Japan’s leader welcomes investment, exchanges to strengthen computer chip supply chain

Hellebuyck standoff caused by… Nathan MacKinnon?

Looking for someone to blame in the Connor Hellebuyck fiasco and cast as public enemy No. 1? How about long-time Winnipeg Jets nemesis Nathan MacKinnon?

Allow us to explain as we fire up the time machine and head back to February in Italy.

Oh, what could have been if MacKinnon had been able to score on what appeared to be an open net late in the third period of the men’s gold medal game with Hellebuyck down and seemingly out of position.

Instead, the star forward fired wide, keeping the score deadlocked at 1-1 as the clock ticked down on regulation.

Kinew delivered what most of us wanted; now we’ll have to deal with the consequences

Premier Wab Kinew has decided to adopt permanent daylight savings time, which means a permanent end to the spring forward, fall back tradition of adjusting our clocks. And absolutely no one is surprised.

Day 1 of Jets training camp in the books with pairings essentially cemented

Nearly six minutes into his question-and-answer session, Scott Arniel took a welcome detour from the news of the day.

After exhausting the discussion around the goalie who wasn’t in training camp, the head coach of the Winnipeg Jets finally got a query about the line combinations and defensive pairings that were unveiled in training camp.

And unlike past years, when exhibition games were more frequent and the training camp wasn’t this condensed, Arniel conceded these groupings were intentional and were likely staying together for some time.

The expansion to an 84-game regular season brings with it a reduction to four pre-season games and a much shorter training camp, which could limit the amount of experimentation that Arniel can do during the next two weeks.

Cabernet Sauvignon star of wine festival

The Winnipeg Wine Festival will celebrate the king of red wine grapes next weekend — the theme of this year’s festival, which takes place Sept. 25 and 26 at the RBC Convention Centre, is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cab Sauv, as it’s also known, is the world’s most widely planted wine grape of any colour, first coming to prominence in the 1800s in France’s Bordeaux region, where the grape is still popular. Rather than single-variety wines, Bordeaux reds tend to be blends, with those coming from the left bank of the Gironde estuary being Cabernet-dominant, while right-bank wines are Merlot-dominant, with Cabernet Sauvignon playing a supporting role. Cabernet and Merlot work well together and many other countries have followed suit in blending the two.

A team at University of California Davis put Cabernet Sauvignon through a DNA test in 1996 and discovered its parent grapes are Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc — it’s likely that at some point the two varieties, planted next to each other in some vineyard, crossed and mutated and became the grape we know today. (Someone growing grapes in the 19th century must have had an inkling of what was up, as the grape has been called Cabernet Sauvignon since long before the DNA test.)

Flavour-wise, most Cabernet Sauvignon wines are big and bold, with a core of deep dark berry flavours, some graphite and spice notes and relatively bright acidity. It’s a grape that is well-suited to barrel aging, with most examples seeing at least some time in wood.

American Hostage stars recall warmth of Winnipeggers during brutal winter

TORONTO — When you stream the eight-part series American Hostage, a sense of familiarity may strike.

That’s because the show was shot in Winnipeg — especially in the Exchange District — from November of last year to the beginning of February, with Winnipeg portraying Indianapolis circa 1977.

The whole world seemed to be watching that midwest American city that year as a hostage crisis unfolded involving one Tony Kiritsis, an angry man who goes ballistic when a mortgage brokerage was poised to foreclose on property he had dreamed of developing into a shopping centre.

Kiritsis kidnapped his mortgage broker, Richard Hall, wiring a shotgun to the back of his head, and demanded a public airing of his grievances, with the reluctant help of popular radio broadcaster Fred Heckman.