WAG opens exhibit of works by Labrador Inuit

Teacher starts petition to reduce e-scooter injuries

As reports of e-scooter injuries continue to surface in Manitoba, a Winnipeg teacher is calling for stronger regulations, public education and enforcement before more people are seriously hurt.

The trolls inside the Conservative tent

The Conservative Party of Canada has a troll problem. And it’s coming from inside the tent.

Once, trolls existed only in imagination. They were figures of mythical proportion, big and small. They lived solitary lives under bridges, in caves, or forests. They were considered dim-witted and mean. Best avoided.

Today, they are real, unavoidable, and ubiquitous on social media. They are anything but solitary. There are tribes of them out there and tribal is how they think and post. As for dim-witted and mean, others can opine but they are uniformly mean and dismissive.

Mean to anyone who disagrees with their views. Dismissive of any view but their own. They distribute questionable, at best, facts and opinions grounded in hostility towards anything or anyone deemed disagreeable or heretical to their world view.

Community rallies around family devastated by fire

Dennis Lafreniere and his wife didn’t expect to celebrate 27 years of marriage Thursday in a Selkirk hotel room while reeling from a recent house fire.

The couple and their two daughters lost their home last Sunday in a raging fire that left nothing behind, but overwhelming support from multiple communities has kept them afloat.

“It’s devastating when you don’t have any clothes, any medication, all of that stuff, and it’s just so overwhelming the next morning. It’s just nasty,” Lafreniere said.

Investigators suspect the fire was caused by a fridge, freezer and battery charger that were all plugged into the same electrical line that got overheated. The house, located on Highway 59 between Selkirk and Libau, is a farmhouse built in 1943, and investigators think worn-out electrical lines also contributed to the fire, said Lafreniere.

Senior’s family frustrated by Manitoba Housing’s response to apartment’s bedbug infestation

The family of a senior who left his Manitoba Housing apartment after two years of bedbug infestations is accusing the provincial body of being ineffectual and irresponsible in its treatment of the persistent pests.

The senior had lived at the Columbus Courts building at 253 Edgeland Blvd., since 2011, but when he began getting severe skin rashes all over his body about two years ago, his son began to worry.

They found out the 14-storey building was being sprayed for bedbugs after an infestation had impacted several units. After multiple rounds of pesticide treatments, the problem has not subsided, the son told the Free Press.

“They come in, they spray pesticides and then they leave. And it’s been completely ineffectual,” he said. “My dad keeps seeing the bedbugs even the day after the treatments and continuously, they’ve just gotten worse and worse.”

‘How do I go on?’ Double homicide victim’s mother speaks at killers’ sentencing

A Portage la Prairie woman who returned home to find her adult son and his girlfriend shot dead told a court she struggles to go on in the wake of the drug world killing.

“All I want to do is sleep and not wake up, but I do and I want to give up,” Mary Bone said at a sentencing hearing earlier this month for killers Preston Whitford and Jeremy Whincup. “How do I go on?”

Bone’s son James Borden, 42, and his girlfriend Emily Smoke, 37, were killed Dec. 1, 2024, after the two accused forced their way into Bone’s home to collect a drug debt from Borden, court was told.

Whitford, who wielded the gun that shot the two victims, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 17 years. Whincup, Whitford’s uncle, pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and was sentenced to 18 years in prison.