News roundup, 5 May 2026

- The US military is making moves to open the Strait of Hormuz to their vessels by force. This is going about as well as you might expect. Iran claims to have hit a US frigate; the US denies this. The UAE intercepted several missiles that it says were launched at it by Iran. While they did not reach their targets, a drone was able to set fire to an oil facility in the emirate of Fujairah. Trump is responding to all this in his trademark style, naturally; he's also proposing to use his navy to escort ships through the strait (people who actually know anything about warfare are skeptical, of course). I guess the one good thing is that at least this is happening in the spring, though there's no guarantee that this will be over by the fall when the need for natural gas for heating is going to spike.

- Another building owned by the nonprofit Winnipeg Housing Rehabilitation Corporation is getting attention for all the wrong reasons after the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority has deemed the building too dangerous for their home care staff to visit. Residents have to go to the nearby Indigenous Family Centre in order to meet with staff; this is obviously suboptimal since people who need home care are generally, well, housebound.

- The Manitoba government has proposed changes to drinking water safety legislation that have sent a lot of rural folks into a tizzy. Among the changes - it clearly specifies that property owners are responsible for the safety of wells on their property. Usually rural types like to natter about "personal responsibility", especially when someone talks about things like systemic causes of crime, but evidently they don't like it when it's applied to them. The legislation also allows medical officers to order chlorination for any well that serves more than one residence - something that worries many Hutterite colonies.

- A Toronto prosecutor was caught apparently berating a police officer who was a witness for the defense in the case of a man accused of deliberately ramming another officer with a motorcycle. There was no sound on the video, but witnesses say that she was swearing at him and, in response to him saying "What am I supposed to do, lie?" she allegedly said "We protect our own!" The judge has tossed the case; folks in this Reddit thread say that the prosecutor in question is married to a cop.

- New legislation being introduced by the Kinew government in Manitoba will require anyone who causes death or bodily harm by impaired driving, in the event that they get their license back, to have a zero blood alcohol content while driving. The government has previously added a provision that anyone convicted a of impaired driving a second time within a ten year period will be permanently banned from driving. 

- A 41 year old man in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba has been arrested after filming himself kicking a 71 year old stranger. The motive is not clear, but I'd hazard a guess that it's a modern version of "happy slapping", a rather unpleasant activity that became trendy in the UK in the mid-noughties.

News roundup, 5 Feb 2026

- Jeff Bezos has ordered massive layoffs at the Washington Post, affecting a third of the newspaper's workforce. Among other things, the entire Middle East desk will be gone, as will be the paper's Ukraine bureau chief and correspondent. Former Executive Editor Marty Baron condemns this and previous decisions by Bezos, which he calls "ill-conceived". The thing is, though, they're only "ill-conceived" if you're thinking in terms of the greater good; if you're thinking in terms of Bezos' personal interests they aren't ill-conceived at all, especially in light of how Donald Trump is making new threats regarding the broadcast licenses of major networks in the US.

- The Trump regime appears to be issuing selective exemptions to tariffs for companies with which he has a good relationship. Nothing suspicious about that at all...

- Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi is warning federal leadership candidates to treat Alberta with kid gloves so that he has a chance of defeating Danielle Smith next year. Meanwhile, leadership candidate Rob Ashton singled out Avi Lewis for "turning New Democrats against each other".

- The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is taking over the Golden Door Geriatric Centre, a personal care home in the Fort Garry district of the city whose private owners had announced plans to close the facility. Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says that the province is working to fill the numerous beds that the owners had been leaving vacant in order to prepare for the closure.

- A little known fact - ICE actually has offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Their agents don't have the power of arrest in this country; they claim that these agents (who are not armed) assist in the investigation of international crimes. NDP MP Heather McPherson is calling on the Carney government to close those offices "until the human rights crisis is resolved"; whether the government will do so remains to be seen.

- Manitoba Hydro is hiring institutional safety officers for its downtown office tower following a seemingly random attack by a methed up teenager with a knife. Manitoba Housing is also hiring such officers for its downtown office. Unlike run-of-the-mill security guards, these officers have specialized training; they are equipped with handcuffs and pepper gel and are empowered to make arrests. CUPE, which represents Hydro employees, is calling for the officers to be deployed as soon as possible.

- Manitoba currently has the highest incidence of measles in Canada. To the surprise of few, these cases are concentrated mostly in the Southern Health Region, and in particular a church in Winkler, though some people were infected in Winnipeg after people from the province's Bible Belt were hospitalized at HSC. 51 confirmed and three probable cases have been reported in the province as of the 24th of January. This compares to 319 confirmed cases of measles and 29 probable cases last year, and only 18 cases between 2000 and 2024. At least 86% of the cases were in unvaccinated people; another 6.2% were in people of unknown vaccination status.

- Following the drowning death of a 12 year old student at a scuba school in Texas, her family sued the school. One thing that has come up in court is the fact that the school's owner had been caught on video bragging about the number of fatalities he'd gotten away with, which does not inspire confidence.