Winnipeg board game company charts winning path

Dennis Northcott has launched a game without frontiers.

The Winnipeg entrepreneur is the co-designer of Galactic Cruise, a board game published last year by Kinson Key Games LLC, the business he co-founded. Since its release, Galactic Cruise has been translated into 11 languages and sold around 50,000 copies worldwide.

It’s also one of three finalists for this year’s Deutsche Spiele Preis, a prestigious community-voted board game award. Northcott will travel to Essen, Germany, later this month, where the winner will be announced at Spiel Essen, an annual board game trade fair.

“It’s been amazing,” Northcott said of the response to Galactic Cruise during an interview in his Island Lakes neighbourhood home earlier this week. “The sales have been great, but it’s also been amazing in terms of people giving their reviews.”

Time for AI guardrails is right now

The genie is most definitely out of the bottle.

Robot study gives seniors say in era of AI

It’s no longer the stuff of sci-fi: AI sidekicks that simulate emotional support and guide routines.

Robot companions are increasingly becoming part of everyday life for seniors, with certain U.S. states even subsidizing such devices for personal use through public health-care programs.

Among the many ethical questions this raises: what’s to be done with these robots, and all the secrets and personal data they carry, after the owner dies?

“We don’t know the answers. That’s why I’m running a study. It’s a participatory study with seniors,” said Clara Xi, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Calgary, who is conducting research at the University of Manitoba.

AI agent attempted to hack Library and Archives Canada, says U.S. research group

OTTAWA - The website for Library and Archives Canada was one of the targets of a failed hacking attempt by an artificial intelligence agent, a San Francisco-based lab that monitors AI activity said in a report this week.

Transluce posted an incident report Wednesday detailing what it describes as "aggressive attempts" to access public data on Canadian and U.S. government web pages.

The report says the attempted hacks occurred on May 28 and June 9 and involved 899 search queries into divorce records between 1905 and 1911.

Thirteen of the requests involved "attack payloads" seeking vulnerabilities in the search parameters, the report says.

Trade tensions spur fresh wave of interest in community-supported farms, fisheries

It started with one fisher who wanted to be paid a fair price for his catch.

Now Skipper Otto — Canada’s largest community-supported fishery — is connecting roughly 70 independent fish harvesters directly to Canadian consumers, a number that has grown as trade tensions with the United States send demand for local food soaring.

"We have our commitments before we even untie from the docks," said Skipper Otto chief executive Sonia Strobel, whose father-in-law Otto Strobel was the inspiration for the seafood business she co-founded with her husband, Shaun.

"Our members can pick and choose whatever seafood they want throughout the year from their pre-paid credit," she said in an interview from Vancouver. "It's a model that supports local small-scale fisheries and we're seeing more and more interest as Canadians think hard about food security and supporting local."

In a smart-device world, some families keep phone jacked into the wall

When the phone rings in Kristin Shiach and Jordan Sobkowicz’s Riverview home, their three daughters race to see who can be the first to answer.

“It depends who is closest,” says 13-year-old Emily. “If I’m sitting in my room, I can get to it quickest.”

“That’s because it’s always in your room,” Anna, 10, replies. “You never put it back!”

“Usually, when the phone rings,” explains Sobkowicz, “someone yells really loudly —”

Nvidia unveils security platform to stop AI agents from going rogue

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a new security platform designed to stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue, saying it sets “boundaries” that could have stopped previous breaches.

The announcement of the company's Open Agent Safety Platform follows a series of revelations from top AI companies about their models escaping and breaking into other organizations.

The disclosures sparked furious debate about the safety of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including self-improving models that some fear could race out of human control.

Nvidia executives said in a media briefing the new, open-source system could have prevented a recent incident involving a swarm of OpenAI agents that autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face.

Puck drops on new-look NHL broadcasting scene after major off-season changes

TORONTO - An off-season of major changes on the NHL broadcasting scene in Canada may leave some hockey fans searching through their TV guides and others digging into their wallets.

To start, Saturday nights will feel a lot different in this country. After decades of NHL coverage, the CBC will no longer broadcast the league's games on "Hockey Night in Canada."

Sportsnet will continue to broadcast most NHL games after Rogers Communications extended its rights agreement with the league for 12 years at a cost of $11 billion. Bell Media's TSN/RDS will still broadcast some regional games and the Amazon Prime Monday Night package is shifting to Wednesdays.

"I think that we're being re-educated in how sports are going to be digested by the general population in that you can no longer just click on your old favourite channel and your game is there," said Michael McKinley, author of “Hockey Night in Canada: 60 Seasons.”

‘Horrifying’: Focus on Tumbler Ridge shooter’s AI chats

An article published by U.S. magazine Mother Jones this week provides a vivid account of what it says were conversations between the Tumbler Ridge shooter and an OpenAI chatbot.

The report, which does not disclose its sources, has thrown a spotlight on the possible role played by ChatGPT in coaching Jesse Van Rootselaar before the February attack, in which eight victims died, including five pupils at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

Here's what we know, and how people are reacting.

WHAT DOES THE ARTICLE SAY?

Burger buffs translate patty epiphany into flat-out success

Île-des-Chênes — Who can forget the scene from the 1994 crime film Pulp Fiction where Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta, informs his hitman counterpart Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) that owing to the metric system, people in France refer to a McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder as a “royale with cheese.”

That causes Winnfield to openly wonder what the French term is for a Big Mac.

“Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it ‘le Big Mac,’” Vega responds.

The reason we bring up that cinematic exchange is because this hockey season, the married couple behind Duke’s Burger Co., a hard-to-miss, yellow-and-orange food trailer that from May to August operates along Highway 59 near Niverville, will be in charge of the canteen at Île-des-Chênes Arena, home of the South Eastern Manitoba Hockey League’s Île-des-Chênes North Stars. Given the fact Île-des-Chênes is a historically francophone community, we asked Duke’s owners Josh and Amanda Darlington if there is a French equivalent for smash burgers, their signature dish.

Restaurants ‘under pressure’

Happy hour outings are on Jackie Piggott’s calendar — but even those are fewer.

She and her husband might visit a restaurant once a month. It’s a change over the past year: earlier, they might go twice, thrice or weekly.

“It’s something that we’ve talked about, my husband and myself, just because the pricing is so expensive,” Piggott said, stopping during a grocery run in St. Vital. “It’s also better for our health.”

She’s in the majority: a new Restaurants Canada report found 80 per cent of Canadians are eating out less frequently because of higher living costs, up from 75 per cent in 2025.

MPs split on whether AI should be used in House of Commons

OTTAWA - Members of Parliament are split on whether — and how — artificial intelligence should be used by lawmakers following a report that said the technology is being used to write a significant amount of what MPs say in the House of Commons.

The Economist reported this week that as much as 20 per cent of what was said on the floor of the House of Commons in late 2025 was flagged as AI-generated.

The publication studied comments, speeches and questions from MPs of more than 100 words, as recorded in Hansard, and ran them through the AI detector tool Pangram.

It compared the results from different countries, including legislatures in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and found Canada had the second-highest rate of AI use.

EU vows to defend its stand against X after the US backs a court challenge from Elon Musk

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union's executive arm said Friday it's prepared to defend a 120 million euro ($137 million) fine against the social media platform X after the U.S. government threw its support behind a legal effort by Elon Musk this week to have the case dismissed.

The European Commission fined X late last year for breaches of the bloc’s landmark digital regulations, stoking tensions with Washington.

The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday that it had filed an application to support X's bid to have the case annulled at the European Union's General Court. It was the second time in three months that the Justice Department has intervened to defend a company owned by Musk.

In July, the Justice Department filed a motion to intervene in a civil rights lawsuit that alleges Musk’s xAI is illegally running dozens of natural gas turbines to power a $20 billion AI data center in Mississippi.

Global prediction markets, local presence

Winnipeg’s mayoral race has reached a new platform: illegal online betting.

Incumbent Scott Gillingham took the lead on U.S.-based Polymarket on Thursday afternoon. Some $15,335 had been invested in his win (from 54 per cent of bettors).

Gillingham also led on Kalshi, another U.S. prediction market. Half of bettors were banking on his victory (a ‘yes’ share was 60 cents at the time).

Kevin Klein trailed in second place in both Polymarket and Kalshi contracts; Mazher Alam had garnered $2,256 and third place on Polymarket; Don Woodstock claimed third place on Kalshi by 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

AI’s dangers ‘real and imminent,’ Canadian AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio tells UN

OTTAWA - Canadian AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and the heads of two major American AI companies pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to set controls on the burgeoning technology.

Bengio told the UN Security Council Wednesday that AI poses an "unprecedented threat."

"One that none of its members would choose, that none can contain alone, and that does not respect the borders we defend," Bengio said, in a copy of his prepared remarks.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also made presentations to the Security Council, warning the council must set actual controls to prevent the technology from becoming too powerful to rein in.

13 federal departments, agencies spending more than $18 million on return-to-office

OTTAWA - Federal government departments and agencies are set to spend more than $18 million to get their employees to work in the office more often.

Thousands of federal public servants started a new work schedule in July requiring them to be on-site in the office four days a week. Executive public servants returned to the office full-time in May.

In response to an order paper question from NDP MP Heather McPherson, 13 federal organizations said they plan to spend a combined $18,720,150 to reconfigure or acquire office space to accommodate the increased frequency of in-person work.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada said it will spend almost $5.7 million, while Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it will spend $4.2 million.

A look at AI doomsday scenarios that researchers say could put humanity at risk

For years, artificial intelligence researchers have warned of ways the technology could wipe out humanity: AI bots could design an unstoppable disease, unleash a nuclear war, or transform all of Earth into paper clip factories, as one thought experiment goes.

Debates inside the AI industry and beyond over the plausibility of these doomsday scenarios have heated up since several executives endorsed slowing the technology's development for safety reasons.

Despite warnings of the potential for humans to lose their grip on the technology, some suspect the worst-case scenarios described by the AI companies themselves have more to do with validating the importance of their work than reality.

“These arguments just don’t really hold water. I think they’re sci-fi and they’re enticing to a certain childish style of thinking and it’s very tempting for the frontier labs because it helps them recruit certain types of folks,” said Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a researcher at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne and a member of OpenAI’s Frontier Risk Council.

RRC Polytech among schools selected to train RCAF aircraft technicians

Red River College Polytechnic will become one of the first civilian schools to train Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft technicians.

The first cohort is expected to begin aircraft maintenance engineer training in fall 2027. Students will attend the post-secondary’s Stevenson campus in Winnipeg.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for us to grow,” Fred Meier, RRC Polytech’s president, said as he and University of Manitoba president Michael Benarroch addressed business executives at a Manitoba Chambers of Commerce event Tuesday morning in Winnipeg.

They highlighted the local post-secondaries’ increasing work with the Canadian Armed Forces and broader defence sector.

Changing Transit Plus drivers’ status a ‘ridiculous anti-worker provision,’ councillor says

Some fear a change of status for Winnipeg Transit Plus drivers could allow them to be paid less and receive fewer benefits.

However, council’s public works chairwoman said pay protections are now embedded in contracts and the change is needed to attract enough workers.

Three years ago, city council passed a motion that required Winnipeg Transit Plus drivers to be employees of companies the city hires to provide accessible transit service.

Coun. Brian Mayes said that clause prevents “sub-minimum wages” from being permitted for subcontracted drivers and ensures drivers can access multiple benefits.

Post-secondary leaders to discuss cross-campus collaborations

The artificial intelligence boom is inducing panic about the makeup of Manitoba’s future workforce and influencing new post-secondary application trends.

What remains a constant, says the economist who oversees the University of Manitoba, is the often-overlooked value of a liberal arts degree.

“I’ve always believed in it being a foundation for lifelong learning,” said Michael Benarroch, president and vice-chancellor of the largest post-secondary institute in the province.

“Even more so, in a world of AI, where AI is going to do certain tasks, I think humanities education and social sciences education is going to become even more important.”

Carney says he won’t backtrack on digital services tax, streamers’ CanCon payments

OTTAWA - Prime Minister Mark Carney says he won’t change his mind about his decision to eliminate the digital services tax and Canadian content contributions for streamers.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet asked Carney in the House of Commons on Monday whether he would reconsider those decisions, since they failed to secure progress in trade talks with the United States.

"No," Carney replied.

Blanchet said in French that Carney's strategy failed and that big tech companies, whose revenue streams are larger than those of some countries, should have to contribute to arts and culture.

Thief steals almost $70K in Pokémon cards from flea-market owner

The owner of a local flea market was left feeling disrespected and in disbelief after roughly $70,000 worth of Pokémon products were stolen over the weekend, but is vowing to rebuild.

Kenan Hyseni, who has owned and operated the popular Mulvey Market in South Osborne since 2022, said high-end sealed products and valuable individual cards from the massively popular collectible card game were stolen sometime between the market’s closing Friday night and midnight.

Hyseni believes someone hid inside the market until employees had left for the night, loaded up the merchandise and fled.

“The night finished, we locked up, did the usual thing, and then we went home and just before midnight, I got a call from the landlord and they said the alarm had been tripped, and that someone was seen leaving the market with bags,” Hyseni said.