Scientists get a rare peek inside of an exploding star

Inman launching new album at WECC

Give Richard Inman a moment and a surface, and he’ll cover it with a story.

“I’ve scribbled down lyrics on paper plates, McDonald’s bags — whatever you got,” says Inman, who grew up in southern Manitoba but now lives in a three-bedroom ranch house near Twin Butte, Alta., so close to the American border that he says he can spit into Montana from his backyard.

“The other day I had a line in my head for seven hours before I wrote it down,” says the songwriter, who managed to remember the phrasing after driving home from a music festival in Idaho. “That certainly was lucky.”

Though Inman, 35, first starting sharing his Americana concoctions with crowds at Winnipeg’s Times Change(d) High & Lonesome Club in the late 2000s, learning how to play his compositions with his band, the Mad Trappers, he has spent the bulk of the past decade out west, splitting time between the stage and the sale barn.

It’s one thing to climb aboard rail-relocation train, quite another to pay for the ride

Anyone who wants a brighter, safer, healthier future for the city of Winnipeg should really want the renewed hopes of rail relocation to finally become reality. And the sooner, the better.

Premier Wab Kinew announced Wednesday the province was going to forge a plan to relocate the Canadian Pacific Kansas City central yards and many of other the lines that run through Winnipeg to a bypass that runs around the city.

This “plan to design a plan” strategy was devised by a task force headed up by former federal MP and cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy, who in 2024 was given a two-year mandate to find the best way to rid the city of some or all of its rail infrastructure.

For the record, Kinew and Axworthy said a relocation would likely take 20 years to complete, which makes this week’s announcement an important statement of intent, but little more. The sobering reality is that this promising idea has been proposed by political leaders, and then abandoned, for decades.

Plasma clinic pauses operations in Canada amid ‘unfounded attention’

A plasma collection company is pausing operations in Canada due to “unfounded attention” after two people died following donations at Winnipeg clinics.

A message to Mark: Don’t. Back. Down.

When is a leak really a trial balloon? While Mark Carney currently enjoys huge favourability in Canada, there are nine federal byelections pending. If he stumbles on his pledge of “Elbows up’ against the U.S., votes could go against the Liberals; millions of Canadians have utterly lost patience with Trump’s madness — and with Carney appearing to pander to it.

Now we lift the booze bans? Meddle with our supply management dairy system? So say “sources” in the Carney camp. But journalists can be manipulated — a galling truth. Set up a leak from a couple of sources. Two is standard; what’s often forgotten is that those sources, especially if the story’s a hot one, should be verifiably unconnected.

If a story is really hot, more sources must be scraped up, but the temptation to run with it regardless of that is enormous. Many a drool-worthy story I ran across in my early days at the Free Press and later at CBC TV news was spiked because those standards could not be met. These days, it’s almost impossible to meet that bar. Everybody’s connected.

Well, appeasement doesn’t work; we all know it. We dropped the digital services tax. That achieved nothing. American trade envoy Jameson Greer noted we don’t get credit for lifting something Trump resented from the get-go. The digital giants who imposed news-sharing bans on Canada in retaliation for the tax did not lift those bans. We still can’t share news links on Meta platforms in Canada, and we have not a penny in digital tax to show for it.

Moving rail lines outside city would make Winnipeg ‘major transportation hub’

After decades of calls to move rail traffic to the outskirts of Winnipeg, a plan that would benefit residents, railways and taxpayers is now on track, says the former Winnipegger leading the way.

A rail line bypass south of the city, using Crown-owned land and the Manitoba Hydro corridor, would take 20 years to complete, remove 120 railway crossings that are a safety risk and free up about 250 acres of Winnipeg land over time for development, Lloyd Axworthy said Wednesday.

“The visions that we have have to be implemented,” Axworthy said at a news conference announcing the launch of a 90-day feasibility study to move freight rail traffic out of Winnipeg’s urban core along Manitoba Hydro’s southern transmission corridor, connecting east to west along the Perimeter Highway.

The former federal transport minister and Manitoba MP was tasked by Premier Wab Kinew in October 2024 to lead a two-year rail relocation feasibility study.