Adoption experience frays fraught family bonds

‘I’m proud of our country right now’: Kinew on Canada’s counter-tariffs

Canada is showing the rest of the world you “don’t have to take a knee” to the United States, Premier Wab Kinew said Tuesday.

Dolly Parton, music star, actor and beloved figure who spanned generations, dies at 80 of cancer

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died in Nashville. She was 80 years old.

“After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones,” her publicist, Marcel Pariseau, said in a statement Tuesday.

Known for her curvy physique, massive blond wigs and skin-tight outfits that served her self-deprecating wit, she was among the most beloved personalities in music and beyond — the rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.

She wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that totaled more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams. Parton, who plucked bejeweled banjos, guitar and dulcimers with her long fingernails during performances, was a generous philanthropist and successful businesswoman whose projects included a theme park in the Smoky Mountain foothills near her birthplace.

Adoption experience frays fraught family bonds

Artfully presented as a series of loosely chronological vignettes, Jenny Heijun Wills’ memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. chronicles her story as a transnational adoptee. Wills was born in Korea and adopted into a white Canadian family when she was six months old (she currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg), and Older Sister reveals the intricacies of her return to Korea to reconnect with her first family and piece together her personal history. The book was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction, which will be awarded Nov. 5.

“What is a life when all the stories come out of order and many... are hidden still?” she asks, pointing to both her own story and the form through which she tells it. Though all memoir writing is necessarily incomplete, Wills’s negotiations with selfhood hinge on not only her separation from her Korean family, but on the uncertainty of reassembling, in words, something she cannot name. She shoulders the weight of her expectations, and how her absence feeds her fear of erasure as a daughter, a sister and a Korean woman.

Even prior to the reunion, Wills navigates tangible bonds rooted in loss, narrating her intense experiences living in a guesthouse with others looking for their own family members where, she notes, “adoptee loss was concentrated.” Here kinship, support, rage, grief and violence all converge, as the guests face the precariousness of searching for relatives they might never find. Though the stakes are already devastatingly high here, they are even further compounded by larger issues surrounding culture, race, ethnicity, gender and class.

An entire page is devoted to the following four lines: “My question is, why? But I know there is no answer. At least not to me. Colonialism. White saviourhood. Orientalism. Impatience. Far-away birth mothers. No take-backs. Which is it?” Naming the many structures around which this narrative revolves is a deliberate, bold move on Wills’s part, but to simply call her story brave means acknowledging the many uncomfortable truths of which she speaks. “Do you know how much people are still willing to pay?” she asks, ever aware of the ways in which the transactional nature of her adoption does not account for her humanity, or that of her Ummah (mother).

Ottawa to hit U.S. back with tariffs on steel, aluminum, smartphones and golf clubs

The federal government hit back at the latest escalation in the trade war with the United States on Tuesday, announcing plans to hike American steel and aluminum tariffs from 25 to 50 per cent.

‘Buy Canadian’ takes on new meaning

The “Buy Canadian” push has re-emerged as the federal government rolls out tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of imports from the United States.

Premier Wab Kinew led the Manitoba charge Tuesday, hours after the federal government announced the retaliatory levies that will take effect Sept. 8.

“Whether you look at it as an affordability initiative, or you look at it as a way to support our economy here, buying local always makes sense,” Kinew said at an unrelated press conference. “It makes even more sense right now.”

Mark Carney’s government has responded to new 50 per cent tariffs imposed by the United States on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian products. Trade talks between the countries broke down late Friday.

Northern Manitoba mobile MRI makes first move in 15 months

Northern Manitoba’s mobile MRI made its first move since it began scanning in Thompson nearly 15 months ago, setting up shop Monday in The Pas.

“It’s really exciting that we finally have this piece of equipment here,” said Dayna McTaggart, a medical radiological technologist in The Pas and provincial manager for the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists Manitoba.

The mobile MRI will travel between the two communities that are 400 kilometres apart in an effort to strengthen northern health-care delivery, the provincial government said in a news release.

“This rotation ensures patients in northern communities have easier, more equitable access to vital diagnostic imaging without the burden of long-distance travel,” Dr. AbdulRazaq Sokoro, Shared Health’s chief operating officer of diagnostic services, said in the release.