Baltic, Nordic officials urge Canadians to learn from the Russian threats they face

OTTAWA - European officials are warning that Russia's meddling in the Baltic Sea is likely a preview of tactics Moscow could someday deploy in Canada's High North.

A recent panel discussion in Ottawa hosted by the Polish embassy touched on how Estonia, Poland and Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are responding to Russian threats that emerge from the sky, sea and online.

Polish Ambassador Witold Dzielski gave the example of an explosion last November on a rail line used to transport military goods to Ukraine, which his government suspects was orchestrated by Russia.

"Saboteurs are hired in order to conduct kinetic attacks," he said.

Health advice is all over social media. Here’s how to vet claims

Health and wellness advice is available in abundance on social media — from trendy to informative to straight-up disinformation — and you're far from alone in seeing it.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults — and around half of those under 50 — get health information from social media or podcasts.

Researchers also looked at the social media profiles of 6,828 health and wellness influencers with at least 100,000 followers. Only about 4 in 10 list a background as a health professional. About one-third called themselves coaches, about 3 in 10 described themselves as entrepreneurs and about 1 in 10 cited their own life experience, like being a parent.

Despite the wide range of expertise, about half of people who get health and wellness information from influencers said the influencers help them better understand their own health, while about one-third said it hasn't made much difference. About 1 in 10 said it made them more confused.

Fausses histoires, vrais liens

Ce vendredi 1er mai, la finale de la 35e saison de la Ligue d’improvisation du Manitoba (LIM) a fait salle comble une fois de plus au Centre culturel franco-manitobain.

Pour la troisième année consécutive, c’est l’équipe des Verts — Roger Durand, Eric Plamondon, Gilles Lessard, Alexandre McMurray, Avery Wolchuk, Léanne Marchildon, Zara Ramlal — menée par Mathieu Jubinville, qui a soulevé la Coupe Canot après l’avoir emporté sur les Jaunes — Alexandre Normandeau, Dominique Wyrchowny, Jacques de Moissac, Josée Roy, Lynne Connelly, Stéphane Grégoire, Stéphanie Morin-Robert — de Maryse Gagné au terme d’un match très serré.

Pour celles et ceux qui ignorent en quoi consiste un match de LIM, imaginez deux équipes qui partagent une même scène et qui s’affrontent ou collaborent parfois sur un thème donné pour raconter l’histoire la plus drôle possible.

Mathieu Jubinville, capitaine de l’équipe gagnante, donne l’exemple suivant: surveillance de voisinage.

Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champ

On what would be his 150th birthday, the story of Maj. John Robinson Benson — Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champion — deserves to be told.

On May 10, 1876, Dr. Edward Benson’s wife Annie gave birth to a son they named John Robinson, after the boy’s grandfather, Col. J.R. Benson. Dr. Benson had arrived in Winnipeg in January 1874 by horse-drawn sleigh via the end of the rail line in Minneapolis. He quickly established his medical practice and became one of the founding physicians of the Winnipeg General Hospital.

Young Rob — as the family called him — grew up in a household that helped build the institutions of a frontier city. At 19, he was the youngest member of the 1896 Winnipeg Victorias, the team that brought the Stanley Cup west for the first time. He had already earned his place across two Anderson Cup-winning seasons and appears in every team photograph from the era: the championship portraits, the Montreal dressing room, the commemorative poster. Listed as the squad’s spare, he was not a marginal figure. In a seven-man game with no line changes, the spare was the one player trusted to step into any position at any moment.

On Valentine’s Day, 1896, the Victorias entered Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink for a sudden-death challenge against the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Montreal Victorias. Winnipeg’s starting seven included some of the finest athletes in the country: Captain Jack Armytage, who had founded the Victoria Hockey Club and played in the first hockey game in Manitoba history; Dan Bain, later voted Canada’s outstanding athlete of the last half of the 19th century; Rod Flett, the Métis point player whose steady, unshakable defence anchored three Stanley Cup campaigns; and George “Whitey” Merritt in goal, who startled the Montreal crowd by wearing protective cricket pads on his legs — a western innovation the easterners had never seen.

New craft exhibition gives artists licence to lighten up

Textile artist and Manitoba Craft Council program co-ordinator Katrina Craig had a simple brief for the artists taking part in her curatorial debut, Serious Play, at C2 Centre for Craft: each person was asked to investigate the radical potential of play when making pieces for the show.

The four local interdisciplinary artists — Charlotte Sigurdson, Candace Neumann, Maureen Winnicki Lyons and Miriam Delos Santos — took her playful instructions seriously.

“Culturally, we think of play as frivolous or irrelevant. It’s a low priority,” Craig, 35, says. “But I think of play as an essential part of creating new things and of problem-solving. I’ve found that when I lean into that not-so-serious side of myself, good things tend to come about.”

The theme is especially pertinent in the field of craft, which can often be more intensely focused on rigorous skill-building and technical mastery. Sometimes playfulness can fall to the wayside in the pursuit of excellence

Movie review: Talking-sheep comedy pokes affectionate fun at mystery genre

There’s a certain kind of little British film that wants very much to be sweet and charming.

It’s a tricky genre. When it’s forced, sweetness can easily become sugary, charming can tip over into twee.

This all-ages talking-sheep comedy-mystery gets it right. With a lot of Babe sincerity and a smidge of Knives Out self-awareness, The Sheep Detectives is cosy but never complacent.

Using a deft blend of live-action and CGI animation, the story starts with George (Hugh Jackman), a shepherd who tends his flock just outside Denbrook, a picture-perfect village with thatched roofs, half-timbered walls and a mossy churchyard.

Governments blasted for inaction as HIV rates rise

An HIV/AIDS advocate who has spent the past 35 years raising awareness about the disease is calling for a national inquiry into what he calls a lack of proactive action by provincial and federal governments to prevent infections.

Albert McLeod, a two-spirit elder from Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, says HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis — commonly known as PrEP — has been approved by Health Canada since 2016. Despite that, infection rates have continued to climb.

“It’s just this sort of very conservative attitude to our health,” McLeod said Friday, challenging anyone to find a poster in Winnipeg promoting HIV awareness or PrEP on street corners or at bus stops.

“And now it’s suddenly an emergency in 2026, when we’ve had 10 years to be proactive and let people know about the availability of this medication? Instead, we have people who are HIV positive who could be negative.”

Hep A outbreak in province’s North makes its way to Winnipeg, officials scrambling to vaccinate people at high risk

Manitoba public health officials say an outbreak of hepatitis A that began in the province’s North last year has led to an increasing number of cases in Winnipeg in recent weeks.

The outbreak, declared in April 2025, was at first affecting communities in northern Manitoba, including several remote First Nations, but has evolved in recent months and spread to other places in the province, provincial health officials said Friday.

The outbreak has spread to Winnipeg, particularly the homeless community, and people with connections to other places where the virus was already spreading.

As of April 26, 601 cases of hepatitis A virus associated with the outbreak have been identified in Manitoba, 131 of which are in Winnipeg.

In legal dispute over ‘The View,’ ABC argues Trump administration is trying to chill free speech

NEW YORK (AP) — In a strongly worded filing, ABC accuses the Trump administration of trying to chill its constitutionally protected free speech and hinder open political discussion.

The point of contention: The popular show “The View," and whether it's subject to equal time rules.

ABC’s filing to the Federal Communications Commission, made public Friday, came in a dispute involving one ABC station in Houston, KTRK-TV. But the wording indicated the network was embarking on a broader battle with the administration.

“The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly,” said the filing on behalf of both KTRK-TV and ABC.

Feds greenlight $673 million to keep Canada Post afloat this year

OTTAWA - The federal government is handing hundreds of millions of dollars to Canada Post to keep the money-bleeding mail service afloat for the current fiscal year.

A cabinet order gives the beleaguered Crown corporation up to $673 million so it can "meet its operating and income" demands through next March.

That amount was carried over from the roughly $1 billion Ottawa authorized in a massive funding top-up earlier this year. It also followed last year's initial $1.03-billion cash injection, which failed to sustain the postal service past early February 2026.

Despite the reassigned funds, Canada Post will likely need hundreds of millions more to make it through the fiscal year, said Ian Lee, an associate professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University.

Someone call the PM: next governor general doesn’t speak a single Indigenous language

This week, Prime Minister Mark Carney selected former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour as the country’s 31st governor general.

Mass cybersecurity breach of learning platform hits Canadian post-secondary schools

Multiple post-secondary institutions across Canada say they've been impacted by a cyberattack targeting an education system used by thousands of schools globally.

Technology company Instructure said it launched an investigation on April 29 after detecting "unauthorized activity" in Canvas, a learning platform for schools that manages student coursework, grades and other education materials.

Information affected by the attack may include names, emails and messages exchanged within the platform, but there's no evidence that passwords, financial information or government identifiers have been compromised, the company said.

Instructure said Canvas went off-line temporarily but is now available to use, and an investigation into the breach is ongoing with a third-party forensic firm and law enforcement.

Nature is a big part of the Canadian economy — but how big? We crunched the numbers.

Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend.

In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security.

Parade of ghostly icebergs brings joy and wonder to Newfoundland and Labrador

ST. JOHN'S -

At the top of Signal Hill in St. John's, N.L., on Tuesday afternoon, a steady stream of people walked around a rocky cliff and gasped.

Some cheered, some took out their phones to capture the moment — a rush of awe as an iceberg floated in the ocean below, cleaved off from a Greenland glacier and delivered by the Labrador current on a cloudless spring day.

It's a banner year for icebergs in Newfoundland and Labrador, where tourists and residents alike are gathering on shores across the province to welcome the ancient visitors.

Developers selling some land slated for delayed ‘complete community’ near Polo Park

Plans for 84-acre development north of the major shopping mall included apartment towers, retail space and parks

Agape Table expansion underscores surging food demand

Food banks and non-profit organizations across Manitoba are expanding their spaces to meet record demand for food.

Agape Table showed off its new 10,500-square foot home at 350 Furby St. Thursday, where it has planted permanent roots for the first time in its 45-year history.

It is located next to the Wave Church, where it had been operating out of the basement for eight years.

The executive director of the food-distribution charity said a bigger space has been needed for years.

Record-setting volunteer army invades downtown to clean up trash

An annual event to clear away downtown trash attracted more than 1,200 volunteers Thursday and also sparked a new program that will offer additional cleanups.

The single-day Downtown Winnipeg BIZ spring cleanup attracted about 1,265 participants, setting a record. About 900 volunteers participated last year.

The agency cut off registration early this year to ensure there weren’t more volunteers than available supplies.

Due to the surge in interest, the BIZ is now offering to help set up smaller community cleanups over the next few months to keep the work going.