Meaningful presents require a personal touch

Record label operated out of Winnipeg in the 1960s provided home for Western Canada acts devoted to Ukrainian wheatfield soul

Record label operated out of Winnipeg in the 1960s provided home Western Canada acts devoted to Ukrainian wheatfield soul

Human rights museum responds to reopening backlash

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights reopened to fully vaccinated members of the public this week, drawing cries of discrimination from those who have chosen not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

While the some of the backlash has been “disturbing,” museum CEO Isha Khan said the conflict has opened room for a conversation about human rights during the pandemic.

“We made the decision to open in compliance with that law, really because we’re a public institution and we saw it as our responsibility to open as soon as we could to the public — within the restrictions as they currently are,” Khan said Thursday.

“But it’s really important to us, as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights we have a mandate for human rights education, that we’re trying to ground the conversation in human rights principles.”

Manitoba curlers make triumphant return after world juniors

It was an over-30-hour journey to return to Winnipeg, but knowing what was waiting for them back home, no one was complaining.

The hug rug at the Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport was surrounded by friends and family decked out in red and white who were proudly holding up signs congratulating two local teams on becoming world champions.

On Saturday in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, Winnipeg's Jacques Gauthier and Altona's Mackenzie Zacharias skipped their teams to men's and women's world junior gold medals. It's the first time two Manitoba teams have won the world juniors in the same year.

Both squads, who were wearing their Team Canada uniforms and had their medals proudly hanging around their necks, landed minutes after midnight on Sunday and came down the escalator to the sound of a piper playing behind them. Dozens of supporters were in attendance to greet the world champions.

When we acknowledge the crimes of colonialism, we're learning history, not erasing it

The first mistake is thinking that history ends. Like a book, like a movie, like a story where one arc is wrapped up and a new one begins. It’s a mistake easily made by those who have enough personal distance from an event to know it only through a page, rather than through a face, a memory, a kinship or a name.

So if it is not your relative whose tiny body might lie in an unmarked grave, far from home, then it’s easy to think that what happened is over. It’s easy to say, as one commentator did earlier this week, that it’s “time to move on.” But you’d be wrong, because history doesn’t end, and those most directly affected by it do not forget.

And when news broke last month that 215 unmarked graves had been found near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, the grief that flowed from the discovery was a sorrow not just for a new revelation about history, but for a pain some have always known.

All between the coasts, survivors and their allies planted gardens of empty shoes, arranged in rows.

No place for politics behind wheel of crime of opportunity

The Winnipeg Police Service recently did an excellent job of acknowledging carjackings — the oft-violent theft of an occupied vehicle — are on the rise.

Police confirmed last week, in the first four months of 2022, there have been 59 reported carjackings. It is a pace that far exceeds the last three years, when the city logged an average of 120 occupied vehicle thefts annually.

WPS also did a good job of explaining it believes the spike in carjackings was due to increased “desperation” among those with substance abuse problems.

What local police did not say is this is hardly a Winnipeg problem; auto thefts in general are on the rise almost everywhere. Toronto has logged 93 carjackings in the first five months of 2022, up from 21 over the same period the year before. In Montreal, police reported more than 6,500 vehicle thefts in 2021, a 36 per cent increase over 2020.

'Code red': UN scientists warn of worsening global warming

BERLIN - Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.