Ill-considered undercover trick badly backfires

Troubadour of tears

Field Guide, for all his sad songs, is dressed exclusively in vibrant colours. His beanie is mustard yellow, his jacket and shirt are forest green, his Blundstones are burgundy. His short, scruffy beard is Spalding-ball orange.

Five-star review of Winkler Bible Camp

Nile Fehr’s voice reaches another level of excitement when he talks about one particular aspect of Winkler Bible Camp: the pizza.

“The pizza? Chef’s kiss,” explained the nine-year-old.

“The pepperoni pizza was so good. It was so cheesy, there was so much pepperoni on there. You know when you go to a restaurant and they have pizza on the menu and you have it and it’s like the best pizza? Pizza is usually better when it’s made at restaurants, like, there’s a method.

“But I think (this camp) found the method that makes it taste better.”

Report slams Omnitrax in fatal derailment

A Hudson Bay Railway derailment south of Thompson which resulted in the death of a conductor occurred after the track was washed out because of high water levels due to heavy rain.

But the 44-page report released by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada on Thursday also condemned the railroad's former owner, Omnitrax, saying that in the months before the derailment, while the company still owned it, "because the rail line was for sale, much of the other infrastructure maintenance was being deferred.

"In general, HBR, under Omnitrax, performed only a minimum amount of maintenance to keep the remaining portion of the rail line open while remaining in regulatory compliance. With a reduced engineering force, the track infrastructure began to deteriorate."

The TSB also found Omnitrax's reduction of its beaver control program also left the track vulnerable to a washout, its emergency response plan didn't include anything about responding to a train derailment, and the plan had never been reviewed by the regulator.

Long-term water advisory lifted for First Nation

SHOAL LAKE, ONTARIO, CANADA - Angelina McLeod spent most of her life in Shoal Lake 40 First Nation watching her uncles and her father, Alfred Redsky, a former chief, fight for clean drinking water and a better way of life.

The moment came Wednesday when, for the first time in nearly 25 years, the water flowing through the community's taps was deemed safe to drink.

"It was like I was there seeing it for them," McLeod said in a phone interview.

McLeod's father died in 2013. She kept up his fight as a documentarian and eventual councillor for the Anishinaabe community on the Manitoba-Ontario boundary.

Don’t delete organ concert tickets when scrubbing digital life

There is an organ in Germany that is playing one composition until 2640.

What’s billed as the world’s slowest concert features a piece by American composer John Cage, and was back in the news because it had its first chord change in two years. It’s already been playing for 25 years; only 614 more to go.

Organ music at the end of the world.

The real take-home for me, however, is the fact that there are already “inheritable” tickets for the final Sept. 4, 2640, event being sold for 2,640 euros (US$3,045).

City MP, nurses want safety standards for increasingly violent health facilities

While there have been hundreds of violent incidents reported at two Winnipeg hospitals over two years, there haven’t been provincial or national safety standards established for health-care facilities, something one local union and a Winnipeg MP are pushing for.

From October 2016 to October 2018, there were 444 violent incidents reported at the Health Sciences Centre and 175 such cases at Grace Hospital, according to freedom of information results obtained by the Free Press.

The statistics encompass incidents of verbal abuse and threats of violence, plus instances of physical aggression. Some incidents stem from deliberate acts, while others involve patients with dementia or those disoriented from a medical condition, who may have no control over their actions.

A Winnipeg MP who spent years working as an emergency room physician is trying to draw attention to health-care violence nationally, tabling a petition Friday that asks Ottawa to tackle an issue in which he has first-hand experience.