News roundup, 17 July 2024

- The City of Winnipeg has released a transportation plan that calls for residents to be using private automobiles for no more than 50% of trips by 2050 (it's currently about 80%). Of course 26 years is a long time; one would hope that some reductions in car use could happen before then.

- The UBC professor who made an injudicious tweet about the attempt on Donald Trump's life was apparently responding to another one by Shoshanah Jacobs, a biology professor at the University of Guelph, who had posted the video of the shooting with the comment "When 4 inches really matters". That university is also investigating the matter.

- Trump has selected JD Vance as his running mate for the fall. I guess Mike Pence was never in the running this time around. Vance apparently once declared himself to be a "Never Trumper", but it turns out he really meant "not a Trumper until it's necessary to further my political career". He's calling for tax rebates for fossil fuel powered cars instead of the ones for electrics, something that serves no real purpose other than to "own the libs". None of this, though, is enough to prevent some of the Republican base from making racist insults about his wife, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

- Wyoming has imposed restrictions on who can bid on oil and gas leases after a conservation organization, Wyoming Outdoor Council, bid on some leases in the hopes of preventing them from being developed.

- A severe storm hit Toronto on Tuesday morning, with roughly 76 mm of rain falling in the downtown core over a few hours and around 100 at Pearson Airport. Major flooding and power outages have resulted.

- Lab-grown meat has been approved in the UK for pet food; this is important because many pets (most notably cats) are obligate carnivores and can't live on a conventional vegan diet. Hopefully approval for human consumption will follow.

- Viet Duong Hoang, an engineering researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, has developed an autonomous drone that can recharge itself from the magnetic fields emitted by power lines without tapping into the lines So far, plans are to use them for the most obvious purpose - inspecting power lines.

- Remember Spirit Rising, the group home operator that made the news a while back for allegedly giving cannabis to their teenage wards, supposedly in the name of harm reduction? That already stretches the boundaries, but at least there was a kind of logic to it. More recently, though, it has been reported that they were also allowing their wards to be sexually exploited in return for alcohol and other drugs. That's worse than Sandra Guiboche's claim that she was helping with harm reduction because she was selling cleaner crack than the competition. And you can bet donuts to dollars that Poilievre will use this case as a "typical" example of harm reduction; one hopes that if he brings it up in an interview the reporter will ask him how many other cases like that he can name.

- Following an inspection that found that some fire safety systems were not working at a North End apartment complex, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service issued an order to the building's owner last Friday to remedy the situation. In particular, they ordered that the exits must remain clear and that a "fire watch" be put in place over the weekend, to keep the tenants safe until the problems were fixed. Instead the slumlord immediately evicted all tenants with no notice, giving them each a wad of cash equivalent to slightly over a month's rent to go away, presumably calculating that this would be cheaper than making the necessary repairs. Presumably they plan to either charge hire rents for the units once the fix is eventually made (essentially a low-budget renoviction), or else let the building become yet another vacant derelict building that someone can break into and burn down. Housing Minister Bernadette Smith is rightly appalled and condemns the mass eviction as illegal. Be nice if the province could just seize the building, fix it up, and permanently add it to Manitoba Housing's stock; we'll have to see.

- Members of a community Facebook page for Saskatoon's Fairhaven neighbourhood (yeah, those kind of people) are calling on the city to prune the lower branches of pine trees in parks in the hopes that this will stop people from sleeping under them.

- Winnipeg lawyer David Davis has pleaded guilty to professional misconduct after punching an articling student in the groin. He has been convicted of professional misconduct on three previous occasions; nonetheless he escaped with a six month suspension.

News roundup, 19 April 2024

- The situation in the Middle East doesn't seem to be improving, with reports of explosions in western Iran. Iran is warning that they will respond to an attack on their nuclear facilities with a like response, though whether they're holding back on something that could penetrate the "iron dome" is a good question. In Israel, the former head of their air defense forces has said that Iran's attack was a "declaration of war", though one can't help but thinking that attacking another country's diplomatic mission in a third country kind of seems like act of war in the first place... although Iran's response is clearly an escalation, and a dangerous one. It's also giving Netanyahu exactly what he wants, because remaining at war is his best chance of staying out of jail.

- Prominent members of the Kennedy family have publicly endorsed Joe Biden, mostly without mentioning their wayward relative Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A more interesting thing in that article, though, is this:

For its part, the Democratic National Committee has emphasized donations supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy from billionaire Timothy Mellon, a major MAGA Inc donor, pushing the concept that Kennedy Jr. is a “stalking horse” for Trump.

That differs from the approach of those supporting Trump, including the Make America Great Again Inc super PAC, which has aimed to paint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “leftist radical.”

The efforts by the two parties underscore concerns they both have that Kennedy could take votes away from their candidate.

Who will RFK Jr. hurt more? I guess that remains to be seen.

- They've now picked a full 12 jurors in Trump's criminal trial for the Stormy Daniels episode, though they're still looking for alternates. Opinions are divided on how strong the prosecution's case is. The thing is, the payment itself was not actually a crime; the prosecution is arguing that the falsification of business records to prevent the payment from becoming public before the 2016 election was the real crime.

- Pierre Poilievre is hinting that he just might dismantle the nascent pharmacare program upon his widely expected rise to power after the next election.

- Björn Höcke, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leader in the German state of Thuringia, who is already on trial for using a Nazi slogan in a campaign speech, is being investigated for having used the same slogan on another occasion as well.

- An Winnipeg inner city nonprofit, Sunshine House, has been operating a converted RV as a "mobile overdose prevention site", or MOPS since 2022. Essentially it's a safe consumption site on wheels, but they also test samples of street drugs, provide clean needles, pipes, and the like. In its first year of operation they had 26,154 visits to the vehicle, of whom 7,086 involved actual drug consumption; naloxone had to be administered 82 times, out of which 4 led to hospitalization. Nobody died. That certainly suggests that they've saved a lot of lives.

- Whereas Sunshine House's service provides pretty much everything except the actual drugs, we can't forget about Spirit Rising, the for-profit foster home operator that was discovered a couple of months ago to have, in a rather bold harm reduction initiative, been giving actual drugs to the kids. Now I kinda, sorta get the idea that at least they aren't doing meth or booze and all that, but giving 15 year olds a daily marijuana allowance still seems a bit suspect to me. Evidently the Winnipeg Police think so too.

- Ron DeSantis has signed into law a bill that allows schools to bring in chaplains, while vowing that the Satanic Temple will not be allowed to take advantage of this, as he does not consider them to be an actual religion. Given that they are recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt church, there may be some court battles ahead.

- The New South Wales Police say that 51 of their officers were injured in the riot following the stabbing of that bishop in Sydney on Monday night. The article shies away from ascribing any motive, though one can't help but wonder if it resulted from the cops trying to take the accused away before they were finished with him. Apparently the bishop, Mari Emmanuel, belongs to a rather fringe (and far-right) splinter group of the Orthodox Christian tradition.