Showing posts with label Stormy Daniels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stormy Daniels. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

News roundup, 4 June 2024

- Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist who had previously served as mayor of Mexico City as well as on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will become Mexico's first female president, having won nearly 60% of the vote in Sunday's election.

- In South Africa, last Wednesday's election has produced a hung parliament, forcing the incumbent African National Congress government to seek out potential coalition partners.

- In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which consists of the BJP and allied parties, are projected to increase their majority based on exit polls.

- Americans are, not surprisingly, deeply divided over the conviction of Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. On the positive side, some independent voters say they're less likely to vote for Trump as a result of the conviction; on the other hand some of the MAGA diehards openly called for violence in response to their hero's conviction.

- A Florida company hopes to revive an old plan to extract groundwater from Wyoming and send it into the Colorado River basin via pipeline. This is of course a rather ambitious idea, and there are numerous doubts about its feasibility, both at the technical and the political level. But as times get more desperate in the American Southwest, there will be more proposals like this.

- The indigenous inhabitants of Gardi Sugdub, a small island off Panama's Caribbean coast, are preparing to relocate to the mainland in the face of the inevitable loss of their homeland to rising sea levels.

- Dangerously high temperatures are expected in much of the US in the coming weeks and through the summer. Meanwhile Mexico City could be at risk of running out of water within a matter of weeks, and in the Mexican state of Tabasco there have been reports of monkeys dying of heat stroke and falling out of trees.

- Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo expressed disbelief and disappointment at reports that his successor threatened a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile the Israeli newspaper Haaretz say that they were blocked from publishing a story about this matter two years ago by the Israeli government.

- Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused China of pressuring countries out of attending a peace conference being held later this month in Switzerland, though he did not name any countries or pressure tactics specifically.

- Two candidates in the Louis Riel School Division byelection being held this Thursday are using far-right dog whistles about "parental rights". The fact that there are two of them is actually somewhat reassuring, as it suggests that the movement doesn't have the level of organization needed to make sure only one of them runs to avoid splitting the vote. What's far less reassuring, though, is the fact that support for LGBT* rights has declined markedly in Canada, and furthermore the decline has been worse here than in many countries. My suspicion with regard to the latter is that Trudeau has become so hated that many of the simple-minded masses have reflexively decided that they're opposed to anything he's for, or that Pierre Poilievre is against, even if they don't have a good understanding of the issue.

- Singapore police have been given access to diagnostic tools to extract data from a vehicle's event data recorder. They applied this in the case of a driver suspected of speeding; this was accepted by the court as legitimately collected evidence, and she received five days in jail and a two year driving prohibition. There is no indication as to how fast she was driving.

- A man was stabbed in a bikejacking last Thursday morning in front of the University of Winnipeg. The victim was apparently walking the bike when he was confronted by the attacker.

Friday, May 31, 2024

News roundup, 31 May 2024

- Donald Trump has been convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. He responded pretty much as you'd expect Donald Trump to respond. Despite the fact that these are felony convictions, the chance of an actual custodial sentence may not be that high.

- A recent poll has revealed that Joe Biden has serious problems appealing to younger voters. Among voters under 45, he leads Trump by only 4 points, although the lead among millennials and Gen Z specifically is a bit higher, at 6 points. What's really worrisome, though, is that if you include RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West in the polling, Trump is 6 points ahead with Gen Z/Millennials and 8 with the under 45s overall.

- Justin Trudeau says that he wants to make housing more affordable for younger folks... while not bringing down values for existing homeowners. This is of course probably not possible, and it illustrates a serious problem that  nearly all governments face in tackling the housing crisis. Because if you drive down property values, you make older folks (aka the people most likely to vote) feel less well off. Another problem, not mentioned in the article, is that if you drive down housing prices you weaken the main source of revenue for municipalities and, in some provinces, school boards.

- An investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call has found that Israel's intelligence agencies have been spying on the International Criminal Court for a decade. They are also not above intimidation evidently; following Palestine joining the court in 2015, two men showed up at the home of ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and handed her an envelope with cash and an Israeli phone number, and people familiar with the case suspect that the real reason was to make it clear to her that they knew where she lived. They also hacked her email. Some legal experts recommend that these actions be investigated as "offences against the administration of justice".

- Following yet another instance of shots being fired at a Jewish school, this one in Toronto, Doug Ford was quick to suggest, without evidence, that immigrants were to blame.

- A bill to recognize Two-Spirit and Transgender Day of Visibility was passed in the Manitoba legislature. What's interesting is that most of the Tory opposition voted with the NDP government to pass the bill, though four of them voted against it - Kelvin Goertzen (Steinbach), Josh Guenter (Borderland), Konrad Narth (La Verendrie), and Ron Schuler (Springfield-Ritchot).

- A city councillor in Whitehorse introduced a motion calling on the mayor to write a letter on behalf of the city to the prime minister and the foreign affairs minister calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The motion was ruled out of order due to it being outside the city's jurisdiction.

- A Winnipeg bakery that has experienced several robberies, most recently one in which someone pushed her way behind the counter, scaring off the staff, and took the cash from the till, has decided to go cashless. Under the circumstances I can't blame them, but if this becomes a trend, especially with services more essential than a rather niche bakery, it will be very bad for people who can't open a bank account (say, because they don't have a fixed address).

Saturday, April 20, 2024

News roundup, 20 April 2024

-  Jury selection is now complete for Donald Trump's trial on the Stormy Daniels case. In other trial-related news, the New York Times has obtained information about where the jurors and alternates get their news; looking at juror #2, I have to wonder why the prosecution allowed that one. Meanwhile a man has died after setting himself on fire in front of the courthouse yesterday.

- Mike Pence accuses Trump of "betraying the pro-life movement" by moderating his stance on abortion. Division of this sort is good news for the Democrats.

- The US Forest Service is losing firefighters, even as the wildfire situation gets worse.

- Mayoral candidates in two different Mexican cities were found dead on the same day. Some 15 other candidates have been killed in the campaign period leading up to the elections scheduled for June; drug cartels are the most likely suspects.

- Assiniboine Credit Union is seeking to absorb two more institutions, Westoba Credit Union and Caisse Financial Group; if approved by the membership of the three entities this will be the only bilingual credit union in the province.

- While you can hardly throw a stone in Winnipeg without hitting a dope store, the province currently prohibits people from growing their own. This may be about to change, however; the government is expected to announce that Manitoba will be joining most other provinces in allowing it.

- Apparently they've developed an algorithm that tries to assign a risk score indicating how likely a person is to become addicted to opioids. Since this is a proprietary algorithm, though, it can't be easily scrutinized for accuracy, and it could leave a mark on patients' records that could be very hard to remove.

- Researchers are trying to selectively breed corals for heat tolerance in the hope of saving some coral reefs.

Friday, April 19, 2024

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.

Monday, April 15, 2024

News roundup, 15 April 2024

- Iran launched a number of missiles and drones at Israel over the weekend, stating that this was retaliation for the attack on Iran's embassy in Damascus earlier this month. The attack had little effect owing to Israel's advanced air defense systems.

- Jury selection for Donald Trump's first actual criminal trial, regarding the hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, begins on Monday. Finding twelve jurors who are sufficiently impartial about Mr. Trump will be a challenge, though. Some are hoping that the details that come out during the trial will be "mortifying" for Trump, but that makes the questionable assumption that he is capable of feeling shame. In other Trump news, shares in Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, are down by about 20% for the week and over 47% so far this month.

- Six people were killed and several others wounded in a stabbing attack in a mall in a suburb of Sydney before the attacker was shot to death by police. The attacker was known to police and wasn't a well fellow by the sound of it.

- Despite the fact that pretty much everyone in a position of authority knows better, new coal plants continue to be built and places that are phasing them out aren't doing it near fast enough. I hate to advocate for geoengineering given all the risks, but they're making it harder and harder to avoid that.

- Four out of the five councillors in the Rural Municipality of Armstrong, in Manitoba's Interlake region, have resigned citing a "toxic work environment" and leadership problems. Details of these issues have not been made public so far, but rural and small town politics can be a pretty nasty business (see for instance the case of St Andrews mayor Joy Sul).

- Danielle Smith hopes that Red Deer will grow tenfold from its current population of 106,000. Many locals aren't so keen. Setting that aside, one wonders if Smith is really thinking things through on this matter, since the rise of a third huge city in the province would probably require a lot of people to move there from outside the province, and this would probably not favour the UCP electorally.

- Former Thunder Bay police chief Sylvie Hauth has been charged with obstruction and breach of trust, becoming the third employee of the force to face criminal charges in the last few months. Meanwhile in Durham Region the police force there released personal information about a woman who had complained about being threatened by cyberstalkers directly to said cyberstalkers in response to a freedom of information request.

- A new law in Florida, just signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, effectively prevents civilian boards from investigating police misconduct.