1. Sled Island alternative music and arts festival starts this afternoon in Calgary
300 artists, bands, filmakers and comedians hope to attract up to 30,000 throughout the week for Calgary’s biggest alternative arts festival, Slide Island. The events will be held in venues around town and in public spaces such as Olympic Plaza. Artists appearing this year include influential Scottish band The Jesus and Mary Chain, the Joel Plaskett Emergency from Halifax and ’90s rockers, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The festival began in 2007. [CBC]
2. Officials revise Manitoba’s math curriculum
Manitoban kids will return to school in September with a revised math curriculum that nixes calculators in favour of times tables memorization and multiplying and dividing on paper and in their heads. Children from kindergarten to Grade 8 will also learn arithmetic before using a calculator. Education Minister Nancy Allan said the move makes Manitoba the first Western province to emphasize the math skills previous generations had. Each school division in Manitoba will have an adviser to help implement the new curriculum. [Winnipeg Free Press]
3. Planning workshop on Parcel Four to be held tomorrow
The Forks Renewal Corp. will hold one public-consultation event tomorrow evening at The Forks Market for the development of two high profile, vacant parcels of land in Downtown Winnipeg. A second consultation event was planned on Thursday evening but due to lack of interest, it has been combined into a single workshop. The workshop will focus on greenspace and will be held from 6:30 to 9 p.m. [Winnipeg Free Press]
Around Canada:
4. Former Montrealer indicted in Hungary for Nazi war crimes
98-year-old Laszlo Csatary, who lived in Montreal for decades as an art dealer, has been charged by Hungarian prosecutors who are accusing him of sending Jews to Auschwitz and running an internment camp in the Second World War. Cstary allegedly served in the Nazi police in what is now Slovakia. After fleeing to Canada, he was sentenced to death in absentia by a Slovakian court in 1948. He remained in Montreal until his citizenship was revoked in 1997 before moving to Budapest, where he lived until the he caught the attention of Hungarian authorities. Csatary denies the charges. [Huffington Post]
5. CRTC prepares for major review of regulations
The CRTC is preparing for large scale public consultations set to role out this fall that could see a major overhaul of Canada’s TV broadcasting regulations. The head of the CRTC outlined questions that would look at how TV is delivered and how traditional networks can compete with new online options. The consultations may revisit the controversial topic of whether Netflix should be subjected to carry a minimum amount of Canadian programming. [Huffington Post]