Parental bond about far more than just blood

Winnipeg man among those missing in Nepal flash flood

A Winnipeg man on a pilgrimage in Nepal is among nearly 2,000 people missing after a deadly flash flood devastated a popular tourist region along the Himalayan border earlier this week.

Mohit Kaushik, 49, was travelling with a tour group taking part in the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra, a sacred, days-long pilgrimage to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in neighbouring Tibet, according to social media posts.

“Our friend and neighbour, Mohit Kaushik, a resident of Winnipeg, Canada, has been out of contact since yesterday while travelling from Timure during his pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar,” Swikriti Pokhrel wrote in a social media post. “If you have seen him or find his name on any hospital list, please let us know. Thank you.”

Kaushik has not been heard from since Wednesday, when a glacier collapse in the nearby Himalayas triggered catastrophic flooding and landslides, sending a torrent of ice, rock and debris roughly 100 kilometres downstream.

White eyes curtain call as Kim preps for another Olympic run

Snider was a brief, shining light during his time with the Jays. It’s a shame that he never became all that we hoped he would be on the field, Mike Wilner writes.

Of frogs, roses, kings and a Great Lake

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the saying goes. Basically, if you change something’s name, you don’t actually change the nature of the thing.

That being said, if even 15 years ago an American president had called an entire news conference to announce he was renaming one of the Great Lakes by writing on a map with a red pen and issuing an executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” all and sundry would question his mental health.

Maybe, after witnessing so much from Donald Trump, we’ve all just been hardened off and the foolish is now expected daily. Perhaps it’s the political equivalent of the fable of the boiling frog.

As the fable goes, drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will jump right out. But put the frog in room temperature water and bring the pot to a boil, the frog will stay until its death. (It’s unlikely the frog would actually wait.)

Security guard in stable condition after grocery store assault

A security guard was taken to hospital after an assault at a Sargent Avenue FreshCo Friday, just days after another guard was stabbed during a robbery at a St. James Dollarama.

Winnipeg police said officers were called to a store in the 600 block of Sargent Avenue shortly after 1 p.m. for a report of an assault.

An adult victim was taken to hospital in stable condition. Police did not provide details about what led to the assault or whether any arrests were made.

The incident comes three days after a 22-year-old security guard was stabbed during a robbery at a Dollarama in the Courts of St. James.

As camp fees increase, Sunshine Fund delivers another summer of adventures

Dana Moroz is on the other end of the line and the manager of the Sunshine Fund can hardly contain her enthusiasm.

With the summer winding down and school on the verge of being back in session, Moroz was asked about the 46th season of the program that sent children in need to 31 accredited camps across the province and northwestern Ontario.

Although the final numbers are still being calculated, it was a banner year for the program, which benefited from the Free Press Sunshine Fund campaign that ran throughout the past several months.

“We had over 700 kids that we supported to go to summer camp,” said Moroz, noting the cost of doing so eclipsed $300,000.

Judy Blume’s life and writerly output for readers of all ages explored in hefty biography

Readers who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s will remember Judy Blume as the acclaimed American children’s author whose fiction offered a frank approach to taboo subjects such as menstruation, divorce, wet dreams and teenage sex. Blume’s books not only changed the face of middle-grade and teen literature, they also sold more than 90 million copies in 32 languages in the past five decades. Now 88, Blume is the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s thought-provoking, well-researched biography.

A longtime Blume aficionado, Oppenheimer previously wrote five non-fiction books. He has a PhD from Yale in religious studies and lives in Connecticut.

Oppenheimer’s succinct, lucid narrative consists of 31 chapters. The opening pages deal with Blume’s early life. Born Judith Maria Sussman in 1938, she grew up in a Jewish middle-class family in Elizabeth, N.J., moving with her family to Miami for two years because of her older brother’s illness before returning to New Jersey.

The next several chapters follow Blume’s first marriage in 1959, at age 21, through motherhood in 1961 and her early stabs at finding her creative footing. After a few false starts in drawing, felt art and songwriting, she finally took a night course in children’s writing in 1967 — and then, for two years, collected rejection slips.