Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop to open first Canadian pop-up MRKT in Toronto

Rural venue lets artists shine on more intimate stage

With cooler temperatures on their way, Jocelyne Baribeau wants to break the linguistic ice between musicians with a new concert series at her home near Ste. Geneviève, about 30 minutes east of the Perimeter.

A onetime Western Canadian Music Award winner as best francophone artist, the St. Vital-raised Baribeau intends the Icebreakers series — which has its first concert this Sunday — to provide musicians with an intimate, rural setting to experiment and collaborate with peers with whom they might not otherwise share a bill.

“A goal for me to sort of erase a bit of that invisible line that we put. ‘It’s a French event,’ or ‘It’s an English event,’” says Baribeau, the vice-president of the Canadian Folk Music Awards.

“The more we can do that, the more opportunity there is for everyone. Music is music, and I don’t think it’s a language thing. You can feel a lot of things even when someone is singing in a language you don’t understand.”

Cancelling court erodes access to justice — just ask Matt Wiebe

Back in May 2023, when the NDP was in opposition and Matt Wiebe was just an earnest justice critic, he had harsh words for the Progressive Conservative government when provincial circuit court sessions were being cancelled.

U of M students call for ban on far-right group

Some University of Manitoba students are calling on their school to ban a far-right group from campus after posters promoting mass deportations were found during the summer break.

More than 50 people rallied on Wednesday, the first day of classes, to make known their concerns about a group called the Dominion Society of Canada.

The protest was organized after a supporter of the self-described nationalist group posted a video over the Labour Day weekend that shows him putting up flyers in Fort Garry.

“Canada is a really beautiful country and I have been welcomed here by a lot of beautiful people and it’s been amazing, but when I see harmful rhetoric online and now, on campus, it gives me a lot of anxiety,” said Ela Ancheta, an arts major at U of M.

Exhibition examines the bonds we make with humanoid objects

For the past few years, Winnipeg visual artist Emilie St-Hilaire has been fascinated by the way humans relate to artificial bodies — dolls, robots, mannequins — through play, care and connection, and how those synthetic relationships can produce very real emotions in humans.

Objects of Fidelity: Barbies, bots, bébés, her solo exhibition on view now at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, explores this space between object and companion. It’s what she calls the “visual culmination” of work that began with her 2024 PhD dissertation at Concordia University in Montreal, which examined Reborn Dolls — hyper-realistic art dolls that resemble newborns — from a feminist perspective.

But when a robot included in the exhibition started malfunctioning and giving signs that it was at the end of its life, St-Hilaire was given a new question to puzzle: what does it mean for a robot, or any other artificial body, to “die”?

To understand that, one must first understand how these human attachments to humanlike objects form in the first place.

Education minister’s reasons for revoking teacher’s licence ‘not good enough,’ judge decides

A Manitoba judge has rejected the education minister’s decision to end a teacher’s career because he repeatedly messaged with a 13-year-old girl on social media.

‘We feel lucky — and a bit traumatized’: Tornado confirmed in River Heights Sunday

Tanner Lemieux wasn’t surprised to learn the violent winds that tore through River Heights and reached their peak near his home Sunday night have been classified as a tornado.

While driving back to his Lindsay Street home from a shopping trip with his wife Sunday, it became clear they were not in the middle of an ordinary thunderstorm when rain and wind started coming from every direction and hit every side of their truck.

The forceful wind made it impossible for him to open his door after they had parked. He climbed through the window, over the top of his vehicle, and the couple struggled to fight the whipping winds to make it into the house.

“As we were running in, the wind started pulling me backwards out of the door,” he told the Free Press while cleaning debris from his yard Thursday.