Your forecast
Mainly cloudy, with a risk of freezing drizzle this morning. Fog patches dissipating this morning. Wind up to 15 km/h. High -4 C, wind chill -15 this morning and -9 this afternoon. UV index 1 or low.
What’s happening today
📖 Saulteaux author Diana Traverse launches a pair of children’s books — Nay-Na-Bush and the Snow Dogs and Nay-Na-Bush and the Red Willow, published by the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre and illustrated by Kaiya Ducharme — at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location tonight at 7 p.m.
Today’s must-read
Manitoba’s justice minister acknowledged law enforcement is playing catch-up to drug dealers and gangs as he helped launch a task force Wednesday to crack down on trafficking.
“Manitobans have been clear, the meth crisis needs to end and the people profiting off of creating misery in our communities need to be held to account,” Matt Wiebe said at a news conference to announce the formation of the task force.
The group includes senior officials from the provincial justice department, RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency, Manitoba Criminal Intelligence Centre, Manitoba First Nations Police Service and police services in Winnipeg, Brandon, Altona, Winkler and Morden. Scott Billeck has the story.
Justice minister Matt Wiebe announces the new drug enforcement task force on Wednesday. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Free Press)
On the bright side
The world’s only flightless parrot species was once thought to be doomed by design. The kakapo is too heavy, too slow and, frankly, too delicious to survive around predators, and takes a shamelessly relaxed approach to reproduction.
But the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird’s fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades.
This year, with a bumper crop of the strange parrot’s favourite berries prompting a rare enthusiasm for mating, those working to save the birds hope for a record number of chicks in February, which would move the kakapo closer to defying what was not long ago believed to be certain extinction. The Associated Press reports.
A kakapo sits with her three eggs, on Anchor Island, Pukenui, New Zealand, on Feb. 3. (Andrew Digby / Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand / The Associated Press files)
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Today’s front page
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