Britain’s leader unveils AI strategy, including vow to rip up red tape hindering AI projects

China keeps perfect record going in Olympic weightlifting

Correctional Services Canada is reopening prison farms. But in B.C., where it has no such programs, a wife and her late husband, who killed a man in a botched holdup, started Emma’s Acres, a unique prison farm she hopes to see expanded.

Hurdy-gurdy show coming to St. Norbert Arts Centre

Quintin Bart’s favourite instrument has a name that’s easy to remember and it makes a sound that’s difficult to forget.

Say it with us — hurdy-gurdy.

Functioning like a wheeled, crank-activated violin, Bart’s trapezoidal instrument produces a continuous range of sound by manipulation of two drone strings, two melody strings and one trompette string. As the wheel spins in a single direction, the music created can last as long as the crank turns.

“I like to think of it as an analogue synthesizer,” says Bart, a jazz-minded Winnipeg folk musician who has used the baroque tool in performances with artists including Matt Foster and Raine Hamilton.

We used to love a good thunderstorm

Growing up on the prairies, even as a city girl, summertime thunderstorms were always cause for excitement. That first rumble signalled it was time to go search for the sleeping bags.

We’d cuddle under them on the front step, under the awning, as we watched the rain pour. And we’d stay out there until we were soaked.

If the lightning wasn’t bad enough for our parents to call us in, we neighbourhood kids would then throw on our bathing suits and go play in the warm puddles. It was some of the best stuff of summer.

As a mom now, with a little girl of my own, I was excited to watch her growing up loving Winnipeg thunderstorms, too.

Selkirk Avenue resident misses sound of silence

Selkirk Avenue resident Gail Allard sits on her front steps, looking at a row of tree stumps.

Until last fall, Allard would have opened her front door to a lush canopy of mature trees. Now, she has an unobstructed view of a freight terminal — the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. intermodal yard.

Although the residential street is quiet on this August afternoon, the steady beeping of machinery moving shipping containers carries throughout the neighbourhood.

It’s the first summer since Manitoba Hydro cut down 262 mature trees — most of them Siberian elms — along Selkirk Avenue between Keewatin and Railway streets.