Cineplex opens first Junxion entertainment, gaming and dining complex in Winnipeg

Alberta sees its way through the fog

“The owls are not what they seem.”

It was a confusing line in a confusing television show, back when television watchers had to wait a week, or sometimes more, for a new episode of a show.

What the owls were — or weren’t — was one small element of the astounding panoply of events in Twin Peaks.

In case this is all flying right over your head, Twin Peaks was a surrealist television show, a mystery/horror/something that premiered in 1990. It had an amazing ability to leave viewers both entertained and, well, hanging.

The whole truth? Well, that depends on who wants to know

She raised her hand in front of her government and country, and swore to tell the truth, nothing but, so help her God.

That truth, as Christine Blasey Ford told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, was simple: when she was 15 years old, Brett Kavanaugh, now the Republicans' Supreme Court nominee, sexually assaulted her.

"I am here today, not because I want to be," she said, in the beginning. "I am terrified."

Then she started talking, reading from the statement she'd prepared about the events that led her to that moment. She recounted the details of the assault 36 years ago — the house party, the hands shoving her into a bedroom, Kavanaugh's weight on top of her.

Taylor Allen

Eighteen years old and still in high school, Taylor got his start with the Free Press on June 1, 2011. Well, sort of...

Ladders, not robots, attract specialists

Manitoba’s shortage of medical specialists is partly a technology story. It is more a story about how a system decides to get ready.

The Free Press editorial board argued last week that Manitoba must give its doctors the tools and conditions they need or the gains in recruitment will not hold. That is true and not where the story begins. The Doctors Manitoba report behind the editorial carries a line that lands hard with anyone who has tried to recruit a surgeon here: physicians are “trained in the medicine of today” and arrive to find “the tools of yesterday.”

The report carries good news and the government deserves credit for it. But most of the shortage that remains is in the specialties and one surgical robot is just a start.

Recruitment is working. It is also only half the task. Recruitment is what we do to bring a doctor here; attraction is what makes one want to come. The two answer different problems: recruitment offsets departure, attraction earns retention.

FIFA president overshadowing the good of the game

There is a big London Derby on Sunday (Arsenal-Chelsea), and the weekend schedule also features marquee matches in Turkey (Feherbahce-Besiktas) and the Netherlands (Ajax-PSV Eindhoven), as well as a showdown between the Italian teams with the last four Scudetti between them (Inter Milan-Napoli).

Then there’s the Under-20 Women’s World Cup, which is set to kick off in Poland (Canada plays England on Saturday at 11:00 a.m.).

And yet, clouding it all — and the world of football is a massive thing to overshadow — is the figure of FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who suddenly finds himself facing a protracted legal battle over his scheme to sell off the World Cup’s commercial rights.

Specifically, UEFA — the sport’s governing body in Europe — is “preparing to bring criminal claims in Switzerland against Infantino…for criminal mismanagement under Article 158 of the Swiss Criminal Code.” So reads its recent filing in a Florida court.