OPP warning of potentially lethal substance being mailed across Ontario

Consumer apprehension grows as US retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools

U.S. consumers aren't just frustrated with high prices. They're angry and confused about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting those prices.

Digital price tags are rapidly replacing paper ones in grocery aisles. Artificial intelligence tools help businesses decide what to charge by predicting how customers might respond. Terms like “dynamic pricing” and “surveillance pricing” are stirring anxiety on social media, where users wonder if different people are getting different prices for the same product.

Americans have grown accustomed to changing prices when booking flights, hotel rooms and rides, but the prospect of everyday spending shaped by algorithms they don’t understand and personal data they may not realize they’re sharing has touched a nerve.

“There are major tensions happening right now between who’s really going to have the power with some of these algorithms and usage of bots and AI: the companies or the shopper,” said Katie Thomas, who leads an internal consumer behavior think tank at the management consulting firm Kearney.

Spinning yarns into comedy, chaos and hope

“I watch ALL the new TV,” I recently bragged at a family Thanksgiving, a fiction that I was rightly called out on.

But I do watch a lot and, more than that, I read about as close to all the upcoming TV as I can. It’s not (usually) for bragging rights but because stories are either distractions or inspiration and both are now more valuable than ever. Here are a handful of worthy-looking new series and docs.

●Phony (series premières today (Oct. 20) on Disney+/Hulu)

High schooler Sonny (Sam Nivola, The White Lotus) has every reason to be faltering in his perception of reality. He did, after all, just barely survive a terrible car accident. But his friends and the other responsible adults in his life are having a hard time with his insistence that his single mom and the school’s principal (Connie Britton) has been replaced by an imposter. Is he suffering from brain trauma or is a sinister plot afoot? This is billed as comedy/mystery, which is an intriguing combo.

‘Make eye contact’: police urge extra caution amid spate of vehicle-pedestrian collisions

Winnipeg police are urging motorists and pedestrians to exercise extra caution at intersections following a rash of collisions across the city, including one that claimed the life of a woman.

“Having the right of way does not make you safe,” Insp. Helen Peters of the Winnipeg Police Service’s traffic division said during a news conference Monday morning.

“This isn’t just about who’s at fault. This is about keeping each other safe and doing everything we can as drivers, motor vehicles or pedestrians to help each other out and navigate our roads.”

Police said a woman in her 80s was struck by a vehicle that failed to stop at a stop sign while turning right onto eastbound Roblin Boulevard from Hunterspoint Road on Sept. 29.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: There are no restrictions to shopping or important decisions today. The moon is in Aquarius.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

This can be a lovely, friendly and romantic day if you can avoid intense discussions about shared property, inheritances and anything jointly held. Focus on what works. Avoid people who are intent on getting their way – not yours.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Disgraced ex-dean landed job at German university after fleeing Winnipeg

Before he was arrested in a posh Paris suburb, the disgraced dean of Manitoba’s only law school — who fled the country following a 2020 expense scandal — kept a low profile at a German university.