EA Sports and FIFA end partnership, both eye new video games

Brandon senior hockey player files suit against opponent, league, Hockey Manitoba over serious injuries, lost income

A Brandon man is taking a fellow hockey player and two sport organizations to court after he was seriously injured on the ice, alleging it caused him hardship and lost income.

In 2024, Devon Leblanc played for the Virden Oil Kings, a senior amateur team in the Tiger Hills Hockey League, which is a member of the Hockey Manitoba association.

Leblanc’s age is not made clear in the court filing, but an online roster suggests he’s 38.

Leblanc alleges Bryce Enns, a member of the Killarney Shamrocks, bodychecked and assaulted him during a game between the two teams on Nov. 28, 2024.

Rich get richer as NDP policy shifts leave opponents in dust

Last week, Finance Minister Adrien Sala made two announcements that showed why the NDP will remain the party to beat in the next provincial election.

Letters, Oct. 22

As every major city in the world (apart from Winnipeg) has discovered, the key to effective public transit is high-speed transit corridors that take transit vehicles out of congested vehicular traffic — either via a subway or much more affordable bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors.

Outbreak should never have happened

The headline offered a vague sense that something had been accomplished, but it most certainly did not describe anything worth celebrating:

“Manitoba declares measles outbreak over.”

The news item in the Oct. 17 Free Press noted provincial public health officials had confirmed Manitoba’s last laboratory-confirmed case of measles was identified in August, and that the absence of any new cases since had allowed for the aforementioned declaration.

The end of the outbreak — which began in February 2025 and included a significant stretch this year during which Manitoba experienced more measles cases than any other province — is certainly worth noting. But it bears reminding that the real story here is that this province, and others across Canada, experienced a resurgence of this highly communicable but successfully eradicated disease in the first place.

Police HQ report ‘outrageous’: Kinew

Premier Wab Kinew says public inquiry findings that taxpayers were overcharged more than $40 million for the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters project and two city leaders broke the public trust are “outrageous.”

Inquiry commissioner Garth Smorang’s report, which was released Monday, concluded former mayor Sam Katz “violated the public trust” and council code of conduct, while the city’s former chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl suffered from a “complete lack of a moral compass.”

Smorang also found the city was overcharged $43.3 million for the project, with $42 million of that going to key contractor Caspian Projects.

“It’s outrageous that people who were elected betrayed the public here in the city. It’s outrageous that there were people in business who ripped you off, ripped me off — I was paying property taxes in Winnipeg at the time — and ripped all of us off to the tune of $43.3 million. That’s crazy,” said Kinew.

EA Sports and FIFA end partnership, both eye new video games

ZURICH (AP) — Electronic Arts will stop making its hugely successful FIFA video game in its current name, marking a split in one of soccer’s most successful and lucrative partnerships after the sides failed to strike a new licensing deal.

Instead, the California company said Tuesday that EA Sports FC will be introduced from 2023 after it creates the final game in partnership with FIFA later this year.

Licensing rights for the game earn FIFA about $150 million annually — the single biggest commercial earner in its expected $7 billion total revenue from 2019-2022 — though FIFA struck a defiant tone in a statement published hours after the announcement of losing that income.

FIFA promised a “number of new non-simulation games (that) are already under production” and will launch ahead of the 2022 World Cup that kicks off in Qatar in November.