it's not going to happen, I'm not sure there's much point in banning one particular country's AIs. Sure, China's government is a nasty one, but that's largely irrelevant since they won't likely be in control of it either after a point. And it's hard not to notice that OpenAI themselves want to be exempted from all kinds of long-established copyright laws in order to compete with these Chinese products. It's not that they're libertarians - they want rules, they just don't want the rules to apply to them.

- The latest opinion polls put the federal Liberals in first place for the first time in a couple of years. The fact that the Conservative majority that seemed inevitable a couple of months ago may be slipping out of reach is definitely good news. Not such good news is the fact that the NDP has sunk so low that they will likely be largely irrelevant in the next parliament. It looks like either the Liberals will win a majority, or else they will win a plurality but need the support of the Bloc to form a government. That said, the NDP might not do quite as badly as the seat projection model predicts; such models usually look at the change in popular vote from the last election for a region of the country and adjust the vote in each riding in the region by that amount. So hopefully the prospect of the NDP losing all its Manitoba seats, as predicted by the model, won't come to pass.

- At the provincial level, of course, the NDP is doing much better in Manitoba. Shannon Corbett won an easy victory yesterday in the byelection forced by the death of Transcona MLA Nello Altomare.

- Donald Trump is claiming that pardons issued by Joe Biden in the dying days of his administration are null and void because the orders were signed using a device known as an autopen. The fact that a previous Republican administration had gotten approval for the use of an autopen to sign orders doesn't matter to the current regime, of course.

- A Republican member of Minnesota's state senate has been arrested on suspicion of soliciting an underage person for sex. Funny, I thought rightwingers were supposed to be all about protecting children...

News roundup, 16 Dec 2024

- Undeterred by the failure of the previous attempt, South Korea's National Assembly has impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol for his short-lived attempt to impose martial law. The president is now suspended from his role pending a hearing from the country's Constitutional Court; the prime minister, Han Duck-soo, will serve as interim president until the matter is resolved.

- Federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon has referred the dispute between Canada Post and its workers to the Canada Industrial Relations Board. He has further directed the board to order striking employees back to work if it determines the dispute is at an impasse. No doubt this is an attempt to be seen as helping to save Christmas, but it probably won't sit well with a lot of unionized federal employees. Conceivably this could create some opportunities for the NDP in places like Ottawa, since the current state of the Liberals is such that tactical voting to stop the Conservatives is probably futile, and in light of that civil servants might just decide to throw their vote behind a party that continues to stand up for them.

- The City of Winnipeg's decision to defer the full electrification of Winnipeg Transit's fleet is drawing negative reviews from some. Tom Brodbeck points out that while it is indeed true that the initial purchase costs of diesel buses are lower than electric buses, the actual operating costs (including maintenance) are higher, and suggests that the overall cost difference is pretty much a wash. He could also have pointed out that in many cases the service problems seen at Transit have more to do with the availability of drivers than buses, and that it will be a lot easier to get federal funding for electric buses now than it will be in another year. On a somewhat related note, the Amalgamated Transit Union is calling for fare evasion enforcement, ideally by community safety officers. They point out that most of the acts of violence against drivers and passengers come from fare evaders.

- Two women who are trying to sue a youth leader at a Winnipeg church for sexually assaulting them as well as the church for their alleged complicity have been ordered to front $50,000 each because they live outside the province and the court doesn't want any trouble collecting court costs if they lose.

- A whistleblower who alleged that OpenAI's use of copyright material goes beyond fair use has died in an apparent suicide. Naturally this has led to speculation that it wasn't really a suicide, though others have pointed out that it's quite possible for tech industry folks to make your life hell without taking any direct action to kill you; "you'll never work in this town again" applies to Palo Alto just as much as to Hollywood. In other OpenAI-related news, the company's CEO, Sam Altman, is donating a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration fund.

- Trump's transition team seeks to discard a policy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which requires vehicle manufacturers to report report crashes if advanced driver-assistance or autonomous-driving technologies were engaged within 30 seconds of impact. Elon Musk vehemently opposes the policy, perhaps because 40 out of 45 fatal crashes reported under the policy have involved his company's vehicles.

- A 19 year old conscript in the Russian military was reportedly shot to death by his commander after refusing to sign a contract to fight in Ukraine, after attempts at persuasion using a whip failed to deliver the desired results.

- The Southern Chiefs' Organization has announced that their grand chief Jerry Daniels will be taking a leave of absence for "health reasons" following an incident in which he was hospitalized following a fight outside an Ottawa bar.

News roundup, 22 July 2024

- Joe Biden has abandoned his bid for reelection and endorsed Kamala Harris. European leaders are praising him for his decision (even if it comes a bit late in the game) as well as for his actions as President. One thing is clear - you likely won't see much talk about the candidates' ages coming from the Republicans anymore.

- Many Republican strategists fear that their legislative agenda will alienate women. Many Democrats hope for that very thing; certainly if Harris becomes the candidate as expected she is expected to put this front and centre. And there are promising signs that the Republicans may have peaked too early; hopefully a relatively fresh and young candidate will be able to take advantage of this.

- While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly made statements about the need for caution with AI, whistleblowers from his company say that in actual practice he is using the traditional Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" approach.

- Over half of Turkey's power grid is now supplied by renewables, though they have a long way to go to catch up with places like the EU. The shift has been recent, and seems to be primarily motivated by a desire to reduce dependence on Russia, who supplies most of their fossil fuels.

- The zebra mussel situation at Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park is not looking good. Parks Canada is still looking at what measures they can take, but this ship may well have sailed. In other invasive species-related news, some lakes in Manitoba seem to have been illegally stocked with largemouth bass (a popular species with sport anglers). This is a potential problem for native trout and pickerel species.

- Manitoba's Residential Tenancies Branch has ordered the owners of that North End apartment block to reverse the eviction of all their tenants. Still not a good look, especially given that the landlord threw out some tenants' possessions without warning. The province warns that additional orders, and charges, may be pending. In other somewhat promising Winnipeg housing news, a long-vacant block in the Riverview neighbourhood has been purchased by Fisher River Cree Nation and may well be up and running by next year.

- CO₂ levels are now comparable to what they are thought to have been in the middle of the Pliocene epoch, around 3 million years ago. At that time the mean global temperature is estimated to have been about 3°C above present levels; this can be expected to happen over the next few decades unless dramatic changes are made right quick (and possibly even then). Much of Greenland was ice-free at the time; sea level may have been close to 10 metres above current levels. For an idea of what that might look like, check out this site.

- It's so hot in parts of the US that pop cans are under significantly more pressure than usual. When carried in airplanes, they're sometimes bursting as a result. In 20 cases, injuries have resulted.

- A former Ukrainian MP was fatally shot on Friday. She had been a member of an ultranationalist party and had drawn criticism for not considering Russian-speaking Ukrainians to be properly Ukrainian; nonetheless, this is not the optimal way of dealing with people with problematic views.

- Thefts of catalytic converters have dropped significantly in the past year. Some of this may be attributable to legislation that makes it harder for thieves to sell them, but a big part of it is simply that the precious metals in them aren't worth as much as they were before.

- At least 12 Russian soldiers died after eating poisoned watermelons in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

News roundup, 23 May 2024

- Norway, Ireland, and Spain have announced that they will be recognizing a Palestinian state. Not surprisingly the Israelis are up in arms; they're withdrawing their ambassadors from those countries as well as summoning those countries' ambassadors and making them watch video of female Israeli captives seized in the October attack. They're thus implying, not so subtly, that support for a Palestinian state necessarily means support for such atrocities. Some would say that tarring the entire Palestinian people with one brush that way is, well, racist, but I guess we're not allowed to say that.

- The University of Manitoba is getting pushback for their decision to remove the video of Dr. Gem Newman's valedictory address; many are understandably a bit uncomfortable that a single hissy fit from a billionaire donor is enough to get something like this done. Meanwhile both Newman and others have weighed in on the donor's comments.

- Julian Assange will get the opportunity to appeal his deportation to the US. Apparently the court was asking for written assurances from the American authorities that Assange would be accorded the same rights as a US citizen under the First Amendment, and the Americans were unwilling to provide that.

- A family medical practice in Ottawa is discharging all of its out-of-province patients, citing administrative difficulties with referrals and the like. The thing is, Ottawa lies on the provincial boundary, and forms a single metro area with its neighbouring city of Gatineau, Quebec. Many people live in one city and access services in the other, so some flexibility on this matter would have been nice.

- The team at OpenAI who were focused on long-term AI risks has been disbanded. The team had been plagued with resignations for months, however due to a "non-disparagement agreement" in the documents that you have to sign when leaving there have been few details of why. There are suspicions, though, mostly associated with CEO Sam Altman.

- Some residents in Newmarket, Ontario are going bananas over a proposed condo building - because they're worried about its impact on the local Tim Hortons. You can't make this stuff up, can you.

- An 18 year old student at the University of Victoria has died of a fentanyl overdose. Her parents believe that the 911 operator and campus security did not act fast enough; the province has ordered a coroner's inquest.

- A bear that climbed a tree in Winnipeg's Wildwood neighbourhood was successfully tranquilized and transported out of the city.

- The apartment complex in west Winnipeg that was evacuated last week due to structural concerns is fenced in and is supposed to have 24 hour security. One evacuee found out the hard way how reliable that security is - someone cut through the fence and stole her motorcycle, damaging another bike in the process. Meanwhile, people who live in houses behind the building have been warned to be ready to evacuate as well in case the worst happens.

- A woman in Dauphin, Manitoba has been arrested after stealing a septic truck from nearby Ebb and Flow First Nation and leading police on a chase, at times veering into the oncoming lane. Happily nobody was hurt in this little impromptu bit of real-life GTA.