SwiftCurrent

If you've noticed a hike in gas prices lately, you can thank the weather in Indiana.

The hike largely comes from the temporary shutdown of a refinery in the US.

"The refinery down south in Whiting, Indiana, a BP refinery, experienced some flooding that took place last week, that forced it to go offline," said Matt McClain, a Petroleum Analyst with Gas Buddy. "That actually has a pretty good-sized impact (in) Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, but it's also impacting multiple U.S. states as well."

Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he left Washington Wednesday with a sense that progress was made after a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

"It was constructive in the sense it was an exchange of views that I think helped both us and the Americans understand the work we need to do to get, we hope, to an agreement," LeBlanc said in an interview with The Canadian Press after arriving in Montreal.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre on Wednesday accused the federal Liberals of allowing temporary foreign workers to take jobs away from young Canadians while youth unemployment is high.

"As our young people have a quarter-century high in their unemployment, Mark Carney this year is expected to bring in a record number of temporary foreign workers to take the jobs of Canadian youth," Poilievre said. 

Statistics Canada data shows unemployment for youth, aged 15 to 24, hit 14.6 per cent in July. This is the highest it's been since 2010, outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a very memorable experience for Swift Current's Griffin Striker in the Canada Summer Games soccer tournament.

It was a marathon and not a sprint for the Wrinkled Warriors.

The Swift Current based Slo-Pitch team won bronze at the Saskatchewan Senior Fitness 55+ Provincial Games in Swift Current.

"It was a lot of ball, a lot of heat, and a lot of fun," said Warriors player Rob Myers. "We had a great time."

They beat the Regina Ruckus 18-2 in the bronze medal game.

The Swift Current-based club went 0-3 on Day 1, falling10-4 to the Ruckus, 14-13 to the Saskatoon Silver Foxes, and 11-7 to the Saskatoon Red Aces.

Police have arrested a man in connection with a break-in and theft from earlier this month.

Swift Current Municipal RCMP detained and charged 25-year-old Blaine Charles Peters.

His charges include:

Canada changed its BSE surveillance after lower global incidence of ‘mad cow disease’ led to international standards shift

Canada’s agency for food safety is encouraged with cattle industry response to a new, more farmer-friendly approach to BSE surveillance.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) updated national bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) surveillance program — put in place earlier this year to meet new international standards — has received 152 samples of risk material as of Aug. 11, it recently said.

Fresh off winning a bronze medal in the 400m hurdles at the Canada Summer Games, Swift Current's Carter Tuplin is off to Texas to start the next step of his junior hockey career.

Massive storm in southeastern Alberta causes significant damage to crops and reported deaths of livestock

The numbers are still coming in for the cost of the damage caused by a huge hail storm that hit various areas of Alberta Aug. 20.

The storm ripped its way through vast swaths of land from Cayley, Milo and Brooks to the Saskatchewan border, as well as Camrose to the Viking, Edberg, Sedgewick, and Hughenden areas.