New on DVD / VOD

A small step among troubling signs

There’s no getting around the fact — to many people, downtown Winnipeg is unsafe. Period.

Bombers’ offence, defence, and special teams fail to show up against Stampeders

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers constantly preach the importance of playing three-phase football.

On Friday night, they went 0-for-3.

Their offence, defence, and special teams all played a significant role in losing 52-30 to the visiting Calgary Stampeders.

The team that erased a 17-point deficit to beat Ottawa last Sunday was nowhere to be found.

Protests spur Ukraine military reshuffle

Even nations fighting for their survival can’t escape politics. “The president should not choose sides during a war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters earlier this month after sacking his defence minister.

New on DVD / VOD

The Brain That Wouldn't DieOf all the cheesy horror movies to ever be broadcast in the "chiller theatre" TV time slots of the 1960s and '70s, The Brain That Wouldn't Die must be the sleaziest.

Shot in 1959 and released in 1962, this amazing Hollywood cheapie is about Dr. Cortner (Jason Evers), a renegade surgeon whose experiments with reviving dead people are deemed unsavoury. When his fiancée, Jan (Virginia Leith), is decapitated in a car accident, the doc goes to extreme measures to keep her head alive, hilariously setting it in an electrified pan on a table. The lecherous doc seeks out a woman with a fabulous body to serve as a transplant donor, haunting burlesque night clubs and camera clubs. Jan's head isn't entirely happy with this situation and seeks to subvert her boyfriend's efforts by telepathically turning one of his monstrous mutant experiments against him. (Interesting trivia: the monster is played by Eddie Carmel, the subject of the famous Diane Arbus photo A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents.)

At one point, the monster rips off the arm of the doctor's assistant, but still more gory horror awaits as Jan takes her heady revenge.

The film has inspired three different stage musicals (one of which features the catchy lyric: "My medulla oblongata is working harder than it oughta"). It's also been ridiculed on TV by both Elvira and the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Manitoba Hydro’s energy plan set to be scrutinized

Manitoba Hydro is set to face questions and concerns over its plan for the province’s future energy needs, which includes proposed natural gas-powered turbines in Brandon and Indigenous-owned wind farms.

The Public Utilities Board, an arm’s-length regulator, will begin six weeks of hearings Monday into the 10-year blueprint and potential ways to satisfy electricity demand, while Hydro grapples with a projected energy shortfall, debt of $25 billion and aging infrastructure.

“The development plan reflects the best available information and analysis of how Manitoba Hydro can meet growing energy demand, while balancing factors we know are important to our customers, including cost, reliability and the environment,” Peter Chura, a spokesman for the Crown corporation, told the Free Press.

“We are confident in our analysis and that we’ve appropriately balanced reliability, affordability, safety and risk.”

An eroding Winnipeg neighbourhood looks to new foundations

WINNIPEG - The lot Jesse Bettcher lives on in Winnipeg's North End used to be a pile of burnt rubble. Same with the one next door. And the one across the street.

But he's now the proud owner of a two-storey house with blue-grey siding and white trim, so new the orange construction fencing is still out front.

It's a dream home for Bettcher, and the latest hope for a city seeking to knock down, clean up and revitalize neighbourhoods that have seen hundreds of homes left vacant, leading to safety hazards and worries about the future.

He bought the house as part of a pilot project aimed at creating affordable home ownership. It let him and his family move out of a rental that he said was falling apart.