Point Douglas church goes up in flames By: Free Press staff Posted: 10:24 PM CST Monday, Jan. 6, 2025 Last Modified: 10:39 AM CST Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 Updates

Crop storage headaches loom on horizon

A sense of calm descends over Prairie fields this time of year — at least on the surface.

Activities become more limited in the weeks leading up to harvest. There’s not much farmers can do now to support this year’s crop, other than monitor and protect it from diseases such as sclerotinia in canola and leaf stripe and fusarium head blight in wheat and barley.

July is when you might see farmers wading into a thick stand of canola, conducting a so-called “wet pants test” to get a low-tech read on how much disease-inducing moisture is lurking in the canopy.

Disease pressure is high in a humid, hot summer like this one and it’s kept aerial applicators busy applying fungicides. Sclerotinia spores live on plant residues in the soil and blossom into a mould that destroys the canola stem, starving the maturing pods.

Downtown Keg closes… to reopen nearby

Downtown Winnipeg is without a Keg restaurant — for a couple of months, anyways.

The Keg Steakhouse and Bar vacated 115 Garry St. on Wednesday, after more than five decades at the location. It will open in a new Donald Street apartment tower this fall.

Its move comes after years of waiting. The DSM, at 185 Donald St., sat as a partially started apartment block after its developer stopped operating and sought creditor protection in April 2023. The developer began the project in 2019.

Carrington Real Estate took over in 2024. Part of the 14-storey site’s initial plans — pre-Carrington — was for the Keg to occupy the main floor.

Rollins becomes fifth councillor to bow out of fall election

Sherri Rollins says she’s withdrawing her bid to keep her city hall seat after eight years, citing her concerns about the “gradual erosion of the role played by council” and the struggle to work co-operatively with the mayor’s office.

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.

On the night table: Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead

Author, Cool Machine

I’ve been reading Caroline Fraser. She has a book called Murderland about serial killers that came out last year. Her previous book, Prairie Fires, was a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s a new author for me, and I’m going through that biography now. I never read Wilder’s books, but I liked the TV show when I was a kid; it’s one of those books that’s about a person’s life, but also pulls back to get the larger cultural panorama of America, talking about frontier life and and prairie life — it’s really interesting.

Colson Whitehead will launch Cool Machine, the third book in his Harlem trilogy, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) in an event presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.

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.”