Do you drink a can of soda every day? Maybe it's time to think again. Drinking two or more soft drinks a week may nearly double a person's risk of developing pancreatic cancer, researchers are warning. That is scary, and is definitely going to change my soda-drinking habits.
Cancer of the pancreas is one of the most rapidly fatal tumours in adults; only 6% of people are still alive five years after a diagnosis. The pancreas makes insulin, and scientists believe high concentrations of insulin can drive the growth of pancreatic cancer cells.
Eating too much sugar increases insulin levels in the body, and one of the leading sources of added sugar in our diets are soft drinks. The new study, by researchers from the University of Minnesota, was based on more than 60,000 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study who were followed for 14 years. During that time, 140 people developed invasive pancreatic cancer. At the start of the study, as part of a food frequency questionnaire, people were asked to report how often they drank one glass of pop. A glass was considered 237 millilitres, or about the equivalent of one cup.
Those who reported drinking two or more soft drinks per week had an 87% increased risk of pancreatic cancer compared to those who didn't drink soft drinks. The pop drinkers were averaging five drinks per week. The finding held after researchers took smoking, obesity, diabetes, red meat intake, coffee consumption and a "whole myriad" of other nutritional factors into account, said lead author Noel Mueller, now a research associate at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington.
There was no significant association between juice consumption and risk of pancreatic cancer. Other studies have looked at the association between pop and pancreatic cancer, but the results haven't been consistent. One of the strengths of the new study is its size.
However, there were only 140 cases of pancreatic cancer, so the finding was based on a relatively small number of cases. Mueller also said caution needs to be taken when extrapolating the findings from the Singapore Chinese study to a western population. But other studies in American and European populations have found similar associations.
A study of 88,794 U.S. nurses and 49,364 male health professionals found that women who consumed three or more sugar-sweetened drinks a week had a 57% greater risk of pancreatic cancer than did women who drank no more than one soft drink per month. In that study, there was no association between sweetened soft drinks and pancreatic cancer among men. But a Swedish study involving nearly 78,000 women and men reported in 2006 that high consumption of sugar and high-sugar foods -- including soft drinks -- was associated with a greater risk of pancreatic cancer in both sexes.
An estimated 3,900 Canadians were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year. Known risk factors include smoking, diabetes and obesity, said Gillian Bromfield, senior manager of cancer control policy at the Canadian Cancer Society.
The new study is published this week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Two and a Half Men actor Charlie Sheen was charged today with assaulting and threatening his wife Brooke Mueller in a heated Christmas Day argument. But, the couple left the court in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen hugging each other, hoping the charges will be dropped, and apparently planning to reconcile.
Sheen, who is 44, was arrested in the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado on December 25 after Mueller called the cops and told them that he pulled a knife on her during an argument and threatened to have her killed. Sheen spent the day behind bars before being released on bail.
Sheen and Mueller, the actor's third wife, married in 2008 and have infant twin sons.
Sheen was charged with felony menacing, misdemeanour assault and criminal mischief. The menacing charge entails the alleged use of a deadly weapon in a threatening manner. Sheen could face up to three years behind bars if convicted. He did not enter a plea and another hearing was set for March 15, 2010.
Judge James Boyd lifted a "no contact" portion of a restraining order that had barred Sheen from speaking to Mueller or having contact with her. Lawyers for both sides wanted the order lifted. Mueller, 32, told police in December that Sheen held a knife to her throat and threatened to have her killed when she said she would divorce him and take their children.
At the time, Sheen denied brandishing the knife but admitted crumpling his wife's eyeglasses and said both of them had slapped each other's arms, according to court records. Mueller embraced Sheen as the end of today's brief hearing and the pair left together.
"They hugged in the courtroom, they hugged downstairs and they are hugging in the car," Mueller's lawyer, Yale Galanter, told reporters after the hearing.
"It is Brooke's position that she would like the charges dismissed and this case to be over," he added.
His Christmas Day arrest is not the first time he has been accused of violence. He pleaded no contest to a 1997 battery charge on his then girlfriend, and his second wife, Denise Richards, obtained a restraining order against him in 2006.
Toyota Motor Corp's president apologized today for safety problems and said the company would bring in outside experts to review quality controls, an unusual action for a company that has enjoyed a reputation for high standards.
"I would like to take this opportunity to apologize from the bottom of my heart for causing many of our customers concern after the recalls across several models in several regions," Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota's founder, told a news conference in Nagoya, Japan.
Toyoda's comments were his most extensive since the latest recall began in January. Toyota has issued two recalls since last November. The company's shares, which have taken a beating in recent sessions, rose as much as 4.1% to $74.73 on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. Since January 21, Toyota has lost $30 billion or a fifth of its market value.
Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's put Toyota and some of its suppliers on watch for a possible downgrade citing "increased concern over the potential negative impact on Toyota's business profile of unfolding developments related to recent quality issues."
Toyota, the world's largest automaker, has recalled more than 8 million vehicles around the world for problems with accelerators. Episodes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles have been linked to up to 19 crash deaths in the United States over the past decade. Toyota is also mulling a recall of Prius, its top-selling hybrid, for a braking problem.
The company has estimated that lost production, lost sales, parts to fix problems, staff training and repairs to recalled vehicles will cost Toyota $2 billion from January to the end of March. The news conference came after U.S. competitor Ford Motor Co readied a solution for braking problems on two of its hybrid models, the hybrid Fusion and Mercury Milan.
Toyoda apologized for safety problems that have left the Japanese carmaker "in crisis". He said Toyota would strengthen its inspection process, respond faster to customer complaints and seek input from outside experts.
Toyoda also pledged to set up and oversee a quality improvement task force involving external experts monitoring quality management. It was not clear how the global quality management committee would function.
Turning to independent experts is "about as good as you can expect," said UBS analyst Philippe Houchois.
"I've seen a lot of recalls, but I don't remember seeing that step of getting an outside expert. That's quite an innovative or aggressive approach to try to solve the problem," he said.
Toyota Europe's spokeswoman Maria Mack said, "This is not the first time we have consulted with external parties, but this is a more structural approach."
"It is a new idea in the way it is conceived. It is the first time there will be a really formalized approach."
The crisis generated by the recalls and the way the 77-year-old company has handled itself publicly have led to widespread criticism.
Toyoda, 53, bowed in apology after addressing the news conference and answered other questions, some in English, after an official tried to end the late-night session. He asked investors to "continue to support us with a long-term view."
Kazutaka Oshima, president of Rakuten Investment Management, said investors needed answers. "Toyoda is responsible for explaining to shareholders since they have lost a significant part of their assets."
Toyoda became the company's president last year, promising to steer it out of its worst downturn in history and bring greater transparency to its corporate culture.
Safety regulators in the United States and Japan are investigating a braking problem with Toyota's latest version of the Prius, Japan's top-selling car last year and an icon of green design that has lifted the public image of the whole company. Japan's transport minister said he had heard from ministry officials that Toyota would recall or voluntarily fix the automobiles affected, including those shipped overseas.
"Toyota's response came up short from the perspective of its customers," Transport Minister Seiji Maehara said.
Since its launch last May, Toyota has sold more than 300,000 units of the newest version of the Prius worldwide, including around 200,000 in Japan, 103,200 in the United States and 29,000 in Europe. Toyota's and Ford's hybrids capture the energy from braking to recharge an on-board battery to boost mileage from its gasoline engine.
Toyota Prius owners have complained that on bumpy roads and on ice, the regenerative brakes of the vehicle appear to slip and it lurches forward before the traditional brakes engage. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it has received 124 complaints from drivers of the third-generation Prius. The agency said that motorists have blamed four crashes on this problem.
Toyota and Ford have said that they have come up with software fixes for the problems. Toyota said on Thursday that it started fixing a problem in the Prius last month.
Ford's roll-out of a software patch to address braking problems on its Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan models came after Consumer Reports magazine reported that one of its test engineers had experienced what appeared to be a loss of braking power with a Fusion hybrid. Ford, the #2 U.S. automaker by sales, said it was aware of one minor accident related to the braking problem, but no injuries.
Ford has said that it notified its dealers in October and sent them a notice, a copy of which was made public by Consumer Reports.
NDP Leader Jack Layton has been diagnosed with a treatable form of prostate cancer. How unfortunate. Mr. Layton said today that he will step away from an active political role for "several months" in order to undergo treatment, but will not step down as leader. Aside from his political beliefs, I do believe that he is a decent guy, and I wish him well.
"I'm a fighter and I'm going to beat this," he told a Toronto press conference.
Mr. Layton, whose father, who was a Progressive Conservative cabinet minister, also had prostate cancer and beat the disease. He added: "I have his genes on my side."
Mr. Layton said that the treatment plan for the disease "is now underway and everything is on track. In the coming weeks, the schedule of my treatment regime means I may have a bit more time to catch the Olympics."
"The hard work and drive of our Canadian athletes will be an inspiration," he said.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff immediately issued a news release wishing Layton a speedy recovery.
"Jack Layton has fought many battles in his life, but none will be as demanding as the fight he now faces," Ignatieff said. "We all know how combative Jack is and we know that he will face this challenge with his usual determination. I wish him strength and courage on the road to recovery, and I know all Canadians stand behind him in this fight."
Mr. Layton has been the leader of the federal NDP since 2003.
Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair is the party's deputy leader. The NDP currently have 37 seats in the House of Commons, short of the mark set by former leader Ed Broadbent in the 1980s. In a leadership review vote held last August, nearly 90% of delegates voted against holding a leadership convention to replace Mr. Layton.
A former member of Toronto's city council, Mr. Layton was elected MP for Toronto-Danforth in 2004 and is married to fellow Toronto MP Olivia Chow.
The Government of Canada confirmed today that it has struck a deal with the Obama administration that would protect the Canadian industry from Buy American provisions. International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon made the announcement at a news conference in Ottawa.
"Preserving and creating jobs is the Canadian government's top priority," Van Loan said. "Our government stood up for Canadian businesses and workers in resolving this issue with our U.S. partners."
The catch behind the deal will see Canada agree to provide U.S. suppliers with access to a range of construction contracts across Canada's provinces and territories, as well as in a number of municipalities. In return, the United States has agreed to provide Canadian suppliers with access to state and local public works projects in a range of programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Canadian and U.S. officials hope to have a final deal signed by February 16, 2010. The two sides have also agreed to continue negotiations on a broader deal governing procurement. Further, there is a "fast-track" provision that would help resolve disputes should similar Buy American provisions be applied to future legislation. Experts say that the pact marks an "important breakthrough" in stopping the spread of protectionism and acknowledging Canada's importance to the U.S. economy.
The deal will be structured to allow the White House to use executive power to treat sectors of the Canadian economy as American by claiming supply chains are so integrated they cannot be separated. This has been done because U.S. President Barack Obama cannot rely on Congress to pass legislation exempting Canada from Buy American provisions.
"We are very happy," said Veso Sobot, director of corporate affairs at IPEX Inc., which is a Toronto-based pipe manufacturer. IPEX gained notoriety after the introduction of Buy American rules for having its pipe fittings pulled out of the ground in California because they had the 'Made in Canada' designation on them.
"This will allow us to compete again," Sobot said. "We are tickled pink and we are going to be aggressive about trying to compete for business in the United States. And I hope this can help bolster our 2010 and bring back jobs to Canada."
American officials were also touting this agreement as a success.
"(The United States) has won that access for American firms, and I look forward to signing the agreement soon," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement Friday. "For years, U.S. firms have sought market access to Canadian provincial procurement under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), which Canada resisted."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has accepted an invitation from British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell to speak at the British Columbia legislature as British Columbia gears up to welcome the world to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
Dimitris Soudas, spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister, has said that Mr. Harper will address the legislature on February 11, which is the day before the Games' opening ceremonies in Vancouver.
"The prime minister will salute Vancouver, Whistler and British Columbia for its magnificent work in organizing and hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games," Soudas said.
A prime ministerial address to a provincial legislature is a rare event. It last happened in 1990 when Brian Mulroney spoke to the legislature for Newfoundland and Labrador. Mr. Mulroney's speech back then was part of his attempts to save the doomed Meech Lake Accord.
Mr. Harper's speech to the British Columbia legislature is unlikely to be fraught with such serious political overtones. He is likely to congratulate British Columbians on their work preparing for the Olympics and would draw attention to the positive benefits of the Games for the people of British Columbia and all Canadians.
In Ottawa, Mr. Harper's political opponents pointed out the irony of the prime minister speaking to another legislative assembly in Canada after proroguing or suspending the one in which he normally speaks, the House of Commons, until March 3.
"We're a little worried he might go out to B.C. and try and prorogue that legislature, too," Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff told reporters in Ottawa. "It does seem a little odd that he's prepared to address a working legislature while he's closed down his own. Go figure."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to cancel two weeks of parliamentary breaks this spring to try to make up for the six weeks of work lost when he decided to prorogue Parliament after Christmas. Conservative MPs were told yesterday that the government plans to alter the parliamentary calendar because of what is expected to be a heavy workload.
"Once Parliament resumes there will be a lot of work to do," Gordon O'Connor, the government whip, wrote in an e-mail that was sent to all Conservative MPs, and obtained by Canwest New Service, whose article we are stealing today.
"Members should expect that the House of Commons will sit during the week of March 15 to 19 and during the week of April 12 to 16. Please arrange your schedules accordingly."
During those weeks, MPs would leave Ottawa for their respective ridings.
"Stephen Harper is showing his arrogance and contempt. He shut down Parliament with a phone call and now wants to change the parliamentary calendar through an internal memo leaked to media," said Jean-Francois Del Torchio, a spokesman for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, late yesterday. "After weeks telling Canadians that prorogation was not important and they were using the time to do the work in their ridings, the Conservatives are now admitting they were wrong," he added. "This is nothing more than the Conservatives scrambling to save face after the public backlash from their decision to shut down Parliament."
MPs were originally planning to return to the House of Commons on January 25, but Mr. Harper prorogued (or suspended) Parliament until March 3, saying the government needs to recalibrate its agenda. Opposition MPs have accused Mr. Harper of trying to hide from Parliament, including from an ongoing inquiry into the issue of Afghan detainee abuse. The parliamentary calendar can only be changed with the consent of all parties.
"There is no reason for the House of Commons to take constituency breaks during these weeks," O'Connor wrote. "Quite frankly, we would be surprised if the opposition disagreed."
NDP Leader Jack Layton said that Mr. Harper could make up for those lost weeks by calling the House of Commons back to work right away.
"Instead of playing silly games, the prime minister should recall Parliament right away to deal with all the important issues facing Canadians," Layton said in an email statement.
Mr. Harper and the Conservatives have seen their popularity plunge in the wake of the prorogation of Parliament because Canadians who had nothing better to do than complain suddenly gave a crap that the Prime Minister decided to prorogue Parliament to recalibrate his agenda. While they had a 15-point lead in some polls heading into Christmas, they now find themselves in a statistical tie with the Liberals, which is a drop pollsters attribute to dissatisfaction with Mr. Harper's decision to shut down the House of Commons until after the 2010 Olympics have wrapped up.
Controversial Saskatoon chiropractor and former MP Jim Pankiw is planning on staging a return to the political arena.
" I'm Back!" the 43-year-old announced in a news release distributed to media outlets Wednesday.
The release, inviting reporters to attend a press conference this morning at the Saskatoon Inn, says the launch of his new website, www.jimpankiw.ca, " will coincide with an announcement of his future political intentions."
" After a brief (but very direct and explicit) statement, Dr. Pankiw will answer any questions provided that they are not of a personal or disingenuous nature," the release states.
The release was distributed by Austin Thomas, a friend of Pankiw who works for a local website development firm. When asked for clarification about the release's implied warning to journalists, Thomas said it was written by Pankiw himself.
" I think he just doesn't want to go down a road where he's labelled as something that he probably isn't. Because he's had some bad press in the past. I think he just wants genuine questions asked, that are related to whatever he's going to be talking about," Thomas said.
" Here's an example, OK? He said to me once, he goes, 'Austin... sometimes reporters report the news in a different way because they're always looking for a great headline.' I mean, who isn't, right? He said, 'Here's an example. Let's say that I went and rescued my dog and he was drowning or something. It wouldn't be, Jim Pankiw Saves His Dog, it would be, 'Jim Pankiw's Dog Can't Swim.'"
Pankiw served as MP for Saskatoon-Humboldt from 1997 until 2004 (first as a member of the Reform Party, and later as a member of the Canadian Alliance). He was eventually expelled from the party along with several other MPs who opposed the leadership of Stockwell Day. Pankiw applied for readmission to the party after Day was replaced by Stephen Harper, but he was rejected on the grounds that his style was too confrontational. He served the remainder of his last term as an Independent, and then lost his seat to Conservative MP Brad Trost in the 2004 election. During his time as an MP, Pankiw repeatedly drew media attention and public complaints for provocative statements concerning government policies such as employment equity, which he considers " race-based privileges."
In 2002 and 2003, he distributed an inflammatory series of " householder" pamphlets to his constituents, calling for a stop to " Indian Crime" and depicting aboriginal protesters at Oka, Quebec, as " terrorists." The pamphlets sparked complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which were dismissed by a tribunal last year on the grounds that MP's " householders" are not covered by the federal Human Rights Act.
Pankiw pleaded guilty to 14 charges of professional misconduct before a discipline committee of the Chiropractors Association of Saskatchewan in 2005, for making a series of profanity-laced, threatening and disparaging remarks about professional colleagues. However, he continues to work as a chiropractor in Saskatoon.
Pankiw unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Saskatoon in 2003. During the campaign, criticism and questions about his eligibility arose when media outlets reported that he was living on an acreage outside city limits, despite having claimed a house in the Forest Grove neighbourhood as his principle residence. The provincial Local Government Elections Act requires municipal candidates to live in the municipality in which they are running.
Pankiw's last bid for political office was in the 2006 federal election in the Battlefords-Lloydminster constituency. However, he lost to Conservative incumbent Gerry Ritz, who has occupied the seat since 1997. Ritz won the 1997 Reform Party nomination for the riding by defeating Pankiw's father, George.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper should support safe-abortion programs abroad if he's serious about improving the lives of women, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says. Mr. Ignatieff threw down the challenge as a test of Mr. Harper's resolve on his new foreign-aid commitment to maternal health in the face of a Conservative party with significant pockets of anti-abortion sentiment.
"We don't want to have women dying because of botched procedures. We don't want to have women dying in misery," Mr. Ignatieff told reporters Tuesday after Parliament Hill meetings on international development. "We've had a pro-choice consensus in this area for a couple of generations and we want to hold it."
The Prime Minister announced in the Star and at Davos, Switzerland, last week that the health of mothers and children would be the focus of Canada's attention at this summer's G8 meeting in this country. Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Mr. Harper, said Tuesday that it was "sad" and "pathetic" for Mr. Ignatieff to be trying to turn the health of women abroad into a "political football."
"This has nothing to do with abortion. This has nothing to do with gay marriage. This has nothing to do with capital punishment," Mr. Soudas said, listing several other hot-button issues within Conservative ranks. "This is about saving lives of vulnerable children and mothers in the developing world."
Mr. Soudas would not say, however, whether access to safe abortions was included in the maternal-health problems Mr. Harper wants to address, nor did he rule it out.
Mr. Harper also has not specifically said what his new "top priority" would entail in terms of aid dollars, but increased support for access-to-abortion programs could be a tough sell for him within his own Conservative caucus, some of whom strongly oppose abortion.
The Liberals issued a release following Mr. Ignatieff's news conference, listing more than a dozen Conservative MPs and ministers speaking out against abortion. In the release, Liberals asked Mr. Harper to "keep ideology out" of his new foreign-aid priority and Mr. Ignatieff hinted strongly he feared that the Conservative government, like Republicans in the U.S. over the past decade, would ban aid to abortion-related programs in the developing world.
As well, the Liberals believe any help for abortion abroad would raise questions about the Conservatives' support at home for organizations that support abortions. For instance, it was revealed this week that the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, a pro-choice group, has seen its federal funding drop under the Conservatives, from more than $1 million in 2006 to $9,381 in 2009. Officials with the federation, formerly known as Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada, downplayed suggestions they are the victim of a pro-life agenda in government. Instead, they say they've been hit by a funding crunch that has squeezed many organizations.
But, they said a greater focus, and money, aimed at family planning is essential to making Mr. Harper's maternal-health agenda succeed. Jolanta Scott-Parker, the federation's executive director, said their funding from Health Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency was aimed at specific projects, mostly overseas, such as sexual and reproductive health services, education and information for youth. She said that most of those projects wrapped up in the past few years, accounting for the drop in government money.
"Would we like to see the federal government investing in sexual and reproductive health in a much more comprehensive way in Canada? Absolutely," she said.
The Lancet, which is a medical journal, decided to formally retract a paper on Tuesday that caused a 12-year international battle over links between the three-in-one childhood MMR vaccine and autism.
The paper, which was published in 1998 and written by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, suggested the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot might be linked to autism and bowel disease.
His assertion, which has since been widely discredited, caused one of the biggest medical rows in a generation and led to a steep drop in the number of vaccinations in the United States, Britain and other parts of Europe, prompting a rise in cases of measles.
"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield... are incorrect," the internationally renowned scientific journal said in a statement.
U.S. housing prices are headed for a double-dip decline, which will hurt related companies that have already assumed there will be a recovery in the sector, CIBC has warned.
"Many companies will be affected," said economist Benjamin Tal, who declined to mention specific names, but argued sectors from forestry to banking could be dragged into the downturn.
The reason, he said, is that any current stabilization in U.S. housing is more a function of a badly damaged market and the distorting affect of temporary tax incentives than evidence of a sustainable rebound.
"We anticipate further weakness ahead as supply continues to outpace demand, mortgage rates head higher and the government's generous homebuyers' tax credit finally expires," Tal said.
The "shadow inventory" of housing is what worries Tal most, and has him calling for another decline in prices of five to 10% over the next two years.
While conventional inventories are trending lower, there are close to two million mortgages that are more than 90 days delinquent, nearly half of which will end up in foreclosure. Add another 2.3 million properties that are already in foreclosure to existing properties on the market, and there will be inventory totalling more than eight million units, a record high 16 months of supply.
Even more staggering is the fact that 10 million households now find themselves in a "negative home equity" position of worse than minus 20%. In other words, many people's homes are worth at least one-fifth less than they paid for them during the subprime-led housing bubble. Considering the ease with which U.S. homeowners can walk away from their mortgages, "strategic defaults," or failing to pay when one could, are a very real option, Tal said.
"In six months from now nobody will be asking what a strategic default is. Everyone will know."
With 24 million Americans now out of work or underemployed, "it's crazy to call for a recovery in the housing market in this kind of environment," Tal said.
"Our advice would be to be defensive at the moment. I would definitely go with defensive big names that pay dividends. Anything that is related to the housing market directly or indirectly will disappoint in the second half of this year."
Up until yesterday, Saskatchewan's major municipalities went to the polls to elect a new city council every three years, or in some cases, re-elect the exact same city council, which occurred in Saskatoon in 2009.
Well, those three years has now been changed to four years. As of yesterday, mayors, councillors and school board officials will serve four-year terms, starting with the next round of municipal elections in 2012.
However, the longer term lengths won't apply to rural municipalities, where reeves and council members are elected to two-year terms in office.
The Government of Saskatchewan's Municipal Affairs Minister Jeremy Harrison made the announcement Tuesday at the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association annual convention in Regina, saying a move to four-year terms was requested by several communities.
The change was welcomed by Regina Mayor Pat Fiacco and Saskatoon Mayor Donald Atchison, who had both been calling for four-year terms.
The legislative amendments to allow for the longer terms will be introduced later this year.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of trying to sneak through a new environmental policy, comparing the announcement Saturday afternoon by Environment Minister Jim Prentice to the New Year's Eve phone call that Mr. Harper made to the Governor General asking to prorogue Parliament.
"Let's notice when they did it," Mr. Ignatieff told reporters today, as he is in Ottawa supposedly working although Parliament is shut down. "It's Hockey Day in Canada. It's Saturday afternoon. It's like the prorogation of Parliament. They hope Canadians won't notice that basically they backed away from their own target."
Mr. Prentice announced new environmental targets, saying the government will reduce carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels. This is in line with the targets announced by the Obama administration in the United States. Previously, the Conservative government had planned to reduce emissions by 20% over 2006 levels.
Mr. Ignatieff said he can't keep track of the number of times the government has changed its plan nor can he count the number of Conservative environment ministers (three).
"They haven't been credible in 2006. They're not credible in 2010," he said.
Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill Rodgers, said today there was plenty of warning for the news conference as "every major media outlet managed to get there."
"It wasn't exactly under the cloak of darkness," he said, pointing out that the deadline for announcing targets to the United Nations as required by the Copenhagen accord was January 31, 2010.
Meanwhile, the Liberal leader, repeated what he has said before that the government should not wait for the Americans to act to set its own policy. He says he understands the necessity of a continental approach but argues Canada can lead the way.
"The last excuse they had, which is we'll just wait for Barack Obama to give us our climate change plan, has been blown apart by the Massachusetts election [where the long-time Democratic Senate seat went to a Republican]. It's obvious to anybody who looks at American politics that Mr. Obama's got other fish to fry."
Mr. Ignatieff, who proposes a cap-and-trade system, says that the government risks waiting yet another "couple of years" before the American president overcomes his political difficulties and settles on a plan.
Toyota owners are hitting the auto giant with class-action lawsuits in response to problems that relate to possible sticky accelerator pedals.
Legal firms have filed statements of claim in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Texas against the automaker, supplier CTS Corp. and affiliated firms regarding the problem.
In Ontario, a driver, Steven Hamilton filed a claim 'on behalf' of owners across Canada on Monday, alleging that the automaker and supplier "knew or ought to have known" of inherent design defects in the pedal system and its components in models as far back as 2001.
The claim, which has not been proven in court, seeks compensation for losses and injuries as a result of the purchase or use of numerous Toyota vehicles. Hamilton said he only bought a Toyota model a few weeks ago and wants a full refund.
"Having only purchased a brand new car a few weeks ago, I simply cannot believe that Toyota would have sold me this vehicle," he said. "I can't even resell my car now."
The Toronto law firm of Rochon Genova LLP, which is representing Hamilton and proposed class members in the lawsuit, said it is concerned that recent Toyota announcements don't appear to resolve the problem or the issue of "a lack of a failsafe" to permit drivers to regain control of their vehicles.
"The consequences of these design defects, including the lack of failsafes used by other auto manufacturers, have resulted in numerous reports throughout North America of uncontrollable unintended accelerations, including cases of collisions involving severe injuries and death to drivers and passengers of these vehicles," the firm said.
Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada, said he could not comment on the claim because he had not seen it yet.
In Regina, another lawyer has filed claims in different provinces against Toyota alleging unintended acceleration in the company's models have caused accidents. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit in Texas claims a family was in an accident after an Avalon suddenly accelerated through a stop sign. The claim attributes the crash to a faulty electronic control system.
This lawsuit sounds like it is... stupid. Good luck to Toyota, and we hope that they win.
Two Saskatoon city councillors say that yesterday's announcement by Premier Brad Wall that cities will receive the same amount of revenue-sharing money as last year will put further strain on a difficult budget year.
"This will make us pull in our horns a bit and go through the books closely," said Councillor Myles Heidt. "Now to me, what we have to do is sit down and take a real hard look at what core services we're going to be providing or raise taxes significantly."
Saskatchewan's cities, towns and villages won't see additional revenue-sharing money in the budget this spring as the government grapples with an anticipated $1.8 billion shortfall in potash revenue, Mr. Wall told delegates gathered in Regina for the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association annual convention. Saskatoon was in line to receive $38 million from the province but now will get $29.2 million because of the freeze, the equivalent difference of a 7.5% tax hike.
Councillor Darren Hill said the announcement from the Government of Saskatchewan "wasn't a surprise, but it was still disappointing."
"That is going to make for some very tough decisions at operating budget time," Hill said. "I don't believe we will see any cuts of service, but we have to be reviewing efficiency in operations."
"I don't believe that there should be any consideration to cutting staff, but maybe re-evaluating what staff are doing and how they're doing it."
Councillor Hill said his goal is still for a tax hike to come in at the inflation rate of 2.9%. The City of Saskatoon needs to begin to generate revenue from facilities such as River Landing and the Shaw Centre to offset their annual costs, Hill said.
"There's no revenue to offset the operating," Hill said.
Heidt proposed putting away $5 million in one-time capital funding in December to set up a rainy-day contingency fund in case provincial revenue sharing was scaled back, a controversial idea among his council colleagues because operating and capital grants are seen as separate entities in government budgeting. The money was eventually funnelled into road paving projects.
"This large snowstorm hits and that $5 million would look pretty good right now," Heidt said. "These are the exact things that can happen."
Expanding core city operations to include curb-side blue box recycling would be difficult given budget pressures, Heidt said.
"You've got a challenge just to maintain what you've got in core services," Heidt said. "We're going to really have to buckle up and take a real hard look at the businesses we're in."
The uncertainty from the Government of Saskatchewan has led to a "difficult year" for the city's accounting staff, who have re-jigged the operating budget projections on several occasions, said city comptroller Kerry Tarasoff. In 2010, the Shaw Centre pool will add an extra $1 million to the operating budget, a new fire hall and salaries will add roughly 3%, the contracts of all civic unions are being renegotiated, money is being socked away for a new police station and Saskatoon continues to expand.
"Growth is a good problem, but it is a problem," Tarasoff said.
Under the Saskatchewan Party government's 2009-2010 budget, urban and rural municipalities received 90% of one point of the provincial sales tax (PST), which worked out to about $167 million.
The government also promised a new, permanent revenue-sharing formula would begin this spring, so communities would, on an annual basis, get the equivalent of a full one point of the PST. But Mr. Wall asked for patience from community leaders, pledging his Saskatchewan Party government will fully implement the planned new revenue-sharing agreement in 2011-2012.
"I want to be very direct and tell you that you should be planning for an equal amount of revenue sharing to what you got last year," Mr. Wall said.
Despite the news, SUMA delegates gave the premier a standing ovation, with the organization's president, Allan Earle, saying he's confident the government will fulfil its revenue-sharing promise in another year, especially since that will be the last budget before a provincial election.
"I am going to remain optimistic that that's the way things will play out," Earle told reporters. "I think if for some reason the premier were to come back a year from now and say, 'We're sorry but we're just not going to be able to do it,' we'd be extremely upset."
Microsoft Corp., the world's largest computer software company, has an important reminder for those of you using Windows 7 Release Candidate. If you were too cheap to buy the final release when it was released back in October, the operating system will begin to shut down every two hours until June 1, 2010.
After that, the wallpaper of the desktop will be removed and a "This copy of Windows in not genuine" message will appear on the lower right corner of the screen. The users will not be able to obtain updates that require genuine Windows validation.
The company had launched the release candidate in May of 2009 for an early pre-launch preview of the popular operating system, which has now emerged as the fasting selling operating system in history.
The lawyer behind a class-action lawsuit against Toyota Canada says that the recent recall over accelerator problems has hurt the resale value of the vehicles, and owners deserve to be compensated.
Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant, who specializes in major class-action suits, told CTV's Canada AM that his case, which has not yet been approved by a court -- is two-fold. Yeah, let's just hope the case doesn't get approved at all. I'd love to see this case get thrown out of court.
First, he said, Toyota Canada has apparently failed to deal honestly and openly with Transport Canada and has played down the problem that he says dates back to the early 2000s. Secondly, he said, it hasn't yet been proven that Toyota actually has a viable solution to the problem. While the company has blamed the sticky accelerator on the pedal assembly, and is repairing those parts, many suggest the problem is actually electronic in nature.
"But the real basis of the case, the most important part of the case is that this cloud over the value of Toyota and Lexus means people are going to lose a huge amount of resale value," Merchant said today. "It isn't just that people are having problems and some accidents, it's that their resale value has gone down, we think significantly, and we think they should be compensated."
Merchant estimated that as many as 400,000 vehicles in Canada could be affected by the recall problems. If the suit is successful, and each owner qualifies for $1,000 of compensation, and the price tag for Toyota would reach $400 million, he said.
"It's a loss of value that's very significant and everyone should contact us for that purpose because we think we're going to get $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 for everyone," he said.
Another class-action suit is also underway, launched by proposed plaintiff Steven Hamilton. His claim has been filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto. Toyota Canada, Toyota in the U.S. and parts supplier CTS are named as defendants. The claim alleges that Toyota and CTS either knew, or should have known, about the flaw that causes runaway acceleration in some of its vehicles.
Joel Rochon, a lawyer in Hamilton's class action lawsuit, says the lawsuit could potentially involve "tens of thousands" of claimants in Canada. That group also claims that the problem is related to faulty computer systems, rather than the accelerator pedal assembly.
Star-struck singers, rappers and actors, including Barbra Streisand, Kanye West and Miley Cyrus, checked their egos at the door yesterday to record a new version of "We are the World" for Haiti's earthquake victims, 25 years after the song raised awareness of the famine in Africa.
None of the singers of the original song were invited to participate in the update, which was recorded at the same Hollywood studio once again under the oversight of Quincy Jones and the song's co-writer Lionel Richie. In all, more than 70 stars lent their voices to the song, and they all seemed in awe of each other.
"As celebrities, we're fans of one another, so we're all looky-looing in there, and getting autographs and numbers," said Natalie Cole.
Streisand, Celine Dion and Tony Bennett appeared to inspire the most stares. Fifteen-year-old Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber joked that he would ask his new friend, R&B singer Akon, to get the telephone number of Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls.
Streisand, a noted perfectionist, ran through multiple takes of the line originally sung by Diana Ross, each one seemingly better than the previous one. Jazz singer Patti Austin came into her recording booth to coach her. Guitar virtuoso Carlos Santana sang along, even though he is not a singer. Two members of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson and Al Jardine, appeared to ignore each other.
Classical crossover tenor Josh Groban described the event as "inspired chaos."
"It's great to see so many legendary artists sweating it out. Everybody left their ego at the door," he said, referring to a request made by Jones at the original session in 1985.
"To be smack-dab in the middle of a sandwich between Barbra Streisand and Weezy (rapper Lil Wayne) was personally a creative experience I don't think I'll ever have the pleasure of having again," Groban added.
For his part, Lil Wayne said his mother asked him to get a photo of Gladys Knight. He was among a heavy quotient of hip-hop stars, including Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Drake, LL Cool J, and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas as well as West.
"Hip-hop is rock 'n' roll to a lot of people around the world, right now," said Jones, explaining the absence of the modern-day equivalents of original performers Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan or Paul Simon.
Lil Wayne, for one, noted that he was not a singer, and thought organizers were joking when they asked him to sing the line originally sung by Dylan. Asked if he did a better job, Lil Wayne said, "Hell no!"
Country and Latino artists were notably under-represented. Organizers said they were turned down for various reasons by some stars. In fact, most of the big Grammy winners from the night before were absent, including Beyonce and Jay-Z, who returned to New York, and Taylor Swift, who flew to Australia straight after the ceremony.
Randy Phillips, one of the organizers, said his "one regret" was the absence of dance-pop star Lady Gaga. The song, which was still being worked on into the small hours of Tuesday, will make its world premiere during NBC's coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics on February 12.
Both the song and an accompanying video, shot by Oscar-winning "Crash" director Paul Haggis, will go on sale both through traditional and online retailers. Phillips said all proceeds will go to a newly established foundation that will carefully monitor disbursement. The January 12 earthquake killed up to 200,000 people in Haiti and devastated the already impoverished nation.
For the good of us all, step away from the Rolex. The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study. That's interesting.
Researchers Roy Y. J. Chua, of Harvard, and Xi Zou, an assistant professor at London Business School, examined the psychological consequences that luxury goods can have on people in their research paper, "The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making."
They concluded that luxury seems intrinsically linked to self-interest. The researchers studied students who were randomly assigned to either a "luxury goods" condition or a "non-luxury goods" condition, and viewed photographs of associated consumer products such as shoes and watches. The students were then asked to imagine various scenarios that might arise if they were CEO of a firm.
The students who viewed luxury goods were significantly more likely than the second group to endorse production of a new car that might pollute the environment, launch new software with bugs, or market a videogame that might induce violence, according to the study.
"Results... suggest that when primed with luxury, people endorsed self-interested decisions that could potentially harm others," the researchers said in the study. "Luxury-primed individuals tend to make decisions that are self-interested and arguably unethical."
A second, word-association experiment suggested that luxury does not necessarily induce "nasty" behaviour toward others, but more indifference toward them. The findings are sure to touch a nerve in an era of mega-sized corporate bonuses and the parallel currency of limousines, private jets and other pricey perks.
After all, it was John Thain's lavish $1.2 million office renovation, including an infamous $35,000 antique commode that is remembered more than his salary in the final days of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. The researchers said that, in practical terms, the same business meeting could reach different decisions when held at a fancy resort as opposed to in a modest conference room.
"Working in a business setting surrounded by money and luxuries might well have an effect on cognition and decision making," said Chua and Zou. "Perhaps limiting corporate excesses and luxuries might indeed be a step toward getting executives to behave more responsibly."
American auto sales figures for January, due later on Tuesday, are expected to show a sharp drop for Toyota after it pulled eight of its most popular models from showrooms last week following complaints over sticking accelerator pedals.
In the first public comment from an executive at Toyota's head office, the company's executive in charge of quality said he was expecting a sales hit from the recall.
"The sales forecast is something that we're extremely worried about," Executive Vice President Shinichi Sasaki told a news conference. The company will report its third-quarter earnings on Thursday.
On top of a separate recall for slipping floor mats, also linked to unintended acceleration, some 8.1 million Toyota vehicles are now being recalled, more than its total group sales last year.
Although Toyota says the occurrence of problems is rare, public confidence is being shaken by coverage of the saga, including the harrowing details of the crash of a Lexus, blamed on unexpected acceleration, which killed an off-duty California state-trooper and three members of his family last year.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, has not formally addressed the public or media on the recall problems. While in Davos, Switzerland last weekend, he appeared briefly on broadcaster NHK and apologized to consumers.
The company's U.S. head, Jim Lentz, appeared on TV on Monday and also expressed his regret as part of a public relations blitz in Toyota's largest market.
"We haven't had any accidents reported in our network," the spokesman stressed.
Toyota detailed its plans on Monday to fix the faulty pedals on at least 4.2 million vehicles in North America and Europe with a small metal spacer to prevent sticking.
Toyota said it would restart production on February 8 of the eight models including its popular Camry, Corolla and RAV4 models after an unprecedented one-week shutdown at six plants in the United States and Canada.
Sasaki said costs were not taken into account with the recall and said they would monitor sales before reviewing their 2010 forecast. Toyota last month forecast global auto sales would rise 6% this year, but has since said that did not take the impact of the recalls into account.
The costs for the recall and the shutdown now look to come to roughly 100 billion yen to 200 billion yen ($1.1 billion to $2.2 billion US), two analysts estimated.
"It's a positive that we now can grasp what the direct costs might be, but Toyota has yet to address uncertainties about indirect costs, such as litigation costs and costs of incentives to win back customers," said JP Morgan analyst Kohei Takahashi.
"The size of these indirect costs is of far greater importance" for Toyota's future, he said.
Shares in Toyota rallied 4.5% in Tokyo on Tuesday following the company's U.S. announcement on the fix and restart of production. The jump in its shares comes after about an 18% tumble over the last seven business days that wiped out more than $20 billion in market capitalization. A weaker yen also boosted shares, some investors said.
Toyota faces a growing number of lawsuits claiming it and its U.S. supplier CTS Corp endangered drivers by not acting sooner to fix problems with faulty accelerator pedals. Lawsuits announced on Monday in the U.S. claimed Toyota had ignored signs of trouble with some of its top-selling models.
The suits are part of what is expected to be a wave of litigation against the automaker for claims ranging from losses on car resale values to injury and death. Analysts and dealers said it would take months for the automaker to fix all of the vehicles at risk of having an accelerator pedal stick in the open position. Rivals such as General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Hyundai Motor Co. have been offering discounts targeting Toyota customers.
Now, if you are going to sue about the faulty accelerator pedals, we can kind of understand that. But if you are suing for lost resale value, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Saskatoon Transit riders adjusted to a new payment system today as the City of Saskatoon unveiled debit-style smart cards and electronic readers on its transit fleet. Some riders reported frustration and slight delays as a handful of people on each bus were caught unaware of the electronic fare system and how it works, despite an advertising blitz on buses and local media.
Yeah... people were "unaware."
Bus drivers showed leniency for riders without the new pass, allowing those who showed up with obsolete paper tickets to use them and telling people to buy the reloadable plastic Go-Pass. Transit officials said Monday they will allow people to use their January bus passes until Friday to help ease the transition.
The downtown customer service centre was lined up all day with an estimated 30-to-45-minute wait. The line-up stretched down 23rd Street in frigid temperatures while people packed inside the small building.
Angie Larson, Saskatoon Transit's business manager, said the long line-ups were a product of last week's snowstorm, which hindered people from picking up the pass early. Saskatoon Transit scheduled staff to help answer questions and troubleshoot problems for drivers and riders throughout the day and opened cashier counters at nearby City Hall, she said.
"We've had a lot of questions from the public today and a lot for the drivers, too," Larson said at a press conference during the noon hour. "It's a new system, something that hasn't been in Saskatoon before, so people don't quite know how to use it."
Saskatoon Transit now uses the Go-Pass rather than tickets or a paper monthly pass. The system is viewed by transit administration as a way to modernize the bus fleet and open up new pricing possibilities to attract more riders. It also allows transit to track usage so it is better able to plan bus schedules and routes, Larson said.
Denise Charpentier, 38, was on her way to work at the Stonebridge Home Depot store early today. She picked up her new pass last week to avoid long line-ups.
A daily transit user, Charpentier welcomes the change but conceded it was a confusing morning for many.
"It's going to be more confusing for those people who ride once in a while," she said.
Denise Chauvin, a Massey Place resident, said the new system has "serious drawbacks" for community groups and families who relied on bulk-buying bus tickets so that they were always on hand. She typically bought 10 tickets and then split them up among her family as they were needed. The minimum that can be loaded on one card is 10 tickets, so she says she'll have to purchase multiple cards.
"They need to be able to allow for one or two tickets on a card," she said. "You only want to give (children) enough tickets to get home."
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals got a taste of its own medicine as one of its seal hunt protesters was pied in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday.
A woman wearing a seal suit was waiting for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to arrive for a speech when a man approached, dressed in a local mascot's outfit, which is a dog with a rain slicker and a "sou'wester."
The seal hunt supporter shoved a cream pie into the woman's face after knocking off the head of her seal costume. Now that's classic... and I'm starting to wonder if there's a YouTube video or something. Anyway, the man then took off down the street. Hopefully, he got away.
Twenty-one-year-old Emily Lavender said she was happy to take a pie in the face for her cause. But, sadly, the protestor was a good sport.
PETA took credit earlier this week for hitting federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea in the face with a pie to protest her support for sealing.
Lavender held a sign that said: "Harper Stop the Seal Slaughter" as a handful of seal hunt supporters counter-protested. Lavender doesn't think it was over the line to pie Shea. Uh... yeah it is. It is considered an assault and should be considered a terrorist act.
"It was a little tofu on her face," she said. "It's not nearly as embarrassing as the blood on her hands. And it's time she stop supporting the largest massacre of marine mammals on the planet."
Wallace Ryan of St. John's told Lavender to leave, and that she was embarrassing herself.
He wore a T-shirt that said: "If seals were ugly, nobody would give a damn."
"We're here to point out that PETA has incited violence and hate against Newfoundland and Labrador for years," he said.
Sealers rely on the spring hunt economically, Ryan said, and PETA has no right to interfere.
The appointment of five new Conservative senators who promise to expedite their party's "tough on crime" agenda marks a realignment of political influence that will reverberate through Canada's Parliament for years to come.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has placed what could become a long-term lock on the upper house with a third straight round of Conservative appointments to a Senate that he has accused of being deliberately obstructionist, particularly on justice bills.
The Liberals have enjoyed a Senate majority since 1997 but, after Friday's appointments, hold just 49 seats in the 105-seat chamber compared to the Conservatives' 51. There are five other senators who are not aligned with either party.
While Mr. Harper does not yet have more than half of the Senate in his grip, he has gained a plurality. And he could appoint his way to an absolute majority by the end of this year with the retirement of three more senators: a Conservative and two Liberals. Because Parliament has been prorogued, Senate committees can be reconstituted to reflect the new make-up of the Red Chamber, and Conservatives are looking forward to a new era in which they are in control.
The new appointees include Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, the Quebec head of a victims' rights group, and Bob Runciman, a Progressive Conservative member of the Ontario Legislature who has been outspoken in his defence of tougher sentences.
"These five new senators are firmly committed to our agenda," Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told a news conference Friday where he shared the table with Mr. Boisvenu and Mr. Runciman.
"These gentlemen have great records, standing up for victims and law-abiding Canadians. I say a minority Parliament is no excuse not to stand up for victims and law-abiding Canadians."
The other appointees are Vim Kochhar, the head of a Toronto-based group for the physically disabled; Elizabeth Marshall, a Newfoundland politician who was that province's auditor-general; and Rose-May Poirier, a member of New Brunswick's Conservative opposition.
The federal Conservatives have repeatedly blamed the Liberals for stalling criminal justice legislation in the upper house. Again Friday, Mr. Nicholson labelled the Official Opposition Liberals and Leader Michael Ignatieff "soft on crime."
However, of the 17 crime bills introduced by the federal Conservative government in the last session, only two were held up in the Senate for more than six months. Most died on the order paper when Mr. Harper prorogued Parliament in late December. But the Conservatives, who have introduced a large slate of controversial policies that lean more toward punishment than toward rehabilitation, believe they can gain a political advantage by framing the Liberals as defenders of criminals and themselves as the champions of victims. Well, it's probably true.
"Prime Minister Harper is sending a clear message by appointing me senator to Canadians and Quebeckers that the Conservative government defends victims' rights as opposed to those of criminals," said Mr. Boisvenu, who promised to donate his senator's salary to the Murdered or Missing Persons' Families' Association, which he founded.
"Our government is serious about getting tough on crime," Mr. Harper said in a statement. "Since we were first elected, we have made it one of our highest priorities. The Liberals have abused their Senate majority by obstructing and eviscerating law and order measures that are urgently needed and strongly supported by Canadians."
The new senators, he continued, "are committed to community safety and justice for the victims of crime. I look forward to working with each towards making our communities safer and protecting families from crime."
Although senators can hold their seats until they turn 75, all of the new appointees have promised to support Conservative legislation that would limit their terms to eight years. But, if the Conservatives were to lose the government in a future election, their saturation of the Senate could create continuing legislative obstacles for an incoming prime minister of another stripe.
Mr. Harper was a staunch critic of partisan nominations to the Senate when he was in opposition, and now it is Mr. Ignatieff's turn to promise to refrain from engaging in dispensing patronage plums. That's a shame...
Mr. Ignatieff said on Friday that if he becomes prime minister, he will have a deal with the provinces on Senate reform before he makes his own appointments. In particular, Mr. Ignatieff said he agrees with a plan for term limits for senators.
"I'm committed to Senate reform. Let's get a proposition on Senate reform that we can take to the provinces, get buy-in, and then we'll look at how we nominate and choose our senators," Mr. Ignatieff said at a news conference.
While past Liberal governments never shied from stacking the Senate with party hacks, organizers, bagmen and supporters, Mr. Ignatieff said Canadians have to remember that the Conservatives had promised to act differently.
"It's hypocritical to say, 'I won't do what the Liberals did,' and then appoint a whole bunch of people who are basically Conservative loyalists," Mr. Ignatieff said. "On the Senate score, [Mr. Harper] has broken his promises to Canadians.
After 90 days spent living in Tokyo's Narita International Airport, Feng Zhenghu looks like he'll be going home, soon enough.
The Shanghai human rights activist began living in the airport after Chinese authorities turned him away eight consecutive times as he arrived at Shanghai's Pudong Airport, refusing to let him come home. Each time, he was roughly hustled onto a plane back to Japan. On November 4, he finally decided to stand his ground and set up camp inside the customs hall next to the departure gates.
Feng has lived there ever since, sleeping on a bench and surviving on the largesse of airline stewardesses and incoming passengers who learned about his protest when it became a hot topic on Chinese blogs and a widely reported story around the world. They brought him food, drinks, books and even a computer after his broke down.
Hundreds of other Chinese citizens share Feng's plight. Many dissidents, particularly young people caught up in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, left China for study or work in North America, Europe and Japan, and were never allowed to return. A self-taught lawyer who often took on the Shanghai government on behalf of people forced out of their homes to make way for one grand project or another, Feng had a valid visa to enter Japan, but decided instead to try to shame the Chinese government into allowing him to return home.
Twitter has been Feng's lifeline in the airport and he announced news of his victory in a tweet this weekend, saying he would end his protest with a news conference on Tuesday. His decision came after the Chinese embassy in Tokyo finally opened negotiations with him last week.
It appears now a date may have been agreed for his return and Feng will enter Japan in the next few days.
Canada's Senate should be reformed to impose 12-year term limits and curb the Prime Minister's power to unilaterally choose senators, says Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. Yeah, I'm sure he's all for Senate reform... too.
While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has talked about the reforming the Senate, the only thing he has achieved is to pack it with his own Conservative supporters, Mr. Ignatieff added.
"Do we need to reform it? I think so," Mr. Ignatieff told CTV's Question Period yesterday, only two days after Mr. Harper announced five more appointments, which will give him control of the upper house. "Do we need term limits? A 12-year term limit, I would support that."
Currently, once named, senators can serve until they turn 75 years old, although many of those appointed by Mr. Harper have agreed to non-binding caps on their terms.
While he doesn't question the Senate itself, pointing out that MPs aren't perfect and the Senate often catches mistakes in legislation, Mr. Ignatieff called into question the system by which senators are currently chosen.
"I'd even go so far as to limit the prime minister's prerogative to appoint senators... I would pass it through a public service appointment commission so we scrub it and get the best possible appointees."
At the same time, however, Mr. Ignatieff said job creation, not Senate reform, is the priority for "hard pressed middle-class Canadians."
Mr. Ignatieff also called on the Conservative government to abandon its policy of waiting for the U.S. to come up with a plan to fight climate change, saying if Canada waits for the Americans, "nothing is going to happen."
"Mr. Obama's difficulties, the fact that he lost the seat in Massachusetts... I think it makes it much more unlikely that the American government is going to come up with a climate change plan of its own."
Pope Benedict XVI called Friday on the Vatican court which rules on marriage annulments to take a strict line, saying the point of Church laws was to save souls. Catholics who have marriages annulled are allowed to remarry in church and take communion, unlike those who are divorced by civilian courts.
But the pontiff said Vatican judges must not seek to satisfy "subjective demands" in order to arrive at an annulment "at any price."
He was speaking at an audience for judges of the Roman Rota, the Church's highest appeal court, whose caseload is dominated by people petitioning for a decree of nullity.
"Marriage enjoys the favour of law. Therefore, in case of doubt, it should be ruled as valid until proof to the contrary," the pope said. "Otherwise, one runs the grave risk of having no objective reference point to pronounce on nullity, turning every conjugal difficulty into a symptom of the failure of a union whose essential legal core -- the indissoluble link -- is thus denied."
"Some people maintain that pastoral charity can justify every step toward the declaration of nullity in order to help those who find themselves in an irregular matrimonial situation."
The truth, the pope said, could thus be instrumentalized and "adapted from time to time to the various demands that may arise."
"In the Church, the aim of judicial activity is the salvation of souls."
The pontiff also urged lawyers to "scrupulously avoid" taking on cases "which their conscience could not objectively support." Figures released by the Vatican show 192 marriage annulments pronounced in 2008.
The Catholic Church operates some 3,000 ecclesiastical courts of first and second instance around the world, although it is possible for an individual to appeal any initial decision directly to the Rota.
Officials at the University of Calgary are floating tuition hikes of as much as 47% in professional programs for next year, which are figures that student representatives call "terrifying."
The university is taking advantage of a one-time offer from the Government of Alberta to apply for increases in base tuition amounts in certain programs.
At least four core faculties, which include engineering, business, law and medicine, are targeted for the hikes, although masters programs for education and business administration are also being scrutinized and none of university's professional programs is necessarily off the table, officials said.
Medicine students, for example, face a $4,000 "market modifier" increase. Added to the 1.5% hike typically allowed each year, fees would jump by 27.8% to $18,600, from $14,384 the year before.
The figures are only preliminary and have not yet been sent to the Government of Alberta for approval, said Colleen Turner, the university's vice-president of external relations. The increases would bring tuition in line with other universities and take into account the likelihood of post-graduation income in the first few years after graduation, Turner said.
Further, the tuition hikes would ease the burden on the post-secondary facility, which has seen education costs rise while government funding fell in recent years.
"The reality is that costs are increasing and government grants aren't," Turner said. "We need to be able to continually evaluate our tuition rates, in particular in the professional schools, where the cost of delivering those programs are so much higher."
Under the new proposal, law students would fork out $13,800. Business students would pay $7,638 for a full 10-course load, an increase of about 47%, and engineering students $7,238, an average 39% increase for courses over the year before.
Students' union president Charlotte Kingston said the potential hikes are "absolutely massive" and suggested they could drive away potential students.
"What we're seeing is shocking," Kingston said. "It's going to create inequality of access in our programs."
Well, does this mean prospective students will move to other cities to attend university classes, such as Saskatchewan?
On Sunday, January 31, 2010, Chris Martin from Coldplay will appear on everyone's favourite cartoon: The Simpsons.
The signer will make a guest voice appearance in a new episode of the show titled "Million Dollar Maybe," which airs on FOX and Global.
After Homer wins the lottery and finds himself with lots of disposable income, he and Bart purchase front-row seats to a Coldplay concert. They're so close in fact, that they find themselves having a conversation with Chris Martin.
The singer joins a long list of famous musicians who have voiced as themselves over the years, including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Bono, Tom Jones, Linda Ronstadt, Little Richard and many, many others.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new focus on helping some of the world's poorest people won praise at the World Economic Forum from two of the annual conference's superstars, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
The former American president emerged from a 30-minute meeting with Mr. Harper on Thursday morning to laud the efforts of individual Canadians to support Haiti.
"It has been unbelievable," Mr. Clinton said. "I'll bet you on a per capita basis, they're No. 1 in the world now in helping Haiti. Probably because of the prime minister's matching grant program but, for whatever reason, the Canadians have all given money and all want to support it. You should be very proud of that. I'm very grateful."
The Conservative government has pledged to match all donations made to for Haitian recovery up to a maximum $50 million. So, if you decide to donate $50 million, as well as a penny, that penny will be disregarded.
Mr. Harper made a keynote speech in Switzerland Thursday evening. Among other things, he announced that the G8 should focus its attention on helping mothers and children in developing countries, which was a focus that was applauded by Bill Gates, whose charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which also works to help developing nations.
"It's super that you've got that out there early so everybody's thinking about it," Mr. Gates told Mr. Harper.
Also, keep in mind: Canada is the first country to host both the G8 and G20 meetings in the same year.
Fewer distracted drivers and more traffic enforcement are at the root of the first year-over-year reduction in reported collisions Saskatoon has seen in January in four years, police say.
The number of collisions reported to police so far this month, at 359, is down from a high of 533 last year and is the fewest since 2006, which saw 311 reports.
"It's a positive indicator," said Saskatoon police acting Inspector Grant Obst.
The numbers are down this year despite a peak in collisions during a recent stretch of bad weather and road conditions, which saw a 19-year-old Swan River, Manitoba woman killed in a two-vehicle crash on Circle Drive.
One of the main factors thought to be behind the drop is a ban that came into effect January 1 on the use of hand-held cellular phones to talk, text, e-mail or surf the web while behind the wheel.
So far this month, police in Saskatoon have handed out one ticket alongside 44 warnings. Officers are only ticketing repeat offenders and those involved in collisions where cell phone use is identified as a factor, Obst said.
"We're giving people that chance to comply," he said.
"When the seatbelt laws came in years ago we went easy for the first little while until people became accustomed to it," Obst said. "But now if you don't wear your seatbelt you're going too hammered."
"I would say we'll probably employ a few more weeks of grace, but then you can count on $280 (the fine for the offence)."
Anecdotal evidence from officers indicates a high-degree of compliance from the public on the cell phone ban, with many drivers turning to hands-free technology. The other contributing factor to the decrease in the number of collisions might be eight additional traffic officers who have bolstered a section of the police service that was undermanned after redeployment in 2007.
Those officers have been making targeted efforts in school zones and other areas this month, Obst said. The Saskatoon Police Service is putting more emphasis on public awareness and trying to be "more vocal," Obst said, to address a traffic problem that has seen the number of collisions in the city rise steadily every year since 2005.
Since then, the number of collisions per year in Saskatoon has increased by 2,000.
In 2009, eight people died and 1,200 were injured in close to 8,000 collisions, the highest number on record, according to police statistics. It's too early to draw any conclusions, but Obst said he hopes the lower number of reported collisions in January is the start of a trend in the other direction.
"We are making a very, very focused stab at bringing the collision rate down," Obst said. "That's our mandate."
For those of you parents who had go through the apparent horrors of driving your own kids to school because you rely heavily on the school bus system, the horrors may be over as of today.
For three days, school buses in Saskatoon were absent from snow-clogged streets, but officials believe the snow has settled into convenient ruts enough to allow drivers to safely navigate through neighbourhoods.
All school bus routes in Saskatoon are running today, says First Student Canada, which operates 200 buses in Saskatoon.
"The snow has packed and settled enough so we can make our way through the streets safely," said First Student branch manager Aaron Paraszczynec.
A Saskatoon company that won an award for job creation in late 2009 issued 16 layoff notices this week.
Point2 Technologies Inc. issued the permanent layoff notices on Tuesday, effective that day, said company CEO Saul Klein.
Point2 develops and sells web-based inventory management and online marketing systems for the real estate and heavy equipment industries.
Klein said that the company was left with a number of employees who didn't fit in with a staff reorganization plan after Point2 began moving resources to the real estate side of the business when contracts with heavy equipment dealers were reduced in June.
Secured creditors for Canwest Ltd. Partnership (LP) voted overwhelmingly to approve the unit's restructuring plan yesterday, setting the stage for its sale or potential spinoff.
A total of 153 lenders voted in favour of the plan, representing about 97% of the votes cast and almost 90% of the unit's $1 billion or so in secured debt.
Under the terms, the LP will solicit bids for the chain, which owns the National Post and ten major metropolitan dailies across Canada, including The StarPhoenix, during the next six weeks. Failing a successful offer, the creditors will take ownership of the assets in a new, independent company, which will eventually be taken public.
The LP filed for creditor protection on January 8, 2010. It is the newspaper division of Canwest Global Communications Corp., whose major holding company, CMI, filed for creditor protection in October.
The re-launching of the Chalk River nuclear reactor in eastern Ontario has been delayed by at least a month, according to a release from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
The reactor, an important source of medical isotopes, has been out of service since May with a leaky containment vessel. The reactor was to have been brought online in March but welding troubles delayed repair work.
The problems are said to have been addressed and welding is to resume later this week.
AECL said the first medical isotopes will be distributed 10 days after the reactor is fixed, now expected to be sometime in April.
You know what I've always hated about youths, besides their foul stenches? The fact that they drink energy drinks, when they don't need them. Occasionally, you'll see a high school student that drinks energy drinks. And why would they drink so many of them? Well, they are stupid, as I fail to see why they would need energy drinks in the first place. As a university student taking five classes and attempting to study, I can see why I would drink those things... but I don't drink them.
Well, Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools has enacted a new nutrition policy, and energy drinks are forbidden from school property. Now that's good.
The policy, which division administrators approved last week, will also prompt the gradual elimination of diet pops, sweetened juices, flavoured milks and waters, and sports drinks from Catholic school vending machines, cafeterias and school events where food is served.
"There is such a proliferation in the amount of prepared -- and, in some cases, unhealthy -- food choices going on," Superintendent of Education Greg Chatlain said. He expects the policy to be phased in at Catholic schools during the next couple of years.
"You think about what's best for student learning," Chatlain said. "Coming with the equivalent over lunch time of eight or 10 cups of coffee, plus three, four times the amount of sugar that's in a regular pop, are they going to be ready to learn? Likely not."
The policy says schools are concerned about the effects of energy drinks on students' behaviour and health. When asked about how the energy drink will be enforced, Chatlain says it "isn't the Criminal Code." Staff members that discover students drinking the rancid stuff will likely have a chat with the student about the product, he says. Man, that's lame. You've got to take it seriously and in the end, you must make a big deal out of it. After all, that's the fun of banning students from doing certain things.
With less than three weeks to go before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the cost of Saskatchewan's presence at the Games is jumping higher.
Last week, the Saskatchewan Party cabinet approved an additional $500,000 for Saskatchewan's temporary pavilion at Vancouver, raising its cost to $4.1 million.
The funding boost comes at the same time the Saskatchewan Party government is aiming for a spending freeze as it prepares a belt-tightening provincial budget.
"In a period like this, anytime you have to go back to your colleagues and say, 'I believe more funding is required,' I was concerned about that," Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport Minister Dustin Duncan said Monday. "But I think everybody feels that we've come so far with this and we want to make sure we have a very strong pavilion at the Olympics and that we're very competitive with the other jurisdictions. We don't want to take a back seat to anybody."
Saskatchewan's total expenditure for the Games will stay at a previously announced figure of $7.2 million, but only by moving $700,000 that has been spent by Tourism Saskatchewan on high-definition photographs of the province out of the Olympics budget and into a different budget. Duncan said the change makes sense since the photos will be used for other purposes besides the Olympics.
But the NDP's Danielle Chartier said that the government is resorting to creative accounting to try and deflect from a total that now appears to be about $7.9 million.
"It's still an extra $500,000 that the people of Saskatchewan are paying (for the Olympics) when we're talking about fiscal restraint, when we've got a billion-dollar deficit, when things are being frozen and deferred and cut. Half a million dollars is a lot of money for a lot of communities," said Chartier, the Opposition's tourism, parks, culture and sport critic, who expressed concern the additional costs are only now coming to light.
Duncan said the increase doesn't come from any one particular area but rather comes from "a better sense of what our costs will be.
"It's not unusual that we've had some costs that have gone up that we weren't counting on."
Among the unexpected costs was a charge by CTV for a live feed of Olympics coverage into the pavilion, which Saskatchewan originally believed would be free.
The pavilion is also being permitted by the City of Vancouver as a permanent building even though it will only be in place for two weeks. The Saskatchewan pavilion will consist of two structures: an entertainment venue showcasing local performers, artists and food, and a business and reception centre with an air-supported stratosphere, which will be able to display 360° images of Saskatchewan.
As the Vancouver Games approach, there have been increasing concerns about everything from the British Columbia weather to the reception the Olympics will receive from locals to the extent of the economic spinoff from the Games. But, Duncan said he's not concerned that Saskatchewan's bang for the buck from its presence won't match expectations.
"I think when all is said and done, we're certainly hoping the Olympics as a whole are going to be successful and that the tourism numbers are going to be very high -- there's all sorts of factors that can't change or you don't have control over," he said.
A report says that urban land use policies are making homes almost unaffordable in markets around the world, including Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
The Demographia International report looked at 272 metropolitan markets in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.
The report says Vancouver is the most unaffordable market in the world when median housing sale values are compared to median household incomes. It says Toronto is in the severely unaffordable category and Montreal is classified as being seriously unaffordable because of constraints on land use.
Wendell Cox, one of the authors, blames urban consolidation policies that restrict the development of suburban residential neighbourhoods for high housing prices. Cox says governments should allow more housing to be built on the fringes of urban areas to help keep costs down.
The Saskatchewan Party thinks it has a winner in its recently launched negative advertising television campaign against Dwain Lingenfelter, with its centrepiece clip of the NDP leader calling Premier Brad Wall a loser.
But Lingenfelter didn't back away from the characterization when asked about the ads last week, repeating it several times during a news conference. See, this is a new low on Mr. Lingenfelter's part... and now the NDP has been running its own radio ads in Prince Albert that mock Mr. Wall for taking umbrage at the loser label and citing the $1-billion summary deficit that was posted in the government's mid-year financial report.
"Do we owe Brad Wall more respect or does he owe you a better performance?" ends the voiceover, which some listeners believe is meant to be a parody of Rawlco Radio host John Gormley.
The ads cost just under $5,000 and were paid for by the taxpayer-funded caucus budget. The use of caucus funds to pay for politically charged advertising has itself been controversial in the past, with the NDP criticizing caucus-funded mail-outs from the Saskatchewan Party and Mr. Wall defending the practice.
It seems winter comes after spring in Saskatchewan. Well, I'm pretty sure a lot of people in Saskatchewan can agree with that statement right now.
After more than a week of temperatures at least 10°C above average, most city services crawled to a stand-still yesterday with crews reporting the worst weather conditions since the blizzard that shut down the Saskatoon in 2007.
"We haven't seen it this bad since our blizzard in 2007," said Troy Davies, spokesperson for MD Ambulance in Saskatoon.
Paramedics rescued one man who spent the night trying to walk to Saskatoon after he was stranded while snowmobiling outside the city Saturday night. The man became stranded around 7 p.m. Saturday, and a passerby found him sleeping in the ditch Sunday morning. MD Ambulance picked up the man at noon approximately 20 kilometres west of the city on Highway 16. He suffered serious hypothermia but is now in stable condition, said Davies.
Several calls also came in from people injured while shovelling driveways, and others who slipped in snow. MD Ambulance also had to use its SUV to pick up staff that were stuck at home, and activated its quad mobile response unit in case the ambulances were unable to get through. On several occasions, MD staff pulled over to help push out drivers who were stuck.
"As soon as you try to drive faster, that's when you see all these accidents happening," Davies said.
He also says that people should be cautious when digging themselves out.
"Yesterday we had one person go into cardiac arrest after shovelling snow. That just throws up red flags for us," Davies said. "It sounds ridiculous but you've got to take your time... we've had people die every year from this."
City services also suffered, with snow blocking many streets.
"It's pretty bad out there," said Mitch Riabko, manager of transit at the City of Saskatoon.
On Sunday morning, 28 transit buses went out on regular routes and 14 of them got stuck within the first hour and had to be towed in.
The last time transit service was cancelled was in 2007, when the January 10 blizzard dumped approximately 25 centimetres of snow as the wind gusted up to 90 km/h. School buses to both the Saskatoon Public and Catholic schools will not run today due to road conditions.
A temporary parking ban has been declared from 5 p.m. today until 5 p.m. on Thursday on streets designated as snow routes, which are marked by "No Parking Snow Route When Declared" signs. It includes Priority 1 and 2 streets. More information can be found on the City of Saskatoon website under "S" for Snow and Ice Program. The parking ban is in place to ensure high-traffic streets are cleared quickly.
Extra public works staff was brought in to help clear streets on Sunday, with 12 graders out, as well as three snow-plows, three loaders and regular sanding crews. Additional staff was called in to help with any mechanical breakdowns. The city also worked with MD Ambulance and city transit to help any stuck vehicles get through the city streets.
"As soon as we're finished clearing it, it's blowing in again," said Wade Gasmo, public works manager with the City of Saskatoon, on Sunday.
"The guys are working their hardest right now," Gasmo said, noting crews would work longer shifts to keep on top of snow clearing overnight. "This isn't an annual sort of thing."
Environment Canada issued winter storm and blizzard warnings across much of the province, with the worst of the storm occurring in the southern part of the province, though storms extended as far north as Cumberland House, Pelican Narrows and the Creighton area.
According to Environment Canada, the storm was caused by a strong low pressure system from Wisconsin moving into northern Ontario. The moisture coming with it was pushed into Canada, while at the same time meeting an Arctic high pressure ridge moving down from the Yukon into Alberta and Saskatchewan.
"You've got the moisture coming from the low, and the Arctic air coming from the Arctic high that's up over the Yukon and the Northwest Territories," said Greg Pearce, an Environment Canada forecaster.
The result of the two systems clashing is "lots of snow and wind," he said, noting the storms were likely to come to an end overnight Sunday. Temperatures were expected to "plummet" after the storms, with a high of -14°C today and low of -24°C expected for tonight.
Before the stormy weekend, temperatures were on average a balmy 7-10°C above normal for this time of year, which is a high of -10°C and a low of -19°C.
"That's all coming to an end now," Pearce said.
RCMP issued a warning Sunday to motorists travelling on Highway 11 between Davidson and Chamberlain after dealing with several vehicles that had hit the ditch by mid-morning, though no fatalities were reported because of the storm.
"With the amount of loose snow that's around right now, people can expect to see drifting snow and finger drifts on the highways that our crews will be treating for the next several days," said Doug Wakabayashi, spokesperson for the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure.
Drivers are recommended to keep an eye on road conditions for the next few days and check with the Highway Hotline before travelling.
China hit back hard against U.S. criticism of China's controls over the Internet, saying on Friday that the United States' push against online censorship could harm relations between the two big powers.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech against Internet censorship on Thursday raised contention with China over cyber policy, which flared after Google Inc. last week warned it could pull out of China over hacking and restrictions.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the U.S. criticisms could hurt ties between the two nations, the world's biggest and third biggest economies, already frayed over trade imbalances, currency values and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
"The U.S. has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom," said Ma, in a statement carried on the Foreign Ministry website www.mfa.gov.cn. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-U.S. relations."
"We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China," Ma said without mentioning Clinton by name.
But the spokesman also indicated that his government did not want to see the dispute overwhelm cooperation with the Obama administration, which has sought China's backing on economic policy and diplomatic standoffs, such as Iran and North Korea. Ma said each side should "appropriately handle rifts and sensitive issues, protecting the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations".
Clinton's speech criticized the cyber policies of China and Iran, among others, and demanded that China investigate complaints by Google Inc., the world's biggest search engine operator, about hacking and censorship.
"A new information curtain is descending across much of the world," said Clinton, calling growing Internet curbs the present-day equivalent of the Berlin Wall that contravene international commitments to free expression.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China, which uses a filtering "firewall" to prevent Internet users from seeing overseas web sites with content anathema to the Communist Party.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told reporters that America had discussed the Google case with China several times from "working levels to very senior levels". It was unclear how the United States could prod China into opening up the Internet. Some fear strong-arm tactics could backfire and make China control content even more tightly.
Ties between China and the United States have been put to the test in recent months over trade, currency, and climate change and arms sales to Taiwan. This month, China denounced the U.S. sale of Patriot air defence missiles, capable of intercepting Chinese missiles, to Taiwan, which China claims as its own.
China announced its own anti-missile test soon after. China has warned that more U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan could badly bruise relations with America and has urged President Barack Obama not to meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet who China denounces as a separatist.
"I think over the short haul (the Google issue) is going to go away because other problems that the U.S. and China face are rather numerous," said Niu Jun, an international studies expert at Peking University. "I think economic and trade issues are still more important. Both sides will find a positive solution through talks. But this is not necessarily just a simple commercial issue. I don't know what the solution will be. But it won't take a long time."
Among other issues, China accuses the United States of protectionism in anti-dumping cases against Chinese exports like tires and steel, while America says China stokes global economic imbalances and the U.S. trade deficit by undervaluing its currency.
The plan to change the title of The Beaver after 90 years to avoid online porn blockers has made Canada's top history magazine an international media sensation... first as joke for Jay Leno and now as the subject of an editorial printed Thursday in another publication: the British-based newsweekly The Economist.
Here's the quote:
The Beaver website was attracting (albeit briefly) readers who had little interest in Samuel de Champlain's astrolabe or what Prairie settlers ate for breakfast," the editorial dryly observed, before concluding that the "dull" new name -- "Canada's History" -- was necessary to help storytelling about this country's past escape "Internet obscenity filters" and crude references to "female pubic hair.
The Economist, not above a naughty pun itself, ran a picture of the tree-chomping rodent alongside its editorial, with the caption: "No, it's not a pussy."
Late-night TV host Leno also cracked wise earlier this week about The Beaver, suggesting the magazine has been a hot seller among young Canadian men who were, however, very "disappointed when they got it home."
The organization, which also publishes a children's magazine called Kayak and runs a host of educational programs, is working at "capitalizing on the opportunity" the renaming has generated, said Morrison. History-minded communities in countries where the story has made a splash are being targeted for an online subscription campaign, and the media attention in the U.S. has coincided with an expansion of the magazine's newsstand distribution south of the border.
The challenge, she added, is "getting beyond the humour of it" to attract new readers while reassuring traditional subscribers that "we are not fundamentally changing the nature of the magazine."
Morrison said the publication's new name, despite complaints from some commentators and society members that it's too boring, is not negotiable.
"It's obviously a good name for a Canadian history magazine -- it says what it is. I know that is, perhaps, anticlimactic after all of this international attention to the name we had, but it will make it a lot clearer for people to know what we are."
She added: "It's the logical, best alternative if we couldn't be The Beaver anymore."
The Beaver, Canada's second-oldest magazine, was launched in October 1920 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Hudson's Bay Company, which sponsored the publication until it was transferred to the history society in 1994. After decades of devoting almost all of its content to the history of the fur trade, the Arctic and Canada's northwest frontier, The Beaver's focus was revamped and broadened over the past 15 years to make it a pan-national clearing house for news and feature articles covering all aspects of Canadian history.
Only Maclean's, the popular weekly Canadian newsmagazine founded in 1905, is older than The Beaver. One of its bloggers, Colby Cosh, suggested this week that The Beaver's forced renaming to "Canada's History" is symptomatic of a broader, web-driven cultural trend toward stultifying literalness.
"The brand could perhaps have stood up to any amount of silent snickering," Cosh writes, "but no media organ can afford to offer confusion to search engines and spam filters now. Google is a powerful, underestimated force for prosaicness: just ask any sub-editor who's been ordered to re-do a charmingly cryptic headline and get rid of the cute irony."
Saskatoon will be the site of one of more than 45 rallies planned for tomorrow to protest Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament.
As you know, Mr. Harper decided to prorogue Parliament on December 30, 2009, and that has angered quite a few people for some reason.
Well, if you are bored and have nothing better to do, you can join a group of protesters in front of City Hall in downtown Saskatoon at 1:00 PM tomorrow.
Yesterday, Michael Ignatieff finally realized that the Liberal Party of Canada needs to stop thinking of themselves as the "natural" governing party and earn the trust of Canadians.
Ignatieff said that the party must listen to Canadians as it embarks on a "path of renewal" culminating in a major policy conference in Montreal at the end of March. The conference will discuss what Canada should try to achieve by 2017, when Canada turns 150 years old.
"We have to have the courage to tell ourselves things we don't want to listen to. We have to listen to people that the party has not listened to. We have to open the doors and open the windows," Ignatieff said in a speech yesterday to cap a two-day meeting here of the Liberal caucus.
The Liberals, who have been criticized for lacking policy alternatives, hope to use the coming weeks to generate ideas and draw attention to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament until March 3, 2010.
As for the next federal budget, Ignatieff claims he did not want to place "conditions" on the government's next budget, which is set to be unveiled on March 4, 2010. However, he said that the Liberal priority is to ensure the government does its best to reverse the rise in unemployment rate, which currently stands at 8.5%.
Have you wanted to be a teacher? Well, some people have thought about it at one point in their lives during their educational careers. Then, there are some people who actually want to pursue that career dream. However, you must go through an interview that determines whether you are fit to be interacting with children.
Well, the University of Saskatchewan has decided to stop its usual entrance interview practice for at least one year.
The number of people applying to the college to become teachers has dropped significantly in the last eight years, while the resources needed to conduct hundreds of in-person interviews has risen, says one of the college's assistant deans.
That's a shame...
In previous years, as many as 700 applicants have vied for 300 seats in the college, according to Lemisko. Although the minimum grade average for entry is 60% in a student's first two years of university, the bigger pool of candidates bumped the admission average to more than 80% and the interview helped the college identify the "cream of the crop."
The makers of the MONOPOLY board game want your input! That's right... but specifically the input of Canadians, as it seems.
Soon, there will be a Canadian version of the game, dubbed MONOPOLY Canada. And, what cities will be featured on the game's board will depend solely on us as Canadians. As a result, we encourage you to head on over to www.monopolyvote.ca to cast a vote for your favourite city.
And by 'your favourite city,' I really mean Saskatoon!
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shuffled about ten cabinet spots.
Stockwell Day will now lead the Treasury Board. Meanwhile, previous Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt is now the Minister of Labour.
The changes were unveiled this morning at a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
The Office of the Prime Minister described the shuffle as "fine-tuning," and none of the major ministers were shuffled around (Finance, Defence and Foreign Affairs).
Lisa Raitt, who was dogged by controversy at Natural Resources, has been replaced by Christian Paradis, who was previously the Minister of Public Works.
Rona Ambrose, who faltered in her previous post as the Minister of Environment, is being moved to Public Works. Ambrose was previously the Minister of Labour.
Vic Toews, who was the president of the Treasury Board, moves to Public Safety, replacing Peter Van Loan.
Van Loan is now the Minister of International Trade, replacing Stockwell Day. Stockwell Day also takes on another job, as Minister for the Asia Pacific Gateway.
Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who was previously the Minister of National Revenue, is now the Minister of Veterans Affairs, and replaces Greg Thompson, who resigned from the cabinet on Saturday.
As for the Minister of National Revenue, that position is now filled by a cabinet newcomer, New Brunswick MP Keith Ashfield. Ashfield also took on the role of Minister for the Atlantic Canada Gateway from Peter MacKay, and retained his role as Minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency.
A second News Brunswick MP, Rob Moore, is making the cabinet debut as Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism.
As for MP Diane Ablonczy, she was named the Minister of State for Seniors.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to announce a small cabinet shuffle tomorrow.
Sources say there will be no changes to major portfolios, with Jim Flaherty staying at Finance and Peter MacKay at Defence.
But Treasury Board president Vic Toews did not completely deny rumours that he is changing jobs. Other rumours have Mr. Harper rearranging the ministers who hold regional development roles.
And speculation abounds that controversy-prone Lisa Raitt will no longer be the Minister of Natural Resources.
The shuffle follows the resignation of Greg Thompson as Minister of Veterans Affairs.
A group of investors has expressed interest in a portion of Canwest Global Communications Corp.'s newspaper unit, and said that it was preparing a bid for three of the chain's largest newspaper dailies.
Led by former senator Jerry Grafstein (damn Liberal senator appointed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau), the group said in a statement that it plans to bid for The Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. Raymond Heard (a media consultant and long-time newspaper executive) and Beryl Wajsman will join Grafstein in leading the consortium.
"Our partnership represents a cross spectrum of engaged Canadians committed to a vigorous, independent media voice for the communities that each newspaper serves," the group said.
Both private equity and rival media firms have been cited as candidates to acquire all or part of Canwest Ltd. Partnership (LP), which owns some of the oldest and most venerable newspaper dailies in Canada.
The newspaper division filed for creditor protection on January 8, 2010 after missing interest payments on about $1.5 billion in debt. At the time of the unit's filing under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, the unit's secured lenders, led by Scotiabank and the four other largest banks, proposed to sell the division as a whole.
The first phase of the sale will last until February 26, 2010, or seven weeks, during which bidders are asked to file indications of interest.
The National Post, Gazette and Citizen together, comprise the biggest portion of the chain in eastern Canada. Grafstein and the consortium have said that they will prepare a formal offer "in the next few weeks" after completing due diligence on the three papers.
Well, back in high school, what happened when you handed in your homework later than usual? Well, you would lose marks. Well, the provincial government in Manitoba has strongly discouraged teachers from deducting marks
A letter from former Education Minister Peter Bjornson sent last June 22 to Carman Conservative MLA Blaine Pedersen says that students should not be deducted marks for missing deadlines.
Bjornson said that if a teacher deducts 10-20% because a student turns work in late, then that mark is not "an accurate indicator of what the student has learned or achieved."
That's just odd... but I know that if I weren't deducted marks in high school for turning in assignments late, I know I would have received higher marks back then.
Back in September of 2001, the World Trade Centre in New York was destroyed. If you did not know that, you should be slapped.
Anyway, as the years passed, construction of a new building/plaza/complex began, and someone has decided to make a documentary about it.
Oscar-winning film director Steven Speilberg will make a television documentary on the rebuilding of the site, according to The Science Channel. The documentary will be titled "Rebuilding Ground Zero" and will be shown in 2011.
The series will chronicle not just the engineering and the building of the new 541-metre high skyscraper, but will also seek to honour those who lost their lives in the September 11 attack.
A $1 million study on the feasibility of constructing a new stadium in downtown Regina is approaching the end.
Enterprise Minister Ken Cheveldayoff told reporters the study is "progressing well," but the final report won't be in the hands of the government until sometime in February. The work was originally scheduled to wrap up this month.
"The information that we're gathering is coming in but it's taking a bit longer than expected, or (longer than) the timeline that was outlined when the feasibility study was first underway," said Cheveldayoff.
The work was launched in July with funding from the Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the City of Regina.
The findings will be made public upon the study's completion, but there isn't a timeline for when a decision will be made about whether to proceed, Cheveldayoff said.
"We'll have the completed report in front of us, we'll have the cost analysis, the cost of operation and all that type of information that cabinet will need to make a decision on where we progress on this," he said.
The feasibility study, involving companies Stadium Consultants International and Global Spectrum, is looking at the possibility of a covered stadium with a permanent roof versus one with a retractable roof.
The ballpark figure for construction of the stadium has been pegged at $350 million. It's expected the facility, which government has said would be a multi-purpose, year-round entertainment venue, could be located at the current site of the CP rail yards, which are expected to relocate to the planned transportation hub on Regina's western fringes.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Quebec Premier Jean Charest put their feud over climate change on pause Tuesday, appearing together for the first time in months to announce a new green energy project. The federal and provincial governments don't always see eye-to-eye on everything but do share major objectives, Mr. Harper said at a news conference in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec.
"Our governments don't always agree, but that doesn't mean we don't work together when we share objectives," Mr. Harper said. "It doesn't mean we're miles apart. It doesn't mean we don't work together on the things that we have in common."
Mr. Harper and Mr. Charest announced Ottawa and Quebec's financial contributions to a new energy plant in nearby Cacouna that will convert organic residues into fertilizer. They were then peppered with questions about their public clash on Canada's climate change policy at the Copenhagen talks last month.
In Copenhagen, Mr. Charest spoke of a "tale of two Canadas" as he scolded Mr. Harper publicly for failing to back more aggressive targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. On Tuesday, a defiant Mr. Charest claimed he wouldn't change a word of what he said and promised to speak his mind on behalf of Quebecers whenever he had a chance.
"Greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is the most important challenge of our time," he said. "We have an economic crisis, but we also have an environmental crisis, and North America will be affected. That's why we are so concerned."
"It's important to speak frankly and honestly. In our relationship with the government, we work very honestly. We are not elected to fight with them; we are elected to work with them."
"When we don't always agree, we are going to express our views."
Quebec boasts one of the most ambitious plans in North America to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pledging last fall to reduce 1990 emissions levels by 20% by 2020. Quebec has also adopted California's stringent automotive emissions standards.
Mr. Harper called the new Cacouna plant a "genuinely innovative" project that "gives us an idea of what the future could look like." The Government of Canada will contribute $13 million to the plant.
Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa were among Canada's largest cities that made it to the 'A' list in terms of places that are attractive to migrants, according to a study released Wednesday. Some of the smaller locales to make it into the top tier in this report from the Conference Board of Canada included Waterloo, Ontario; Richmond Hill, Ontario, and St. John's, Newfoundland.
"Cities that fail to attract new people will struggle to stay prosperous and vibrant," Mario Lefebvre, the board's director of municipal studies, said in a statement.
The cities were assessed in the following categories: society, health, economy, environment, education, innovation and housing. Vancouver was lauded for its warm climate and "young, diverse, and multicultural population."
Calgary was ranked at the top of the list in terms of its economy and innovation, and also showed strength in the housing category.
Ottawa, the nation's capital, received high rankings for education and innovation, and scored well in all other categories except health.
Waterloo, home of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., was the top ranked city for education, and also scored high for innovation, economy and housing. Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, was judged to be exceptionally attractive to migrants for its diverse population, and it scored well in innovation and education.
St. John's was among the highest ranked cities in terms of health and environment.
Toronto, Edmonton and Victoria were among the cities in the 'B' category for being well suited to newcomers. Toronto (Canada's largest city) was the top ranked spot in the society category due to its ethnic diversity and culture. However, the Conference Board said things such as air quality and access to health care kept it out of the 'A' list.
Apple and Google, who are like Jerry Seinfeld and Newman on Seinfeld, have smart-phones.
Well, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan is hosting technology companies next month where representatives, including a U of S graduate in charge of Google's Canadian operations, will give talks about their companies and recruit students at a February 9 career fair.
Organizers are still negotiating with Apple to confirm its attendance, but Google and IBM have both confirmed. In a heated tech market, companies are looking for the best students from across the world, said Chad Jones, an instructor with the Department of Computer Science.
"They obviously see value at the U of S or they wouldn't be coming," said Jones. "Google can go anywhere in the world. We have a strong department and companies recognize that. We could put our graduates up against any in the world."
A Saskatoon activist is on trial for refusing to participate in the 2006 census is challenging the constitutionality of Canada's Statistics Act.
Sandra Finley objected to the Government of Canada's hiring of Lockheed Martin Canada Limited to provide computer hardware and software for printing of forms for the census.
Finley, 60, is representing herself at a trial that continued today.
As a democracy, Canada needs to measure its population every five years to determine the number of seats in the House of Commons, said Anil Arora, now Canada's chief statistician, who was the director general of the 2006 census.
In case you didn't know, Canada's second-oldest magazine is called The Beaver.
What? That sounds harmless, right? Wrong. It apparently refers to something of a sexual nature. Because of that connection to sex, Internet filters have turned it off to potential readers.
The publication itself was founded in 1920 as a publication of the Hudson's Bay Company, then a fur trader and now a department store chain. It has long since become a broader magazine about Canadian history and will change it names to Canada's History with its April issue.
Well, apparently, you can live at a university residence even after you graduate... and the university is going to have a hard time evicting you.
Well, the University of Victoria can finally evict someone. They are saying that a recent court decision means that it can finally evict a guy who is still living at a student residence almost 13 years after he graduated.
Alkis Gerd'son moved into residence in 1991, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1993 and a Bachelor of Education degree in 1997, according to a judgment made public this week. But, he never moved out.
Although he's registered in a business management program, he hasn't enrolled in credit courses since 1997.
Yesterday in Saskatoon, the complete roster for Team Canada in the Olympic Games were unveiled.
Here it is:
Goaltenders Martin Brodeur, New Jersey Marc-Andre Fleury, Pittsburgh Roberto Luongo, Vancouver
Defencemen Dan Boyle, San Jose Drew Doughty, Los Angeles Duncan Keith, Chicago Scott Niedermayer, Anaheim Chris Pronger, Philadelphia Brent Seabrook, Chicago Shea Weber, Nashville
Forwards Patrice Bergeron, Boston Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh Ryan Getzlaf, Anaheim Dany Heatley, San Jose Jarome Iginla, Calgary Patrick Marleau, San Jose Brenden Morrow, Dallas Rich Nash, Columbus Corey Perry, Anaheim Michael Richards, Philadelphia Erc Staal, Carolina
Facing stiff recessionary competition from online bookselling and a budding e-book market, beloved independent bookseller McNally Robinson announced on Tuesday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will close half of its retail outlets.
The Winnipeg-based institution, which was opened by Paul and Holly McNally in 1981 and voted Canada's Independent Bookseller of the Year seven times since 1996, is closing its Toronto location at the Shops at Don Mills and its Polo Park Shopping Centre outlet in Winnipeg in a bid to restructure the business. About 170 full and part-time employees will lose their jobs, the company said. Its 24,000 ft2 flagship store in Winnipeg's Grant Park will remain open, as well as a location in Saskatoon.
McNally Jackson, an affiliate bookstore opened in New York in 2004 by the McNallys' daughter Sarah, also remains open.
"Booksellers in Canada are currently working against serious headwinds: Recession, stagnant book prices, steep discounting and increasing competition from Internet sales and electronic text formats," McNally Robinson said in a release, noting the Toronto store, which opened in April, and the Polo Park store, which opened in 2008, were not profitable. A McNally Robinson store in Calgary closed in 2008 after six years.
The news comes as increasing numbers of consumers buy books online and on the heels of an announcement from Amazon.com this week which said on Christmas Day -- a day when most retail stores in North America are closed -- consumer online purchases of digital e-books for its Kindle reading device outsold the number of regular books sold on Amazon.
"When I think of the amount of retailing that has had the double whammy of the recession and technological disruption -- look at music stores," said Luke Sklar, partner at market research firm Sklar Wilton Associates. "Who would have imagined Telus Corp. buying Black's photography for $28 million?"
"There is a long list of Canadian retail icon brands that have not been able to continue due to (competition from evolving technologies). But this is about poor business," he said, noting independents have been closing due to stiffer traditional competition from retailers such as Walmart and Costco.
Iconic downtown Toronto book stores Pages and David Mirvish Books closed their retail outlets this year after decades of operation. Nevertheless, the low-margin business of book sales is holding up, with overall sales rising 3.8 per cent in Canada in the third quarter, according to BookNet Canada.
"It will be interesting to see how Indigo fares now," said Sklar. "It has been doing a lot of things to adapt the business to technology and it will be the leading indicator on this one."
Literary agent and technology writer Rick Broadhead called McNally Robinson's move into Toronto overly ambitious regardless of the recession. "I think they made a bad decision opening a 20,000 square-foot (Toronto) store in an area that was not a high-traffic area. It was a very big gamble."
Two massive system-wide service outages this week that left millions of BlackBerry users across North America in the dark for hours were blamed Wednesday on a bug in the hand-held device's instant messaging program. The flaw was believed to be in two recent versions of BlackBerry Instant Messenger that have been available for download since December 14, according to the Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion.
The company is advising users who downloaded the application to upgrade the application as a precaution.
"Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," said company spokesman Jamie Ernst in an e-mail Wednesday. "RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."
This latest outage lasted nearly eight hours after email stopped working on the devices late Tuesday night. Service began to be restored by 8 am on Wednesday, with some users reporting a lag in sending and receiving mail and web browsing. Customers were still able to use their devices as telephones and to send instant messages.
The company apologized for the unplanned blackout. There was a similar widespread email outage early last Thursday, which was fixed by mid-afternoon. That outage affected North and South American users.
Prior to this week, the last time there was a service outage on the devices was in February 2008. That disruption lasted several hours and affected eight million users across North America. It was caused by a system upgrade.
In April 2007, BlackBerry also suffered a major service outage. Last week, the company delivered its third-quarter results, to positive reviews.
Research in Motion said sales for the next quarter should be between $3.3 billion and $3.5 billion, ahead of the roughly $3 billion analysts had been expecting. The company also said it expects to add about 2.9 million new subscribers next quarter, also higher than expected.
In an article published on Tuesday in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper had some nice things to say about America's longest-running prime time TV series, and had criticism for those who would simply discount its often-irreverent take on modern family life. Here's how Catholic News Service translated a portion of L'Osservatore Romano's article:
"Rigid censors turn off the television," when the Fox program comes on, "but the more serious analysts praise the realism and intelligence of its scripts, even if they often attack -- and rightly so -- the crude language and violence of some episodes.
According to Catholic News Service, the Vatican paper went on to describe The Simpsons as "tender and irreverent, scandalous and ironic, boisterous and profound, philosophical -- and sometimes even theological -- nutty synthesis of pop culture and of the lukewarm and nihilistic American middle class."
Clearly, somebody in the Catholic Church has been paying attention to the series. In fact, the paper goes on to discuss the show in terms of its theological viewpoint, too:
Simultaneously reflecting modern people's indifference toward and great need for the sacred, Homer... finds his ultimate refuge in God.
The idea of the Vatican newspaper taking the time to comment on a cartoon television show is pretty unusual. In fact, it has all the makings of a pretty good "Simpsons" episode.
The University of Saskatchewan, with the help of the Government of Saskatchewan, is in preparation for a major donation to the university that will soon be revealed. Last week, the Saskatchewan Party cabinet approved an order-in-council authorizing the university to spend up to $6 million for the acquisition of property in Saskatoon for commercial investment purposes.
University vice-president of finance and resources Richard Florizone said that the approval, necessary for any property purchase more than $500,000 under the legislation that governs the university, is a "catalyst" for an offering that is currently being kept under wraps.
"What this is about is we have a donor in the community who is working with us on what would be a major gift. Part of that major gift involves... a large real estate transaction that will be part purchase, part gift," he said in an interview this week.
The university is still finalizing details with the donor, so little information is being released before an announcement that will likely come in early January. Florizone said the deal involves two properties in Saskatoon off-campus, but he would not say whether they would be used as university facilities or as properties to generate revenue.
While the university is prepared to spend $6 million, the benefits to the institution will be exponential, he said. Advanced Education Minister Rob Norris said that the government was glad to facilitate a "historic, multimillion-dollar donation" from a "highly respected member" of the academic and business communities.
The university's planned purchase comes at the same time as it finalized a multi-decade development plan for a 145-acre chunk of university land between College Drive and 14th Street as well as Cumberland Avenue and Preston Avenue.
An Arizona music teacher whose students performed at a presidential inauguration event is on administrative leave after taking 40 high school students to a Hooters restaurant. Paradise Valley school district spokeswoman Judi Willis says choir director Mary Segall accompanied the students to a performance in downtown Phoenix last week, and during the outing, they ate lunch at Hooters.
Willis says Segall explained that the restaurant, known for its waitresses' somewhat revealing attire, was the only place that could accommodate a group of that size. But district officials believe there were other options for lunch in the area. Segall could not be reached for comment.
The teacher plans on retiring in January, and Willis says she does not know if she'll return before then.
Do you drink a can of soda every day? Maybe it's time to think again. Drinking two or more soft drinks a week may nearly double a person's risk of developing pancreatic cancer, researchers are warning. That is scary, and is definitely going to change my soda-drinking habits.
Two and a Half Men actor Charlie Sheen was charged today with assaulting and threatening his wife Brooke Mueller in a heated Christmas Day argument. But, the couple left the court in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen hugging each other, hoping the charges will be dropped, and apparently planning to reconcile.
Toyota Motor Corp's president apologized today for safety problems and said the company would bring in outside experts to review quality controls, an unusual action for a company that has enjoyed a reputation for high standards.
NDP Leader Jack Layton has been diagnosed with a treatable form of prostate cancer. How unfortunate. Mr. Layton said today that he will step away from an active political role for "several months" in order to undergo treatment, but will not step down as leader. Aside from his political beliefs, I do believe that he is a decent guy, and I wish him well.
Controversial Saskatoon chiropractor and former MP Jim Pankiw is planning on staging a return to the political arena.
The Lancet, which is a medical journal, decided to formally retract a paper on Tuesday that caused a 12-year international battle over links between the three-in-one childhood MMR vaccine and autism.
U.S. housing prices are headed for a double-dip decline, which will hurt related companies that have already assumed there will be a recovery in the sector, CIBC has warned.
Up until yesterday, Saskatchewan's major municipalities went to the polls to elect a new city council every three years, or in some cases, re-elect the exact same city council, which occurred in Saskatoon in 2009.
Two Saskatoon city councillors say that yesterday's announcement by Premier Brad Wall that cities will receive the same amount of revenue-sharing money as last year will put further strain on a difficult budget year.
Star-struck singers, rappers and actors, including Barbra Streisand, Kanye West and Miley Cyrus, checked their egos at the door yesterday to record a new version of "We are the World" for Haiti's earthquake victims, 25 years after the song raised awareness of the famine in Africa.
For the good of us all, step away from the Rolex. The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study. That's interesting.
Saskatoon Transit riders adjusted to a new payment system today as the City of Saskatoon unveiled debit-style smart cards and electronic readers on its transit fleet. Some riders reported frustration and slight delays as a handful of people on each bus were caught unaware of the electronic fare system and how it works, despite an advertising blitz on buses and local media.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals got a taste of its own medicine as one of its seal hunt protesters was pied in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday.
The appointment of five new Conservative senators who promise to expedite their party's "tough on crime" agenda marks a realignment of political influence that will reverberate through Canada's Parliament for years to come.
After 90 days spent living in Tokyo's Narita International Airport, Feng Zhenghu looks like he'll be going home, soon enough.
Pope Benedict XVI called Friday on the Vatican court which rules on marriage annulments to take a strict line, saying the point of Church laws was to save souls. Catholics who have marriages annulled are allowed to remarry in church and take communion, unlike those who are divorced by civilian courts.
Officials at the University of Calgary are floating tuition hikes of as much as 47% in professional programs for next year, which are figures that student representatives call "terrifying."
On Sunday, January 31, 2010, Chris Martin from Coldplay will appear on everyone's favourite cartoon: The Simpsons.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new focus on helping some of the world's poorest people won praise at the World Economic Forum from two of the annual conference's superstars, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
Fewer distracted drivers and more traffic enforcement are at the root of the first year-over-year reduction in reported collisions Saskatoon has seen in January in four years, police say.
For those of you parents who had go through the apparent horrors of driving your own kids to school because you rely heavily on the school bus system, the horrors may be over as of today.
A Saskatoon company that won an award for job creation in late 2009 issued 16 layoff notices this week.
Secured creditors for Canwest Ltd. Partnership (LP) voted overwhelmingly to approve the unit's restructuring plan yesterday, setting the stage for its sale or potential spinoff.
The re-launching of the Chalk River nuclear reactor in eastern Ontario has been delayed by at least a month, according to a release from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
With less than three weeks to go before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the cost of Saskatchewan's presence at the Games is jumping higher.
The world's first film shot by chimpanzees is about to hit the airwaves.
It seems winter comes after spring in Saskatchewan. Well, I'm pretty sure a lot of people in Saskatchewan can agree with that statement right now.
China hit back hard against U.S. criticism of China's controls over the Internet, saying on Friday that the United States' push against online censorship could harm relations between the two big powers.
The plan to change the title of The Beaver after 90 years to avoid online porn blockers has made Canada's top history magazine an international media sensation... first as joke for Jay Leno and now as the subject of an editorial printed Thursday in another publication: the British-based newsweekly The Economist.
Saskatoon will be the site of one of more than 45 rallies planned for tomorrow to protest Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament.
A group of investors has expressed interest in a portion of Canwest Global Communications Corp.'s newspaper unit, and said that it was preparing a bid for three of the chain's largest newspaper dailies.
Well, back in high school, what happened when you handed in your homework later than usual? Well, you would lose marks. Well, the provincial government in Manitoba has strongly discouraged teachers from deducting marks 
Back in September of 2001, the World Trade Centre in New York was destroyed. If you did not know that, you should be slapped.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Quebec Premier Jean Charest put their feud over climate change on pause Tuesday, appearing together for the first time in months to announce a new green energy project. The federal and provincial governments don't always see eye-to-eye on everything but do share major objectives, Mr. Harper said at a news conference in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec.
Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa were among Canada's largest cities that made it to the 'A' list in terms of places that are attractive to migrants, according to a study released Wednesday. Some of the smaller locales to make it into the top tier in this report from the Conference Board of Canada included Waterloo, Ontario; Richmond Hill, Ontario, and St. John's, Newfoundland.
Apple and Google, who are like Jerry Seinfeld and Newman on Seinfeld, have smart-phones.
A Saskatoon activist is on trial for refusing to participate in the 2006 census is challenging the constitutionality of Canada's Statistics Act.
Well, apparently, you can live at a university residence even after you graduate... and the university is going to have a hard time evicting you.
Yesterday in Saskatoon, the complete roster for Team Canada in the Olympic Games were unveiled.
Facing stiff recessionary competition from online bookselling and a budding e-book market, beloved independent bookseller McNally Robinson announced on Tuesday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will close half of its retail outlets.
Two massive system-wide service outages this week that left millions of BlackBerry users across North America in the dark for hours were blamed Wednesday on a bug in the hand-held device's instant messaging program. The flaw was believed to be in two recent versions of BlackBerry Instant Messenger that have been available for download since December 14, according to the Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion.
The University of Saskatchewan, with the help of the Government of Saskatchewan, is in preparation for a major donation to the university that will soon be revealed. Last week, the Saskatchewan Party cabinet approved an order-in-council authorizing the university to spend up to $6 million for the acquisition of property in Saskatoon for commercial investment purposes.
An Arizona music teacher whose students performed at a presidential inauguration event is on administrative leave after taking 40 high school students to a Hooters restaurant. Paradise Valley school district spokeswoman Judi Willis says choir director Mary Segall accompanied the students to a performance in downtown Phoenix last week, and during the outing, they ate lunch at Hooters.