Jones gets a handle on big ideas

First Crumbl cookie shop opens in Winnipeg

The early birds got their cookies.

Klaudia and Jayson Ballantyne were the first in line for the grand opening of Winnipeg’s first Crumbl location at 1570 Regent Ave. West, arriving at 2 a.m. Friday — six hours before the cookie chain was set to open.

The brother and sister brought their lawn chairs and blankets and hunkered down.

Roughly 90 minutes later, by their count, the next customers arrived.

Klein, Gillingham trade jabs over megaproject

Two of Winnipeg’s mayoral candidates wasted no time trading barbs over who bears responsibility for the skyrocketing cost of overhauling the North End sewage treatment plant, during a televised debate Wednesday.

Scott Gillingham and Kevin Klein pointed the finger at each other for the rising cost of the massive project, which had a cost estimate of $795 million in 2015 and had ballooned to $3.2 billion as of the latest estimate.

“We need to be able to understand how that amount tripled in that short a time,” Klein said at the event held at CBC’s downtown Winnipeg headquarters. He pointed out the first estimate was given when Gillingham was chairman of the city’s finance committee. He questioned what the incumbent did to garner funding for the project.

Gillingham shot back by noting Klein was Manitoba’s environment minister in 2023. He accused his opponent of failing to make a dent on the cost.

Builder beefs up security after string of blazes

A Winnipeg builder said he’s had to beef up security around his developments after one of his projects sustained significant damage Wednesday in suspected arson cases.

Winnipeg Jets trade Connor Hellebuyck to New Jersey Devils

Connor Hellebuyck finally got his wish. Kevin Cheveldayoff finally got an offer he couldn’t refuse. And a long-running sports soap opera has finally ended.

The Winnipeg Jets pulled off a blockbuster deal Friday morning, shipping their disgruntled franchise goaltender to the New Jersey Devils for a package including four players and two draft picks.

Although they liked the return, nobody within the organization was popping champagne. This was, in many ways, a dark but necessary day.

“It certainly hasn’t been fun. There’s no question about it. But at the end of the day, Connor made his choice. And, as an organization, we had to act accordingly and we did,” the general manager said during an afternoon news conference inside Canada Life Centre.

Final legal judgment rendered in Canadian Wheat Board saga

A judge has thrown out a class-action lawsuit that sought damages for certain grain farmers in relation to the end of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly by the federal government.

It’s the last of extensive litigation over the dissolution of the board.

Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Chris Martin, in a decision this month, dismissed farmer Edward Andrew Dennis’s 2017 civil claim against the federal attorney general and G3 Global Grain Group, the successor to the wheat board.

The wheat board was created in 1935 as a voluntary marketing program and transformed into a compulsory marketing agency in which farmers were required to sell their wheat and barley to it.

Jones gets a handle on big ideas

Winnipeg journalist Sheilla Jones will tackle some of the biggest, and smallest, stories in the universe in a book to be released next spring by New York publisher Palgrave Macmillan (a division of St. Martin's Press).

Jones has signed a book deal for What's Wrong with Physics Today, a popular science book that touches on cosmology, particle physics and quantum physics. The book is intended to help non-scientists get a handle on how current big ideas about the universe are increasingly so over the top that they seriously risk undermining scientific credibility. Jones is teaming up with German scientist Alexander Unzicker.

Jones is also the author of The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science (Thomas Allen/Oxford University Press, 2008), a look at "the trouble with quantum physics."

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