The City of Brandon is looking into whether council members should work full-time and receive higher salaries; staff is to file a report in February. Several councillors say demands from the public have increased, and making the job full-time will get better results. Most Brandon councillors get paid just over $23,000, while Mayor Jeff Fawcett makes $100,000.
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Police believe they’ve arrested the person responsible for fires at the Winnipeg offices of two Manitoba cabinet ministers. In June, fires were set at the offices of Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine and Homelessness and Addictions Minister Bernadette Smith. 35-year-old Jesse Wheatland is also accused of arsons at several restaurants, a provincial treatment centre, and a school administration building.
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Manitoba nurses are voting this week on whether to ‘grey list’ Thompson General Hospital over safety issues. Grey listing is a designation the nurses union uses to tell members, and potential applicants, that the employer does not provide a safe working environment. This summer, Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg was grey listed.
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Doctors Manitoba, which represents the province’s physicians, is pleased about the government’s promise to eliminate sick notes for time off work of less than 7 days. They say sick notes for mild illnesses are not a good use of the health-care system – and the new policy will ease doctors’ paperwork.
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Fertility advocates are disappointed the Liberal government did not make good on its campaign promise to fund Invitro fertilization treatments in the recent federal budget. They had pledged to provide up to $20,000 per cycle of IVF, something they estimated would cost $103 million annually starting this year. The government says it would have more to say “in due course”.
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Many younger Canadians aged 18 to 34 are planning on spending more this holiday shopping season, and 58% say they’ll use credit cards to do it. As for Baby Boomers, a new poll found they’ll spend about the same as last year, and use savings and regular income rather than credit.
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There are plans for a first-of-its-kind museum in Manitoba that would take you back to the early days of computers and video games. The founders of the Manitoba Computer and Gaming Museum don’t have a physical location yet, but hope to open one in 2027. The space would display retro gaming systems and also host lectures and workshops.
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Researchers have determined a popular human behaviour dates back at least 21-million years. Humanity’s earliest kisses were recorded 4,500 years ago in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, but scientists say it goes further back based on the study of apes and chimps. They believe extinct human relatives like Neanderthals likely engaged in non-aggressive, mouth-to-mouth contact.
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How weak are your passwords? Another report shows we’ve learned nothing from previous warnings. NordPass says the most common passwords in Canada this year were the usual ‘admin’, followed by ‘123456’, ‘gallant123’, ‘password’…and coming in fifth: ‘1hateyou’. A fast fix to a weak password would be creating a more complex one, but more secure methods are becoming more common like passkeys and biometric data.
