Alberta not proceeding with Premier Smith’s bill to protect COVID-19 unvaccinated

Actor-director Cooper takes new approach to familiar tale

TORONTO — In his self-directed version of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper plays a rock star named Jackson Maine.

Note the name: it marks the character as a member of a cinematic lineage that descends all the way to 1937.

That year, the first A Star Is Born was made, with Frederick March in the role of alcoholic actor Norman Maine. The name stayed in 1954, when James Mason took over the role of an actor who first nurtures the career of Judy Garland’s up-and-coming star Vicki Lester before his drunken shenanigans threaten to derail it. By 1976, Kris Kristofferson played the role of musician John Norman Howard, a rock singer with a musical stake in the ascent of Barbra Streisand’s Esther Hoffman.

Cooper, 43, remembered the Maine name, but also brought his own vision as a first-time feature filmmaker to the new version, which opens Thursday, Oct. 4, opposite Lady Gaga after the originally designated director, Clint Eastwood, dropped out. While actors might not want to see different interpretations of a role, Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the past iterations.

Haunted houses aren’t the only places to find jump scares

C’est l’Halloween, to quote the 1981 elementary school French class banger by Matt Maxwell, but you know what’s already plenty scary? Life.

We all have our personal haunted houses, so to speak, hence the popularity of the “a haunted house but it’s just…” meme that pops up every October. Sample: “a haunted house but it’s just a bunch of men telling you you’d be prettier if you smiled.”

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d offer up a few jump scares of my own.

A haunted house but it’s just Gate E25

Olympics Overnight: Canada reclaims gold in women’s hockey, Thompson wins silver in ski cross, and Kamila Valieva struggles in women’s free skate

Here’s what you missed overnight at Day 13 of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

NEW YORK - Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison's family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," the family announced. "The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing."

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her "visionary force" and for her delving into "language itself, a language she wants to liberate" from categories of black and white. In 2012, Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Court ruling concludes Canadian Wheat Board saga

It remains to be seen whether the recent court ruling in a lawsuit filed after Canadian Wheat Board’s dissolution in 2012 puts the whole debate to rest, as some no doubt hope.

But either way, the dust has settled on the post-CWB world. The sun still rises and a new generation of farmers on the land only knows by name an institution that for generations influenced every aspect of Prairie grain farming.

The first Rural Revival column I wrote for this newspaper more than 30 years ago was about a thousand farmers from Western Canada demonstrating in support of the Wheat Board. It was in the aftermath of the Western Grain Marketing Panel report, one of several efforts that eventually included a plebiscite to help the federal government decide what to do about a vocal minority of farmers who wanted marketing “freedom.”

The polls at the time suggested about two-thirds of farmers were comfortable enough with the single-desk system for food wheat and barley to keep it around. It served as a counterbalance to canola, which they sold on the open market. They essentially had a dual market.

Doctor’s departure stressful for teen

Morgan Walker is a typical teen — but only because a piece of his brain the size of a deck of cards was removed four years ago.

Walker, who had seizures multiple times a day before his surgery, fears other people might not be so lucky.

That’s because his surgeon, Dr. Demitre Serletis, is leaving the province and Health Sciences Centre. Serletis will start practising at the Cleveland Clinic in the new year.

“I was kind of shocked, but I understood why,” Walker said from his home in Brandon. “The government really hasn’t been respecting doctors.”