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Around the NSL: Welcome to footypeg; Rapid on top; Canadian Champ to be crowned

Welcome to footypeg, Northern Super League superfans! It will soon no longer be a view from Row Z.

It was a long — too long — time coming, but Winnipeg will finally have its very own professional women’s league team. And what better sport than the beautiful game.

Decorated Olympian and hometown hero Desiree Scott made the announcement of the league’s expansion into the Prairies on Tuesday. The Winnipegger nicknamed the Destroyer during her playing days co-founded the seventh franchise in Canada’s women’s pro footy league with renowned former coach Rob Gale. She will serve as vice-president of community and player experience and Gale will serve as chief sporting officer.

The club’s first season will kick off in 2027 and the league has announced it hopes to expand again in 2028.

Nine years for man who kidnapped delivery driver

A delivery driver was kidnapped after the break-up of a business partnership involving “grey-market vapes” that were sold at Winnipeg convenience stores, a Manitoba judge has been told.

The Winnipeg Police Service said last week that investigators recently arrested a third suspect in the Oct. 11, 2024 incident, in which three men are accused of kidnapping the 22-year-old driver and holding him at gunpoint for hours as they stole merchandise from a storage facility.

One of the men arrested, 43-year-old Jonathon Ranger, pleaded guilty earlier this year to forcible confinement and two offences related to the stolen gun that was found when he was arrested in December 2024.

In June, he was sentenced to nine years in prison, minus time served, based on a joint recommendation from the Crown and defence as part of a plea bargain.

Christopher Nolan crafts modern epic, brings wartime saga home

Months before this week’s release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, the film was already being criticized for being too “woke,” insufficiently manly, overly casual and not faithful enough to the original 2,800-year-old poem.

There was a lot of online griping about the historical inaccuracy of the armour, the helmets and the boats. (These accusations about lack of realism being made, mind you, against a story that also includes a one-eyed, man-eating giant, a six-headed sea monster and a sorceress who can turn men into pigs.)

If you’re willing to approach it on its own terms, Nolan’s cinematic epic is magnificent, moving and visually astonishing. And — putting to one side those quibbles about period-specific Bronze Age breastplates — his take ends up being “realistic” in a much more profound sense: even sequences reaching toward mythic heights remain grounded in fundamental and enduring human questions about love and loyalty, death and war, time and age.

Worrying about fidelity to the original also seems by-the-by. The Odyssey is a foundational text that weaves through centuries of re-imaginings in literature and art. Even the comparatively brief history of cinema offers up several adaptations, from a 1905 silent short by Georges Méliès, to a (sadly) unrealized Ray Harryhausen Claymation version in the 1990s, to the Coen Brothers’ antic musical O Brother, Where Art Thou? from 2000.

Councillors expand downtown cleanup of drug-related items, weapons

City hall wasted no time Thursday expanding the seasonal cleanup of drug needles and other hazardous material from select downtown parks to include many other public spaces, at least until the end of this year.

Hydro’s planned outages turn out the lights for thousands across province

Business owners in the East Beaches area of Lake Winnipeg hauled out generators Wednesday after a planned Manitoba Hydro outage left thousands of residents and cottagers without power.

Lise Bourassa, who runs several stores in Grand Beach, had to rent generators to accommodate the eight-hour blackout, which affected the area from Beaconia to Victoria Beach as well as Sagkeeng First Nation, while Hydro crews fixed a pole that was damaged by fire in May .

Despite the spare power source, she was only able to open one of her stores during the outage and said it came at a bad time.

“I understand the importance of what Manitoba Hydro is doing, the problem all the businesses in this area are having is that our season is very short and to be shut down for a full day has a fairly big impact, plus they added cost of getting generators,” she wrote in a message to the Free Press. “We also had less than one week to make arrangements, find electricians and generators to be able to keep all the food safe.”

First Nations’ concerns overshadowed by talk of major projects

The contrast could not have been more stark in Ottawa — unceded Algonquin territory — this week.

On one side, hundreds of chiefs and their proxies met at the annual summer meeting of the Assembly of First Nations to debate resolutions focused on issues — primarily crises — in their communities.

Of the 53 policy resolutions and two emergency resolutions proposed by the chiefs, pressing topics such as child welfare, housing, drinking water, poverty, Alberta separatism, citizenship, and online attacks from deniers of the atrocities of residential schools were all on the agenda.

On the other side, over seven cabinet ministers from the federal government showed up basically to argue the case for the fast-tracking of “major projects.”