Iran pardons Grammy Award winner whose song became an anthem to the 2022 protests

Hockey teams scramble after two city arenas put on ice

Instead of ice, Barry Bonni walks onto a dull concrete surface at the Terry Sawchuk Memorial Arena on Thursday.

The arena, as well as the West Kildonan Memorial Arena, have had to close after failing inspections. Predictably, the city’s hockey community is in a tailspin because ice time is so precious.

“We’re now in panic mode,” said Bonni, president of the River East Royal Knights on Thursday. The Sawchuk arena is the team’s home rink.

Bonni, who is a living legend in Manitoba’s hockey community, said the Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League club is scrambling to find ice time.

Not much of a race when most of the field can’t find their running shoes

In Winnipeg's mayoral race, there are few truly bad ideas, but hardly any really good ones.

Carney’s ‘counterweight’ summit strategy

Modern summit diplomacy had very inauspicious beginnings. Winston Churchill is widely credited with coining the phrase “summit” in 1950 to describe a conference of global leaders. But it was another British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who initiated the first actual summit meeting 12 years earlier — with Adolf Hitler, no less.

It didn’t go well.

Over a one-month period, the two leaders met three times over the fate of Czechoslovakia. Hitler threatened war. Chamberlain threatened appeasement. Guess who won?

Chamberlain was so desperate for a peace deal and so convinced he alone could convince Hitler, that he swallowed his inhibitions and flew in an airplane for the very first time in his life. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” he told reporters, explaining his tenacious summit activity. Skeptical of the spectacle, British Foreign Office wags quietly amended it to, “If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly again.”

Author Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party a story of hope in dark times

If Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party is in any way prophetic, Americans should be worried.

The B.C.-born, New York-based author’s bestselling fourth novel, 2014’s Station Eleven, chronicled a performing troupe in a post-pandemic world. The novel experienced a second wave of popularity when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, and when HBO’s Station Eleven miniseries premièred in late 2021.

Mandel launches Exit Party, her seventh novel, at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location tonight, where she’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg novelist Joan Thomas.

Published in September by HarperCollins, Exit Party sees Mandel once again working in the near future, in this case in a novel that features two timelines — one (dubbed the A-side in the novel) where the U.S. has fractured into a number of small countries following a civil war, and another (the B-side) where a singular, autocratic surveillance state has tightened its grip over its citizens.

Women wearing appropriate clothes to gym not asking for men’s opinions

Prior to last Saturday, I was the blissful sort of person who could say “who is that, again?” when I heard the name Shane Gillis.

Now, I know him as the comedian who said “women just dress like whores now” at the gym during his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live — a show that fired him in 2019, by the way, for being racist and homophobic on a podcast yet continues to invite him back as a host for some reason.

Gillis also likened women’s short shorts (the kind one might wear to lift weights, say) to neon fishing lures.

“And don’t look. You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming,” he said.

Federal data on Winnipeg's number of homeless people inaccurate, advocates say

The head of End Homelessness Winnipeg says she has no confidence in data about the city’s homeless population due to problems with the federal system that tracks those numbers.