Cyndi & Cher

Get to know your Jet: Neal Pionk

“Give it 110 per cent.” “Get pucks in deep.” “One shift at a time.” “Play our game.” “Keep it simple.”

Hockey has a language all its own. Unfortunately, after hearing the same phrases repeated often enough, that language can start to sound a lot like white noise.

So we’re going to try something different.

The Free Press will occasionally sit down with a Winnipeg Jets player at his locker-room stall for a wide-ranging conversation about the stuff you don’t always hear in a media scrum.

Man pleads guilty to manslaughter for chasing, stabbing man downtown

An intellectually disabled man who drunkenly chased down a man he had been arguing with and fatally stabbed him in broad daylight admitted to manslaughter on Wednesday.

Matthew Gerald Tomack Pelletier, now 38, chased Ricky Dwayne Mancheese, 49, down Kennedy Street before stabbing him six times in front of his wife on the sidewalk between Sargent and Cumberland avenues, at about 11:50 a.m. on June 11, 2024.

Pelletier, who police arrested the next day, was charged with second-degree murder, but instead pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter in front of Court of King’s Bench Justice Joan McKelvey on Wednesday.

“This type of incident on Winnipeg streets is all too common and must be strongly deterred,” said McKelvey.

Federal funding extension falls short: Ministers

Provincial and territorial health ministers say a one-year extension of a 10-year $1.2 billion annual funding agreement announced by the federal health minister late Wednesday isn’t good enough.

“We are still facing an enormous fiscal cliff,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, who is hosting the ministers in Winnipeg, said at a press conference Thursday at The Leaf in Assiniboine Park.

The one-year extension of funding for mental health, substance use and home and community care that was set to expire March 31, 2027 was announced by federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel, who meets with her provincial and territorial counterparts Friday.

“We welcome that first step, however, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of engagement that needs to happen (Friday),”Asagwara said.

Serial arsonist gets more jail time, community ban

A serial arsonist who believes controlled burning is his “calling” was sentenced to nine months in jail and barred for two years from a southwestern Manitoba community after he deliberately set multiple grass fires during a fire ban in May.

Slain chef’s family infuriated by stayed charges

The family of a Ste. Anne chef who died after an altercation at a party says they are angry a manslaughter charge has been stayed against a 46-year-old man.