Why tinker with tacit two-timing entente?

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: Caution. Avoid shopping (except for food and gas) and important decisions all day until 7:30 p.m. After that, the moon moves from Leo into Virgo.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

A playful day. Enjoy socializing with others, especially romantic outings, sports and fun activities with children. At a deeper level, you feel you’re seeing the world through new eyes — which in fact, you are.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Dynamic Winnipeg husband-and-wife duo lead Salvation Army 'troops'

And so this is Christmas for the Salvation Army in Winnipeg.

Throughout the city, bells jingle as volunteers staff the iconic kettles to collect funds for critical year-round programming.

At police stations, fire halls and Scotiabank locations, growing piles of toys are gathered through the annual Toy Mountain campaign, ensuring thousands of Winnipeg children will have a special gift come Christmas morning.

On Winnipeg’s coldest and cruelest nights there is always room at the inn as the Centre of Hope provides a warm bed for those experiencing homelessness.

The next Duff’s Ditch must be medical

A runaway rail trolley hurtles towards five people tied to the tracks. You stand at the switch lever. If you pull the lever, the trolley veers onto a sidetrack, where one person is tied down. Do nothing and five die. Pull the lever and one dies by your hand.

A health minister needs no introduction to the weight of that choice. Every budget season, governments confront this dilemma with one cruel modification — the lever switches between today and tomorrow. Down the near track sits this year’s emergency, a crowded emergency department, a surgical backlog, a crisis demanding a decision by Friday. Down the far track, in the distance, over the horizon, waits a geriatric demographic that has not arrived yet. Each year’s budget cannot simultaneously rescue both.

Philosophers treat the trolley scenario as a thought experiment. A health minister calls it Tuesday.

The actual choice is crueller, because both tracks hold real people. The stroke patient in today’s hallway deserves rescue, as do the patients down the line. Two scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt, analyzed such allocations as tragic choices — scarcity forces a society to preserve one value by sacrificing another. Their darker observation concerned method. Societies rarely make these choices in the open. The lever keeps directing traffic away from the immediate noise, toward the far track.

New vaccine brings optimism amid variants threat

Canada's vaccine rollout received a boost Friday with the approval of a third COVID-19 inoculation, giving the country another immunization option at a time when case counts remain nearly 75 per cent higher than they were at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic.

Health Canada approved a vaccine from AstraZeneca, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said jabs will keep arriving "faster and faster as we head into the spring."

While numbers of cases and hospitalizations have dropped from all-time highs just weeks ago, variants of concern are rising in parts of the country.

Canada's top doctor Theresa Tam said nationally there are 964 reported cases of the variant first detected in the U.K., up from 429 reported two weeks ago. There were also 44 cases of the variant first discovered in South Africa, and two cases of the version first found in Brazil.

As the WSO’s concertmaster for 35 years, setting an example is Gwen Hoebig’s forte

Gwen Hoebig doesn’t believe in looking back. The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra concertmaster keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the horizon while marking her 35th anniversary in tandem with the WSO’s own diamond jubilee this year.