Kenney sets date to launch carbon tax court fight if he wins election

Manitoba family adopts Ukrainian children just before Russian invasion

When Trish Braun sees horrific images of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the Manitoba mother is thankful she had enough time to flee from the country with her three adopted children.

Other Canadian families weren’t as fortunate, as Ukraine halted intercountry adoptions due to the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion and war.

“I’m so thankful we were able to get out, but lots (of Ukrainians) don’t have the option of getting to leave,” said Braun, who lives in Grunthal, about 50 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg. “It’s hard to adjust to life here while our hearts are over there.”

Just days before Russia began its assault, Braun was staying in the Odesa region with the three Ukrainian children — siblings Daniel, 16, Lewis, 10, and Paige, 6 — that she and her husband, Mike, 43, had adopted from an orphanage.

Science-art collaboration injects dose of emotion into cold, hard truths

Looking at spreadsheets and map plots of trees is far beyond Rhian Brynjolson’s typical day as a visual artist, but she became entranced and inspired by data collected by Canadian scientists for a new art project.

Her hope is to try and bring the numbers, map dots and statistics to life in a new way to help the public better connect to climate science.

Falcon Lake’s Brynjolson is one of 12 Canadian artists who participated in an art-science collaboration exhibit, co-ordinated by the Global Water Futures program out of the University of Saskatchewan. The project saw the artists paired with researchers and scientists across the country who then engaged in conversations to try to inspire a new angle to their art.

“The whole idea behind it is: water is life,” says Louise Arnal, the project lead, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Hydrology and Coldwater Laboratory.

Shocking development

HOCKLEY VALLEY, Ont. — It’s not too often you get into a new vehicle, look at the interior, and say to yourself, “Wow, this is different… in a good way.”

Automakers tend to stick pretty close to defined norms, and when they differ, it’s not always successful. I’m looking at you, Toyota Yaris and Nissan X-Trail.

So, stepping into the 2027 BMW iX3 was refreshing. A bright parallelogram of a main touchscreen is closer to the driver than most, aided in no small part by pushing the instrument cluster to a narrow band just under the windscreen.

The effect is to clean up the look of the dash but without moving to a centre-mount instrument panel like the Yaris and X-Trail. The most valuable information (speed, battery charge, range) is right in front of the driver, visible above the top rim of the steering wheel.

Just say no (to deficits during good economic times)

When a political party pledges to run small, “manageable” deficits if elected, it almost always means it will go deeper into the red if it wins government.

It’s human nature.

After all, as a government, if you get the blessing of the public to spend beyond your means, what’s a few billion more a year in overspending?

The problem is, it doesn’t usually end there. When those same politicians seek re-election, they often want permission to post even larger deficits. In some cases, they’ve abandoned the idea of balancing the books altogether, arguing perpetual deficit financing is acceptable, as long as the debt doesn’t exceed a certain percentage of the economy.

Neo-Nazi group members plotted to kill Free Press reporter

Disturbing details of a plan to kill a Free Press reporter who had infiltrated a white nationalist hate group were revealed for the first time Wednesday.