The Wrap: Texts from Gaza, conflict-of-interest fallout, Jets open training camp, and Winnipeg author Jenny Heijun Wills

For 11 months, Winnipegger Joanna Hiebert Bergen has been receiving frequent text messages from her friend in Gaza. Abdal needs to tell his story, and his updates chronicle how the war is affecting him and his family.

Hiebert Bergen, a member of the Mennonite Church Manitoba Palestine-Israel Network and Fort Garry Mennonite Fellowship, has been closely following the family via Abdal’s quick check-ins and, at times, his devastating revelations. They talk a lot about prayer.

“I have wept with them and advocated for them along with many others in this city of ours, Winnipeg, and beyond,” she says. John Longhurst has the story.

Provincial cabinet minister Ian Bushie apologized and promised to sell his family business after Manitoba’s ethics commissioner ruled he was in a conflict of interest because of a renewed contract he didn’t disclose.

In violation of the conflict-of-interest law, Bushie’s gas station and convenience store in Hollow Water First Nation renewed its contract with the provincial government while Bushie is an elected government official. As sole proprietor of Grandpa George’s gas station and convenience store, Bushie said Thursday he’ll sell the business even though he’s not required to do so.

Carol Sanders reports.

While Scott Arniel drove to his first day of training camp as the new head coach of the Winnipeg Jets, he couldn’t wait to step onto the ice to put his team through its paces.

“I was up early,” said Arniel. “I was pretty pumped to get this going.”

You can certainly understand why.

This was a moment he’d been waiting patiently for, for more than a decade.

Sportswriters Ken Wiebe and Mike McIntyre have all the storylines from the opening day of Jets camp.

In 1982, Jenny Heijun Wills was given up for adoption as an infant by her Korean parents and raised by a family in Ontario. The emotional experience of reuniting with her Korean family years later served as the basis of her debut 2019 memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

In her new collection of essays, Everything and Nothing at All, the Winnipeg author and University of Winnipeg professor expands on aspects of her experience as a transracial and transnational adoptee as well as exploring notions of family, race, beauty, kinship, reading and more.

The author talked to Ben Sigurdson about embracing cerebral themes for her latest collection, and about how Winnipeg inspires her work.