Suspect in Taylor Swift Vienna concert attack plot convicted and sentenced to 15 years

Hydro Québec faces issue we should avoid

You might be tempted to call it a canary in an electric power generation coal mine.

Man who exploited teen sentenced to 11 years in prison

A man who picked up a vulnerable 17-year-old child-welfare ward on the streets of Winnipeg and coerced her into providing sexual services for several months has been sent to prison for more than a decade.

After a trial, Hassan Kargbo, who’s in his early 30s, was found guilty of sexual exploitation, making child sexual abuse and exploitation material, receiving a material benefit from sexual services provided by a person under 18, procuring a person under 18 and advertising sexual services.

Provincial court Judge Julie Frederickson sentenced him to 11 years behind bars late last month.

“Mr. Kargbo picked up a young Indigenous girl walking over the Osborne Street bridge and quickly got her involved in drug use and escorting,” Frederickson said in a written decision.

Morning-show veteran swaps microphone for macchiatos at new Corydon café

Good news if you were used to having your morning coffee with Terri Gale, who earlier this summer signed off from CTV Your Morning, after 15 years on the job.

Gale, the three-hour program’s longtime weather expert, and her husband Rob Gale, the ex-head soccer coach of Valour FC and co-founder of the Northern Super League’s new Winnipeg franchise, are the owners of Golden Hour Café and Bar at 775 Corydon Ave.

Gale (formerly Apostle) nods when she is asked who would know more about caffeinated beverages than a person who, for the last decade and a half, set her alarm to go off in the wee small hours.

“I do love coffee and take mine black. Except because I hate burning my tongue — not a good thing when you speak for a living — I got into the habit of throwing a couple of ice cubes in my cup, to be on the safe side,” Gale says, seated on the second level of their attractive, 2,100-square-foot premises, which officially opened in mid-September.

Former host/VJ Rick Campanelli revisits his gambling addiction in new memoir

To many Canadians, veteran media personality Rick Campanelli is better known as Rick the Temp, the energetic, baby-faced intern-turned-VJ on MuchMusic in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But behind that winning smile was a much darker reality.

In his new memoir, Tempted: My Story, released last month via HarperCollins Canada and co-written with John Meyer, Campanelli, 56, opens up for the first time about his struggles with a serious — and secret — gambling addiction, which reached its nadir in 2008 when the then-host of Entertainment Tonight Canada was detained by U.S. Homeland Security for unpaid casino debts on a flight back from Las Vegas.

The Free Press caught up with Campanelli in advance of his Winnipeg launch Monday evening at McNally Robinson Grant Park. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Real journalists matter in an AI world

An algorithm can decide what you see, but it doesn’t report the news. Nunatsiaq News, an award-winning newspaper in Nunavut, recently reported that a so-called “news” website was posting AI-generated articles about the north by stealing real news stories produced by real journalists.

The articles were supposedly written by Nunavut correspondent Leah Qammaniq — a fake journalist, with a fake photo and a fake bio.

Governor General Louise Arbour warned us of fake news in her installation speech in June. She said, “We must continue to protect the public space in which our national debates take place: from schools and universities to the media, political parties, unions and civil society organizations …With instant access to vast amounts of information, it is very tempting to pay little attention to the reliability of sources. The lines between knowledge and belief, between truth and falsehood, between facts and assumptions, are increasingly blurred. AI could be threatening not only the way we live and work, but also the control we exercise over our own destiny.”

The Government of Canada has recognized the problem as well. Its recent discussion paper, Enhancing trust in artificial intelligence through increased transparency, stated, “Canadians encounter news reporting, product reviews, and audio-visual content across the internet, often without any indication of whether it was written by a person, generated by an AI system, or produced through some combination of both … A particular concern within this broader landscape is that generative AI greatly enables the creation and dissemination of deceptive or misleading content.”