News roundup, 24 March 2026

- New York's LaGuardia Airport has reopened after Sunday's fatal collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck. The NTSB is investigating the accident; they are expected to scrutinize the role of the air traffic controller who cleared the truck onto an active runway as well as staffing levels that may have led to the controller being overworked.

- The funding shortfall for the Department of Homeland Security continues, with TSA workers still not receiving paycheques. Trump has insisted that any funding deal has to allow his "SAVE America Act", which complicates voter registration for many voters (significantly, those whose current legal name differs from that on their birth certificate, such as the majority of married women in the country) to move ahead. However, some Republicans in the Senate are getting antsy as more people's flights down to resorts get delayed or cancelled, fearing that said voters might turn on them.

- The European Union and Australia have signed a trade agreement. Negotiations on the agreement had been going on for eight years, but the rise of the Trump regime seems to have focused their minds on getting a deal.

- The Carney Liberals continue to lead the Conservatives by a significant margin. Of course, voters are a fickle lot, and this could change easily based on outside factors (e.g. high fuel prices resulting from the war in Iran).

- Amanda Lathlin, who represented The Pas-Kameesak in the Manitoba legislature for the NDP, has died at the age of 49. She was the first First Nations woman to serve in the legislature.

News roundup, 15 Oct 2025

- New York Attorney General Letitia James has been criminally charged with bank fraud, based on claims that she misrepresented her residency when applying for a mortgage in 2020. A Virginia prosecutor has already concluded that there is no real basis for charges, but since James is a black woman who won a case against Trump, the regime isn't going to let a lack of grounds interfere with the prosecution.

- Larry Bushart Jr., a former cop in Perry County, Tennessee, responded to a Facebook post announcing a vigil in honour of Charlie Kirk by posting a meme of Trump responding "We have to get over it", which he did only a day after a school shooting in Iowa last year. Somehow, this was interpreted by members of the Facebook group as a threat, and Bushart was arrested for making "threats of mass violence".

- Air travellers in the US are now supposed to be shown a video of Homeland Security Secretary (and noted dog killer) Kristi Noem blaming the Democrats for delayed flights as they go through security, though there is some question of whether the regime has the authority to order this, and many airports are refusing to show the video.

- Hungary's intelligence service has been running a spy network against multiple EU institutions for years, according to a report from the Belgian newspaper De Tijd.

- Russia's forces invading Ukraine include some 180,000 convicts who have been offered pardons in return for their military service. Some of them were convicted of heinous crimes, including murder and rape; apparently Vladimir Putin is now starting to worry about what will happen when the war ends and these people return to Russian society en masse.

- An explosion destroyed an explosives manufacturing facility in rural Tennessee, killing all 16 workers at the plant.

- A resident of a homeless encampment in Winnipeg's Centennial neighbourhood was arrested after allegedly throwing a bottle at a child and chasing him. The child was not injured. Stuff like this gives ammunition to those calling for a hard line against encampments, though it's worth noting that the last time something like this happened folks in the relevant Reddit thread pointed out that kids had been harassing the guy for months. In contrast to the more recent case, in that situation there were apparently no charges laid, so perhaps this case is different.

Has the TSA finally gone too far?

The recent intensification in US airport security has gone over extremely poorly, and with good reason. Consider what they did to this woman:



Now truth to tell, I'm not sure whether or not X-rays are actually harmful to breast milk. X-rays are a form of ionizing radiation, and not good for living tissue, but I'm not sure how much effect they'd actually have on the milk. Still, I can't blame anyone for preferring to be safe than sorry, especially if it says in the rules that breast milk doesn't have to go through the X-ray. And for trying to point out what the rules actually say, she was put through hell. And I'm sure this is far from the only example of such harassment; if there's anything unusual about this case it might be the fact that the victim was white.

The thing is, even when the rules are followed things are crazy enough. Consider this point raised by Roger Ebert:

It appears that not a single TSA agent has declined to perform a full-body pat down of airline passengers. That includes patting down small children. They're not patted down on a routine basis, but on some occasions they can be and they are. A child under 12, sometimes way under 12, may be required to remove outer clothing and be touched on such areas as the genitals.

This is so high on the WTF scale that it beggars the imagination. All this makes me wonder, though, if there might not be a silver lining of sorts to this very dark cloud. While I'm not sure I'd go so far as the Bishop of London, England in saying that flying is a sin, it is the worst form of travel from a climate perspective, and I suspect that a lot of people will start to think hard about whether they really need to fly after being submitted to indignities like this a few times. It would be interesting to track Greyhound and Amtrak ticket sales before and after the new policies came into place. Of course, if there are signs of a major shift, the airlines will start to lobby for the TSA to be put into the train stations and bus terminals too; can't have unfair competition after all.

And what will happen to tourism? Even if the Americans eventually submit meekly to this stuff, will people whose own countries don't put them through this stuff every time they fly want to visit a place like that? I certainly have no enthusiasm for flying to the US any time soon, that's for sure.

And, predictably, a lot of people are saying that the solution to this problem is to only do it to brown people.