Young woman says she was on social media ‘all day long’ as a child in landmark addiction trial

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A young woman who is battling against social media giants took the stand Thursday to testify about her experience using the platforms as she was growing up, saying she was on social media “all day long” as a child.

The now 20-year-old, who has been identified in court documents as KGM, says her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Meta and YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled.

The case, along with two others, has been selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies are likely to play out.

KGM, or Kaley, as her lawyers have called her during the trial, started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9.

Eight of 10 people using bus to get downtown unhappy after system overhaul, BIZ survey reveals

“The level of dissatisfaction — that is dire,” said Coun. Sherri Rollins. “Winnipeggers are… voting with their feet. They’re not taking transit anymore. We’re losing revenue.”

Sikh Canadians say state violence a continued threat as PM prepares to visit India

OTTAWA - Some Canadian Sikhs are calling on the government to take a firmer stand on India as Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to travel there this week on a mission to expand Canada's non-U.S. trade.

B.C. Sikh activist Moninder Singh, who received a warning from Vancouver police on Sunday about a credible threat to his life, said he suspects that threat is linked to the Indian government.

Singh said this is the first duty-to-warn report he's received from police since 2022. This one is different, he added, because it's the first warning to be extended to his wife and children.

"No other Sikh activist, with a dozen plus of us having (received police warnings) across the country, has had the family brought into it," Singh said in a phone interview with The Canadian Press.

Métis leaders unveil 1920s model dog sled repatriated from Vatican

OTTAWA - Métis leaders on Wednesday unveiled a model dog sled repatriated to their communities after more than a century in the Vatican collection.

The sled, made in the 1920s of leather, wood and glass beads, was one of 62 items repatriated to Indigenous Peoples from the Vatican last year after decades of calls for their return.

“We’re not simply opening a box. We’re welcoming something very special home. We’re beginning a new chapter, a chapter that’s grounded in relationship, kinship and connection,” Métis National Council president Victoria Pruden said during the ceremony.

“These are not artifacts in the Western sense. These are carriers of memory – that Kiyas Kiskiowin Oma – remembering who we are, our memories returning. They hold the imprint of the hands that made them, and the communities who once knew them.”

Social media can be addictive even for adults, but there are ways to cut back

Social media addiction has been compared to casinos, opioids and cigarettes.

While there’s some debate among experts about the line between overuse and addiction, and whether social media can cause the latter, there is no doubt that many people feel like they can’t escape the pull of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and other platforms.

The companies that designed your favorite apps have an incentive to keep you glued to them so they can serve up ads that make them billions of dollars in revenue. Resisting the pull of the endless scroll, the dopamine hits from short-form videos and the ego boost and validation that come from likes and positive interactions, can seem like an unfair fight. For some people, “rage-bait,” gloomy news and arguing with internet strangers also have an irresistible draw.

Much of the concern around social media addiction has focused on children. But adults are also susceptible to using social media so much that it starts affecting their day-to-day lives.

New report says youth should help guide Ottawa’s campaign against online exploitation

OTTAWA - The federal government should listen to young people as it takes on the problem of online harms, a group of youth advocates told reporters on Parliament Hill Wednesday.

The John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights held a joint press conference with the youth advocates in Ottawa to present a new report. It says current systems aren’t protecting young people in digital spaces.

"Youth are calling for clear federal action," including a national youth advisory council on digital safety, said Blue Vetsch.

The report outlines harms young people are experiencing online, including sexual exploitation and technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

With new American pressure, will Cuba fall?

If you were to listen to many of the commentators, experts and prognosticators, you would think that Cuba is about to collapse.

Homelessness a humanitarian crisis, Rattray says

Jennifer Rattray says few challenges facing Winnipeg are as urgent as the homeless crisis.

“Collectively as a society, as a province, as a city, we need to do better,” the new executive director of End Homelessness Winnipeg told the Free Press.

She says a humanitarian crisis has unfolded on city streets.

“It’s awful,” she says. “We need to do something, and we need to do more than what we’re currently doing.”

Advocate urges feds to update equity act, settle class action with Black employees

OTTAWA - An advocate is urging the federal government to update equity legislation for Black employees and to drop its fight against a discrimination lawsuit that has cost more than $15 million so far.

Nicholas Marcus Thompson, president and CEO of the Black Class Action Secretariat, told The Canadian Press that changes to Canada's Employment Equity Act are long overdue.

In 2023, former labour minister Seamus O'Regan announced two new designated groups would be created under the act for Black and LGBTQ+ people.

The act requires that federally regulated employers, including the public service, take steps to eliminate barriers and maintain proportional representation in the workplace for members of designated groups.

Ukrainian emergency visa holders expected to return after war: immigration department

OTTAWA - Canada's immigration department says it still expects Ukrainians who fled the war with Russia to return to their home country once the conflict ends.

That's in spite of comments from Immigration Minister Lena Diab, who recently acknowledged that many Ukrainians who came to Canada on temporary visas are here to stay.

"Canada and the people that made the decision felt that it would be temporary, which is why they were called temporary programs. We now know it's not temporary," Diab said in a Jan. 26 interview with The Canadian Press.

"They've been here for X number of years, and for the most part, people are working, they're building a life, they have children and so on. So I understand that."

Relationship with city’s icy waterways warms many a Winnipegger’s heart

In summer, a screened porch or gazebo adds another room to Winnipeg houses, full of light and fresh air.

A balcony in a high-rise apartment seems to double the horizon available to residents: it feels like you could step out into the branches of a big old elm or a cottonwood, full of birds.

In the same way, the frozen Assiniboine, Red and Seine rivers add concert hall- and football stadium-sized swathes of space to the city.

The iced-over rivers provide new ways of seeing and understanding this place we call home.

More Canadian athletes powered by artificial intelligence at Winter Games

Just for fun, Xavier McKeever and his cross-country ski teammates once tasked ChatGPT to design a training plan for them.

"It was the craziest training plan we've ever seen," said the 22-year-old from Canmore, Alta.

"It basically said you should do intensity every single day. You should do three hours of skiing and then an hour of intensity, and repeat that a few times -- and then you should take a week off completely. We know you can't do that.

"It was pretty funny to see and do, to see Chat GPT can't write a training plan, and that we need our coaching to help us with that."

Province to power up smart thermostat program, rebates

Manitobans may get cash for turning down the thermostat during peak energy-use periods next winter.

What to know about EPA decision to revoke a scientific finding that helped fight climate change

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday revoked its own 2009 “endangerment finding,” a scientific conclusion that for 16 years has been the central basis for regulating planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles and other sources.

The finding itself is straightforward: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas — endanger public health and welfare.

It was adopted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration says the finding hurts industry and the economy and that the Obama and Biden administrations twisted science to determine that greenhouse gases are a public health risk.

Get vaccinated for flu, COVID-19, measles to protect crowded hospitals: top doc

The province’s top doctor is asking Manitobans to get vaccinated as respiratory virus season threatens to strain hospitals and measles outbreaks tear though parts of Manitoba.

Energy sector’s interest in Churchill heating up: Kinew

Several companies, including at least one Canadian energy giant, are “kicking the tires” on a long-touted vision to export oil, gas, minerals and agricultural products through Churchill, bringing the dream of a trade corridor to the Hudson Bay coast closer to reality, Premier Wab Kinew says.

A mother recounts her dangerous journey across the border to escape Trump’s America

MONTREAL - At times, a 25-year old woman said the snow reached her knees as she trudged through a dark, icy forest near the Quebec border in mid-January.

With temperatures hovering around -11 C, her left hand clutched her daughter and her right held up a cellphone, as they listened to a voice transmitting instructions on which direction to go and where they needed to stop. Four other Haitian migrants were travelling with them.

“It felt like a race with time,” the woman recalled in a recent interview.

Weeks after this ordeal, the woman and her daughter are seeking asylum in Canada.

Plight of imprisoned Hong Kong ex-publisher Jimmy Lai evokes grief over loss of press freedoms

HONG KONG (AP) — About five years after Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily shut down and its founder was jailed, the newspaper’s former staff and readers are lamenting the loss of the city’s press freedoms.

Founder Jimmy Lai, 78, was sentenced Monday under a Beijing-imposed national security law to 20 years in prison, the longest such sentence so far. His co-defendants, six other former Apple Daily journalists, received jail terms ranging between six years and nine months and 10 years.

Officials in both Hong Kong and Beijing defended the case against Lai, with the city's leader John Lee accusing the newspaper of inciting violence and poisoning young minds. The government insisted his case had nothing to do with press freedom, saying the defendants used journalism as a guise to commit acts that harmed Hong Kong and China.

There's no question that things are different in Hong Kong without the Apple Daily. Since it folded, the city’s once freewheeling press scene has changed drastically. Its voice was one of many that have been silenced in the former British colony.

Ukrainians push for permanent residency in Canada as war with Russia grinds on

OTTAWA - Roksolana Kryshtanovych never planned on moving to Canada before Russia's war, but the invasion made it impossible for her to go home to Ukraine.

In the years since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, she said, Canada has become her new home. But without a path to permanent residency, she and thousands of other Ukrainians here face an uncertain future as the war drags on.

Immigration Minister Lena Diab has acknowledged many of these visa holders are no longer here temporarily — but the government has no concrete solution yet to their plight.

Now, her government is under new pressure to open a permanent residency pathway for the nearly 300,000 Ukrainians like Kryshtanovych who came to Canada through the emergency visa program.

Google, Meta, push back on addiction claims in landmark social media trial

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jurors in a landmark social media case that seeks to hold tech companies responsible for harms to children got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube.

At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits will play out. KGM and the cases of two other plaintiffs have been selected to be bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.

Comparing social media platforms to casinos and addictive drugs, lawyer Mark Lanier delivered opening statements Monday in the Los Angeles Superior Court trial that seeks to hold Instagram owner Meta and Google's YouTube responsible for addictive features and harms to children who use their products. Two other defendants, TikTok and Snap, have settled the case.

Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt spoke of the disagreement within the scientific community over social media addiction, with some researchers believing it doesn’t exist, or that addiction is not the most appropriate way to describe heavy social media use.

Province’s Indigenous tourism industry growing

Melanie Gamache has been taking her beading and jigging sessions on the road lately.

Schools, immigrant services agencies and private companies had asked whether she would take Borealis Beading to them.

“With the exception of last year (with wildfires), there has been a growing demand,” Gamache said. “There’s just an increase in people wanting to know more — like people want to know the history.”

Gamache registered her company, Borealis Beading, in 2018 and started by hosting Métis beading workshops.

Bracing for a future global water shortage

Declaring bankruptcy is by all accounts a painful, traumatic and perhaps even humiliating process.

Is the concept of Canada as a ‘middle power’ meaningless?

Does the middle power concept have any relevancy today?

When you read through Prime Minister Mark Carney’s notable Davos speech, he makes a number of references to the term “middle power.” This was no accident for sure.

Government officials, commentators and journalists often refer to Canada as a middle power as if it’s supposed to mean something important. But it is really little more than a term of convenience — and a self-serving one for Canada.

Does the concept still have any meaning today? Does it denote a certain status, influence or position in the international hierarchy of states? More to the point, what makes Canada a so-called middle power?