News roundup, 20 March 2026

- Iran's retaliatory measures seem to have escalated. A strike on natural gas facilities in Qatar has reportedly wiped out 17% of the country's export capacity for at least three years. Whether the MAGAts will be able to draw a connection between their Dear Leader's war and the inevitable increase in the cost of home heating is an open question. While a handful of those people might actually change their ways, the best possible outcome for most of them would be for them to become sufficiently disillusioned that they don't bother to vote anymore. And some will stubbornly keep voting for Trump and his associates out of sheer spite, taking consolation in the fact that it's directly hurting people that they hate - assuming that there are even meaningful elections by then.

- Generally, in a functioning democracy law enforcement is supposed to get a warrant to access private information such as cellphone location data. But what if this data is already being sold by data brokers? The FBI under Kash Patel has been buying data from said brokers in order to track people; defenders of the practice argue that this is publicly available information and thus a warrant should not be necessary. Maybe the real question we should be asking is whether this sort of data should be allowed to be sold on the open market in the first place. For instance, if the authorities can buy this data, then presumably so can a stalker.

- London mayor Sadiq Khan is calling on Labour to campaign on rejoining the EU in the next general election. Certainly some recent polling suggests that this might be a good move; the extent to which this would translate into actual votes is far from clear, though.

- The war in Iran has helped to focus the minds of European leaders on renewable energy. Trump wants to export more American natural gas to Europe, but the spike in prices instead incentivized Europeans to try to replace natural gas with renewables.

- In some parts of the world, you can buy solar panels that just plug into a regular outlet and feed power back into your house's wiring. In some US states, electric utilities are trying to keep them out, claiming that it's a safety concern for their lineworkers (suggesting that it could still lead to power being supplied to a line that a worker thinks is dead because it's not being powered by the utility). Advocates say that this hasn't been a problem in other places and suspect that what the utilities are really concerned about is the "safety" of their shareholders' investments.

- Russia has issued new guidelines for physicians, calling on doctors to ask women how many children they want and to refer them to psychologists if they give "zero" as an answer. The country has already imposed restrictions on abortion and prohibited "childfree propaganda", but evidently those measures aren't doing the job in bringing the birth rate up to a level acceptable to Putin.

- Two Texas-based scientists have found a way to make usable soil from simulated lunar surface material, by combining it with vermicompost and certain fungi which are effective at sequestering heavy metals so they aren't taken up by plants so much. They've managed to grow chickpeas to the point of producing seed, though the success of those seeds in producing new plants remains to be seen.

News roundup, 12 Nov 2025

- There are signs that the record-setting government shutdown in the US may be moving towards resolution. Eight centrist Democrats in the Senate voted with the Republicans in return for a vote on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies at some unspecified time in the future, with no guarantees of Republican support for the subsidies. The House of Representatives is expected to approve this today. This does not sit well with the more left-leaning Democrats, though, who see it as a capitulation. Probably the fact that over 10,000 flights have been cancelled in the country due to the shortage of air traffic controllers is a factor; the US Thanksgiving holiday is just around the corner, and presumably nobody wants to be the one blamed for ruining that.

- The European Union has proposed legislation that would, among other things, require satellite operators to address the space junk problem. The Americans are foaming at the mouth about this, saying that it would place "unacceptable regulatory burdens" on US companies and could threaten threaten technological advancement in space. Even if that last point is true, though, the threat to technological advancement from this is trivial compared to that posed by "Kessler syndrome"; hopefully the Europeans will stand their ground.

- Canada's top public servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council, met with the CEO of Saab recently. Now, a delegation including Sweden's king and numerous members of the country's business community are scheduled to visit next week, including a tour of aerospace plants. This is leading to speculation that the government may be considering a purchase of Gripen fighters. That would be a very interesting development; stay tuned.

- Canada has lost its status as a country free of measles transmission following over 5,000 recent cases. Of course the decline in vaccination is the reason. Meanwhile there are fears of a mismatch between the current flu vaccine and the strains spreading across the country, which could make for a very bad flu season this year.

- An event held at UC Berkeley by Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, was met with over 100 protesters, and there was at least one violent altercation between protesters and supporters. The US Department of Justice is investigating the university's preparations for the event.

- The US Travel Association is forecasting a 3.2% decline in tourism for this year, driven mostly by a decline in visits by Canadians. This is expected to cost the travel sector some $5.7 billion.

- Arizona representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is finally expected to be sworn in, potentially tipping the balance towards forcing a vote on the release of the Epstein files. 

News roundup, 26 March 2024

- The MV Dali, a gigantic Singapore-flagged container ship, collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last night, apparently after losing engine power and directional control and being carried by the current into one of the bridge pillars. Given the enormous size of this vessel, the physics of such a collision did not favour the bridge. Fortunately this happened in the middle of the night and only eight people, all construction workers repairing potholes, fell into the river below; unfortunately six of the eight are missing and feared dead. Predictably, the usual suspects (including Marjorie Taylor Greene) are spouting their usual nonsense about terrorism, diversity hires, how Baltimore is a "failed city", and the like; longtime Baltimore residents like The Wire creator David Simon are not amused.

- Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has announced that he's leaving his position at the end of this year. Some would say this is not before time, given recent news as well as that of a few years before. It's often said by commentators, with lament, that Boeing was run by the engineers rather than the accountants until the merger with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, after which the accountants with their short-term thinking ran the company into the state it's in now. That is certainly one of the claims of this guy writing for Forbes, though upon reading the article I was struck with something else - he certainly thinks that Boeing is something that's "too big to fail", but he doesn't mention the idea of nationalization, even to subsequently reject it. But I guess you don't talk about that sort of thing if you want to get published in Forbes.

- Russian President Vladimir Putin would have us believe that Ukraine somehow were able to order radical Islamists to attack the Crocus City concert hall. Seems a bit less likely than the possibility that specialized "interrogators" working for Putin's own security services were able to order the suspects to "confess" that they were working for Ukraine...

- In the latest shenanigans related to Donald Trump, the judge presiding over one of his criminal trials has imposed a gag order prohibiting him from commenting about jurors, witnesses, prosecutors, court staff, or their relatives. Because, you know, he's Donald Trump. In other Trump news some are predicting that the Truth Social IPO won't be the boost to his finances that he hopes for, though the jury is still out on how many shares he can unload before the market realizes that they're worth almost nothing.

- Austria is scheduled for an election soon, likely in September. There are fears that the far right could triumph; that country does have a certain history with that sort of thing.

- China has reportedly been working on nuclear fission space propulsion. They believe it would enable humans to reach Mars in as little as three months.

The new Fatal Shore?

With all the obsession with crime these days, it's hard to even get a word in edgewise about such things as prevention. Just look at what happened in Wednesday's municipal election -- I'm pretty sure that a big part of the outcome was a rejection of anything other than a purely punitive approach to the problem. The thing is, it can't go on forever like this. It costs a heck of a lot to keep people in jail, and doesn't really solve the crime problem anyway -- yet ask the average person on the street how to approach the problem, and they'll likely tell you to get tough, hang 'em high, etc. How will this play out in the long run?

One possibility, of course, is that the general public will come sufficiently to their senses that it will be politically possible to put more focus on rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the likes of Sun Media make it awfully hard to have an intelligent conversation with the average person on this issue, so the "get tough" approach is likely to continue for the forseeable future. But how will society deal with the escalating costs of keeping people incarcerated (not to mention the recidivism rate if convicts' issues aren't properly dealt with while they're on the inside, with is the case now and will only get worse as they incarcerate more and more people). The British found a "solution" to the problem in the late 1700s by setting up penal colonies (most famously Australia, but for a time Bermuda and the American colonies were used for this purpose as well). Of course, that's not so easy to do now that there are no more new frontiers.

Or are there? Recently I came across this story about plans for setting up a Mars colony. What leaps out is this:

Worden's comments prompted speculation that trips to Mars could be only 20 years away. Commentators talked about the difficulties of such a trip because of the cost, estimated at $10 billion US one-way, and the likelihood that the explorers would not be able to ever return to Earth.

My emphasis. It would be tough to get people to volunteer for such a mission, but I bet some will suggest sending criminals. You'd still need a few volunteers to run the place, but the general labourers would be virtually free. This idea is explored in D. G. Compton's 1971 novel Farewell, Earth's Bliss, and I don't doubt that it will be proposed in all seriousness in the years to come. It's not my idea of a good solution to the crime problem, but in one way it would be an improvement on previous penal colonies -- at least in this case it wouldn't involve the displacement and destruction of indigenous peoples, since there are none on Mars.

Some of us are looking at the stars

And may it always be that way:

Quietly and with almost no flourish, the space agencies of the US and Europe last month settled upon a new joint mission to the farther reaches of the solar system. They will mount a fresh exploration of Jupiter and take a closer look at its mysterious moons, Europa and Ganymede. Adventures such as these are an act of faith: they are devised by scientists who may never live to see the outcome, and based on instruments that will be out of date before they can be used.

From the Guardian. The fascinating thing is that Europa is considered a strong candidate for being inhabited:

The fundamental requirements for life seem to be water and a source of energy. So, for more than a decade, space scientists have been tantalised by the possibility that, beyond Mars, beyond the asteroid belt, and wheeling around the second biggest object in the solar system, there could be living things, sheathed in an enormous goldfish bowl, masked by dense, self-repairing ice, the creatures of a separate genesis. They proposed an orbiter to take a closer look: President George Bush cancelled the project in 2002, because the cost would be excessive. Seven years on, and with a new presidency, the great adventure can begin again.

It's tempting to say that this money could be better spent elsewhere, but although there are an awful lot of things that need attention now, just ending some foreign military adventures (ahem) could free up enough money to fund energy conservation, alternative power sources, build up healthcare, education, and other social programs to decent levels, and continue the exploration of space. We most definitely need to look towards the near future, but we can't ignore the far future either. And the value of finding life on another world would be incalculable.