Canine conundrum calls for clear-cut consensus

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.”

Scholar, educator and author Karen Busby tirelessly fought for groundbreaking human rights and social justice changes

Of all the remarkable achievements in Karen Busby’s life, one of the most incredible is how she found the time.

Time, as a trailblazing legal scholar and educator at the University of Manitoba, to help lead transformative fights for human rights. Her work would help secure same-sex marriage equality in Manitoba, strengthen Canada’s laws against gender-based violence and earn landmark Supreme Court decisions to better protect sexual assault victims in court.

Around this core mission, she also found time to write books that made a lasting impact on equality in education, to become one of Canada’s strongest public voices for Indigenous, gender and LGBTTQ+ rights and to build Winnipeg’s art community, including as a co-founder of Ace Art and serving a decade on the board of the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq.

But above all, Busby always had time for her family, both born and chosen.

Long journey to home ownership for Eritrean couple

Solomon Ghebru and his family have been building a life together in Winnipeg for the past three years after years of living apart in various countries. Now, they are working toward a new goal: owning a home.

Their story is the focus of this year’s Habitat for Humanity Manitoba Cycle of Hope fundraising ride, a seven-day cycling event through southern Manitoba that begins Monday. The ride aims to raise $150,000 to support Ghebru, his wife, Mehret Awate, and their two daughters as they work toward affordable homeownership.

The couple’s journey to Canada started in Eritrea, where they grew up and attended the same church together. They left Eritrea separately, hoping to build a better life together out of the country. Ghebru travelled through Sudan and Libya before reaching Malta, while Awate travelled to Sudan and then Uganda.

After he found work in Malta, he tried to have his family join him, but government policies prevented them from reuniting. The couple married in Uganda in 2016, and their first daughter, Peniel, was born there the following year.

Rollins becomes fifth councillor to bow out of fall election

Sherri Rollins says she’s withdrawing her bid to keep her city hall seat after eight years, citing her concerns about the “gradual erosion of the role played by council” and the struggle to work co-operatively with the mayor’s office.

Stampeding to Starlette’s

ELMA — Build it and they will come.

Lee and Star Giesbrecht are the owners of Starlette’s Burger Saloon, a western-themed, outdoor eating spot situated on the married couple’s 40-acre spread, immediately north of Elma.

Seated at one of a half-dozen picnic tables that dot the grounds, Star recalls a conversation she and Lee had prior to the May 2025 grand opening of their locale, which, with its weathered-wood exterior and rustic swinging doors, wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Yellowstone.

Because they are “literally in the middle of nowhere,” Star says Lee thought it would be advantageous to mount a TV in one corner of the kitchen, for those occasions when they’d be twiddling their thumbs for hours on end, with little to do.