New in Paper

Transit drivers increasingly in peril, but city kicks safety upgrades down the road

Winnipeg Transit drivers are being assaulted with alarming frequency, yet the city continues to move at a glacial pace on a simple measure that could make their jobs safer.

The latest incidents should make the case for full driver shields impossible to ignore. In the past few weeks, Transit operators have been punched, bitten and stabbed, while another driver was threatened with a hatchet after a passenger reached around the existing partial shield.

These aren’t isolated incidents anymore. They’re part of a disturbing pattern that is making an already difficult job considerably more dangerous.

The hatchet incident last week was particularly frightening. A bus was waiting at the St. Vital terminal outside St. Vital Centre when a passenger repeatedly demanded that the driver leave.

New in Paper

A Thousand Farewells

By Nahlah Ayed (Penguin, $18)

THE former Winnipegger's memoir takes us from her childhood in a Palestinian refugee camp to her experiences as a CBC foreign correspondent.

Fear and loathing in bedbug-infested seniors building

Years of living in a regularly infested suite in an always-infested building have given Lewie Gwyllt nightmares in which he’s wrestling giant bedbugs.

The 64-year-old has lived at 529 Country Club Blvd., a 107-unit seniors’ home run by Manitoba Housing, for nearly eight years. Much of his tenancy has been marked by monthly, but futile, bedbug-eradication treatments.

Gwyllt’s routine is set in stone: he bags his laundry, steams his clothes, and buys covers for any piece of furniture he buys. He has a physical disability and struggles to move things when the pest-control people arrive to spray for the bugs, but he knows the nooks and crannies of his baseboards are a problem spot.

The mental toll has weighed heavily on him. He takes anti-anxiety medication to deal with the stress and despair when the treatments don’t work.

Main Street mural honours Winnipeg’s three-time Stanley Cup champions

The city’s newest piece of artwork brought Dave Benson to tears.

His grandfather, Robert Benson, and the three-time Stanley Cup-winning Winnipeg Victorias (1896, 1901, and 1902) have received a long overdue acknowledgement with a four-story mural on the south wall of the Palomino Club at 436 Main St.

It was installed over a week ago, but officially introduced by the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame & Museum (MHHOF) on Wednesday with a press conference featuring several speakers, including Mayor Scott Gillingham.

“You come down Main Street from the south, and you see it from three or four blocks back. Especially this morning when the sun was shining, it was just gorgeous. I just feel absolute pride,” said an emotional Benson, 72.