River resto returns to frozen Forks for 10th anniversary

Playoff hopes dwindle for Bombers after loss to Edmonton

EDMONTON — It’s a script the Winnipeg Blue Bombers should’ve shredded, burned, and buried.

Go to Edmonton, dominate the first half, crumble in the final two quarters and lose.

That’s what happened in Week 12, when the Bombers blew an early 16-point lead in a 22-19 loss. And in their return to Commonwealth Stadium on Friday night, the Bombers went down a nearly identical path in a 35-27 defeat to the Edmonton Elks.

In their latest disappearing act, the Blue and Gold led 21-10 with less than a minute remaining in the first half before seemingly vanishing into thin air.

Convicted harasser accused of targeting old, new victims, including judge

Agnieszka Ciochon-Newton, who was sentenced to six years in prison for mercilessly harassing two people she believed had wronged her, as well as other crimes, wasted no time when her sentence ended to launch fresh attacks on victims new and old, including the judge who convicted her, court documents allege.

The 58-year-old former nurse was arrested last month after Winnipeg police “became aware that (Ciochon-Newton) was engaging in aggressive and harassing behaviours again, starting almost immediately upon the expiry of her parole conditions” on May 13, Det. Sgt Kylie Case wrote in search warrant documents obtained by the Free Press.

Ciochon-Newton is charged with seven counts of criminal harassment, two counts of uttering threats and one count each of fraud, breaking and entering, attempting to obstruct justice, intimidation of a justice official, mischief and defamatory libel. She remains in custody.

Search warrant documents say provincial court Judge Keith Eyrikson learned in late August that Ciochon-Newton had emailed CBC Manitoba days earlier and threatened him.

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.

Letters, Oct. 16

A few days ago, U.S. President Donald Trump attended a rally in Arizona. At about the same time, Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada was interviewed on The Really Big Show.