Japan’s anti-monopoly body orders Google to fix ad search limits affecting Yahoo

Letters, Aug. 18

A huge shout out to David Asper, coach Mike Raimbault and his staff, all those involved in game-day and office activities and all the Winnipeg Sea Bears players for an outstanding and very entertaining championship basketball season.

A grand jeté of climate-change denial

The first hurricane to hit Hawaii in 34 years. The Mediterranean on fire from Spain to Greece. ‘Heat domes’ one after another for months on end in Europe and North America. Thousands of excess deaths. A record El Niño piled on top of an average global temperature up from +1.2 C five years ago. Predicted high for this year: +1.7 C.

Surely they’ll get it now, you think — but no, they won’t. It once seemed sensible to think that when the climate damage gets bad enough and the trend line becomes impossible to ignore, ‘they’ (meaning the climate change deniers and their fellow travellers) will finally accept that the threat is real and urgent action is necessary.

A few of them will, but most will not.

It is becoming clear that as the old position of flat disbelief in climate science becomes untenable, the preferred response among former deniers is to admit that climate change is big, dangerous and already well underway — but to insist that it is already too late and nothing can be done about it now.

Free fix is in: repair café aims to keep items out of landfills

Stephen Kirk wants to give people a chance to fix items they’re not ready to let go of.

The Spence Neighbourhood Association staffer took notice when repair cafés started popping up around the world, and he decided to bring the idea to Winnipeg.

The café invites people to bring broken items like bikes, clothes and small kitchen appliances to the association’s headquarters to get free repairs by a team of skilled volunteers.

“Certainly in our neighbourhood, a lot of people’s motivation is economic, they would rather fix it than have to buy a new one,” said Kirk, the environmental and open spaces coordinator for the Spence Neighbourhood Association.

Trustees call for e-scooter safety education

School trustees are calling on the province to bolster public education around e-bike and e-scooter safety ahead of back-to-school season.

The Manitoba School Boards Association brought members’ concerns about a growing number of students using electronic devices to get to and from classes to the education minister’s office this month.

“There’s a concerning lack of safety knowledge on the part of Manitoba youth,” executive director Alan Campbell said.

Campbell, a long-time trustee in the Interlake School Division, resigned from elected office this summer to run the association that mobilizes school boards and provides them with labour relations support.

An ambassador, a petition and 213,000 signatures

You have to admit, they have a point.

As of 7 a.m. on Monday, 209,909 Canadians had signed it. By 9:41 a.m., that number had reached 211,846. By 10:54 a.m., 213,124. And there are months left to sign.

It is an electronic petition to have the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, ousted and sent back to Trump’s America.

The reasons? Well, ambassadors are meant to represent the national positions of their governments and you could argue that Hoekstra is doing exactly that: his blunt pronouncements on things such as Canadian sovereignty sound very much like the words of one Donald Trump, President of the United States.