Limited-edition libations to celebrate

Federal data on Winnipeg's number of homeless people inaccurate, advocates say

The head of End Homelessness Winnipeg says she has no confidence in data about the city’s homeless population due to problems with the federal system that tracks those numbers.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: Avoid shopping (except for food and gas and important decisions until after 8:30 a.m. After that, the moon moves from Sagittarius into Capricorn.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

You couldn’t pick a better day for sports training or improving a skill in the arts, music, welding, sculpting, pottery making or doing anything that requires repetition to improve. That’s because you have the patience and the perseverance to keep trying.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Diesel bill adds to cost-price squeeze on farm

Blessed with a week of good weather, most Manitoba farmers are now in the home stretch of harvest and beginning to assess whether their crop will earn enough to cover the cost of growing it.

Commodity market prices have surged well above the numbers used to prepare production budgets earlier this year, with the price of top-quality milling wheat up 27 per cent over a year ago. Canola and soybeans are up 36 per cent and oats by 14 per cent.

That’s a significant boost for the crops harvested in good shape before rainy weather shut down operations for a couple of weeks during the critical harvesting window. However, upwards of half of the province’s crop overall was affected by the bad weather, resulting in yet-to-be calculated yield and quality losses.

Then there’s the cost side of the balance sheet.

Carney’s ‘counterweight’ summit strategy

Modern summit diplomacy had very inauspicious beginnings. Winston Churchill is widely credited with coining the phrase “summit” in 1950 to describe a conference of global leaders. But it was another British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who initiated the first actual summit meeting 12 years earlier — with Adolf Hitler, no less.

It didn’t go well.

Over a one-month period, the two leaders met three times over the fate of Czechoslovakia. Hitler threatened war. Chamberlain threatened appeasement. Guess who won?

Chamberlain was so desperate for a peace deal and so convinced he alone could convince Hitler, that he swallowed his inhibitions and flew in an airplane for the very first time in his life. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” he told reporters, explaining his tenacious summit activity. Skeptical of the spectacle, British Foreign Office wags quietly amended it to, “If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly again.”

Misused ensemble, underconfident script keep Street Fighter game adaptation from landing its blows clean

Adaptations of fighting games come built-in with a major problem: how does one tell a coherent story about a game with no true protagonist?

Sadly, Street Fighter doesn’t know.

When it debuted in 1991, Street Fighter II (upon which most of this film is based) featured 12 “world warriors,” eight of them playable and with their own motives.

Managing such a cast requires a script capable of efficiently introducing them and then giving everyone decent reasons to interact — or homing in on a few and letting the rest be set dressing. Director Kitao Sakurai opts for the latter, focusing on Japanese warrior Ryu (Andrew Koji), American Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) and Interpol agent Chun Li (Callina Liang).