Teaching, learning are unrealistic expectations in intolerably hot classrooms

There is something fundamentally wrong with a province that can find room for tax cuts yet still sends thousands of children and teachers into classrooms that feel more like saunas than places of learning.

Early childhood educators discuss First Nations students’ needs

Early childhood educators traded tips to improve attendance and well-being among First Nations students and their families at a first-of-its-kind event in Winnipeg.

The University of Winnipeg hosted an inaugural roundtable for ECEs to share their challenges and successes related to Indigenous education on Tuesday.

“The limited assessment data that we do have shows Indigenous children are not doing as well in life as other children and so we need to pick it up,” said Sheri-Lynn Skwarchuk, a professor who oversees the developmental studies program.

The facilitator described the gathering of nearly 50 women, including front-line workers, centre co-ordinators and post-secondary instructors, as a momentous occasion for their shared profession.

Goldeyes hosted second school game of the season Wednesday

A sizeable chunk of inhabiting schools from around Friendly Manitoba came out to the Blue Cross Park to get a taste of what baseball is all about Wednesday.

The Winnipeg Goldeyes hosted their second school day of the year, filling the crowd with students from 78 different schools located throughout the province.

Goldeyes general manager Andrew Collier looks forward to these events every year as the stands are filled with smiling kids, whether they have a deep love for the sport or are just being introduced to it.

“They are really successful days of the year. Kids have a great time,” Collier said. “It’s nice to have a field trip and get out of school.”

Manitoba makes strides on poverty, but EIA rates must increase: report

When Jayline Bursey gets her monthly Employment and Income Assistance cheque, it’s gone almost immediately.

Advocates call on Ottawa to limit nicotine use among youth, demand stricter measures

OTTAWA - Several health organizations are urging the federal government to bring down nicotine use among Canadians to less than five per cent of the population by 2045, as vaping among youth rises.

Les Hagen, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, says nicotine use has grown exponentially among Canadians aged 25 and under, which he says is a "huge concern."

Hagen said several published systematic reviews have shown that vaping creates a nicotine pathway in the brain — making them addicted to the substance, which makes youth more susceptible to starting smoking cigarettes.

"If that can't be satisfied by nicotine products like vaping products, they will find other ways to satisfy those cravings, including smoking."

North End puts its best foot forward with Culture Fest

Fostering friendship is one of the most important parts of Melanie McKay’s day.

At the Winnipeg Indigenous Friendship Centre, she serves as a program co-ordinator, where she organizes bingo nights, drop-ins for elders and craft sessions. She spent Saturday afternoon at the third annual North End Neighbours Culture Fest, where a dozen organizations serving the neighbourhood gathered at the Ukrainian Labour Temple to share food, watch performances and celebrate each other.

“These are the people that we represent, and these are the people that we want to help out,” McKay said Saturday. “I think being here shows that we’re out there in the community, and we’re willing to help any way we can.”

The Indigenous Friendship Centre began operating out of 410 McGregor St., May 1, while they renovate their former home at 45 Robinson St. They’re holding an open house June 5 in hopes of letting more people know their resources are available to the North End, regardless of their cultural background.

Even residential school couldn’t erase who Christina Henderson was

Over her life, Christina Gladys Henderson was known by a few names.

She was born Aug. 6, 1948, as Teenie Cook, to Adam Cook and Violet Quill, and lived her early years in Sapotaweyak Cree Nation, on the shore of Lake Winnipegosis, about 600 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

She would later adopt the name Tina, which most people called her, and later, Christina. In marriage, she would trade the surname Cook for Henderson.

Over her 77 years, however, one part of her identity did not change: Henderson would hold fast to her first language, Swampy Cree, despite more than a decade spent in residential schools — institutions that routinely punished and humiliated First Nations children for speaking their own languages.

Religion on census needs a rework, group says

Did you get the long form of the census? If you did, then you are among the 25 per cent of Canadians who had a chance to tell the government about your religious identity.

The federal government has been collecting information about religion in Canada since 1871; it’s one of the oldest efforts to track religion in the world.

Since that time, the religious landscape in Canada has changed a lot. Up until the 1960s, the country was mainly Christian, with small numbers of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Canadians.

The 2026 census lists over 200 religious groups, just over half of them Protestant and Catholic. The rest are from a wide variety of other religious traditions, including six streams of Buddhism, 10 different Jewish groups, seven kinds of Islam and five different forms of Indigenous spirituality. People can also choose from Wiccan, Satanist, Rastafarian and New Age groups, among others.

After years of living in encampments, Lawrence is slowly adjusting to life with a roof, instead of a tarp, over his head

Just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life in early 2020, Lawrence had a steady job, reliable income and a roof over his head. Within months, it was all gone.

After burning through his savings to keep paying rent, the 58-year-old from Sagkeeng First Nation spent the next 4 1/2 years homeless, living in an encampment along Waterfront Drive.

“At first, I couldn’t believe it,” he said while sitting in an office chair inside a low-barrier apartment complex in the city’s West End. “I was sitting at a drop-in centre trying to figure out ‘how did I end up here?’ It was too quick for me to absorb at the time.”

Lawrence, who didn’t want his last name used, has now been housed for three months through the province’s Your Way Home strategy, which aims to move roughly 700 Manitobans from encampments into stable housing.

Human rights panel accuses Canada of genocide against Indigenous population

MONTREAL - An international panel of human rights experts has accused Canada of committing genocide against its Indigenous population after a week of hearings in Montreal.

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal was mandated to look at missing and disappeared children and unmarked graves at Canada’s residential school sites, as well as the forced sterilization of Indigenous women, through the lens of international law.

The panel of seven judges said Canada historically adopted a series of policies that they deemed were crimes against humanity with genocidal intent, including the residential schools, which were in operation for over 150 years. The last residential school closed in 1996.

Survivors at the hearings held onto each other and wiped away tears as three tribunal members read out the decision.

Impulsive kids easy prey for addictive-by-design content

The allure of the screen is powerful, and despite working full-time in the realm of media literacy education, my home is not immune to the siren song of social media.

Winnipeg author explores a child’s grief in latest picture book

In the latest picture book from Winnipeg author Anna Lazowski, a child who has lost a loved one heads out to the backyard to build a rocket ship out of cardboard, tape and tinfoil.

That’s what you need to do, after all, when someone feels “as far away as the stars.”

I Built a Rocket Ship, out Tuesday via Kids Can Press, explores the constellation of feeling that is grief through our unnamed narrator — a kid with a shock of white hair just like the person they are missing — who is processing the loss.

Lazowski wrote the first draft of the book in 2021, during the pandemic.

Chinese online retailer Temu hit with $232 million fine over unsafe toys and electronics

LONDON (AP) — Temu was hit with a 200 million euro ($232 million) fine Thursday after a European Union investigation found the Chinese online retailer failed to protect consumers from illegal products like toxic or hazardous toys and unsafe electronics.

The 27-nation EU's fine follows preliminary findings last year that Temu was exposing consumers to a high risk of products sold on its platform like baby toys and small electronics that didn't comply with EU consumer safety rules.

The bloc's executive arm issued the penalty under the Digital Services Act, or DSA, a wide-ranging rulebook that requires online platforms to do more to keep internet users safe from harmful content or dodgy goods, under the threat of hefty fines.

It's the second time Brussels has issued a fine under three-year-old DSA, following a $120 million penalty last year for Elon Musk's social media site X.

Gamification and memes lure young people to sports wagering apps, prediction markets

When Rory McIlroy won the Masters for the second year in a row, Kalshi shared a photo of him on Instagram with the words, “Wait he’s goated.” When a video of NBA player Damian Lillard recovering from an injury circulated online, Kalshi’s main competitor Polymarket posted, “The league is cooked.”

If you don’t know what either of those phrases mean, it's because you may not be the target audience.

The posts and hundreds of others like it are exposing younger people to prediction market platforms, where users can put money on the line for the outcomes of real-world events — or absurd ones like when the U.S. will confirm that aliens exist or whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027.

Once on the platforms, companies keep users hooked with what they market as low-stakes, casual opportunities to make an easy buck, creating an environment that some say feels more like a game and less like a risky financial transaction with potentially harmful consequences. Indeed, recent academic research looking at 588 million trades on Polymarket found that profits were concentrated to just a very small group of top traders while the majority of users — 69% — lost money.

‘Letting it rip’: Beyblade fanatics are giving childhood craze another spin

RICHMOND -

At Imperial Hobbies in Richmond, B.C., the air is filled with the sounds of battle.

"Three, two, one — shoot!"

The combatants unleash their weapons, setting off high-pitched whirring, and clashes of plastic and metal.

The Minneapolis immigration crackdown ended months ago. For these little kids, trauma remains

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Minn. (AP) — The little girl approached the therapy dog outside the school library, reaching out to touch her fluffy blond coat. Social worker Nicole Herje leaned in.

"How does it feel when you pet Sage?” Herje said.

“I like it," the girl said. “In Ecuador, I had a dog.”

A few months earlier, this girl and many of her classmates at Valley View Elementary were staying off the streets to avoid the immigration officers flooding their suburban Minneapolis community. Attendance plummeted as families kept their kids from school during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge.

Survivors gather at former residential school site near Brandon

BRANDON — Marjorie Prince had tears in her eyes as she searched to find her and her brothers’ names among more than 3,000 orange flags pegged in the ground at the site of the former Brandon Indian Residential School.

The flags represent children who never returned home as well as survivors.

The woman from Dakota Tipi First Nation said it was her second time returning to the site since she was taken from her family at seven years old with her three brothers.

She couldn’t recall what year she attended the school or how long she was there.

Manitoba delinquency rate rises amid cost of living strain: Equifax

Manitobans are increasingly missing credit card payments as the cost of living rises.

Non-mortgage debt in Manitoba jumped 1.84 per cent, when comparing January through March to the same time last year. Manitobans’ average non-mortgage debt hung around $18,568.

Meanwhile, the measure tracking when Manitobans pass payment deadlines by at least 90 days — called a delinquency rate — hiked 2.32 per cent year-over-year, according to new data from credit reporting agency Equifax Canada.

“It’s not the worst province, by a long way,” said Rebecca Oakes, Equifax vice-president of advanced analytics. “But … (there’s) also a little bit more financial stress than some of the other provinces.”

Manitoba bill would reduce availability of flavoured vapes; one group wants more

WINNIPEG - The Manitoba government plans to greatly reduce the number of locations where flavoured vaping products can be sold, but one group says the idea does not go far enough and lags behind efforts in many other provinces.

A bill introduced in the legislature Tuesday would forbid the sale of such products in businesses in urban areas that allow people under 18 to enter. The measure would not apply in rural areas.

The NDP government said the aim is to help reduce the risk that minors might see the products, be enticed by the flavouring, and get hooked.

"We know that (flavoured vapes) is a gateway for kids in particular (to) choosing more significant — like tobacco, cigarettes — substances later on," Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said.

Manitobans prefer later sunsets in time-change debate: poll

A new public opinion poll suggests year-round daylight time is the leading choice among Manitobans, as the provincial government considers ditching twice-annual clock changes.

The survey by Winnipeg-based Prairie Research Associates found roughly three in four Manitobans support an end to seasonal time changes, a move that would lead to the permanent use of standard or daylight time.

“There is a large group of people who say, ‘I don’t care what the change is as long as there is no (seasonal time) change.’ That group was larger than I expected,” PRA partner Nicholas Borodenko said about the survey results.

“The fact that more people are leaning toward wanting to have more summer daylight in the evening was expected.”

System to address violence in schools a no-brainer

For too long, violence in Manitoba classrooms has been treated as an uncomfortable problem discussed quietly in staff rooms, but rarely confronted publicly.

That silence is beginning to crack.

As more teachers come forward with stories of classroom evacuations, physical assaults and workplaces increasingly defined by fear and disruption, the province can no longer dismiss these incidents as isolated or unavoidable.

Far more needs to be done to provide teachers — and students — with safe learning and working environments.

You should be dancing, yeah. Moving to music offers all kinds of benefits as you age

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Carol Ross can’t stop smiling at dance practice as she shouts out the steps of a routine to members of her tap and jazz troupe for women age 50 and older.

“I’ve been dancing my whole life, it’s the best,” said Ross, who founded the Rodeo City Wreckettes group 23 years ago at an age when many people are getting ready for retirement.

Now 87, Ross and her husband and lifelong dance partner John, also 87, have long known what more older adults are now discovering: Moving to music is one of the best ways to stay healthy. Medical professionals say it doesn’t matter if it’s Western line dancing, ballroom steps, salsa, tap, Zumba at the gym, or with a group like the Wreckettes.

“Dancing is one of the most powerful activities for older people,” said Julio Loya, a nurse and geriatric program coordinator at the Tucson Medical Center.