Canada’s Elections, Portugal and Spain’s Blackout, & Elon Musk’s Secret Turbines

April 29, 2025

Hello, readers – happy Tuesday! Today, we’ll be talking about Canada’s elections, Trump’s executive orders, the ICC’s thoughts about Israel, a blackout in Spain & Portugal, revenge porn, voting rights, & a potential xAI scandal.

Here’s some good news: “Meadowscaping,” in which people turn their lawns into meadows, is the latest landscaping trend. This has a ton of benefits – compared to lawns, meadows are less expensive, require less water and energy, encourage biodiversity, and are typically more appealing to pollinators. Also, Parsons Bakery in the U.K. has created an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), giving its 400-plus staff a controlling interest in the company. Hopefully they also get free pastries.

“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.” – Helen Keller

Trump Gets Liberals Elected?

(Celebration for Carney by Dave Chan via Getty Images)

Canadians headed to the polls yesterday to select their country’s next Parliament. As the country prepared for the election last year, Canada’s Conservatives held a large lead in the polls, but Trump’s international policy quickly changed that. His talk of making Canada the “51st state” (which he repeated yesterday) and his trade war against his northern neighbors stoked nationalist unity in Canada, helping the Liberal party surge ahead just as election season hit full swing.

Last night, that Liberal revival in the polls translated into a real win for the center-left party. At time of writing, the Liberals are projected to have secured victory in the election, though they haven’t yet secured a majority in Canada’s parliament. If the Liberals aren’t able to secure 172 seats once all the votes are counted up later today, they’ll have to form a coalition government with other parties, diluting their policy agenda to stay in power.

Incumbent Prime Minister Mark Carney (who was handed the job by Justin Trudeau) is set to keep his job, marking his first ever election victory. “My solemn promise is to stand up for Canadian workers, to stand up for Canadian businesses,” Carney said last month. “We will stand up for our history, our values and our sovereignty.”

45 Fortifies His Fascism

Yesterday, Trump signed two more immigration-related executive orders. One order directs the U.S. Attorney General’s office to publish a list of sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities’ deportation orders and “obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws,” and also calls on federal agencies to determine what federal funds the White House can leverage as punishment for not supporting Trump’s immigration agenda.

The second order is even more concerning – it directs the attorney general’s office to fund the legal defense of law enforcement officers who “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law,” and also instructs federal prosecutors to “[hold] state and local officials accountable” for “willfully and unlawfully [directing] the obstruction of criminal law.” So your taxpayer dollars will be used to defend cops who get sued for a variety of reasons, and the Republican-led federal government will start suing state governments. So much for states’ rights!

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is still carrying out its usual concerning deportations. According to internal ICE documents, the agency is ramping up its operations targeting unaccompanied children, and ICE is also now deporting U.S. citizen children born to immigrant parents. In an interview on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that multiple mothers “who are illegally in this country” have been deported, and the children “went with their mothers.” Who’s next?

Want To Know More?

Homan presses undocumented immigrants to self-deport, threatening prosecution (Politico)
Behind Trump’s push to erode immigrant due process rights (Politico)

The ICC Has The Ick

On Monday, the U.N.’s highest court held a hearing regarding Israel’s legal responsibilities towards Palestinians after the country blocked UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating within its borders. At the hearing, the Palestinian Ambassador to the Netherlands accused Israel of “starving, killing and displacing Palestinians while also targeting and blocking humanitarian organizations trying to save their lives.” The hearing comes as the World Food Program announced that its food stores in the Gaza Strip ran out last week.
Israel claims that the case is part of a wider conspiracy of “systematic persecution and delegitimization” that the U.N. is carrying out. According to the counsel for the Palestinian state, Israel’s “deliberate obstruction of the [U.N.’s] work and its attempt to destroy an entire U.N. subsidiary organ” were “unprecedented in the history of the organisation,” adding that they amounted to “a fundamental repudiation by Israel of its charter obligations owed both to the organisation and to all UN members and of the international rule of law.” While that might sound unfair to some, Israel will likely choose to ignore whatever the ICJ rules in this case unless the U.S. moves to keep it in line. Which it probably won’t.

Iberian Peninsula? More Like “I Be In The Dark” Peninsula!

The Iberian Peninsula — home to Spain and Portugal — was left in the dark for much of Monday as the region experienced an hours-long blackout. The outage took down cell networks, traffic lights, and subway lines, freezing everyday life for up to 10 hours in some parts of both countries. According to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the outage was due to a “strong oscillation” in the wider European power grid, though the cause for that is still unknown.
A European Commission executive vice president working on green energy called the outage “one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times,” though it might just be the sign of a new normal in Europe — in March, a fire shut down power to Lindon’s massive Heathrow Airport for hours, and the E.U. has been struggling to keep up with power demands without the help of Russian fuel.

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Deep Fakes Get The Stamp Of Disapproval

Last night, the House of Representatives voted 409-2 to pass the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes publishing nonconsensual intimate imagery (including AI-generated deepfakes) and requires tech platforms to remove it. The bill has already passed the Senate, and now heads to President Trump for his signature.
First Lady Melania Trump promoted the bill. “Advancing this legislation has been a key focus since I returned to my role as First Lady this past January. I am honored to have contributed to guiding it through Congress,” she said in a statement. Don’t worry, though, Trump is still Trump-ing – he said, “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind,” leading many to worry he’ll use the bill to suppress free speech.

Rocking The Vote

The Department of Justice has removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases. This comes not long after Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the civil rights division, sent out new “mission statements” to the department’s sections that made it clear it was shifting its focus from protecting civil rights to supporting Trump’s priorities.
The voting section, which is responsible for enforcing federal laws designed to prevent voter discrimination, had seven managers in January overseeing around 30 attorneys. “The career managers established norms and standards and made sure that the section spoke consistently, over time, with one voice,” said a former justice department employee. “That is destroyed by gutting all the career managers.”

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Red Flags In The Home Of The Blues

Last July, the generators at a massive data center near Memphis, Tennessee, turned on for the first time, marking the beginning of Elon Musk’s Colossus Supercomputer facility. The data center is home to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are being used by Musk’s xAI firm to train its Grok AI.
The center is currently satisfying its massive power needs by running 15 massive portable gas turbines around the clock, though they haven’t received the proper permits yet. Technically, Colossus is allowed to run those turbines for up to 364 days as long as they aren’t permanently installed in one spot. The problem is that new thermal images show that the facility is running at least 33 turbines, and hasn’t even applied for permits for the remaining 18. xAI also apparently lied to Memphis Mayor Paul Young about it – in a public statement, Young announced that xAI had promised it was only using 15.
The thermal images were taken by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which showed “33 turbines giving off significant amounts of heat, meaning they were currently running at the time of the photo.” The center added that they also “show that more than 30 of xAI’s methane gas turbines are operating, debunking recent claims that the company was merely storing—and not running—more than half of the turbines outside of its data center.”

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