News roundup, 17 June 2025

- Israel and Iran continue to launch strikes against each other. An Iranian newscaster was forced to run for cover from an incoming missile; casualties have been reported in that strike. Israel's defense minister has not denied targeting the TV station; indeed, before the attack he hinted that it would be a target. Iran also accuses the Israelis of targeting a hospital in the western part of the country. Meanwhile in Israel, a strike on an oil refinery killed three people and all of the city's oil facilities shut down as a precaution. At least 224 Iranians and 20 Israelis have died in the conflict so far.

- In the course of the unrest in Los Angeles over the last few days, several Waymo robotaxis were set on fire. Analysts say that such vehicles are "sitting ducks" for this sort of thing; because they're programmed to try not to run people over, if surrounded they have no defense. While the numerous cameras on the vehicles may be a deterrent to attackers, they are also a provocation as many fear that they may be gathering surveillance footage. Some are suggesting that including human drivers may be a deterrent, however this also defeats the purpose of autonomous vehicles, at least from the point of view of the owners.

- People in the US continue to show some resistance to ICE overreach. In the village of Westbury, on Long Island, residents saw a number of vehicles with masked agents in them, apparently waiting for parents to pickup their children so that they could apprehend any who looked like they could be undocumented immigrants. The agents quickly fled when confronted by a mob of residents. One of the fleeing agents ran a stop sign and got into an accident, injuring the driver of the other vehicle. The occupants of that vehicle quickly got into another ICE vehicle and left the scene.

- Disney and Universal are suing the AI company Midjourney for plagiarism due to the latter company's use of their intellectual property to train its products. I hate having to root for Disney, but somebody's got to bring these cowboys under control, and they're among the few companies with deep enough pockets to have a chance.

- The AI assistants provided by Google and Meta took an article from the Beaverton as fact, telling users that Cape Breton Island will be adopting a new time zone, 12 minutes ahead of Atlantic time and 18 minutes behind Newfoundland time. Given how fallible such systems are, it's kind of disconcerting that people are using them to make hiring decisions, not to mention the dating and mental health advice that we've already discussed here.

News roundup, 31 March 2025

- The new tariffs that the Trump regime is going to impose on automobiles and parts is going to impact all automakers, including American ones, but one automaker is expected to be impacted a lot less than the others. Guess which one.

- The regime is continuing with their efforts to curb activism by international students. Hundreds of students have already had their visas revoked, apparently for participating in protests against the war in Gaza. Last week Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish-born PhD student, was arrested by masked ICE officers and taken away in an unmarked vehicle; she had co-authored this op-ed for the university's newspaper last year, which I guess in their eyes constitutes "supporting Hamas".

- A fan was removed from the Toronto Blue Jays' home opener on Thursday for wearing a "Canada Is Not For Sale" hat, with security guards citing a ban on "political statements". Following the inevitable bad publicity, the organization has apologized to the man, and attributed the incident to an "error" on the part of staff. Some folks on the related Reddit thread have their doubts, though, saying that the Jays' chair Ed Rogers is a big Trump supporter and that security was going around in the stands stopping people from booing the American anthem.

- The Conservatives are doing their utmost to stop their supporters from saying the quiet part out loud. At Poilievre rallies across the country, they are seizing items such as MAGA hats and signs (as well as more mundane items such as knives and e-cigs) from people attending the events, presumably not wanting to give the media the opportunity to remind the non-crazy part of the Canadian population what the Cons are actually like. Stuff like this adds to fears among party insiders of division and dysfunction within the organization.

- The National Post is claiming to have found evidence of plagiarism in Mark Carney's 1995 PhD thesis. Funny thing is, most of the academics who actually went on record for the article dismiss the accusations. I guess the Post hopes that most people won't read beyond the headline.

- Paul Chiang, the Liberal candidate in the suburban GTA riding of Markham-Unionville, is facing criticism and calls for his withdrawal from the race after suggesting in a Chinese-language news conference that people should claim the bounty that China has placed on his Tory opponent, Joe Tay.

- The Vancouver Auto Show broke attendance records despite calls by the MAGAts for a boycott over their exclusion of Tesla from the event.

- A gospel singer is facing criticism for his fundraising pitch after delivering a speech to the 109th Pentecostal Assemblies for the World Convention in Baltimore last summer. Following the speech he asked church ushers to lock the doors until he got $40,000 in donations.

- China hopes to have a 100 megawatt hybrid fission-fusion reactor operating by 2030. The idea is to use the neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion to induce fission in uranium; since no chain reaction is involved it is considerably safer than many fission reactors and no enrichment is necessary (natural or even depleted uranium would suffice). If this could be achieved, this could be an important stepping stone to a pure fusion reactor.

Conference Board's reports on copyright contained plagiarized information

Oops:

One of Canada's most respected research organizations has a black eye after being forced to withdraw three reports on copyright and intellectual property because they contained plagiarized information from a study by a U.S. lobby group for the entertainment industry.

The Conference Board of Canada said it recalled the reports Thursday after an internal investigation showed that they relied too heavily on – and included entire paragraphs lifted from – a document produced by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA).

Globe and Mail

More on the "plagiarism" scandal

Not surprisingly, the Australian media have taken an interest in this story. The Australian has this to say:

John Howard was never renowned as a great orator. Much of the time he simply spoke from dot points.

But now a speech he gave five years ago has come ricocheting back across the Pacific after causing chaos in Canada's election campaign.

Two days after Mr Howard rose to his feet in the House of Representatives in March 2003 to announce Australia's defence forces had been authorised to go into action against Saddam Hussein, Canadian Conservative leader Stephen Harper repeated much of his case for intervention in the House of Commons in Ottawa -- word for word.

Mr Harper is now Prime Minister of Canada. His Conservatives are leading in the polls, but the plagiarism claims have derailed their campaign two weeks out from the October 14 election.

To say it has "derailed their campaign" seems a bit extreme, though it's an embarrassment for them. But if it reminds enough people about how gung-ho Harper was about going into Iraq at the time, it might do some good.

What's interesting is that neither the Australian, nor the ABC, nor the Sydney Morning Herald, nor any Canadian media outlet, seems to have bothered to ask John Howard what he thinks of this episode. You'd think that would be a rather obvious thing for a journalist to do. But there is nothing -- not even anything about Howard refusing comment, which leads me to believe that no comment was requested. The Australian article notes above that Howard often "spoke from dot points"; perhaps on this occasion he was reading from a speech that came from a ready-made template -- a template also used by Stephen Harper. But perhaps it's considered improper for professional journalists to raise that issue during the campaign.

Harper lifts Howard's speech

As aka Mycroft said at babble, small minds think alike:



I hate to say this, but kudos to the Liberals for finding this. And as others have already noted, the big story is not the alleged plagiarism, but the possibility that both Harper and Howard were reading from the same script, straight off Karl Rove's desk.