Young pianist shows extraordinary talent

Brighter days ahead after Camp Arnes

Keishna Abenstein remembers what it was like to be a teenager who was stuck in her shell.

She also recalls how much going to summer camp at Camp Arnes helped her spread her wings.

Abenstein has watched her middle child, Teagen, go through a similar roller-coaster as a teenager. Teagen, described as a social butterfly in his childhood, has become a bit more reserved in his adolescence after many of his closest elementary school friends went to a different middle school, forcing him to make new friends as he began the next chapter of his education.

Abenstein saw an opportunity for a similar experience at Camp Arnes that could impact her son the same way it did for her.

Woman, 23, charged with fatal stabbing outside Portage Place

A 23-year-old woman has been charged with fatally stabbing a woman after they argued outside the entrance of Portage Place mall in the middle of the afternoon Tuesday.

On the night table: Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead

Author, Cool Machine

I’ve been reading Caroline Fraser. She has a book called Murderland about serial killers that came out last year. Her previous book, Prairie Fires, was a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s a new author for me, and I’m going through that biography now. I never read Wilder’s books, but I liked the TV show when I was a kid; it’s one of those books that’s about a person’s life, but also pulls back to get the larger cultural panorama of America, talking about frontier life and and prairie life — it’s really interesting.

Colson Whitehead will launch Cool Machine, the third book in his Harlem trilogy, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) in an event presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.

We’re giving, they’re taking — where’s the win?

In the give-and-take of negotiations so far, Canada seems to be doing all the giving, while the United States does all the taking.

In the last few days, the Canadian government said it was backing away from a five per cent levy to be paid by American streaming services such as Amazon and Netflix after, earlier, dropping the three per cent digital services tax. Then, there was what now appears to be succumbing to American President Donald Trump over the Gordie Howe International Bridge, where Canada agreed to let the U.S. share the net revenues from the bridge, even though Canada paid for the entire construction.

Now, Prime Minister Mark Carney is signalling he won’t use energy exports to the United States as a bargaining chip in the current talks on the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement, saying he didn’t “see the value” of using Canada’s energy exports to the U.S. as a trade bargaining chip.

“Canadians are reliable,” Carney said Wednesday in Red Deer, Alta. “One of the biggest commodities, arguably the best, is trust. People trust us, and so, when you’re a supplier of a key commodity, key service, you’ve got to think really hard about not supplying.”

Hydro scrambling to restore power to remaining 4,500 customers after storm; some outages will continue into Saturday

Power outages could stretch into a third day for some Manitobans — mainly in and around Winnipeg — while crews continued to repair widespread damage caused by powerful thunderstorms.

About 4,500 Manitoba Hydro customers were still without electricity at 2:30 p.m. Friday, after more than 30,000 lost power while powerful winds brought down trees and power lines Wednesday night and early Thursday.

The Crown corporation said it is aiming to have all outages with greater numbers of customers restored by Friday night, but some customers may remain without power into Saturday.

“The challenge is just the sheer scale of this thing — hundreds of different outages spread across a large part of the city,” Hydro spokesman Peter Chura said. “Just getting to all of them in a timely fashion is very difficult.”