Urgent love-and-marriage agenda can be frightening

‘He sounded scared for his life:’ Witness to brutal beating death testifies

A woman who was in the same house when Brooklyn Elijah Hiebert was tortured and beaten to death defended the man’s three accused killers in court at the same time she implicated them in his murder.

Hiebert, 20, was killed in the basement of a Selkirk Avenue gang drug house, Dec. 24, 2023. His body was found a week later wrapped in a shower curtain and duct tape behind a Flora Avenue church.

Christopher Kyle Wattman, 38, Hazel Flett, 38, and Victoria Lee Andrews, 28, are on trial charged with first-degree murder.

On Wednesday, a woman who lived in the house testified Hiebert arrived in the late evening or early morning hours in the company of Flett, another woman who lived at the house and a male gang associate, and within moments was embroiled in a “confrontation” over a lost phone, a financial debt and accusations Hiebert was a “skinner” (street slang for child abuser).

Hutterite colonies embrace the manufacturing business – while staying faithful to their way of life

Tucked away at Oak Bluff Hutterite Colony, past rows of communal housing and farm buildings, Aaron Maendel tinkers in a laboratory.

Black-and-white sheets smeared with grey-test formulas cover a counter. A Thermotron — a refrigerator-looking machine — is powered off but standing by to simulate any desired temperature.

Maendel moves to a worktop littered with partly full mixing cups. He pulls out a small, rectangular sample — a sheet showing the drying time of his new fixation, floor coatings.

“Very simple, actually. Very simple machine. Drags a stick through the mud,” Maendel says.

Katie Zacharia and the telling of lies

U.S. President Donald Trump’s new press secretary made her debut last week and was almost universally panned and parodied, lasting just five days before being fired.

MPI gambles with low rate request

It sounds a bit like a gamble from a player in an industry that is almost pathologically averse to gambling.

Is Osborne a street or a road? ‘Stroad’ status fails everyone

Last month, the City of Winnipeg said it would soon begin to study ways to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety along Osborne Street, which runs between two of the city’s densest neighbourhoods, where residents walk and bike for many of their daily activities.

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.