The rumours are true: Guy Maddin makes it to Cannes

Relief, reproach from law school staff after disgraced ex-dean’s arrest in France

The overseas arrest of a disgraced former law dean who defrauded the University of Manitoba out of more than $600,000 is being met both with relief and renewed frustration in the local legal community.

U of W marks 10 years of Indigenous education requirement

The University of Winnipeg is collecting course outlines, historic concerns about systemic racism on campus and related records to mark the 10-year anniversary of mandating Indigenous studies.

The unveiling of a new archive drew nearly 200 people to Centennial Hall on Thursday afternoon to reflect on how the Indigenous course requirement, also known as “the ICR,” came to be.

University archivist Brett Lougheed told the crowd its inception is “an amazing story” of student activism that, until now, wasn’t accurately reflected in U of W records.

“What little material we had told the story of administration’s role in developing the ICR as though it was the ultimate driver… and not a student-led response to racism,” Lougheed said.

Concrete doc befits brutalist Winnipeg

Moviegoers across North America are pounding the pavement and lining up around the block to see The History of Concrete, small-screen documentarian John Wilson’s feature-length debut.

Manitoba’s small oil, gas sector lists 31 ownerless sites — far cry from thousands in Alberta, Saskatchewan

As other western provinces struggle to address the environmental and economic fallout from an accumulation of thousands of orphan oil and gas wells, only a tiny portion of Manitoba’s petroleum infrastructure is sitting idle and unclaimed.

But it’s unclear if the province’s small roster of orphan wells is the byproduct of effective regulation — or an historic lack of departmental oversight.

Manitoba’s oil and gas industry is relatively small and generally opaque. None of the experts contacted for this story had direct knowledge of the province’s orphan well landscape.

“My lab has probably measured the most non-producing wells in the country. I don’t think anybody I know is working on it (in Manitoba) who are in the academic realm,” says Mary Kang, an associate professor in civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal.

Two U.S. presidents, and America’s decline

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” — Abraham Lincoln in his Cooper Union address, given in New York City in 1860.

“When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 per of the oil in the world. So it’s perhaps the biggest deal. It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils.” — U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations on Tuesday. (And a point of clarification — combining U.S. and Venezuelan oil would amount to 22 per cent of global oil reserves.)

It is quite the juxtaposition: Lincoln speaking in one of his strongest speeches, making the case that slavery should not be extended to the Northern Territories of the U.S. It was a sentence — the closing line in his speech, in fact — which argued that moral truth and justice will prevail against brute force, and that moral behaviour will, in itself, become power.

Donald Trump essentially argued that the obverse is true: that brute force justifies all behaviour — saying that might is right. The end of seizing control justifies the means, the means in this case being an invasion of Venezuela and the end being gaining de facto control of an independent nation’s resources.