Applications for federal public service jobs drop by almost 30 per cent

OTTAWA - The number of people applying for a job in the federal government plummeted last year as Ottawa works to slash the size of the public service.

Two years ago, there were more than a million applications for jobs in the federal public service.

But between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, that number fell by nearly 30 per cent, to less than 735,000.

The number of job ads the government posted was also down almost 40 per cent, while the number of people who left the public service, including retirements and resignations, increased 12 per cent.

Solar-powered tricycles help Cubans navigate fuel shortages and blackouts

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s iconic vintage cars have all but disappeared and in their place, small electric tricycles — most of them made in China — have become the primary means of transportation for hundreds of thousands of Cubans grappling with a prolonged fuel crisis.

These are no ordinary electric tricycles — many Cubans have outfitted them with solar panels, allowing the vehicles to recharge without relying on the island nation's strained power grid.

The three-wheelers are a far cry from the old-timers that only a year ago cruised the streets spewing clouds of black smoke.

“This is how people get around now,” said 40-year-old Liecer de la Cruz, who owns one of these vehicles.

Westman residents fear power project’s wind turbines will sully their idyllic landscape

POLONIA — Leonard Kaspick can list just about every household in the valley.

“There’s someone living right across the northeast, someone living behind here, about a quarter mile there’s a house there, then a half mile there’s another house there, I’m here, and then on top of the hill there’s someone else there,” he says, standing in the heart of the hamlet — a community hall just off the main drag.

Besides the hall and the smattering of homes, there’s a historic (though out-of-commission) church next door and a single general store further down the road.

“There’s less people here now than there was in 1885,” Kaspick, 83, jokes as he wraps up a condensed history of the western-Manitoba community.

MMF buys long-vacant federal lab

The Manitoba Métis Federation has taken another major step in its effort to help revitalize downtown Winnipeg by acquiring the former National Research Council property on Ellice Avenue.

The federation has scheduled a news conference today to announce it has purchased the office tower, laboratory and parking lot at 435-445 Ellice Ave. The acquisition expands its downtown footprint to more than one million square feet of owned property and will eventually house about 70 per cent of its 1,300 employees.

The sale ends a years-long legal dispute between the federation and the research council. The federation had sued the federal agency after an earlier agreement to purchase the property collapsed in 2020.

“Everybody’s happy, they’re happy, we’re happy. And now we just got to start the transition of our plan,” federation president David Chartrand told the Free Press Thursday.

China takes a page from SpaceX and recaptures the first stage of a rocket to reuse it

BEIJING (AP) — China successfully recaptured the first stage of a rocket after a launch on Friday in a breakthrough for the country's space program, state media said.

The first stage of a Long March-10B rocket separated from the second stage after liftoff and returned to a platform in the sea, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

It was the first time China recovered the first stage of a rocket. America's SpaceX has been doing so for several years to drive down launch costs by reusing the booster that helps lift the satellites or whatever the rocket is carrying into space.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been recovering their rockets since 2015, saving vast amounts of money by recycling them rather than ditching them after liftoff. SpaceX leads the pack with more than 600 landings of its first-stage Falcon boosters, steering them to ocean barges as well as landing zones near the launch pads. Just this week, SpaceX launched a booster for the 36th time, a new record.

‘It’s infectious’: Optimism a priority for Ontario town’s chief positivity officer

NEWMARKET - When Newmarket Mayor John Taylor appointed a few dozen people to serve as positivity ambassadors in the southern Ontario town during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wanted someone at the centre of the effort.

Longtime customer service supervisor Jamie Boyle took on the new role of chief positivity officer with aplomb.

And he didn't stop when the pandemic ended.

"Jamie's level of enthusiasm, positivity and just go out there and take on the world attitude is almost without parallel, and it's infectious," Taylor said.

FIFA World Cup, youth job gains gave the labour market a lift in June

OTTAWA - The FIFA World Cup and a better summer jobs market for young workers appeared to drive steady gains in Canada's labour market last month.

Employers added 18,000 jobs in June, Statistics Canada said Friday, mostly in part-time and private sector work.

That pushed the unemployment rate down a tenth of a point to 6.5 per cent, back to where it stood in January.

Employment gains narrowly topped economists’ expectations heading into the release but mark a slowdown from the 88,000 jobs added in May.

Apartment rents continue to climb in Manitoba

Winnipeg saw a marginal increase — 0.9 per cent — to $1,678, according to a July 2026 Rentals.ca report, which shows June data.

A shoe factory fire that killed 28 highlights China’s persisting worker safety risks

BEIJING (AP) — Authorities were investigating a blaze at a shoe factory in southeastern China’s Fujian province that killed 28 people, raising renewed concern over worker safety.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency said Friday that a search had ended while an investigation was underway into the cause of the fire Thursday that gutted the Fujian Huiteng factory in Jinjiang, a manufacturing hub for sports shoes.

According to product listings on online sales and import platforms, Fujian Huiteng makes shoes for both Chinese and foreign brands.

Local media footage showed people trapped on the roof of the five-floor building, enveloped in thick black smoke, while the spray from fire truck hoses fell short of flames showing through windows on its upper floors. Xinhua said the factory’s owner and managers were arrested and the company’s accounts were frozen.

Colourful folk festival campground a hive of creative activity

The 51st annual Winnipeg Folk Festival had yet to commence, but festivities in the campground were already in full swing.

The festival campground opened early Wednesday morning and provides a temporary home to more than 6,000 residents during the four-day music festival at Birds Hill Provincial Park.

By Thursday afternoon, the area had been transformed into a sea of colourful tents and trailers. A steady stream of campers could be seen hauling wagons from the parking lot loaded with essentials: coolers and tarps, sleeping bags and sunscreen.

Others brought a little more than the basics.

Mayor flip-flops on cutting tree-planting budget after intense criticism

Public opposition has prompted Mayor Scott Gillingham to change his mind about chopping $1.2 million from the city’s tree-planting program.

B.C. First Nation challenges dredging plan to accommodate larger tankers in Vancouver

NORTH VANCOUVER - A British Columbia First Nation says it has launched a legal challenge against a plan by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority to dredge Burrard Inlet to make room for oil tankers with larger loads to operate.

In a release, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation says it has filed for a judicial review, seeking to overturn the permits issued by the port authority to allow for the dredging to take place.

The plan calls for the dredging along northern and southern edges of the navigation channel in Vancouver's Burrard Inlet underneath the Second Narrows bridge, starting in September.

The Tsleil-Waututh Nation says while it understands the project's importance for Canada's trade needs, the approval process was "rushed" and did not address any of its concerns about the impacts of the operation — including the "risks of more fully laden oil tankers traversing the inlet."

City of Winkler hit by cyberattack

Winkler has become the latest Manitoba municipality to grapple with cybersecurity incidents.

On Tuesday morning, the city’s cybersecurity protection systems detected an incident, prompting officials to isolate affected systems and take certain municipal systems and services offline as a precaution while the situation is assessed.

Phone and payment systems are unavailable as the city, about 115 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, works to resolve the issue.

“We’re fortunate that we have a very good IT team, and security has always been a significant investment for us,” Winkler Mayor Henry Siemens said. “So we were maybe better prepared than others potentially would have been because of the strength of our staff and the strength of our security protocols.”

Keeping cool: How Meta plans to cut down on water use at its Alberta data centre

CALGARY - A Meta Platforms Inc. executive garnered applause at a news conference this week after he boasted that a gargantuan data centre planned for north of Edmonton would use less water annually than a typical Alberta golf course.

The tech behemoth was announcing a $13-billion-plus investment in a complex the size of 33 Canadian Football League fields. It will be powered by a new natural gas plant that could eventually produce more electricity than what the City of Edmonton uses.

The data centre in Sturgeon County, like other hyperscale proposals in Canada, is to use what's known as a closed-loop cooling system to keep servers from overheating. That differs from an evaporative cooling system, which requires enormous amounts of cool water that is not reused.

Gary Demasi, vice-president of data centre strategy and development at Meta, told a news conference Wednesday that no water will be needed for regular cooling operations.

Canada objects to Olympics loosening restrictions on Russia athletes amid Ukraine war

OTTAWA - Canada objected on Thursday to the International Olympic Committee loosening its suspension on Russian athletes.

The move, announced Tuesday, would apply to the 2028 games in Los Angeles, opening the door for Russian athletes to compete, but the IOC says it will decide later if they could do it with the Russian flag and anthem.

"I am appalled by the IOC’s decision," wrote Secretary of State for sport Adam van Koeverden, a former Olympian.

"The countries of Russia and Belarus should not be represented in international sports competitions while Russia's illegal and unjustifiable full-scale invasion against Ukraine continues," he wrote.

Court rules confidentiality clause for air travel complaints violates Charter

An Ontario Superior Court judge has struck down a rule that blocks travellers from sharing the outcome of passenger complaints made to the country’s transport regulator.

The ruling Wednesday found that federal regulations barring travellers from disclosing the result of complaints on matters ranging from refunds to accessibility violate Canadians' Charter right to freedom of expression.

The Canadian Transportation Agency's complaint resolution process, in place since 2023, had prevented consumers and airlines from publicly disclosing such information unless both parties agreed to waive confidentiality.

Canada’s biggest airlines, including Air Canada, WestJet, Air Transat, Jazz Aviation and the industry group that represents them, had opposed the court challenge.

News outlets urge a judge to sanction OpenAI in a high-stakes AI copyright fight

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times, the Daily News and other media outlets are asking a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, escalating a fight over artificial intelligence and copyright that could shape the future of a struggling news industry.

The newspapers allege the ChatGPT maker is hiding evidence important to what could be a landmark copyright infringement trial over how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, built their AI technologies using millions of news articles. At issue is whether AI chatbots are unfairly competing as an information source, siphoning off web traffic without doing the journalistic work involved in gathering the news.

A filing Thursday in a Manhattan federal courthouse alleges OpenAI “chose obstruction” over releasing datasets and ChatGPT logs that could show how the AI system used copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs are asking the judge to penalize the company for "discovery misconduct” that could distort evidence, saying the recent deposition of an OpenAI employee contradicts the company's earlier claims.

New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said OpenAI has been "making misrepresentations" for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in its AI training datasets and logs.

Disc drive: petition seeks to reverse Sony decision to stop producing physical discs

Atop a counter displaying vintage video games, a sign urges passersby to petition Sony Group Corp.

The Japanese multinational company’s PlayStation system discs aren’t retro — yet. But they will be in 2028, when Sony plans to stop producing the physical products.

Its games will be sold online or in “digital formats” at shops, including as codes.

Winnipeg-based independent chain PNP Games has outfitted its St. Vital area store with signs of protest. It’s also launched an online petition — one garnering more than 231,000 signatures in roughly a week.