Helping little ones face up to masks

Big Loser’s latest a winning mix of country, folk

The yellow trucker hat for sale on Facebook Marketplace said “Selkirk Lumber,” so Adam Wayne Brown knew he had to hammer home a deal.

Like the other millennial members of Winnipeg folk-country band Big Loser, the bassist has an affinity for the nostalgic, taking every opportunity — through music, through lyrics and through wardrobe — to recall the unique circumstances of growing up in a changing Interlake.

“I remember the matte yellow trucks driving around — the lumber trucks — and so I’ve had this strange memory of something disappearing from my youth and then persisting,” says Brown, who, like the band’s frontman Alex Paradoski, moved to Winnipeg more than a decade ago.

“I have a photo of the Lockport Bridge in my dining room,” chimes in Paradoski, whose first job as a teenager was bunning wieners and chopping fries at Skinner’s, a drive-in mainstay since 1929 along Highway 44.

West Kildonan Industrial residents call for speed bumps after child hit by truck

Residents in the West Kildonan Industrial neighbourhood are calling on the city to install speed bumps in their area after a child was hit and dragged by a vehicle Thursday.

Katelyn Bemister lives near the area where the child — who was hospitalized as a result of the incident and has been upgraded to stable condition — was struck. She says people frequently speed in the area.

“They’re going really fast, and they’re not really paying attention at all to the pedestrians in the area,” says Bemister.

In video supplied to the Free Press by a resident, the child can be seen riding a bike down a sidewalk along the 500 block of North Point Boulevard.

Could renewed interest in strategically critical rare earth elements finally make sub-sector profitable?

Rare earth elements are among the most critical of mined resources for modern economies.

They’re essential in manufacturing specialized magnets used in a host of technologies from wind turbines and electric vehicles to hard drives, smartphones, television screens, and fibre optics. Most notably, however, rare earth minerals are increasingly vital to the defence industry.

These 17 elements — closely related chemically and usually found all together in mineral deposits — have indeed been growing in geopolitical importance as the United States, Canada and other Western nations recognize their dependence on production from China.

It is the world’s largest producer and processor of rare earths, including the most in-demand elements neodymium and praseodymium used to manufacture very light and powerful magnets for an array of technologies, including the most advanced weapons of modern warfare.

Corroded Arlington overpass yields way for new hope of spanning urban chasm

It’s an interesting quirk of timing, perhaps, that the end of two of Winnipeg’s most unlovely features are coming into view in the same few weeks. The rail lines that split the city in half, and the bridge that was built to tie it back together. The original problem, and the solution.

And in the confluence of those two ends, we have an opportunity to dream of what a better Winnipeg can be.

At a news conference on Wednesday, former federal transport minister Lloyd Axworthy laid out a vision for a rail line bypass that would remove more than 120 railway crossings from Winnipeg, route them through Crown and Manitoba Hydro corridor land south of the city, and reclaim 250 acres in the urban core for greenspace and development.

The next step is to focus on how to make it happen. Nothing of this scope comes easy. This new bypass plan emerged from a two-year feasibility study that Premier Wab Kinew had tasked Axworthy with back in 2024. Now, Axworthy will helm a new 90-day feasibility study zooming in on that route specifically.

WRHA directs three care homes to accommodate surge of hospital patients

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority has directed three long-term care centres to make space for hospital patients, citing “exceptionally high demand for care across the health-care system.”