Crime in Winnipeg in 2016 did not increase dramatically nor did it decline in any substantial way. Homicides were down from 2015 by one unfortunate soul. The homicide levels have been in a reduce mode the last few years, six years ago 30+ homicides a year were normal. Winnipeg has given up the infamous title of murder capital of Canada. ‘The City of Champions” is now the murder champion belt holder in Canada. Edmonton had 40 homicides this year.
Back in ‘The Peg’ robberies and break and enters were way up. Desperate people doing bold things to get that next twelve pack or meth fix. Overall however it was a good year in terms of Winnipeg breaking its long held reputation as the ‘Detroit of the North’.
The part of The Forks skating trail system that is on the Assiniboine River has been silent for 3-4 years. Thin ice thickness, uncooperative weather and strong currents didn’t allow any action on the Assiniboine. But Winnipeg had a blast from the polar vortex for a week that froze the nuts on bridges, not to mention the rivers. So the ice is thick enough and the crews are getting the trail ready. I’m starting to look for my skates.
A problematic area of the Assiniboine, I think there is an outlet of some sort under there keeping the ice from freezing.
The skating pond is full of activity.
The paths around The Forks have been flooded and frozen, including the bridge.
Snow couches, or the British/Canadian term chesterfields.
Other Forks shots.
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Downtown
An elderly citizen with a cane and a helmet, just to be safe.
Each week in 2016, an art historian has taken a photo in the news and compared it with a great artwork for BBC Culture. Here’s our round-up of images that have shocked and inspired us.
January: Tim Peake’s spacewalk
In the 1960s,writes Catherine Ingram, space travel had a different colour. As the US artist Andy Warhol described it, back then “silver was the future, it was spacey – the astronauts wore silver suits”. This photo of British astronaut Tim Peake’s spacewalk reminds Ingram of Warhol’s 1966 work Silver Clouds, with “a sense of the infinite – that there are no walls or ceiling or floor; that where you are goes on forever”.
February: Asoldier in the Free Syrian Army stands guard
Taken as a major ceasefire in the war in Syria came into effect, this photo shows a soldier who “seems forever poised on a threshold”,according to Kelly Grovier. Arguing that the perspective of this photo works in the same way as a 19th-Centurytrompe l’oeil, he looks at how news photos help break down “the barrier between the stresses of a conflict raging in an inconceivable elsewhere and the retinas of distant readers”.
March: The father who saved his son
Snapped at the instant when a bat slipped from the hands of a baseball player and a fan instinctively stretched out his arm to save his son, this heart-stopping photo went viral in March.
April: Ruins at Palmyra
After Palmyra was retaken by Syrian forces, a photographer captured the extent of the damage wrought by militants. Joseph Eid held up a picture he’d taken of the Arch of Triumph at the ancient city in 2014 – against the backdrop of the arch in ruins, after it was destroyed by the so-called Islamic State. Kelly Grovier looked at Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei,a work that Grovier believes is“cruel to be kind by forcing observers to confront an isolated, if vivid, instance of the destruction of heritage he believes is raging all around us in a world obsessed with the superficial rewards of the fast-and-easy here and now”.
May: The woman who defied neo-Nazis
A photo of a single figure standing up against nationalists at a rally in Sweden went viral in May. When Afro-Swedish social activist Tess Asplund came face-to-face with a May Day march of 300 uniformed nationalists in Borlänge, she faced them silently, fist clenched. Her spontaneous reaction was unstaged and yet,according to Kelly Grovier, the image has all the “power of Delacroix’s epoch-defining painting” Liberty Leading the People (1830).
June: A Chinese lawyer with torn clothes
Taken in Nanning, Guangxi, this photo shows a lawyer outside a district court. He told reporters that when he refused to hand over his mobile phone, court officials violently attacked him and nearly ripped his clothes off his body.
July: Fishermen surprised by Whales
August: A human pyramid
Taken during a festival in Barcelona’s Gràcia district, this photo “shows scores of Barcelonans in a surge of torsos and limbs that culminates in the outstretched arms of a soaring figure atop the living tower”.
September: A protestor in Santiago
“Staring is power,”writes Kelly Grovier. “The ability to command another’s gaze, to transfix their mind and muscles by using nothing more than… one’s unblinking eyes, requires discipline and courage of purpose.” This photo of a standoff between a protester and a Chilean policeman in Santiago prompted Grovier to consider the meaning of an unflinching gaze. In her 2010 work The Artist is Present, performance artist Marina Abramović stared into the eyes of visitors. It was a reminder of John Ruskin’s belief that “All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.”
October: Man and machine
After the world’s first Cybathlon – an international competition for disabled athletes assisted by robotic technology –Kelly Grovier looked at art’s fascination with the blurred boundary between man and machine. The contest, in the Swiss city of Zurich, included “competitors whose physical shapes are a fusion of athleticism and cutting-edge engineering”.
November: A sinkhole in Japan
On the day of the US election, a sinkhole appeared in Japanese city of Fukuoka. Social media users were quick to see the event as an omen, offering competing prophecies attached to the crater.
December: Stars in time-lapse
We began the year with a spacewalk, and end with the stars – as shown in this time-lapse photo taken in Indonesia.
I videoed a Bobcat loading a dump truck with snow and a Cat wheeled loader doing the same. The Cat’s front end bucket is three times the size, so it should outperform the Bobbie. But not in this competition, the Bobcat had a way better operator who made that little devil bounce back and forth between the snowbank and the dump truck. Often it isn’t the machine that makes the difference, it’s the operator.
The Donald had Don King as a guest today at Trump Tower. Donald and Don go back a long ways. Not to say they were friends, but they were friendly acquaintances. Two hardcore promoters who love the buck and love themselves. And their other affiliation is the hair, the bloody hair!
Donald’s hair looks like a rogue ocean wave while Don’s looks like he grabbed hold of a 50 megawatt power line with both hands.
The pow wow today.
“Anyone worried about the next 4 yrs, just look at Trump today w/ Don King in a wizard costume and a giant Trump button and tell me..oh Jesus”. – Bill Maher.
Don King brief bio:
King was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended school and graduated from John Adams High in 1951. After dropping out of Kent State University, he ran an illegal bookmaking operation out of the basement of a record store on Kinsman Road, and was charged with killing two men in incidents 13 years apart. The first was determined to be justifiable homicide after it was found that King shot Hillary Brown in the back and killed him while he was attempting to rob one of King’s gambling houses. King was convicted of second degree murder for the second killing in 1966 after he was found guilty of stomping to death an employee, Sam Garrett, who owed him $600. The judge reduced King’s conviction to nonnegligent manslaughter for which King served just under four years in prison. King was later pardoned for the crime in 1983 by Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes, with letters from Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, George Voinovich, Art Modell, and Gabe Paul, among others, being written in support of King.
King has been investigated for possible connections with organized crime. During a 1992 Senate investigation, King invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his connection to mobster John Gotti. In public, however, King has strongly denied any connections to organized crime and has responded to mob allegations by calling them “racist”.
Mike Tyson, the former undisputed World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, says of his former manager, “(King is) a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker. This is supposed to be my ‘black brother’, right? He’s just a bad man, a real bad man. He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He’s ruthless, he’s deplorable, he’s greedy … and he doesn’t know how to love anybody.”
King has been sued by Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Tim Witherspoon and Mike Tyson.
In 2005 King launched a $2.5 billion defamation suit against ESPN, the makers of SportsCentury, after a documentary alleged that King had “killed, not once, but twice”, threatened to break Larry Holmes’ legs, cheated Meldrick Taylor out of $1 million, and then threatened to have Taylor killed. Though the documentary repeated many claims already made, King said he had now had enough. King’s attorney said “It was slanted to show Don in the worst way. It was one-sided from day one, Don is a strong man, but he has been hurt by this.”
The case was dismissed on summary judgment with a finding that King could not show “actual malice” from the defendants. Judge Dorian Damoorgian ruled, “Nothing in the record shows that ESPN purposefully made false statements about King in order to bolster the theme of the program or to inflict harm on King.”
The Transamerica Pyramid is the tallest skyscraper in the San Francisco skyline. Its height is surpassed by Salesforce Tower, currently under construction. The building no longer houses the headquarters of the Transamerica Corporation, which moved its U.S. headquarters to Baltimore, Maryland, but it is still associated with the company and is depicted in the company’s logo. Designed by architect William Pereira and built by Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Company, at 853 ft (260 m), on completion in 1972 it was the eighth tallest building in the world.
Building facts:
There are 48 floors, 15 passenger elevators, 3 freight elevators, and 3,678 windows.
Because of the shape of the building, the majority of the windows can pivot 360 degrees so they can be washed from the inside.
The decorative aluminum spire at the top is 212-feet tall – roughly 20 stories.
The spire is actually hollow and lined with a 100-foot steel stairway at a 60 degree angle, followed by two steel ladders.
The conference room (with 360 degree views of the city) is located on the 48th floor and can be booked for $400-600 dollars…an hour.
The building is covered in crushed white quartz, giving it its pure white color.
It takes 18,000 work hours to get “brightened” every 10 years, last occurring in 2007.
The building is a tall, four-sided pyramid with two “wings” to accommodate an elevator shaft on the east and a stairwell and a smoke tower on the west.
Religion and war have always been mixing and closely related throughout history. Missouri-born artist Kris Kuksi took notice of this connection, repeating itself throughout history, and decided to unveil it in his Churchtanks sculpture series. By creating the juxtaposition between the classical world and the modern war gear, Kuksi transforms churches into tanks, blending the two structures smoothly and seamlessly.
As explained in his statement, creation of the sculptures is a “process that requires countless hours to assemble, collect, manipulate, cut, and re-shape thousands of individual parts, finally uniting them into an orchestral-like seamless cohesion that defines the historical rise and fall of civilization and envisions the possible future(s) of humanity.” Churchtanks thus represent the ability of art to fascinate and at the same time to raise awareness.
For the last sixty four years the US army has been playing Santa Claus to some 20,000 people inhabiting dozens of tiny Micronesian islands spread across a vast area in the western Pacific Ocean. Each year in December, these islanders receive all sorts of gifts and useful supplies packed in approximately a hundred crates and dropped gently to earth on green military parachutes. Known as Operation Christmas Drop, this effort on the part of the United States Air Force has been called the “longest running humanitarian mission in the world.”
Operation Christmas Drop has its roots to the Christmas of 1952, when the crew of an Air Force B-29 aircraft, flying a mission to the south of Guam, saw some of the islanders waving at them. In the spirit of the season, the crew gathered some items they had on the plane, placed them in a container, attached a parachute and dropped the bundle to the islanders below.
An airman of the US Air Force pushes a bundle from a C-130 Hercules during Operation Christmas Drop over Guam on Dec. 5, 2016. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Delano Scott
A witness to the first drop on the island recalls, “We saw these things come out of the back of the airplane and I was yelling: ‘There are toys coming down'”. The effort grew from there into a major annual training exercise.
All the gifts are donated by residents, civic organizations, military personnel and businesses of Guam, which are collected by private organization and the US Air Force, and then sorted and packed into boxes. The items sent to the Micronesian include fishing nets, construction materials, powdered milk, canned goods, rice, coolers, clothing, shoes, toys, school supplies and so on.
The Air Force uses old parachutes that have outlived their military usefulness, but are still strong enough to support bundles weighing up to 500 pounds. The parachute is said to be the most important item on the bundle. Islanders use it for a variety of applications, from roofing their houses to covering their canoes.
Some of these islands are so remote that they receive supplies from passing ships only once or twice per year.
“Christmas Drop is the most important day of the year for these people,” said Bruce Best, a communications specialist at the University of Guam who has been volunteering his time to help Operation Christmas Drop for the last 34 year.
“The yearly success of this drop is a testament to the generosity of the civilian and military population of Guam,” said U.S. Air Force sergeant and Operation Christmas Drop committee president. “We continue to do this to help improve the quality of life of the islanders. We may take it for granted that we can go to a mall to purchase our daily needs, but these folks do not have the same privilege from where they live.”
In recent years, the US Air Force has received assistance from members of the Royal Australian Air Force and Japan Air Self-Defense Force in the collection and distribution of the Christmas Drop crates. According to organizational data, by 2006, the Christmas drop operations have delivered more than 800,000 pounds of supplies.
A bundle exits the ramp of a C-130H aircraft during an airdrop mission over the Federated States of Micronesia during Operation Christmas Drop 2013.
A pallet containing toys, holiday decorations and other donated items floats toward an island of the Western Pacific and Micronesia area, bringing holiday cheer Dec. 14 during Operation Christmas Drop. While Santa Claus must find a rooftop to land his reindeer on, America’s Airmen and their four-propeller C-130 Hercules deliver the holiday items from the air and move on to their next target.
A resident of Mokil Atoll waves to the C-130 crew after receiving an air dropped aid package in 2012
Loadmasters from the 36th Airlift Squadron, Yokota Air Base, Japan, prepare humanitarian aid bundles destined for remote islands within the Micronesian Islands, Dec. 11, 2012.
Senior Airman Angel Torres, 36th Airlift Squadron C-130 Hercules loadmaster, pushes a low-cost, low-altitude bundle drop over the Federated States of Micronesia during Operation Christmas Drop 2016.
Airmen from the Royal Australian Air Force deliver a low-cost, low-altitude bundle during Operation Christmas Drop 2015 to the island of Mogmog. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Katrina Brisbin
A bundle exits the ramp of a C-130H aircraft during an airdrop mission over the Federated States of Micronesia during Operation Christmas Drop 2013.
A resident of Mokil Atoll waves to the C-130 crew after receiving an air dropped aid package in 2012.
Tech. Sgt. Magen Harger, 36th Medical Support Squadron medical lab technician, pushes a box of supplies to islanders Dec. 11, 2014, over the Pacific Ocean.
Packages make their way to the shore of Kayangel Island during Operation Christmas Drop 2013.
Islanders watch a C-130 Hercules fly overhead during Operation Christmas Drop 2015 at Fais Island, Federated States of Micronesia, Dec. 8, 2015.
Micronesian islanders receive supplies airdropped from a C-130 Hercules near Andersen Air Force Base, on December 16, 2013
Operation Christmas Drop is primarily conducted from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and Yokota Air Base in Japan.
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