5 things to know about the new UN report on climate change

Woman, 23, charged with fatal stabbing outside Portage Place

A 23-year-old woman has been charged with fatally stabbing a woman after they argued outside the entrance of Portage Place mall in the middle of the afternoon Tuesday.

Climate change threatens events we wait for all year

This week, owing to extreme heat and a wild storm with tree-snapping winds, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet had to cancel its full run of Ballet in the Park, a much-loved annual tradition at which people from all over Manitoba can enjoy world-class art in the verdant Assiniboine Park.

Two weeks prior, Rainbow Stage, another jewel of a Winnipeg summer, had to cancel the closing matinee of Jesus Christ Superstar owing to heat and humidity.

And at the beginning of July, Winnipeg Folk Festival attendees baked under scorching temperatures — 47 C with the humidex — to enjoy not just the discovery of music, but the community that has formed in Birds Hill Park on the second weekend of July for over 50 years.

This doesn’t feel great. I do not begrudge cancellations — they are absolutely the correct call for the health and safety of performers and patrons — but I can’t be the only one feeling some existential dread about our summers, and the things that make them special, in the face of a changing climate.

Hydro scrambling to restore power to remaining 4,500 customers after storm; some outages will continue into Saturday

Power outages could stretch into a third day for some Manitobans — mainly in and around Winnipeg — while crews continued to repair widespread damage caused by powerful thunderstorms.

About 4,500 Manitoba Hydro customers were still without electricity at 2:30 p.m. Friday, after more than 30,000 lost power while powerful winds brought down trees and power lines Wednesday night and early Thursday.

The Crown corporation said it is aiming to have all outages with greater numbers of customers restored by Friday night, but some customers may remain without power into Saturday.

“The challenge is just the sheer scale of this thing — hundreds of different outages spread across a large part of the city,” Hydro spokesman Peter Chura said. “Just getting to all of them in a timely fashion is very difficult.”

Prepare to be … blutterbunged?

Are you not blutterbunged?

If Russell Crowe’s second-century gladiator character had uttered a 19th century equivalent of “Are you not entertained?” that fit the mood of today’s 21st century, that would be it.

Definitions first. Blutterbunged is an obscure regional dialect word from England that means everything from astonished to confounded to bemused or shocked into speechlessness. Its composition suggests something both more and less, namely blustering bloviation (that’s the more part) and empty words (that’s the empty part). These days we would more naturally punctuate our reaction to an event or statement with a profanity. But you get the drift.

Unearthed by lexicologist Susie Dent, it speaks volumes about our times that it fits now. That we need to reach back hundreds of years to find the right word to adequately capture a contemporary civic reaction to what the hell is going on in politics and the world today.

Brandon laying groundwork for Arabian championship

BRANDON — It’s time to dish the dirt on what’s about to happen at Brandon’s Keystone Centre.

Hundreds of horses and hundreds more spectators are about to descend on the site for Canada’s National Arabian Championship Aug. 6 to 15, and before that happens, the staging surface has to be perfect.

“We have been working on this day in and day out,” said Devin Epp, sales manager in the Ag Centre at the Keystone Centre.

Since July 24, staff have been working on a 24-hour schedule to build the competition floor. Dirt was hauled into the arena and has since been worked into place with tractors and hand-pushed equipment.