Wind turbine maker to pay settlement after blade broke apart and washed up on Nantucket beaches

Around the NSL: Everything comes down to the final week of the regular season

It all comes down to this.

The final week of the Northern Super League’s regular season has arrived and the standings are anything but sorted.

There will be no Supporters’ Shield repeat for AFC Toronto, the Montreal Roses will battle the Ottawa Rapid in a winner-takes-the-regular-season contest, and fourth place is up for grabs between the Halifax Tides and Vancouver Rise.

How did we get here? Let’s break down the implications of all three regular-season finales after a tumultuous Week 26.

Policy change gives Manitoba renters a break from proposed hikes

Aidan Wilson said he was reduced to tears after getting a call from Premier Wab Kinew’s office.

He’d just learned tenants of a West Broadway apartment, including himself, would no longer pay a hundreds-of-dollars monthly rent increase as of Nov. 1.

“It’s been a lot to deal with, it’s a lot to push for, and it’s a lot to speak up. All of these emotions just kind of came flooding out,” Wilson said Tuesday at a news conference alongside Kinew.

The premier announced that renters will not have to pay the increases until the provincial Residential Tenancies Branch hears landlords’ arguments and issues its decisions.

Police HQ report ‘outrageous’: Kinew

Premier Wab Kinew says public inquiry findings that taxpayers were overcharged more than $40 million for the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters project and two city leaders broke the public trust are “outrageous.”

Inquiry commissioner Garth Smorang’s report, which was released Monday, concluded former mayor Sam Katz “violated the public trust” and council code of conduct, while the city’s former chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl suffered from a “complete lack of a moral compass.”

Smorang also found the city was overcharged $43.3 million for the project, with $42 million of that going to key contractor Caspian Projects.

“It’s outrageous that people who were elected betrayed the public here in the city. It’s outrageous that there were people in business who ripped you off, ripped me off — I was paying property taxes in Winnipeg at the time — and ripped all of us off to the tune of $43.3 million. That’s crazy,” said Kinew.

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).

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.