Suffice it to say there’s a lot going on in U.S.-Cuba relations today.

There is the loose talk by U.S. President Donald Trump that he will have “the honour of taking Cuba” and his recent order to deploy the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group just off the coast of Cuba. Then there’s the tightening of the U.S. economic blockade against the island, the imposition of a crippling oil embargo, and a U.S. federal indictment against former Cuban president Raúl Castro on four murder counts.

Recently, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — the main driver of U.S. Cuba policy — has poured cold water on any possible diplomatic solution between the two countries. And he has made it abundantly clear that the Cubans will not “be able to wait us out or buy time.” Does that leave U.S. military intervention as the only viable alternative?

As U.S.-Cuba talks have essentially stalled, the Pentagon has provided the White House with a list of options for attacking Cuba and the CIA has initiated a new task force that specifically targets Cuba.

On Aug. 24, Canadians of Ukrainian descent and Ukrainians throughout the diaspora celebrated the 35th anniversary of the restoration of Ukraine’s independence. This jubilant occasion identified Ukraine’s sovereignty within the international community.

Another milestone event will soon be addressed by Ukrainians. On Sept. 7, 1891 — 135 years ago — the first wave of Ukrainians arrived in our country.

Two adventurous individuals, Ivan Pylypiw and Wasyl Elyniak, were the first two officially recorded Ukrainian immigrants in Canada. They arrived in Montreal, on the steamship Oregon, and are considered the pioneers of the dynamic Ukrainian Canadian community that settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Pylypiw and Elyniak were directly responsible for the first settlements on the Prairies by eventually bringing their own families and inspiring other households to come.

No one leaves their country unless inspired by some selfless ideal or compelled to do so by reasons of an imperative nature, such as politics and economics — as with the mass Ukrainian migration of 2022, after the Russian invasion, when millions of Ukrainians fled their homes and settled throughout Canada and the world.

Across Manitoba, we’re rapidly moving toward a more electrified future, as homes, businesses, industries, and transportation increasingly turn to electricity. This transition offers a significant opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it also requires us to rethink how we plan for and participate in our energy future.

Manitoba Hydro’s 2025 integrated resource plan (IRP), currently under review with the Public Utilities Board, projects that our province will need significant additional capacity over the next decade to meet growing electricity demand. Much of the public discussion following the IRP has focused on how to meet that growing demand and what new generation sources may need to be built.

These are important conversations, but I believe there’s another question that deserves just as much attention.

How much of that growing demand can we address by using energy more efficiently?

On the same morning, the Free Press carried two pieces written from opposite vantage points, arriving at the same locked door.

Charles Bernstein, writing as a gastroenterologist, described a nurse-practitioner program at Health Sciences Centre that gave patients with inflammatory bowel disease somewhere to turn before their illness forced them to an emergency room. It was then not funded to continue, and it ended. A service that had been approved, put in place, and shown to work was allowed to lapse.

Tom Brodbeck, writing as a columnist, described Shared Health, an organization created eight years ago as a fourth layer of administration added to the three the system already had — Manitoba Health, the regional authorities, and hospital administrations. He asked what this layer has done for patient care that those three could not, found no one able to answer, and concluded that the province should either make the case or let the structure go.

One writer watched something that worked disappear. The other watched something no one can justify persist. Their accounts are two symptoms of one disease.

I write as a proud Canadian-Australian who is experiencing something I never imagined possible — watching Canada’s sovereignty, economic security and national identity being repeatedly challenged by the country it has long regarded as its closest neighbour and ally.

This is not an abstract diplomatic disagreement to me. Canada is my beloved country. To witness its name, dignity and independence treated as though they may be diminished, negotiated away or simply disregarded is profoundly painful.

Any one of the events that has occurred might be dismissed as another dispute between governments. Taken together, however, three developments provide unmistakable evidence that a red line has been crossed.

First came the tariffs affecting Canadian steel, aluminum, automobiles and softwood lumber. These measures were introduced despite the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement — CUSMA — intended to provide stability, predictability and largely tariff-free trade across North America.

On Sunday, Aug. 30, a Falcon Heavy rocket delivered the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope onto a direct transfer trajectory to its permanent home at the Lagrange Two Point (L2), 1.5-million km from Earth. In 100 days it will reach its station, power up, and start observing the universe.

Astronomers will use it to try to understand the nature of dark matter, which makes up most of the mass in the universe (but some say may not even exist).

It is expected to find up to 100,000 new exoplanets circling other stars, and may be able to spot ones even smaller than Mars. Current methods can only see much bigger ones.

It will test a new technology called a coronagraph, which may one day be able to detect life on some of those planets by analyzing the light reflected from them. It would be nice to have a better answer to scientist Enrico Fermi’s famous question: “Where is everybody?”

There has been much talk lately about how Manitoba can strengthen its economy and improve its general well-being. Adding a third component to our education system, one that would be equal in funding and recognition to K-12 and post-secondary education, would do just that.

That third component, adult basic education, already exists, but with inadequate funding and little recognition.

Adult basic education includes adult learning centres that offer mature high school diplomas to those who have not previously completed high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults up to high school entry level.

Adult basic education works well. Since 2003, some 25,000 Manitobans have earned their mature high school diplomas. Enough graduates move off employment and income assistance, saving the provincial government money, and into full-time employment, increasing the government’s tax revenue, so that over a 10-year period the government makes more than it spends on adult basic education. The system pays for itself.

When we talk about barriers to education, what usually comes to mind are tuition, cost of books or access to technology.

But, after years of listening to Indigenous students, families, elders, communities, and organizations across Manitoba, we heard something else. For many, the biggest barrier to post-secondary education is having a safe place to live, where their culture is honoured and resources are accessible.

Jordan was living in a tent in downtown Winnipeg for the first few weeks of his time at RRC Polytech.

Before attending Pathways to Business, he had been progressing in his journey to sobriety for a while. He knew he needed to keep that momentum going, and the opportunity came when he saw a poster for the program. Jordan saved up money from social assistance to apply, and was accepted for the 2024 fall term.

History is messy. On one hand, it offers uplifting stories of success, courage, human achievement, invention, ingenuity, compassion and kindness. Think of Dr. Jonas Salk and his development of the first successful polio vaccine. Or Viola Desmond, who asserted her civil rights against racial segregation in Nova Scotia.

On the other hand, history is also dark, ugly, mean-spirited and a catalogue of hardships, tragedy and brutality. Consider slavery, the Holocaust, the First and Second World Wars and residential schools — to list only a very few examples of the bloodshed, cruelty, death and depravity that has frequently defined history.

Anyone who has extensively studied history or read a history book knows that the past is complex and rarely black and white; that men and women, whether they are politicians, activists, businessmen, journalists, lawyers and judges, have their good and bad sides. Human perfection is elusive and there are few saints.

Most of us understand this except, it seems, U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House officials. They don’t like presentations of U.S. history, for example, that highlight slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, key elements of the American past for hundreds of years.

In 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley, inspired by the shattered statue of the most powerful Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II, wrote the sonnet Ozymandias as a comment on human hubris and impermanence. It provides a fitting epithet for the imperialistic forays of the current United States’ president and would-be autocrat, Donald J. Trump.

What Ramses and Trump have in common is unrestrained hubris and unlimited delusion.

Ramses says: “My name is O, King of Kings. Look at my works you Mighty and despair.”

Trump’s hubris and bluster on limits to his power: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” On Truth Social, Trump declared himself the “most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”