Your forecast
Clearing early this morning, with wind northeast 20 km/h gusting to 40. High 22 C, UV index 6 or high.
What’s happening today
During their brightest moments in the theatre, Sharon Bajer and Elio Zarrillo’s work could be described with the same language the weatherman employs when delivering the daily forecast: sunny one moment, cloudy the next, with the steady chance of a storm.
But the meteorological lexicon struck too close in the fall of 2022, when the playwrights’ homecoming comedy The Outside Inn had its world première in Antigonish rocked by the arrival of an antagonist who stared down on the Nova Scotian production with a destructive, unforgiving eye. “Hurricane Fiona came just before we were about to start rehearsals,” Bajer says.
The Outside Inn is on now at Prairie Theatre Exchange, and Ben Waldman has a preview here.
The Outside Inn co-writers and stars Sharon Bajer and Elio Zarrillo (Mikaela MacKenzie / Free Press)
Today’s must-read
A former provincial jail inmate has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Manitoba government over solitary confinement, calling the use of the widely condemned practice a “reprehensible dereliction” of responsibilities to the incarcerated.
Lawyers from Toronto firm Koskie Minsky LLP — which specializes in class-action lawsuits; it has filed an ongoing action in Ontario over that province’s use of solitary confinement — filed the lawsuit in Manitoba Court of King’s Bench last Thursday on behalf of James Darren Audy, a 36-year-old Indigenous man. Erik Pindera has the story.
Legal documents state Darren Audy was placed in approximately four months of solitary confinement at the Winnipeg Remand Centre in 2023. (David Lipnowski / Free Press files)
On the bright side
Scientists studying the sperm whales that live around the Caribbean island of Dominica have described for the first time the basic elements of how they might be talking to each other, in an effort that could one day help better protect them.
Scientists have been trying for decades to understand what sounds made by the whales might mean, with only minimal progress. While they still don’t know, they now think there are sets of clicks they believe make up a “phonetic alphabet” that the whales can use to build the very rough equivalent of what people think of as words and phrases. The Associated Press reports.
A sperm whale and her calf swim off the coast of Dominica in March. (Samuel Lam via The Associated Press files)
On this date
On May 8, 1941: The Winnipeg Free Press reported in London, RAF fighters downed 12 German aircraft over England and off the coast during the day and 22 bombers during the night, and anti-aircraft gunners shot down two more. Powerful intervention by British armed forces were reportedly weakening Iraq military resistance despite reliable reports German reinforcements had arried in Baghdad. Manitoba premier John Bracken, returning from Ottawa, indicated Manitobans would no longer have to pay both federal and provincial income and corporate taxes, but only the federal ones. Read the rest of this day’s paper here. Search our archives for more here.
Today’s front page
Get the full story: Read today’s e-edition of the Free Press.
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