RWB apologizes to students victimized by ex-instructor who took, sold intimate photos

Man pleads guilty to manslaughter for chasing, stabbing man downtown

An intellectually disabled man who drunkenly chased down a man he had been arguing with and fatally stabbed him in broad daylight admitted to manslaughter on Wednesday.

Matthew Gerald Tomack Pelletier, now 38, chased Ricky Dwayne Mancheese, 49, down Kennedy Street before stabbing him six times in front of his wife on the sidewalk between Sargent and Cumberland avenues, at about 11:50 a.m. on June 11, 2024.

Pelletier, who police arrested the next day, was charged with second-degree murder, but instead pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter in front of Court of King’s Bench Justice Joan McKelvey on Wednesday.

“This type of incident on Winnipeg streets is all too common and must be strongly deterred,” said McKelvey.

Capital punishment as macabre theatre

There was already enough to write about the question of capital punishment when the State of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike.

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, but her execution on Sept. 30 did not go as planned — she survived, despite two lethal injections of pentobarbital, and was taken to hospital in critical condition.

Pike was released from hospital and sent back to the same prison where she has been incarcerated for the last 30 years, ever since she was convicted — as an 18-year-old — of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

Pike faces a long recovery, and an uncertain one. Tennessee assistant attorney general Will Ayers has not said if the state will attempt to execute Pike again, but Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions this year and ordered an independent review of what went wrong.

Slain chef’s family infuriated by stayed charges

The family of a Ste. Anne chef who died after an altercation at a party says they are angry a manslaughter charge has been stayed against a 46-year-old man.

Group’s second LP made to get hearts racing

While a live performance is a moment in time that comes and goes, a record is something that, ostensibly, lives on.

Both are important, often complementary methods of artistic expression for any band of musicians, not the least independent local artists carving out names for themselves in the dark heart of the continent.

Claire Thérèse & the Lockdown are celebrating the vinyl release of Racing Heart, its second full-length LP, with a gig tonight at Public Domain. The group’s last full-length record, Villainy!, was released in 2022.

“For me, this seems like perfect timing,” says Thérèse, primary vocalist and songwriter in the group. “This album has been done for almost two years now. I don’t even know if I would call it procrastination, (but) there are just those steps that one needs to take to actually release something into the world, and that’s how long it has taken me.”

Kinew won’t budge on opposition to criminalizing residential school denialism

Premier Wab Kinew stood by his opposition to the proposed criminalization of residential school denialism Wednesday, after some First Nations leaders criticized his earlier comments and asked him to reconsider.

Kinew said he doesn’t think Canada should make residential school denialism a crime, nor does he think it’s feasible to do, and he’d prefer to see it combated with education.

“When somebody has a question or wants to make a statement from a place of ignorance, the response isn’t to try to criminalize,” he told reporters.

“The response should be to try to heal whatever is going on with them that would cause them to say something hurtful, to try and educate whatever they lack in terms of knowledge about the true history of our country, and ultimately to find a way for us to all live together.”