News roundup, 2 Dec 2024

- The International Court of Justice is opening two weeks of hearings into the obligations of the international community towards countries vulnerable to climate change. The plaintiffs, including several island nations that face annihilation due to rising sea levels, are calling on the court to rule that they are being unlawfully subjected to harm and to specify what actions are required. Any ruling will be non-binding, however.

- The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a section of BC's Opioid Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act (ORA), which allows the province to sue manufacturers and distributors of opioids, is legal. The companies had argued that the section was unconstitutional due to interprovincial jurisdiction issues.

- Vancouver's city council has voted to retain a rule that prohibits natural gas heating in new construction in the city, after three councillors from the dominant ABC party broke ranks and voted with the opposition.

- Siloam Mission, a Winnipeg homeless shelter, reports an increasing number of seniors accessing their services. Other organizations, such as the seniors' advocacy group CanAge, also say that there has been a sharp rise in homelessness in that demographic.

- The Public Works Committee of Winnipeg City Council has voted to move ahead with a reduction of the speed limit on Wellington Crescent between River Avenue and Academy Road following the fatality earlier this year. If passed by council as a whole, the speed limit will be reduced from 50 to 30 km/h until protected bike lanes can be installed.

- The town of Gravenhurst in Ontario's Muskoka Region has declared a state of emergency after receiving around 140 centimetres of snow over the weekend.

- Searchers at the Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg have narrowed down the part of the landfill most likely to contain the remains of two of Jeremy Skibicki's victims, and this week the debris will be sifted for the remains.

- A mall in Montreal is playing the rather grating children's song "Baby Shark" in its emergency exit stairwells in order to discourage homeless people from loitering there.

News roundup, 6 Aug 2024

- Kamala Harris is expected to announce her running mate today. The most likely choices are two governors, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, as well as Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. Polling suggests that Kelly is the most popular with the public.

- A Virginia man has been charged with posting large numbers of threats to social media. Targets include Kamala Harris as well as Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and FBI director Christopher Wray.

- Across the UK, the rioting sparked by disinformation about the identity of the suspect in the mass stabbing in the town of Southport that killed three children continues. The suspect is Rwandan and has no apparent connection to Islam, but the rioters aren't letting the truth get in the way of a good time.

- A former sessional lecturer at Brandon University believes that at least half of his students have used AI to cheat. Among other things, he says some of their essays referenced sources that didn't exist (a common issue with using AI for this purpose). On a possibly more positive note, there seems to be a backlash building against the widespread use of AI, with some companies withdrawing their use of the technology (or at least not promoting their use of it anymore).

- Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre is looking at installing weapon scanners to reduce the risk of violence to front line staff.

- Fentanyl was involved in four out of five overdose deaths in Canada last year. Up until now, most of the fentanyl sold on Canadian streets has been imported, but since 2019, when China cracked down on the export of the drug, more of the production has been domestic. The pandemic, with its impact on supply chains, has accelerated the trend. Now I'm all in favour of "on-shoring" industry, but maybe not this one.

- The man convicted of manslaughter after throwing the trailer hitch that fatally injured Barbara Kentner in Thunder Bay in 2016 has had his day parole revoked following several breaches of his conditions. These include impaired driving, theft, and associating with people with whom he was ordered not to consort. The parole board also noted that he'd gotten a Confederate flag tattoo while on day parole, which doesn't speak favourably to the success of efforts to rehabilitate him.

- Power utilities are paying people to hand over control of their thermostats during high demand periods. The energy savings are significant; the utilities sometimes refer to such measures as "virtual power plants" because of the amount of additional energy they make available to the system.

News roundup, 13 March 2024

- This past winter (the meteorological winter ends on the 1st of March, not the equinox), was the warmest winter in the US in over a century of records. The Lower 48 had an average temperature of +3.1°C (37.6°F); that's 3°C above average. Those numbers don't fully convey the story, though. Leaves are budding on trees weeks earlier than normal, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have been essentially ice-free all winter, and mosquitoes were biting in Michigan as early as February.

- Since Paris moved to triple parking costs for SUVs, other cities are looking to follow their example. It's almost as if everybody knew it was a good idea, but nobody had the nerve to go first until Anne Hidalgo did.

- Manitoba's minimum wage will be going up to $15.80 an hour this fall. It did not go up this past fall because the deadline to make a decision on the matter came too soon after the election, and the new government, rightly or wrongly, was reluctant to make a snap decision on the matter. In the long run they want to bring it up to a "living wage", currently pegged at $19/h by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

- The interim leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, Wayne Ewasko, is following the standard rightwing playbook, calling for parents to be notified when their kids request to be addressed by different pronouns at school. I'm sure that the life of a trans kid in, say, the RM of Hanover would not be made any easier by this (not that it's easy in any case, of course) but it seems the PCs don't care and are doubling down on the far-right messaging that contributed to their defeat last fall.

- Manitoba Public Insurance has suspended the sale of "special risk extension" coverage for truckers that operate outside the province. The Tories are trying to make political hay with this by accusing the NDP of "abandoning" truckers; funny thing is, though, MPI says that they made this move in August, while the Tories were still in power.

- The City of Winnipeg's Executive Policy Committee has voted 5-1 in favour of moving ahead with reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians. It will not be surprising to anyone that North Kildonan councillor Jeff Browaty was the holdout.

- Loblaws, like many grocery companies, has been pushing hard on self-checkout, but they're having to take measures to combat theft, like setting up gates with receipt scanners at the exits. Many customers find this to be an alienating experience, of course. Interestingly, Loblaws claims that this is largely driven by "organized crime", even as many studies find that self-checkout makes thieves of previously honest people (and that's not even counting the number of people who accidentally fail to scan an item). In other places, many chains are abandoning it entirely, finding that it's not even cutting down on their labour costs.

- Many people think of opioid addiction as a big city problem. In fact, in Canada at least, when municipalities are sorted by population, the ones with the highest incidence of hospitalization from overdoses are small cities between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and the next worst are municipalities with less than 10,000. Hospitalizations were actually least common in large cities over half a million.