China and the Vatican agree to extend an agreement on appointing bishops

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.

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.

Klein, Gillingham trade jabs over megaproject

Two of Winnipeg’s mayoral candidates wasted no time trading barbs over who bears responsibility for the skyrocketing cost of overhauling the North End sewage treatment plant, during a televised debate Wednesday.

Scott Gillingham and Kevin Klein pointed the finger at each other for the rising cost of the massive project, which had a cost estimate of $795 million in 2015 and had ballooned to $3.2 billion as of the latest estimate.

“We need to be able to understand how that amount tripled in that short a time,” Klein said at the event held at CBC’s downtown Winnipeg headquarters. He pointed out the first estimate was given when Gillingham was chairman of the city’s finance committee. He questioned what the incumbent did to garner funding for the project.

Gillingham shot back by noting Klein was Manitoba’s environment minister in 2023. He accused his opponent of failing to make a dent on the cost.

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.

‘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).