Quick-thinking passenger steers bus to safety on Manitoba highway

Passengers were sleeping or fighting boredom when screams filled a packed bus on a dark, isolated section of a Manitoba highway early Friday morning.

Chad Cook, who was travelling from Winnipeg to Thompson with his pregnant partner and their two young children, said he looked up from his phone and made a dash for the steering wheel.

“They were all pointing to the front of the bus, and the bus driver’s head was on the wheel,” he said, noting the vehicle was starting to swerve.

“I had to lift his head with my left hand and grab the wheel with my right.”

MPI sues dairy producer

Manitoba Public Insurance is suing a dairy producer, alleging it’s liable for damages in a collision that damaged five motorcycles and caused the death of a Winnipeg man.

The lawsuit, filed by MPI’s lawyers in Court of King’s Bench April 19, names Steinbach producer Pennwood Dairy Inc., its owner and a John Doe as defendants.

The public insurer’s civil filing is seeking $34,946 in towing and repair costs to five motorcycles it insured that were damaged in the Sept. 24, 2022 collision.

Pennwood and the named defendants have not yet filed statements of defence. The dairy producer could not be reached for comment Monday.

Developer asks city to change street name honouring former educator

Six months after it was named, the developer of a new Waverley West neighbourhood is asking the city to consider changing the name of Sheryl McCorrister Way, a street named for the former principal of a First Nations school in south Winnipeg who is being sued for allegedly giving herself thousands of dollars in multiple unapproved raises.

In Week 2 of testimony at Donald Trump’s hush money trial, prosecutors zero in on the details

NEW YORK (AP) — The first week of testimony at Donald Trump's hush money trial was the scene-setter for jurors: Manhattan prosecutors portrayed what they say was an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 presidential campaign by burying negative stories. Now prosecutors are working on filling in the details of how they believe Trump and his allies pulled it off.

Court was resuming Tuesday with Gary Farro, a banker who helped Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen open accounts, including one that Cohen used to buy the silence of porn performer Stormy Daniels. She alleged a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, which he denies.

For his part, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee has been campaigning in his off-hours, but is required to be in court when it is in session, four days a week. Outside the courtroom, Trump criticized prosecutors again.

“This is a case that should have never been brought,” he said.

Education minister’s next stop Steinbach after trustee complaints

Manitoba’s education minister says the Public Schools Act is working exactly as its supposed to, despite mounting complaints regarding school trustees.

For the second time in a week, Education Minister Nello Altomare is set to meet with a rural school division after complaints about its board of trustees.

A letter from concerned parents calls for the removal of six of the nine-person Hanover School Division board of trustees in Steinbach, including its chair and vice chair.

“We want to work with school boards,” Altomare said Monday. “We’re here to support them. I do want to work with this board … ensuring that they’re creating safe, inclusive spaces for their kids.”

Climate-controlled space for cosmetics testing on dry skin first phase of Source Nutraceutical Inc.’s next step

Thanks to Source Nutraceutical Inc., at least some of the thousands of Manitobans with dry skin may now have the chance to turn the affliction into cold hard cash.

SNI, the province’s only independent clinical research organization, offers a broad ranges of services for companies looking to test pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products. It just completed (in record time) a climate-controlled space to conduct consumer safety trials for cosmetics.

The 20-person operation built the facility to satisfy a multi-national cosmetics company with all sorts of consumer brands on the market that wanted to test products on people with dry skin.

So, of course, it thought of winter time in Winnipeg.

Councillor pushing for demolition of vacant buildings

Another city councillor is hoping to put pressure on the city to both demolish and clean up vacant buildings destroyed by fire, at the expense of the property owner.

St. James councillor Shawn Dobson will bring forward a motion at Friday’s Assiniboia community committee meeting asking the standing policy committee on property and development to request a public service report on how the city could perform both demolitions and cleanups at sites immediately after fires, with the bill going to the owner of the property through municipal taxes.

“We’ve got to keep pushing. It has to happen. We cannot accept piles of rubble everywhere, we have to be able to clean up right away,” he said Monday.

A similar motion was put forward by Coun. Cindy Gilroy last April, but a city staff report released in September found that while the city has the power to clean debris and charge owners for doing it, the practice could be cost-prohibitive.