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It’s the “machete kids” that worry Donnel Jonsson most. The property manager for Ashberry Place, a low-income apartment complex in Thompson, Man., has dealt with assaults, fires and even murder over the years. However, recent youth crime has him feeling unsafe, particularly along the city’s Spirit Way trail.

“Kids are going around and assaulting individuals walking the path, no reason why, they just come up to them and basically stab them or cut them across the face,” he says, pointing to a wooded section of trail below a 10-storey-high wolf mural ...

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Customers trickle in and out of La Pampa, a restaurant specializing in empanadas in Winnipeg’s River Heights neighbourhood, as owner Alfonso Maury weighs containers of Argentine desserts. Two doors down, a Korean specialty store is busy selling groceries.
But in between, there’s an empty storefront that once housed a hair salon.
 
“She really tried to make it work, but she just couldn’t,” Mr. Maury said of the salon’s owner, who closed shop permanently when the city went into its second COVID-19 lockdown in early November.
That lockdown remains in place ...
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Navigating the narrow aisles of his Winnipeg shop with the energy of a man half his age, Yusuf Abdulrehman pauses to point out bright spices, dark teas and pastel sweets that have travelled across the globe to reach his prairie outpost.

“We don’t only sell halal meat, we have a variety of products coming from all over the world, coming from Syria, from Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia. This is why you need to be at the store to see it all, there is so much here,” he says, pointing to shelves stacked high beyond his own reach with tea sets and kitchen accessories ...

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Working in total darkness, Thaddeus Conrad carefully feels his way up a nearly vertical set of stairs before switching on a single green light.

The bulb casts a weak, eerie glow, revealing a room packed with heavily budded marijuana plants.

But there’s nothing clandestine about the hazy light or the darkness, it’s simply great crop science at work.

“I like to keep them in total darkness the last three days,” Conrad says, speaking over the hum of numerous fans. “It brings out those trichomes.”

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No three words in the Canadian lexicon do more to undermine the course of justice than “known to police.”

In Canada, citizens have the right to face their accusers, a right to privacy, the freedom to peacefully assemble and to be deemed innocent until proven guilty. Or at least they do in principle.

In reality, there’s a growing reliance on untested nonconviction data when it comes to law enforcement in this country. Stored in systems with names like Niche RMS or Police Records Information Management Environment, better known as PRIME, police use this information to track individuals — even those who have never been accused of a crime ...

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A black binder sits on the table next to the job board at Aylmer Community Services. Glued to its cover is a stock photo of two hands holding a tiny seedling. Red letters proclaim its title: Agricultural and Farming Jobs. 

In the steady stream of job seekers, however, few visitors to the jailhouse-turned-community service centre in this busy Ontario town stop to flip through its pages.

“I hear it all the time,” says employment counsellor Susan Loewen. “People come in and tell me they don’t want to work on a farm… they say, well, I want to work inside, I don’t want to work Sundays or weekends. They want something year-round.”

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He has no employees, no products, and no factory.
But every day Keith Hannah walks into a small office building across from Innes’ Garage in Waskada, hoping to salvage some part of his dream — creating a Peak of the Market-style business for health foods in the province’s smallest incorporated municipality.
“I’m trying to get things straightened around,” said Hannah. “I lost a lot of money in this myself, a lot, and I’ve got other investors here who have lost a fair bit of money as well ...
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Tony Woods was a man who loved to travel. A retired salesman and extrovert, he would strike up a conversation with just about anyone, making friends wherever he went. But when he died in Winnipeg after unexpected surgical complications in June, the friends he’d made over the past 76 years were left to grieve alone — as was his family.
“I’m a hugger, and I can’t do that right now,” his widow, Sharon Thiessen-Woods said recently. “I haven’t been able to physically be with any of his family to share this, it’s all been telephone calls, Zoom, texts and e-mails, but that’s the reality.”
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By the time I realized the dog was about to bite me, it was too late.

I’d seen the gaunt canine milling around, but feral dogs seemed to congregate on every corner in India, so one more roaming the grounds of Amritsar’s Partition Museum didn’t garner any special attention.

At least not until it sunk its incisors into my knee, leaving two bloody puncture marks. It could have been worse, but in a country where rabies kills thousands of people each year, it could have been so much better.

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Somehow, the name Chinese gooseberry didn’t quite fit the bill for a fruit grown in New Zealand.

Was it a real gooseberry? Was it from China? Was it part of a communist plot to raise funds? Was it subject to berry tariffs or possibly a melon tax?

These were the questions that plagued the furry brown fruit until June of 1959, when producer Jack Turner suggested rechristening what was then called Hayward’s Chinese gooseberry as the modern kiwifruit. There was only one problem ...

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Canada’s federal government wants the public to know that it is promoting the “prudent use” of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals.

But it doesn’t want the public to know what that means — and it certainly doesn’t want the public to hear what its scientists and veterinarians have to say about what many are calling a “crisis” in modern agriculture and public health.

“They muzzled people,” said Dr. James Hutchinson, medical director of the Vancouver Island Antimicrobial Stewardship Program ...

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It had been another frigid day in Manitoba, snow swirling as farmers and ranchers gathered at a downtown hotel, but once inside it didn’t take long for the temperature to rise. They’d gathered for Keystone Agricultural Producers annual general meeting, where one issue outpaced the rest — carbon pricing.

It was standing room only, with long lines at the microphones.

“With young farmers we have little to no equity in our farming operations… so things like this carbon pricing could really affect our entrance into the industry,” aspiring farmer Carter McKinney told the crowd.

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Munther Zeid pages an employee at one of his Winnipeg grocery stores and instructs him to bring the object Zeid keeps hidden on top of an old ice cream freezer to his office. A minute later, the young man returns with a metal baseball bat.
“Our friendly weapon,” says Zeid. “I’m not going to allow my store, my staff, to be threatened and lose all that money. I’m not a multi-million-dollar company that can afford stuff like this.”
The problem? A seemingly growing number of brazen thefts targeting meat, as well as cheese, at his five Food Fare locations ...
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Walking the trails around Dalhousie School in Winnipeg’s south end, Lubna Usmani reminisces about her time playing lacrosse there as she eyes up potential hiding places. Pausing under a memorial plaque for her one-time gym instructor, Foy Mar, she pulls a colourful rock with the word “smile” written on it from her tote bag, carefully places it on a window ledge, then quickly snaps a photo.

“He was my favourite teacher, so I always like to leave one here,” she says, before depositing a bright red rock with “Enjoy the moment” painted across it on a nearby bench. Usmani is on a mission—to spread kindness, one rock at a time ...

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It’s a sad precedent, but a necessary one; the father of a 4-year-old boy killed after falling from farm equipment, convicted of criminal negligence causing death and handed a suspended sentence. 

Emanuel Bauman clearly didn’t intend to cause his son’s death by letting him ride in a skid-steer bucket as he pulled wood chips, but it’s not surprising such reckless equipment use ended tragically.

I’ve seen it before ...

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Two-year-old Hallie Thiessen scoops up a chunk of ice from the front yard of her home in Steinbach, Man., and puts it in her mouth. Since being diagnosed with eosinophilic gastrointestinal disease, ice is all she can eat.

Cari-Lynn Thiessen describes the yard as her daughter’s “buffet” only half-jokingly as a neighbour pulls over to ask how the pair is faring. The toddler’s rare diagnosis is characterized by adverse reactions to all food, a compromised immune system and inflammation of the entire gastrointestinal tract.

A permanent gastrostomy tube into her stomach would free Hallie and her parents from the constant struggle to provide nutrients and medication through a temporary, external feeding tube, but the surgery – deemed elective by the province – has been cancelled three times ...

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By the time the doors of the Manitoba Law Courts opened to the public at 8:30 a.m., Rowan Greger had been standing in line for more than two hours.

“I thought maybe I could have slept in a little bit longer, but I was really excited,” he says. “It’s a chance to see the real justice that sets precedent in our country and sets common law. It’s amazing.”

The former court clerk and first-year law student was one of hundreds who lined up in downtown Winnipeg for the chance to witness the Supreme Court of Canada hear cases outside Ottawa for the first time in its 144-year existence. Some, like Rachel Hubner, pulled their kids out of school for the historic event ...

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