36 jours en mer : récit des naufragés qui ont survécu aux hallucinations, à la soif et au désespoir

FASS BOYE, Senegal (AP) — Un mois s’est écoulé lorsque les quatre premiers hommes ont décidé de sauter.

D’innombrables cargos sont passés à côté d’eux, pourtant personne n’est venu à leur secours. Ils n’avaient plus de carburant. La faim et la soif étaient insoutenables. Des dizaines de personnes sont déjà mortes, dont le capitaine.

Le voyage de Fass Boye, petit village de pêche sénégalaise en difficulté économique, jusqu’aux îles Canaries en Espagne, porte d’entrée de l’Union européenne où ils espéraient trouver du travail, était censé durer une semaine. Mais plus d’un mois plus tard, le bateau en bois transportant 101 hommes et garçons s’éloignait de plus en plus de la destination prévue.

Aucune terre n’est en vue. Pourtant, les quatre hommes croient, ou hallucinent, qu’ils peuvent nager jusqu’au rivage. Rester sur le bateau «maudit», pensaient-ils, était une condamnation à mort. Ils ont ramassé des récipients d’eau vides et des planches de bois, tout ce qui pouvait les aider à flotter.

Riel’s vision grows stronger

As the first visionary of Manitoba, Riel fought the rest of his life to stop British domination and destruction of Indigenous lives, while stubbornly maintain the independent and unique multicultural spirit that birthed this place.

Esports competitions motivating force for First Nations students, educators say

Esports clubs are allowing First Nations students to play against peers from other on-reserve schools without the costly and time-intensive trips required for basketball, hockey and other traditional extracurriculars.

For teacher Karl Hildebrandt, one of the many motivators to grow Manitoba’s online gaming community is giving youth in rural and remote areas more competitive opportunities to represent their schools.

“When you tell kids they can play video games at school, their eyes open and when you tell them you can compete against another school in the province, their mouths drop,” said Hildebrandt, director of rural and northern esports for the Manitoba School Esports Association.

A handful of members of the Manitoba First Nations School System, including Lake Manitoba, Brokenhead, Fox Lake, Roseau River and York Landing, have started developing cybersport programs. Some teachers have also started integrating online games into their everyday lessons.

Manitoba auto repair shops in high gear amid lengthy MPI strike

Despite bumps in the road, Manitoba auto repair shops are chugging along as strike action at Manitoba Public Insurance drags into its seventh week.

“There are some delays, but we are hoping the (MPI) people can get back to work. We miss them. We miss the adjusters, but there is not much we can do about it,” said John Vernaus, owner of Vernaus Autobody in Winnipeg.

“Can you ask for more when (MPI is) operating with maybe one-10th of the staff?”

Around 1,700 walked off the job Aug. 28, after the Manitoba Government General Employees’ Union and the Crown auto insurer failed to reach a contract agreement. Many services have been halted, delayed or limited in the weeks since, as MPI works to maintain operations with reduced staff.

Crave introduces ad tiers, including $9.99 plan

TORONTO - Crave is introducing two ad-supported tiers that each shave $5 or $10 off the monthly subscription fee.

Bell Media says its new Crave Basic with Ads costs $9.99/month, while Crave Standard with Ads costs $14.99/month. An unchanged ad-free option remains at $19.99/month, and is renamed Crave Premium Ad-Free.

Viewers can watch most shows and movies, including HBO and Max originals, on the ad-supported plans. About one per cent of titles won't be available due to licensing restrictions.

Ads will be 15 or 30 seconds long, totalling about five minutes per hour, and appear before and during some episodes and films.

New Islamic school set to open in city

While students and teachers look forward to the end of classes, new school trustee Delvinder Zamir anticipates piles of summer homework.

As the board chair of the yet-unnamed new Islamic elementary school supported by the Manitoba Islamic Association, Zamir plans to hire teachers, furnish classrooms and buy supplies before the institution opens its doors in September.

“It will be nice to see parents and kids come to a spiritual place where they can use it in a different way,” she says of the kindergarten to Grade 4 school to be based out of Winnipeg Grand Mosque and Community Centre on Waverley Street.

The fourth Islamic school in Winnipeg, this one is the first located at a mosque and run as a project by Manitoba Islamic Association, and the only one in southwest Winnipeg, says Zamir, who also serves as second vice-president of the MIA board. Members asked for a community-run Islamic school at the mosque since they faced waiting lists at other schools, she says.

Controversy? Conspiracy in cryptic Conservative code? Just another day for Manitoba Tories

Stop the presses. Former federal Conservative MP Candice Bergen thinks youth today are “entitled” and they have been “brainwashed” by post-secondary and public education.

If you’re wondering right now what exactly Bergen was trying to communicate, and why, you are not alone.

The opposition NDP used question period to drop a 78-second clip of an address Bergen — who is the co-chair of the Progressive Conservative 2023 election campaign — delivered to a group of young Tories at an event held in a meeting room at the Manitoba Legislative Building. The recording included several pretty bizarre comments. |

Low-cost Temu goes head-to-head with Amazon

It started with a video of a postal worker sorting a mountain of orange packages from Temu.

Rachael D'Amore hadn't heard of the online shopping site, but after watching the video she found good reviews, affordable products and free shipping on most orders — what she called "a unicorn in Canada these days."

"I had to double check the URL to make sure that I wasn't on the U.S. site," she said.

Temu also offered a $5 credit if an order took longer than 12 days to arrive — a quasi-insurance policy that gave D'Amore the confidence to place a $30 order for seven items, including an 89-cent necklace, earrings for $1.78 and hair clips for $3.59.

Raising up books as social justice tools

Valerie Chelangat spends her days reading. She reads every day, mostly in the morning, sometimes before bed in the evenings and, if she has time to spare, in the hours between.

Study shows ‘striking’ number who believe news misinforms

NEW YORK (AP) — Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.

The survey, released Wednesday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive.

Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.

Similarly, 52% disagreed with a statement that disseminators of national news “care about the best interests of their readers, viewers and listeners,” the study found. It said 23% of respondents believed the journalists were acting in the public's best interests.

As elites arrive in Davos, conspiracy theories thrive online

NEW YORK (AP) — When some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last year, sessions on climate change drew high-level discussions on topics such as carbon financing and sustainable food systems.

But an entirely different narrative played out on the internet, where social media users claimed leaders wanted to force the population to eat insects instead of meat in the name of saving the environment.

The annual event in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, which opens Monday, has increasingly become a target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus of commentators who believe the forum involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit. Experts say what was once a conspiracy theory found in the internet’s underbelly has now hit the mainstream.

“This isn’t a conspiracy that is playing out on the extreme fringes,” said Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who studies anti-government extremism. “We’re seeing it on mainstream social media platforms being shared by regular Americans. We were seeing it being spread by mainstream media figures right on their prime time news, on their nightly networks.”

The joke’s on us as social media capitalizes on our base impulses in race to the bottom

The most important thing we can teach ourselves, and our children, about how to navigate social media is this: the algorithms want you to be angry. They want you to be angry, because it is good for business.

Behold the transformation of Poilievre

It appears newly minted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is willing to add a little water to his wine. After months of criss-crossing the country peddling conspiracy theories and fuelling anti-Liberal rage with juvenile slogans and deranged claims about Canadians losing control of their lives, Poilievre is showing signs of moderation.

Neo-Nazi group members plotted to kill Free Press reporter

Disturbing details of a plan to kill a Free Press reporter who had infiltrated a white nationalist hate group were revealed for the first time Wednesday.

Fenians fancied a Manitoba foothold

Sometimes it’s the local angle that turns a book into a bit of a revelation.

Leaving auto repair life in the rear-view

For decades, Cadillacs, Mustangs and Audis have overnighted in the Exchange District for repairs and transformations.

Now, a Winnipeg mechanic envisions a new use for his shop — one that sees it filled with milk and produce instead of wrenches and tires.

“There’s no groceries down here,” said Andy Baranowski, owner of J.W. McDonald Auto Service. “Where are you going to get your milk?”

The 189 Bannatyne Ave. building has been an auto repair garage for almost a century — since 1923, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

Disdain, confusion around officials’ handling of UFO reports

Although the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is very popular and has persisted since the 1940s — when the darned things were known as flying saucers — skeptics often note that few academic or scholarly studies on this topic have been produced.

Search for the Unknown: Canada’s UFO Files and the Rise of Conspiracy Theory, based on the excellent doctoral dissertation by Canadian historian Matthew Hayes at Trent University, challenges that assertion. In this way it’s similar to David Jacobs’ 1973 history thesis The UFO Controversy in America, from the University of Wisconsin.

Hayes’ in-depth, heavily annotated work is not, however, a book about UFOs. In fact, Hayes only describes three Canadian UFO cases in detail and briefly notes a few dozen others.

Hayes instead “presents a history of the Canadian government’s investigations into reports of UFOs, and how these were handled, handed off, and defended from 1950 to the 1990s.”

Raber Gloves’ Garbage Mitts the must-have Winnipeg winter accessory

‘I am the wrong person to complain to about the weather,” Howard Raber says jubilantly midway through a Winnipeg January, wearing a golf shirt as he opens the door to his family’s factory on McDermot Avenue.

Raber does not mind the cold. It’s the reason he is in business.

Had his grandparents immigrated in 1925 to a warmer place, their grandson’s opinion on the windchill might differ. But the ancestors chose Winnipeg — not such a bad place to be in the business of making gloves.

When it’s freezing outside, which in the wintertime is often, if not always, Howard Raber considers himself especially lucky. “When it’s cold out, we are everybody’s best friend.”

Even if games go on, MLB lockout could alienate Gen Z

NEW YORK (AP) — Max Scherzer stars in the last video posted to Major League Baseball’s TikTok account before the league locked out the players Thursday morning.

The clip, viewed over 400,000 times, shows the final out from Scherzer's first no-hitter in 2015 with Washington, followed by teammates dousing the three-time Cy Young Award winner with chocolate syrup. Hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd's “Swang” plays in the background.

“Max Scherzer is ... officially a New York Met!!!” the caption reads, celebrating Scherzer's $130 million deal to pitch in Queens.

It could be the last post featuring a big league player sent to the account’s 4.8 million followers for months, a curveball with real consequences for a sport already concerned about courting young fans.

It’s a tough spell for official wizards

What with there being only two weeks until Halloween, I’m not sure this is a good time to fire your official wizard.

But that’s exactly what the New Zealand city of Christchurch did the other day when it dumped its official wizard from the payroll after 23 years of loyal service.

Ha ha ha! OK, I’m not kidding. Christchurch’s city council has ended its contract with the world’s only state-appointed wizard — “I’m going to have to ask you to turn in your wand!” — because it has decided to go in a more modern and diverse direction.

Anyone who has ever read a Harry Potter novel or seen one of the films is probably thinking: “Laying off your wizard just before All Hallow’s Eve can only end in tears, right?” Or as famed American columnist Dave Barry chirped in his blog: “Tomorrow’s headline: City council turned into frogs!”

Feds to return parliamentary find to Algonquins

The Conservative Party of Canada must embrace rapid change to its methods of platform development, leadership and candidate selection, while pushing back on efforts to radicalize the party.

St. Boniface Museum home to 30,000 artifacts, many connected to founder of Manitoba

St. Boniface Museum is home to 30,000 artifacts, many connected to the founder of Manitoba.