Australia records deadliest day of pandemic with 80 deaths

Get to know your Jet: Mario Ferraro

A one-on-one conversation with a Winnipeg Jet about the stuff you don't always hear in the media scrum

Late philanthropist, family fill Harvest’s Empty Bowls with record-setting $5-M donation

It was a record-breaking night for Harvest Manitoba made possible by a genuine Winnipeg hero and his family.

The organization’s annual Empty Bowls Celebrity Auction Dinner on Thursday raised $6.5 million to support Manitobans facing hunger and food insecurity.

And it was a $5-million legacy donation from late city philanthropist Doug Harvey and his family that will see the event go down in the history books as the largest gala fundraising total ever recorded in Manitoba.

“There was literally nothing that lit my dad up more than contributing himself, but even more so, inspiring others to give,” his daughter Lauren Harvey said Friday.

Person killed in workplace accident at Fairmont construction site

Emergency responders were on scene and Manitoba Workplace Safety and Health is investigating after a worker died following an incident at a Winnipeg construction site Thursday.

Little information about the worker killed was provided, but the fatal incident happened at the Fairmont Winnipeg, located at 2 Lombard Place, with police responding around 5 p.m.

The hotel is currently closed and is an active construction site. The person killed has not been identified by name.

Information from a provincial spokesperson said the deceased was working for Kepsco Construction when they were fatally injured after a “portion of an overhead canopy collapsed during asbestos abatement work.”

A Rocky day on the mayoral campaign trail for Kevin Klein

Kevin Klein acknowledges it’s hard to foresee what he’ll wake up to each morning in the final weeks of a mayoral campaign.

But the seasoned politician, who has served as both a city councillor and a provincial cabinet minister, couldn’t have predicted the events — what he describes as “drama” — that unfolded last Sunday.

Fellow mayoral candidate Mike Vogiatzakis accused Klein’s campaign team of offering him a job to drop out of the race, while a guest writer’s column in the Winnipeg Sun that questioned the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools, just days after the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, sparked condemnation from a prominent Indigenous organization. (Klein is the CEO of the Klein Group, the company that owns the Sun. He has maintained he is not involved in its operations while running for mayor.)

The Free Press had already been scheduled to join Klein on the campaign trail Monday, intending to document a day in the life of the front-running candidate to unseat incumbent Scott Gillingham, before the controversies hit.

Crime spree lands accused murderers behind bars

Three men have been sentenced to jail terms for a commercial robbery spree in southern Manitoba launched just two weeks after they are accused of killing a 19-year-old man in Abbotsford, B.C.

Twenty-two-year-old Ravdeep Gill of Winnipeg, pleaded guilty Monday to four counts of robbery and Harmandeep Gill, 27, of Brampton, Ont. and Jaskaran Singh, 21, of Surrey, B.C., each pleaded guilty to two counts of robbery for a 10-day crime blitz that targeted gas bars in Swan Lake, Teulon and St. Laurent, and a meat shop in Winnipeg.

Ravdeep Gill was sentenced to four years custody while Harmandeep Gill and Singh each received sentences of 30 months.

According to B.C. media reports, all three men are charged with first-degree murder in a Feb. 1, 2025 killing in Abbotsford that police there described as a targeted hit.