No fans allowed at Canada’s figure skating championships due to COVID-19 concerns

The women’s 100 metres in Tokyo ended with Elaine Thompson-Herah’s celebration. It might have cost her a world record

Thompson-Herah beats compatriot Fraser-Pryce and leads a Jamaican sweep of the podium.

Banning controversial songs is a tone-deaf solution

Along with sipping egg nog and trimming trees, Canadians engaged in another reliable holiday tradition this week: debating whether or not Baby, It’s Cold Outside promotes date rape.

On Tuesday, three of the country’s major broadcasters — CBC, Rogers and Bell Media — announced they’d be putting the chill on the contentious duet, written by American songwriter Frank Loesser in 1944, and would not be playing it on their radio stations this year.

Several American radio stations have also put the song on their naughty lists, arguing it has no place in the #MeToo era. 

Through a modern lens, it’s not hard to see how some people might view this song as a woman being pressured into sex by a guy who won’t take no for an answer. 

Pimp sentenced to 11 years in prison

A man who picked up a vulnerable 17-year-old child-welfare ward on the streets of Winnipeg and coerced her into providing sexual services for several months has been sent to prison for more than a decade.

After a trial, Hassan Kargbo, who’s in his early 30s, was found guilty of sexual exploitation, making child sexual abuse and exploitation material, receiving a material benefit from sexual services provided by a person under 18, procuring a person under 18 and advertising sexual services.

Provincial court Judge Julie Frederickson sentenced him to 11 years behind bars late last month.

“Mr. Kargbo picked up a young Indigenous girl walking over the Osborne Street bridge and quickly got her involved in drug use and escorting,” Frederickson said in a written decision.

Report calls for schools to add more ‘sensory rooms’

Manitoba schools are being urged to set up more “sensory rooms” and use the spaces — which can feature mood lighting, flexible seating and fidget toys — to address growing concerns about student outbursts and related injuries.

A new report from the Manitoba Federation of Labour is renewing calls to better protect educational assistants, teachers and other public-sector employees.

One of its 10 recommendations, published on Monday, focuses on tackling overcrowding in community facilities and establishing “safe spaces in schools to respond to violence.”

“It’s become the norm: kids having meltdowns that require you have to evacuate the classroom,” said Jane Allison, an educational assistant in Winnipeg.

The Green Fog pays homage to the City by the Bay via Hitchcock's Vertigo

The Green Fog is certainly an original film. But it is best approached with a thorough familiarity with Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1958 thriller Vertigo.

In fact, it’s an absolute prerequisite.

Commissioned by San Francisco International Film Festival director Noah Cowan, it is a “celebration of San Francisco in cinema” that, in its own strange way, functions as a kind of remake of Vertigo, told obliquely with footage from an array of San Francisco-set movies and TV shows, including Bullitt, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, McMillan and Wife, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and The Streets of San Francisco.

“We were told to feature footage from any film or TV show ever shot in the Bay Area,” says director Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World), who took the assignment in collaboration with fraternal partners Evan and Galen Johnson.