Small changes, big impact

Are you a climate champion or climate destroyer? Ecological quizzes and carbon-footprint calculators can help you find out.

Introduction to Michif — one word at a time

Before the wolf can howl, Norman Fleury says a Michif word: Ooyoowuk.

“Ooyoowuk,” Fleury repeats. Or, in English, “howl.”

Ooyoowuk is one of 70 words articulated by Fleury with an animation and English translation to match — all bundled into digital flashcards.

A group of Métis entrepreneurs unveiled their Michif flashcards this week. They join a swelling movement to revitalize the Métis language, which combines languages such as Cree and French.

St. Boniface residents drained after demolition of Happyland pool

As demolition continues at one outdoor pool in St. Boniface, a city councillor hopes to take a second look at extending the life of another one.

Will electric tractors gain traction? At a pilot event for farmers, researchers see possibilities

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — In the soft dirt of an indoor horseback riding ring last month, a group of farmers got ready to test drive a new piece of equipment: an electric tractor.

As they took turns climbing in — some surprised by its quick acceleration — they gave real-time feedback to the Michigan State University researchers who have been developing it for over two years.

The farmers remarked on the motor's quiet whir. Most were intrigued, or at least open to the idea. Some were concerned that the battery on the underside of the carriage would mean a lower clearance over the field, while others worried that it would simply be too expensive.

“What we hope to do when we retire is we want to get everything electric on the farm. The tractor is the last electric implement to get,” said Don Dunklee, one of the farmers to provide feedback. He runs a small organic vegetable farm that's relied on wind and solar for decades.

After summer evacuation, northern students ready to hit the books

Hundreds of young wildfire-evacuees will be reunited with their peers and teachers on Sept. 29 for a belated, albeit welcome, first day of school on familiar campuses across northern Manitoba.

Frontier School Division plans to officially launch 2025-26 in South Indian Lake, Leaf Rapids and Lynn Lake before the end of the month.

Chief superintendent Tyson MacGillivray said he and his colleagues are looking forward to “opening day,” following months of emergency management and uncertainty.

Approximately 450 students are currently unable to attend regular classes at West Lynn Heights School (Lynn Lake), Leaf Rapids Education Centre (Leaf Rapids) and Thunderbird School (South Indian Lake).

Age isn’t everything when deciding if a child is ready to be home alone

School is back in session, bringing new routines — and new milestones for students.

For some, this is the year they are allowed to go home to an empty house instead of an after-school program or day care. It’s a decision faced by many parents whose work or other obligations keep them from coming home until long past school release time.

With after-school care often expensive and hard to find, parents have reason to encourage independence. But how can they be sure their child is ready to navigate home on their own, even if only for an hour or two?

A handful of states have set age minimums. Maryland law, for example, makes it a crime to leave a child younger than 8 years old unattended.

Homemade Cooking School: Squash your aversion to veggies

In this Homemade Cooking School class, Camille Metcalfe shares how to make the most of produce.

Athletes Unlimited softball commissioner Ng excited as sport surges, league prepares for expansion

Kim Ng is excited about how far Athletes Unlimited softball has come in the past year and believes the sport is surging as her league prepares to expand in 2026.

The Athletes Unlimited Softball League’s commissioner is brimming with confidence after the league posted what she called promising numbers in its first year. This was the first time Athletes Unlimited added a traditional team format after five years of crowning only individual champions.

There were 20 sold-out games in a touring format that visited 10 cities. The AUSL website had 5.3 million views during the season, and the championship series had peak viewership of 347,000 on ESPN. There were 240 million impressions on the AUSL’s social channels.

“I think it went really well,” Ng said. “And we were all just incredibly excited, incredibly thrilled about what we were just able to do, and really, for the future of AUSL.”

Early childhood educators give high marks to job satisfaction: poll

Despite eight in 10 early childhood educators reporting high levels of job satisfaction, many employers in the sector continue to struggle with staffing shortages.

The Manitoba Child Care Association has released the results of an online survey of its members that took place between Feb. 4 and 18.

Probe Research Inc. led the project — a decade after the Winnipeg-based polling firm conducted an initial workforce survey for the association.

This time around, 830 people, including front-line early childhood educators, centre directors and family child-care providers, submitted responses.

Rogers wins gold, sets Canadian record in hammer throw at world championships

TOKYO - Camryn Rogers set the tone early in the women's hammer throw at the world athletics championships Monday with an impressive opening toss of 78.09 metres.

Good enough for a world title. Not good enough for Rogers.

The 26-year-old from Richmond, B.C., put the competition out of reach with her second throw of 80.51 metres to claim her second straight world championship gold medal in dominant fashion.

Rogers's winning throw broke her own Canadian record and is the second longest ever behind the world record of 82.98 set by Poland's Anita Wlodarczyk in 2016. Rogers's previous personal best was 78.88 metres.

First Anishinaabe woman Bar Association president prioritizes mentorship, protecting the rule of law

In 1991, when Stacey Soldier was just 15 years old, Manitoba marked a watershed moment. After three years of hearings, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry released its final report, a searing reckoning with how the province’s police and justice system had failed Indigenous people.

At home in Thompson, Soldier watched news of the inquiry unfold on TV. (“We were only allowed to watch the news in our house,” she says with a laugh.) The Anishinaabe teen was inspired to see an Indigenous judge, then-Justice Murray Sinclair, co-presiding over the proceedings, and was transfixed by the findings.

It felt “thrilling for justice,” she recalls. But it was also a stark lesson in the challenges her people faced to obtain it.

“One thing that the AJI made clear is that this is a system that wasn’t designed to help Indigenous communities and people in any way,” she says, chatting at her law firm Cochrane Sinclair’s Exchange District offices last week.

Local engineer was a real game changer

Forty-seven years ago, George Klassen had an idea that improved the lives of millions of people in Bangladesh. It was for a hand-powered rower pump, a classic piece of simple, inexpensive and appropriate technology that poor farmers could use to irrigate their crops.

Today, an estimated 500,000 rower pumps are still in operation, benefitting more than 2.5 million people in that southeast Asian country — a legacy to Klassen’s vision, curiosity and ingenuity.

Klassen, who died on April 15 in Steinbach, spent his early years in Blumenort (near Gretna) before moving with his parents and 10 siblings to a farm near Steinbach. After graduating from the University of Manitoba with a B.Sc., he taught science and math in Nigeria with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for three years.

There, he became convinced the best way he could serve people in the global south was by assisting them with practical skills and knowledge. With that in mind, when Klassen returned to Canada he decided to go back to the University of Manitoba to study engineering.

Very hungry caterpillars very good for biodiversity

Widely considered a pest and a scourge, a leaf-chomping defoliator dedicated to decimating crops, boring into buds and biting down blossoms as it works to satiate its inexhaustible appetite, a new nature documentary reveals there’s more to the much-maligned caterpillar than meets the eye.

The larval creature takes centre stage in Winnipeg filmmaker Jeff McKay’s documentary feature The Extraordinary Caterpillar.

His hour-long film takes viewers on a journey to understanding why the famously “very hungry caterpillar” is a key player in maintaining biodiversity.

“Caterpillars are right at the centre of the food chain, they are key to the food chain working as it should,” McKay says.

Running down Terry Fox’s dream

In an era when today’s endurance feats seemingly defy human limits, his accomplishments still marvel.

In 1980, a curly-haired young man dipped a prosthetic right leg in the Atlantic Ocean in St. John’s, Nlfd., before embarking on a cross-country journey to raise money and awareness for cancer research.

With his signature hop-step running gait, Terry Fox, often only wearing grey shorts, a white cotton T-shirt with the words Marathon of Hope stencilled on the front, and blue adidas shoes, ran an average of 42 kilometres, or the equivalent of a full marathon, for 143 days. In total, he tallied 5,373 kilometres spanning six provinces.

His physical journey ended Sept. 1 of that year just shy of Thunder Bay when the cancer that had claimed his leg at age 18 had returned in his lungs. He died 10 months later, shortly before his 23rd birthday. However, his dream of raising millions of dollars for cancer research never faded.

Anything but sweet: outage spoils dozens of litres of parlour’s ice cream

The owner of an ice cream shop was licking her wounds Thursday after dozens of litres of icy treats melted away, causing profits to go down the drain.

Patty Mikos, the longtime co-owner of Dairy Delight on St. Anne’s Road, arrived at work to find 10 tubs of 11.4 litres of hard ice cream melting inside a freezer that had been off for hours because of a hydro outage.

The ice cream was tossed into a garbage bin with other perishable food products, including hamburger.

“We had to throw out all the meat — about 50 pounds today,” Mikos said. “You don’t want to risk it when it comes to meat.”

Amazon’s Zoox launches its robotaxi service in Las Vegas

Amazon's Zoox on Wednesday launched its robotaxi service in Las Vegas, offering free rides through parts of the entertainment mecca for anyone willing to gamble on the safety of a driverless vehicle that operates without a steering wheel.

The Las Vegas debut of Zoox's long-planned ride-hailing service reflects Amazon-owned robotaxi maker's confidence in the safety of its boxy vehicles after two years of testing them in the city.

The robotaxis initially were only available to employees in Las Vegas before gradually expanding to friends and family members. Now, anyone with the Zoox app will be able to request a ride to five designated locations, including Resorts World, the Luxor hotel and the New York-New York hotel. The longest distance the Zoox robotaxis will travel is about three miles (4.8 kilometers) while carrying up to four passengers.

All rides will be provided for free for at least the first few months to help promote the existence of the service in the perennially popular travel destination. Once it begins charging for rides in Las Vegas, Zoox says its prices will be comparable to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

Worse-for-wear riverwalk a victim of total neglect

Partway down my well-beaten path from West Broadway to The Forks, I feel a bit like Dorothy navigating Oz. The path ahead is lined with Winnipeg’s version of dancing poppies and flying monkeys: hazards, confrontations and ghostly spectres to which we’ve become perhaps far too accustomed.

One Tech Tip: Ditch the chatbots and take your AI nature apps on a birdwatching hike

I didn't notice the scarlet tanager until the alert appeared on my phone: “Merlin heard a new bird!”

Despite its brilliant plumage — jet-black wings on a crimson body — the songbird can be a hard one to spot in a forest because it prefers to stay high in the canopy. It sounds a little like a robin to an untrained ear.

But the free Merlin Bird ID app detected a scarlet tanager was likely nearby by using artificial intelligence to analyze my phone’s live sound recording. I paused my hike, quietly scanned the treetops, saw the bird as it kept singing and clicked a button to add the species to my growing "life list" of bird sightings. Digital confetti burst on my screen.

Like a real-world version of Pokémon Go, a gotta-catch-'em-all drive to add to my Merlin list has helped me find a great kiskadee in Mexico and a rusty-cheeked scimitar-babbler in the Himalayas. But sometimes the greatest revelations are close to home, as more AI nature app users are starting to discover.

Winnipeg elementary school shoots for moon with stuffie design

A stuffed animal designed by elementary schoolers in Winnipeg could be launched into outer space on NASA’s Artemis II mission.

Being Muslim and American in the nation’s heartland

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — The oldest surviving place of worship for Muslims in the United States is a white clapboard building on a grassy corner plot, as unassumingly Midwestern as its neighboring houses in Cedar Rapids – except for a dome.

The descendants of the Lebanese immigrants who constructed “the Mother Mosque” almost a century ago — along with newcomers from Afghanistan, East Africa and beyond — are defining what it can mean to be both Muslim and American in the nation's heartland just as heightened conflicts in the Middle East fuel tensions over immigration and Islam in the United States.

Standing by the door in a gold-embroidered black robe, Fatima Igram Smejkal greeted the faithful with a cheerful “salaam” as they hurried into the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids for Friday prayers. In 1934, her family helped open what the National Register of Historic Places calls “the first building designed and constructed specifically as a house of worship for Muslims in the United States.”

“They all came from nothing … so they wanted to give back,” Smejkal said of families like hers, who arrived at the turn of the 20th century. “That’s why I’m so kind to the ones that come in from Somalia and the Congo and Sudan and Afghanistan. I have no idea what they left, what they’re thinking when they walk in that mosque.”

Le centre d’interprétation Saint-Léon: là où souffle l’esprit de la nature et de l’innovation

Avec ses galeries interactives, ses sentiers en pleine nature et son riche contenu éducatif, le Centre d’interprétation Saint-Léon est bien plus qu’un simple musée rural. En 2025, la communauté célèbre les 20 ans du premier parc éolien du Manitoba — une réalisation marquante racontée au cœur du Centre. Entre salamandres mystérieuses, énergies vertes et oiseaux migrateurs, les visiteurs y découvrent un territoire où science, nature et fierté locale se rencontrent.

Situé près du lac Saint-Léon, le Centre d’interprétation Saint-Léon a toujours eu pour vocation d’éduquer les curieux, qu’ils soient touristes ou de la région, mais aussi de rassurer. Lorraine Mabon, la présidente, raconte:

“Le but original, c’était de parler des salamandres et de leur rôle, parce qu’il y en avait énormément dans la région et les gens en avaient un peu peur. Mais les salamandres, qu’on trouve sur les terres humides, sont une bonne chose: elles sont indicatrices de la bonne santé de l’environnement.

“Un autre fait intéressant, c’est que si elles perdent un membre, elles peuvent le régénérer! Beaucoup de scientifiques étudient cette faculté exceptionnelle.”

Keeping fur babies fed in a fire zone

FLIN FLON — Harley Eagle became an expert at breaking into houses during the month-long evacuation of this northern community as a wildfire raged nearby.

However, he had the homeowners’ permission.

While 5,100 Flin Floners waited out the fire in southern Manitoba, Eagle and his wife, city councillor Judy Eagle, offered to stay behind and feed animals that didn’t make the trip with their owners.

“It was groundhog day every day. You get up at 5:30 a.m., go to the community hall, make the coffee and then that’s when you start caring for all the animals,” he said Wednesday afternoon, as residents slowly made their way back to their homes and pets.

Graphic novelist to lead free workshop for aspiring artists

Jonathan Dyck’s most monumental piece of advice? Start small.