News roundup, 14 July 2025

- Elizabeth May is calling for the federal government to impose a potash embargo on the US. As this would devastate the Canadian potash industry if done in isolation, she is calling for the government to buy the potash that would otherwise have been exported to the States and set it aside as a strategic reserve. She is also calling for them to reinstate the digital services tax, since removing it doesn't seem to have done any good. Seems like a good idea; whether Mark Carney will take the advice remains to be seen however.

- Solar power now has the largest share of Europe's electricity generation, narrowly topping nuclear and far above fossil fuels.

- A farm worker was killed and several hundred were arrested in an ICE raid on a farm in California. The worker had climbed to the roof of a greenhouse in the hope of avoiding the raid and fell to his death.

- A US District Court in California has requested that the LAPD please stop shooting journalists, even if it's just with rubber bullets. 

- Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has acknowledged what many of us already recognize - that Israel actually is guilty of war crimes and that not everyone who points that out is an antisemite.

- The MAGA crowd are losing whatever remained of their minds over the latest Superman movie, calling it "super woke" and accusing it of attempting to indoctrinate viewers. Their concerns centre partly around the fact that Superman/Clark Kent is explicitly called an immigrant.  This is of course true, but then the guy is from another planet, what else are you going to call him? And the pro-Israel crowd is incensed over a plot point in the film - a conflict between two fictional nations, one of which is brutally occupying the other. The countries aren't directly based on Israel and Palestine, of course (the occupier seems to be imagined as a former Soviet republic while the other is some unspecified west Asian one) but it's kind of telling that ultra-Zionists feel threatened by any fictional presentation of a brutal occupation.

- A radio station in Swan River, Manitoba was destroyed by fire on Thursday; investigators have concluded that it was arson. The incident follows a heated discussion on a social media account run by the station owner. Following the death of a passenger in the car that also killed two much loved members of the Winnipeg arts community, a post made reference to the dead passenger's criminal history. Given that he's dead there's not much of a public interest in the details of said history unless it was really weird or interesting (which it isn't), so a lot of people thought that it was needlessly hurtful to his family to dwell on the matter. That said, torching a radio station does seem like an excessive response.

News roundup, 1 July 2025

- Numerous nonprofits, including Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Oxfam, are calling for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint US-Israeli operation, to be shut down. They accuse the organization of putting people in harm's way by essentially serving as a honeypot for the IDF.

- The Carney government's move to cancel the digital services tax may have been short-sighted. The next thing in the Trump regime's sights is supply management, and getting rid of that would be a hard sell indeed. Fortunately, a recently passed piece of legislation, Bill C-202, explicitly prohibits trade negotiators from "making any commitment on behalf of the Government of Canada" that would impact supply management.

- Criminologists report that homicides in the US, after peaking dramatically in 2020-2021, have declined just as dramatically. It is believed that the spike was driven by the pandemic, and that the decline was driven by the return of jobs and services that had been disrupted.

- A church in Winnipeg's West End has just held its final service; the building will be donated to a nonprofit to serve as housing for seniors. 

- A man who had been assaulted by a crowd of people was taken to the drunk tank at the Main Street Project after being medically cleared by paramedics, and was again cleared on arrival, however he died shortly afterwards. The death is under investigation; if I had to guess it might be that he sustained a concussion in the assault and the symptoms were mistaken for signs of intoxication, but we'll have to see.

- British punk/rap act Bob Vylan, as well as Irish rap group Kneecap, are being investigated for possible "public order offenses" over things they said from the stage at the Glastonbury music festival. Bob Vylan chanted "death to the IDF" (the BBC is apologizing for not pulling the plug on the live broadcast) while Kneecap also made anti-Israeli chants as well as attacking UK prime minister Kier Starmer. The Trump regime has revoked Bob Vylan's visas for a planned US tour; Liberal MP Anthony Housefather and several Conservative MPs are calling for Canada to take similar measures. I do have to wonder if an artist who chanted "death to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" would have been subject to the same scrutiny.

News roundup, 30 June 2025

- The US Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of nationwide injunctions so that they only apply in the jurisdictions that brought the matter to court in the first place - severely limiting courts' abilities to stop the Trump regime's efforts to limit birthright citizenship (and potentially many other things).

- A man has been charged with mischief after allegedly vandalizing the National Holocaust Monument with red paint and the slogan "feed me" (apparently a reference to Israeli starvation tactics against the Palestinians). While anger at Israel for this is more than justified, it's hard to justify expressing said anger with an attack on a monument to a crime that was committed against the Jewish people before Israel even existed. The suspect is a lawyer who was employed by the City of Ottawa until his arrest, whereupon he was fired.

- The federal government has decided to cancel the digital services tax in the hope of appeasing the Trump regime sufficiently to get them to reopen negotiations on tariffs.

- A poll suggests that the majority of supporters of the Conservative party in Manitoba say that they would either definitely or probably vote to leave Canada. The "definitely or probably" group accounted for only 22% of Manitobans overall, but 52% of supporters of the provincial Conservatives and 56% of supporters of the federal party lean towards separatism. On the positive side, this will make it harder for the Cons to court non-extremists; on the downside, under our first past the post electoral system this will probably make it harder for reasonable alternatives to the Liberals (e.g. the NDP or Greens) to make any headway.

- Winnipeg's revamped bus network made its debut yesterday; whether it improves service for more people than it worsens it remains to be seen.

- Manitoba's Minister of Families, Nahanni Fontaine, had an unfortunate hot-mic moment when, at a graduation ceremony for indigenous women, she muttered to her assistant about the placement of the ASL interpreter in a way that could have been interpreted as a complaint about the very presence of said interpreter. Unfortunately her utterance was picked up by an APTN camera crew. Fontaine, whose responsibilities include people with disabilities, has apologized about the matter, though some members of the deaf community are not satisfied.

News roundup, 29 May 2025

- A provincewide state of emergency has been declared in Manitoba due to the wildfires in the north and east. Around 17,000 people have been evacuated, including the entire city of Flin Flon as well as the First Nations communities of Pimicikamak and Pukatawagan and the Northern Affairs community of Cross Lake. Most of the evacuees are being sent to Winnipeg; a reception centre has been set up at an arena in the northewestern part of the city. The military is being brought in to assist.

- Besides the various other provisions in the omnibus bill that Donald Trump has dubbed the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" such as the ban on AI regulation, the bill also effectively tears up a Canada-US tax treaty that has been in place since 1942. This is presented as a retaliatory measure against taxes that Trump considers to be unfair, such as the digital services tax introduced in 2024. The bill has yet to clear the Senate but this is expected to occur, and Trump expects to sign it into law in time for the 4th of July. More interesting, though, is the fact that Elon Musk is criticizing the bill for increasing the deficit, saying that it undermines his own work at DOGE, and is now leaving his role with the regime.

- Despite the Trump regime slapping tariffs on countries near and far, some countries are getting sweetheart deals. Among them are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which Trump presumably likes because they don't do that nasty democracy stuff and buy lots of American ordinance to drop on Yemen.

- Two Calgary lawyers with the so-called "Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms" are facing possible disbarment for dishonourable professional conduct after they hired a private investigator to spy on the judge hearing one of their cases.

- A Hamilton landlord has been fined $100,000 for four illegal "renovictions". Under the law, tenants evicted for renovations are entitled to "right of first refusal" for their old units, but the landlord immediately offered the units to other people at more than double the rents the original tenants were paying. Evidently he hoped the authorities wouldn't do anything about it; surprisingly, they did.

- Two human smugglers convicted after a family of four froze to death attempting to cross the Canada-US border in January of 2022 have received substantial prison sentences in a Minnesota court. The ringleader was given a ten year sentence; the driver sent to pick them up got 6½ years.

- Germany is offering to host a satellite campus for Harvard University so non-Americans can still attend the institution.

- The Swiss village of Blatten, population around 300, was devastated by a landslide that resulted from the partial collapse of a glacier. One person has been reported missing.