Honda cancels EV plant just as demand atarts to pick up

It's ironic that Honda is officially putting its $15 billion electric vehicle (EV) and battery plant in Alliston, Ontario on indefinite hold now, just as demand for EVs in Canada (and around the world) is starting to pick up again.

Honda paused development last May, at a time when EV demand was indeed reeling. Since then, though, the US war in Iran and the ensuing oil price shock, along with Canada's reinstatement of a $5,000 rebate, has made EVs much more palatable and demand for zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) is recovering, big-time. In March 2026, sales of ZEVs in Canada increased by 75% over the previous year. Where EVs made up just 6.6% of new vehicles a year ago, in March 2026 they made up 12.2%, almost double. And gas prices have continued going up and up since March as the US war in Iran continues, so the expectation is that EV demand will continue to rise.

And this is the time that Honda drops its bombshell about cancelling its new investment in the Alliston plant?

A big part of the problem is that the market for EVs in the USA is still soft, and most of the cars that would be made in Ontario would be destined for the US, not Canada. But, even in America, EV demand is picking up, as the Iran war and the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz, drags on with no end in sight.

So, is Honda being short-sighted here? Well, longer-term trends are almost impossible to predict in this rapidly changing world, and Honda is notoriously conservative. It's hard to commit $15 billion without a pretty firm guarantee of future sales demand, I get that. But taking risks and getting ahead of the competition is what corporate capitalism is all about, no?

Trump is openly flirting with fascism, but Americans only care about gas prices

I'm kind of tired of writing about Trump. But I still keep doing it because, like it or not, he is the driving force of our times, the single individual generating most of the worldwide news (almost all of it bad) in these weird times we live in.

Trump's popularity in the USA, the metric by which he measures himself, is at an all-time low. (His popularity in the rest of the world has always been at an all-time low, but doesn't really care about that.) So, does this mean that America is finally waking up from an embarrassing - and extremely consequential - trance?

Er, probably not.

See, here's the thing. Despite the fact that Trump has spent the last year and change converting the US into a fully-functional fascist state, the thing that is finally causing Americans to snap out from under his spell is actually something as mundane as ... gas prices.

Think about that. It gives a good indication of just where American priorities lie. 

Trump has presided over the establishment of a vicious paramilitary force tasked with oppressing the American people and forcefully abducting specific segments of the population based on racist ideology. He has co-opted the highest legal court in the land by installing compliant judges willing to put ideological bias before sound legal judgement. He has wilfully demonized political opponents, and weakened insititutional trust. He has pursued an aggressive policy of imperialistic expansionism, in words and sometimes in actions. He has deliberately taken actions to undermine democratic norms and protections, and has openly flirted with extreme authoritarianism. He has attempted to suppress free speech where it implies criticism of his actions and policies. He, his family, and members of his administration have all enriched themselves on the back of his policies, at the expense of the working stiff. He no longer feels constrained by international norms or domestic institutions, but is happy to let power speak, whatever the ethical implications. Truth is now optional in official circles.

This, it has been widely argued, is fascism. But many Americans have stood idly by and watched all this happen (I'm talking here about the republican/conservative half of this dismally divided country - Democrats have always opposed Trump, even if not as loudly as they might have.) Land of the free? Cradle of democracy? Pshaw. Over-rated.

What has actually - finally - galvanized opposition to Trump and his policies is the threat to their profitability and financial ease. America has always been a country obsessed with money and wealth, to a degree unmatched by any other state. When Trump's disastrous trade policies and, particularly, his ill-advised invasion of Iran (and the oil price chaos that, predictably, followed) finally started to hit their proverbial pocketbooks, even Republicans have started to wake from their deplorable sleepwalk.

Brightly-painted wind turbines would save many bird deaths

I've posted before on ways to make wind turbines less destructive of birds, bats, etc. (I've also posted on the fact that wind turbines are much less destructive of birds, bats, etc, than most people think.)

Now, another study, recently published in the journal Behavioural Ecology, shows that birds are much more likely to avoid turbine blades that are painted to minic venemous snakes or frogs. It makes a lot of intuitive sense: neither birds nor bats are particularly sophisticated intellectually, and operate much more on short-range instincts.

Almost all wind turbines and their blades are painted bright white, for reasons I have never understood. For reasons no-one really seems understand, that is the very colour that attracts birds towards them. It has been known for some years that even just painting one of the blades black significantly reduces bird collisions, and yet I have still never seen a wind turbine painted anything other than white.

The latest study demonstrates definitively that birds are least likely to avoid white blades, followed by blades where one is painted black. However, they are much more lilely to avoid blades painted red and white, or rad, black and yellow (to mimic a venemous coral snake). The differences are apparently quite dramatic. 

Personally, I think that brightly-coloured striped wind turbines would be an improvement aesthetically - plain vanilla white is so blah - although I'm not sure everyone would agree.

Does Donald Trump type out his own social media posts?

I was trying to figure out how Donald Trump found the time and the energy to make all those unhinged late night Truth Social posts. I mean he's have to spend most of the day consuming the latest conspiracy theories and disinformation streams, wouldn't he, and then stay up half the night as well? Well, it turns out that he has a "personal aide" or "executive assistant" called Natalie Harp who does most of the leg (and finger) work for him.

Little-known and low-profile, Harp is one of his most influential aides, and has been instrumental in the nearly 8,800 posts Trump has made since the start of his second term. She has access to Trump's Truth Social account, but she also has an alarming amount of control over what Trump writes about. She also controls much of what reaches his desk in the first place. Unusually, she appears to work directly for Trump and answers only to him, without any oversight by Trump's chief of staff, national security officials, or other communication aides, which has raised more than a few eyebrows.

How it works is that she arrives at Trump's residence each evening with a stack of printed-out draft posts, on subjects that she thinks Trump would want to publish under his name. She will have spent most of her day scouring the internet for suitable videos, images and text that would align with Trump's current grievances and worldview. 

Then, once Trump approves the selections, she logs into his account, usually in the late-night early-morning hours, and posts large batches of messages in quick succession, occasionally up to 160 in a single night's activity. This gives the impression that Trump is up at all hours, working(!) for the American people.

So, who is this eminence grise? Well, not so grise, it turns out. Ms. Harp is 34 years old, and sports long blonde hair and lots of make-up - a typical Trump pick, you could say. She used to be an anchor with One America News Network, a far-right political commentary TV network, and joined Trump's campaign in 2022. She became known as the "human printer" because part of her brief was to follow Trump around, even onto golf courses, to print out pertinent information for him, as Trump is of an age to prefer the printed word to screens.

Natalie Harp

Although she has somehow managed to remain quite private, she has attracted some scrutiny for some rather embarrassing adoring letters she has sent to Trump, which include comments like "You are all that matters to me", "I don't ever want to let you down", and "I want to bring you joy". Sycophantic, bordering on creepy. Others in Trump's staff found the "aggressiveness of her attention" discomfiting and unnerving, and possibly even a security concern.

Trump, however, is a big fan, and anyway is a sucker for the attentions of a young blonde woman. So, maybe don't feel too sorry for him tapping away on his phone into the wee hours - he's probably tucked up in bed with a can of Coke at the time his Truth Social posts are sent out.

The next Super El Niño is due this year

Batten down the hatches, we're in for a wild ride this year, weatherwise. We're expecting the strongest ever El Niño weather pattern in the second half of the year - a "Super El Niño", in the rather alarming argot of some climate scientists - which, combined with the effects of climate change, will probably generate some record-breaking weather in terms of temperatures and rainfall: stronger heat waves, worse droughts, more wildfires, stronger storms and more intense floods (although, as recompense, the Atlantic hurricane season may be less intense).

El Niño is a long-term weather event, usually lasting nine to twelve months, in which sea surface temperatures in the equatorial regions of the Pacific Ocean are warmer than normal. This has the effect of altering and de-stabilizing the world's weather patterns for the duration, as it re-distributes heat across the whole planet. These events tend to occur every two to seven years, according to no fixed schedule. La Niña, on the either hand, is where the equatorial Pacific is cooler than average.

Currently, sea-surface temperatures are rising rapidly, with further intensification expected in the months to follow. The volume and intensity of sub-surface warm water anomalies in the Pacific are as large as have ever been seen, scientists say, "more out of balance than at any time in observed history". 

So the chances are high that this year's El Niño will be the all-time strongest, even more exteme than the previous record-holder of 1877-8. That year's El Niño caused catastrophic famines across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere that killed more than 50 million people (3-4% of the world's population at the time), "arguably the worst envirnmental disaster to ever befall humanity".

While this year's El Niño may be even stronger, it's effects may not be quite as drastic. These days, we are forewarned by our technology (although we do then have to act on the warnings!) The Super El Niño of 1982-3 was a pivotal turning point in our understanding of the phenomenon, and led to crucial advances in ocean monitoring and real-time tracking. They helped predict the Super El Niños in 1997-8 and 2015-6.

Plus, we are better prepared socially, politically, technologically and economically to deal with the effects - at least in theory, and provided we can stop waging war on each other for long enough to deal with it.

Erskine-Smith's hubris may have derailed his whole career

I live in the Beaches-East York riding of Toronto. It's a reasonably well-to-do area, but reliably left-wing politically. That can translate into Liberal or NDP, depending on the particular candidates involved. The same can be said for the next door riding, Scarborough Southwest. However, it has been a bit like musical chairs in the area's politics just recently, as a whole complex series of candidate moves have taken place.

lt was all precipitated by the resignation of long-time Scarborough Southwest federal MP Bill Blair, who is to take up the position of High Commissioner to the UK (promotion? demotion? merely a change of scenery?) The provincial MPP for the same riding, Dolly Begum, had a yen to break into federal politics, which she clearly sees as the Big Leagues. So, she resigned her provincial seat and stood as a federal candidate in Scarborough Southwest, which she promptly won (part of the wave of recent Liberal by-election wins and floor-crossings that has given them a majority status).

Meanwhile, ambitious Beaches-East York MP Nathan Erskine-Smith was not satisfied with his position in the federal government (and was also smarting from being demoted out of the cabinet by new Liberal leader Mark Carney), and had set his sights on leadership of the provincial Liberal Party. (Why, you ask? No idea.) Now, it's not essential, but it's vastly preferable for him to have a seat in the Ontario Parliament for such a move, and his old riding of Beaches-East York already has a Liberal incumbent (Mary-Margaret McMahon). So, he figured, easy, pick up Dolly Begum's old provincial seat in Scarborough Southwest. Still with me?

Except it wasn't so easy. Erskine-Smith has lost the Liberal nomination for the provincial ridimg to local pizza mogul, Ahsanul Hafiz. Erskine-Smith - polished, experienced and oh-so-ambitious - just assumed he would be able to walk into the Scarborough seat. Yet now he may have put paid to his ambitions for the provincial Liberal leadership, and possibly any parliamentary seat at all, federal or provincial. 

He can probably keep his current federal seat in Beaches -East York, which he never explicitly resigned from, even though that would be the usual protocol. (He only committed to resigning ttat seat if he won the provincial nomination.) But that was in itself a point of contention for many Scarborough voters, and his yearning to move out of Beaches-East York - and just the man's naked ambition - may have damaged his brand there too.

So, Erskine-Smith has gone from a safe and secure position in the federal (now majority) governent and, up until quite recently, a cabinet position, to a much shakier position and possibly an end to his aspirations to lead the Ontario iberals (which are still in complete disarray anyway). Oh, how the mignty are fallen! And what a miscalculation for one who had such a reputation for political savvy! Hubris is the word that springs to mind.

Labour council losses laid at Keir Starmer's feet

Votes are still being tallied after Britain's local authority elections, but it seems clear that it has been a bit of a bloodbath for the ruling Labour Party.

Labour has gone from 65 councils to just 28. Most of them were converted into "no party majority", but several Labour councils went directly to the surging hard-right Reform UK party (and a handful to the Green Party). Reform ended up with a majority in just 14 councils, and the Greens with 4, both up from zero in the last election. The centrist Liberal Democrats also had a good showing, increasing its count from 1 to 15 councils. The Conservatives continued their down-and-out status, losing most of the few councils they used to control.

In Wales, once-dominant Labour lost 26 of its 35 seats, amd the.Conservatives lost 15.of their 22, with ascendant Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru becoming the largest part, although Reform UK did better there, taking 34 seats (upnfrom zero). In Scotland, the Scottish National party retained their dominance (although just short of an outright majority), despite a surge from Reform and the Greens, with the Conservatives seeing the biggest flops.

However, although Reform UK has clearly made significant gains in these local elections, it was maybe not as dramatic as expected by many, and there is some speculation that Reform's support may have already peaked. Reform leader Nigel Farage, of course, is claiming a "historic change in British politics" and asserting that Reform UK is on track for a general election victory, but this was probably not the landslide he had been hoping for.

Either way, overall, Labour was the big loser, and almost everyone is saying that the single biggest reason was national Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, even though he has nothing to do with regional municipal politics. Maybe it makes no logical sense, but this was in essence a referendum on Keir Starmer's leadership (and on the extent of Reform UK's surge).

The man is REALLY unpopular, and has been for some time, in spite of his broadly popular stance on the Iran war. There doesn't seem any way he can extricate himself, and many Labour MPs and voters are already looking ahead to a new leader, on the grounds that there is no way Labour can win another election with Starmer in place. (As of today, at least 90 of his own Labour MPs are calling for Starmer to stand down, and at least three cabinet ministers have tendered their resignations, so there doesn't seem to be any way back for him now.) 

As for who might replace Starmer, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is many people's favourite to replace Starmer, but Burnham is not an elected MP (a pre-requisite for the leadership position). Another popular choice is Health Secretary Wes Streeting, with one-time deputy prime minister Angela Rayner as a longer shot.

Israel uproots thousands of Palestinian olive trees

The state of Israel has never had a good image. From its very beginnings, it has been militaristic, combative and uncompromising. Since its scorched-earth policy in Gaza over the last couple of years (and, yes, let's say it, it's genocidal intentions), it has lost most of the little goodwill it may have had. You can be sympathetic to Jewish people for the way they were treated by the Nazis, but still hate the policies and the philosophy of the Israeli state, particularly its apartheid treatment of Palestinians.

More recently, since the press spotlight has been caught up in the Iran debacle, Israel has pressed what it sees as its advantage and made further illegal incursions into the West Bank. Attacks and intrusions by Israeli settlers have become increasingly violent, and whole Palestinian villages have been razed to the ground to make way for Israeli settlements (illegal under UN law).

Now, they have upped the ante, and hit new highs (lows) of callousness, as Israeli contractors uproot and destroy thousands of olive trees in the West Bank. The olive trees of Palestinians are their lifeline economically, but also a symbol of their national pride. Israel, of course, knows that, and pursued this action deliberately to further its aims of complete obliteration of Palestine.

The orders came directly from Bezalel Smodrich, one of the most hawkish members of the Israeli cabinet. He made his intentions quite clear: to "build the land of Israel and destroy of the idea of a Palestinian state". You can watch video of the devastation if you have a strong constitution.

Still on the fence about whether Israel is guilty of genocide?