A 5.5 quake jolts central Turkey, sending residents into the cold streets

Retired sportscaster Scott Oake determined as fundraising for women's addictions treatment facility enters home stretch

For now, the patch of land just east of the Victoria Hospital doesn’t look like much: just a field of rocks, mounded dirt, and concrete piles driven into the earth. Yet when Scott Oake looks over the site, he can already imagine how it will look in just over a year’s time, when the new Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre is expected to open.

It’s easier to picture this time around. In 2020, when the recently-retired CBC sportscaster and his late wife, Anne, were building their first labour of intermingled grief and love, the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men, it was hard for him to wrap his mind around how a raw construction site could transform into a welcoming addictions treatment facility.

When that centre opened in 2021, Oake found it looked “almost identical” to the architect’s renderings. So it’s easy to hope the Anne Oake Centre will be the same. It will be the first facility of its kind, its founders believe, not only in Canada but in North America: a place where 50 to 70 women can pursue sobriety while staying with their children.

“At Bruce Oake there’s a culture of love, and most of all a culture of hope,” Oake said, speaking at the site Thursday after a media conference to announce the final push of the centre’s fundraising campaign. “I can feel it every time I walk into that building. And I know it will be the same here.”

U of M students call for ban on far-right group

Some University of Manitoba students are calling on their school to ban a far-right group from campus after posters promoting mass deportations were found during the summer break.

More than 50 people rallied on Wednesday, the first day of classes, to make known their concerns about a group called the Dominion Society of Canada.

The protest was organized after a supporter of the self-described nationalist group posted a video over the Labour Day weekend that shows him putting up flyers in Fort Garry.

“Canada is a really beautiful country and I have been welcomed here by a lot of beautiful people and it’s been amazing, but when I see harmful rhetoric online and now, on campus, it gives me a lot of anxiety,” said Ela Ancheta, an arts major at U of M.

Supportive housing operator sued after man with dementia walks away

The Public Guardian and Trustee of Manitoba is suing a health services company after a man with dementia under its care allegedly wandered away from an apartment it operates for vulnerable people and was later found face down in a puddle — unresponsive, hypothermic and severely injured.

The public trustee — a provincial government agency that, among other duties, makes financial and personal care decisions for vulnerable adults who cannot do so themselves — filed the lawsuit against Cambridge Health Inc. and a related numbered company in the Court of King’s Bench earlier this month.

The agency did so on behalf of a now-38-year-old man, who has been under its care since 2018, as a result of his frontotemporal dementia. The disease often starts in mid-life, rather than old age, as is the case with most other forms of dementia.

The lawsuit alleges the man, who resided at a Henderson Highway apartment complex where Cambridge Health operated a supportive residence for people with complex behavioural health issues, was in a common area of the home at about 4:30 p.m. on April 3 last year.

The plane truth about a dangerous president

U.S. President Donald Trump has crossed firmly into cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face territory.

International Peace Garden 9/11 remembrance ‘especially meaningful’

INTERNATIONAL PEACE GARDEN — Hundreds of people on the American side of the International Peace Garden, which straddles the Manitoba-North Dakota border, bowed their heads and observed a moment of silence Friday on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Firefighters, politicians, military members and aviation officials were part of the ceremony at the garden, held to remember and honour the nearly 3,000 people who died and the heroic acts of first responders.

“Twenty-five years have passed, but the significance of that day has not diminished,” said Dave Schellenberg, the vice-chair of the Manitoba Association of Fire Chiefs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City and a third one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while a fourth one that was targeted to hit the White House crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The attacks were orchestrated by al-Qaida.