Read and research, before engaging your rage

It looked like Liberal arrogance of the first degree, deliberately blowing off a meeting of a major Parliamentary committee.

Conservative MP Larry Brock on X: “UNBELIEVABLE. Parliament is back, but Liberal members of the Justice Committee are MISSING IN ACTION. Crime is out of control, Canadians are terrified, but Conservatives are ready to restore safety to our streets.”

Ditto, Conservative MP Roman Babar: “It’s 3:30 pm on a Tuesday. The Standing Committee on Justice is supposed to be meeting right now. Crime is out of control and justice reform is desperately needed. The Committee’s Conservative members are ready to work, but Liberal members refuse to show up. Unbelievable!”

You get the point. Problem is, there was no meeting. No staff. No translators. Just four Conservative MPs.

We all live in glass houses now

In the 19th century, stocks and pillories were still in use in Canada, with people put on public display, their necks, hands or feet clamped into hinged wooden frames for a few hours as punishment for crimes like public drunkenness or disorder, theft and perjury.

Homemade Cooking School: Squash your aversion to veggies

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

Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s therapy-set two-hander plays with reality

The public and private perils of online engagement crash through the screen and into a therapist’s office in Job, a nervy drama that explores the power of posts and the ethical responsibilities inherent to our respective postings.

Written by New York’s Max Wolf Friedlich and directed by Calgary’s Jack Grinhaus, the opening production of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season heads to the races with the brandishing of a starter’s gun in the warped offices of Bay Area psychotherapist Lloyd (Dov Mickelson).

Lloyd’s description of his typical patient — young people who are “hopeless and beyond help” — isn’t exactly inspirational.

Blundstone-booted Jane (Jada Rifkin) seems to have made the cut, having been placed on paid administrative leave after a viral meltdown by her employer, an unnamed tech giant on whose campus she’s enrolled as an adjudicator.

New documentary revisits Lilith Fair, gives it the overdue kudos it deserves

In the opening moments of Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new documentary about the pioneering all-women touring festival co-founded by Canadian icon Sarah McLachlan in the late 1990s, there’s a series of TikTok videos fronted by gen Z women expressing wonder and astonishment that something like that ever even existed.

“There was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999 — and I am shook to my core,” one woman says.

Ally Pankiw, the film’s director, is not surprised younger generations have never heard of Lilith Fair.

“It was not celebrated for how massive it was,” says the Canadian film/TV writer and director (Feel Good, Shrill). “It was so commercially successful. It changed so many artists’ trajectories and careers. It raised so much money for charity.

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.

Blame game after acts of political violence can lead to further attacks, experts warn

DENVER (AP) — From the moment conservative activist and icon Charlie Kirk was felled by an assassin’s bullet, partisans began fighting over which side was to blame. President Donald Trump became the most prominent to do so, tying the attack to “the radical left” before a suspect was even identified.

It was part of a new, grim tradition in a polarized country — trying to pin immediate responsibility for an act of public violence on one of two political sides. As the nation reels from a wave of physical attacks against both Republicans and Democrats, experts warn that the rush to blame sometimes ambiguous and irrational acts on political movements could lead to more conflict.

“What you’re seeing now is exactly how the spiral of violence occurs,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago.

On Friday, authorities announced they had arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of Washington, Utah, in the shooting. While a registered voter, he was not affiliated with any party and had not voted in the last two general elections. Even so, officials said Robinson had recently grown more political and expressed negative views about Kirk.

Equatorial Guinea enforces yearlong internet outage for island that protested construction company

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — When residents of Equatorial Guinea's Annobón island wrote to the government in Malabo in July last year complaining about the dynamite explosions by a Moroccan construction company, they didn't expect the swift end to their internet access.

Dozens of the signatories and residents were imprisoned for nearly a year, while internet access to the small island has been cut off since then, according to several residents and rights groups.

Local residents interviewed by The Associated Press left the island in the past months, citing fear for their lives and the difficulty of life without internet.

Banking services have shut down, hospital services for emergencies have been brought to a halt and residents say they rack up phone bills they can't afford because cellphone calls are the only way to communicate.

Bewildered and ‘in horror,’ Toronto man fights fake news that he shot U.S. influencer Charlie Kirk

TORONTO - Michael Mallinson had never met Charlie Kirk, nor had he ever heard the name of the American right-wing commentator who was shot dead in broad daylight at a Utah college event on Wednesday.

But the retired Torontonian has done some research about him after his death.

"I gather that he appeals to young conservatives. I'm an old socialist. I guess that's the best way I could put it," Mallinson said in a phone interview.

They would never have come across each other, but a piece of viral online misinformation has tied Mallinson to Kirk's story. Now the former banker, 77, is fighting to make the truth understood: he is decidedly not the person who put a bullet in the controversial commentator's neck.