Fidel Castro and his communist band of brothers have had a good long run in power (66 years), but they have run out of road.

Most of the relatively small Cuban middle class fled to the United States after the 1959 revolution, but the new regime certainly had mass popular support for at least the next quarter-century. Then it began to erode, but only quite slowly at first.

The Castro brothers and their allies always faced huge economic problems because of the U.S. trade embargo, but things got much harder after the old Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, eliminating about 85 per cent of Cuba’s foreign trade.

The ensuing “Special Period in Time of Peace” spanned the 1990s and brought great hardship to ordinary people — rationing, blackouts, even severe food shortages — but the economy stabilized (at a permanently lower level of prosperity) by 2000.

A Winnipeg couple has been charged and sentenced for heinous acts of animal cruelty that took place in a Lord Roberts-area apartment in 2024.

Irene Lima and Chad Kabecz were sentenced earlier this month to 12 years in prison for torturing and killing small animals including kittens, hamsters and a frog, in so-called “crush” videos and photos posted online.

Reaction to the case has been as expected.

Animal-lovers countrywide and beyond have expressed anger, disgust and horror over the abuse, and mixed emotions about the sentencing. Taking to social media, many demand the couple be held longer behind bars, while others call for street justice.

Regulation represents, in microcosm, the role of government in society, which makes it controversial. Simply put, regulation involves the imposition of constraints mainly on the behaviour of private individuals and organizations, but sometimes also on other parts of government, such as the Public Utility Board regulation of Manitoba Hydro. In simple terms, legislation makes law, and regulations are the rules that put those laws into practice.

Politicians of all stripes stridently declare their opposition to the “red tape” of regulation and other administrative requirements and promise to eliminate it. This is disingenuous. Governing complicated, interdependent and dynamic societies cannot happen without regulation. And more often than not we get the red tape we demand when we insist that governments address serious problems.

A balanced, smart approach to the assessment of regulation is required. It starts with a recognition that many rules support economic activity and advance important environmental, health and safety, and consumer-protection objectives. And of course there are also some regulations that are poorly designed, duplicative, unduly complex or outdated. There is both an objective factual dimension to regulation and a psychological dimension which involves how organizations and individuals perceive such rules.

Both of Manitoba’s two main parties talk about “regulatory reform,” a phrase which sometimes refers to the removal of unnecessary constraints on businesses and individuals, and other times refers to greater transparency and accountability in the regulatory process.

One of the main projects on Mayor Scott Gillingham’s list of goals is an extension of the Chief Peguis Trail. Whether necessary or not, this is an extension the city simply cannot afford and which city council and the mayor should not proceed with.

The first reason why is fiscal. The mayor touts this project as being important to the economic future of Winnipeg, as per the CBC. The argument seems to come from the net present value (NPV) of the project (a metric which compares the costs of a project to how much income it will bring in the future). However, the NPV of the project just got downgraded from $98 million to $42 million, per a Deloitte assessment.

While this might seem like a good thing for the city, and while there is a report from city staff detailing an NPV of $280 million, the cost paid is enormous: $900 million, an amount that the city does not even have on hand, and would have to go further into debt for.

The repayment of this debt, plus any interest that accrues, will easily surpass the $42 million in benefits the city gets, with a different article on the subject by CityNews stating that this project would put us above our debt ceiling.

Every year at this time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the world’s most powerful alliance for the past 77 years, holds a conference in Munich to examine its state of health.

The one just past was really a wake, but it played out more like the immortal Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python, in which a customer (John Cleese) enters a pet shop with a cage containing a dead parrot (a Norwegian Blue) and says:

“This parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not half an hour ago you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out following a long squawk.”

Shopkeeper: “Well he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for the fjords.”

I remember January 2020, hearing about a virus in China. February, watching numbers climb in many countries. The World Health Organization declaring it a pandemic on March 11. By the time everything locked down here in mid-March, we’d been watching it spread for weeks, this growing dread that it was coming for us too.

For the third year in a row, the atmosphere in Manitoba’s staffrooms during the provincial school funding announcement has been one of cautious relief rather than the dread we came to expect for a decade.

As a high school teacher-librarian and a parent with a child in the public system, I want to begin by acknowledging the progress made.

After the lean, adversarial years of the Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson governments, years defined by the looming threat of Bill 64 and funding increases that didn’t even cover the cost of a box of pencils, the current NDP government has chosen a different path.

This $79.8-million injection for the 2026-27 school year, building on the $104-million and $67-million investments of the previous two years, represents nearly a quarter-billion-dollar shift in how we value our children’s future. For the nutrition programs, the salary harmonization, and the simple act of treating educators as partners rather than enemies: thank you.