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/ 29 September 2007
Phil Mickelson and Woody Austin pounded Retief Goosen and Australia’s Stuart Appleby 5&4 in foursomes play to take the first point on Saturday for the United States in the Presidents Cup. The Americans have stormed back, Mickelson and Austin setting the pace with a crushing win and the US leading in all four other matches.
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/ 29 September 2007
American Woody Austin twice ended up in water, first with his ball and then comically on his stomach, while playing the par-four 14th in Friday’s foursomes matches at the Presidents Cup. Although he and partner David Toms lost the hole to Internationals duo Rory Sabbatini and Trevor Immelman, he ended his round with three consecutive birdies to halve the match.
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/ 28 September 2007
Three tense last-hole foursomes triumphs on Thursday sparked the United States to a 5½ to ½ edge over the Internationals at the Presidents Cup, matching the largest first-session lead in its history. The Americans nabbed the biggest first-session edge since they grabbed 5-0 leads on their way to victories over their non-European rivals in 1994 and 2000.
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/ 26 September 2007
Tiger Woods has a history of taking on the home-nation hero in singles matches at the Presidents Cup, but Canada’s Mike Weir, a captain’s choice for the Internationals, is not buying into the talk. United States captain Jack Nicklaus raised eyebrows on Tuesday by suggesting Woods should face Weir, the lowest-ranked global player.
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/ 12 September 2007
It took gay Indian filmmaker Parvez Sharma six years to make Jihad for Love, a documentary film about gay men and women trying to live Muslim lives in Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and South Africa. He says his challenge will be to make sure the movie reaches Muslim communities, even in countries where being homosexual remains a crime.
Canada has no intention of apologising for one of its diplomats after the Sudanese government expelled Ottawa’s charge d’affaires, Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said on Sunday. ”Canada condemns the government of Sudan’s decision to expel the charge d’affaires,” Bernier said in a statement.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal begin the countdown to this month’s US Open as the top two in the world resume their rivalry atop the field at the Montreal Masters. The event, which begins on Sunday in an effort to attract more fans, is the first of back-to-back elite events as the big names swing into action on the hard courts of North America.
A mummified infant discovered wrapped in a newspaper older than 80 years in the ceiling of a Toronto home was likely stillborn and displayed no obvious signs of foul play, authorities said. The mummified remains were wrapped in a copy of the long defunct Mail and Empire newspaper dated September 15 1925.
Mounties in eastern Canada were called in to help round up rogue honeybees after a palace coup this week caused a split in the hive, a spokesperson said on Thursday. "The beekeeper came to us and said that he lost half of his bees, about 30 000 to 40 000 of them," said Cheryl Decker, spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
As criminals increasingly hijack digital technologies, police in Canada are turning to an unusual candidate pool for crime fighters: the virtual world of Second Life. The game, created by Linden Lab in 2003, is one of the most popular digital virtual worlds on the internet, with more than eight million users worldwide.
A new pizza restaurant in western Canada that delivers pornography with every pie has once again proven the adage: sex sells. Porno Pizza in Winnipeg has been doing brisk business since opening last week, titillating the hungry with racy pictures at the bottom of every pizza box.
Two days before Canadians celebrated their nation, a survey published last Friday found that more than half of them would not be granted citizenship on the basis of their knowledge of their own country. According to the Ipsos Reid poll, 60% of Canadians would fail the citizenship exam, a necessary step for immigrants to be granted citizenship.
Healthcare officials in Calgary have unveiled a new ambulance designed for treating and transporting obese patients in an emergency, believed to be the first of its kind in this country. The ambulance is equipped with a wide stretcher and a mechanical lift that gently raises patients weighing up to 450kg into the carriage.
Britain’s Lewis Hamilton sits eight points clear at the top of the Formula One world championship after a dream weekend in Montreal and he is now concentrating on winning the driver’s title. Hamilton, racing for McLaren Mercedes, achieved his first Formula One victory after keeping his cool as his competitors skidded, crashed and faltered in Sunday’s dramatic Canadian Grand Prix.
McLaren rookie Lewis Hamilton celebrated his first Formula One victory on Sunday, keeping his cool to win a chaotic Canadian Grand Prix and take an eight point lead in the world championship. ”I knew I was ready for something, it was just a matter of where and when,” said the 22-year-old Briton.
A Klingon is an unexpected sight in Canada’s vast western plains, among the lonely oil wells, cow pastures and wheat fields. But hundreds of the ferocious warriors from Gene Roddenberry’s fictional <i>Star Trek</i> universe gathered in Vulcan this weekend for the town’s annual <i>Spock Days and Galaxyfest</i> — a three-day space festival and <i>Star Trek</i> convention.
A Canadian man who was arrested driving a borrowed motorised wheelchair while drunk has been convicted of impaired driving, officials said on Thursday. Patrick Shanahan (35) was on his way home from a pub in a Toronto suburb in December 2004 at about 1.15am when he was arrested, said Corporal Jodi Dawson of the Peel Regional Police.
Canada has denied a visa to South African anti-apartheid leader Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was to be the keynote speaker at a fund-raising gala in Toronto on Tuesday, featuring an opera about her life. Immigration officials in Ottawa were not immediately available to comment.
People eat more when they are glued to the television, and the more entertaining the programme, the more they eat. It seems that distracted brains do not notice what the mouth is doing, said Dr Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago
Got change for a million? Canada does: the world’s biggest pure gold coin at 100kg. Already, three buyers have shelled out for one of the one-million Canadian dollar coins introduced last week. The Royal Canadian mint made the coins — 50cm in diameter and 3cm thick — mostly to seize the bragging rights from Austria.
Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood are among 15 authors selected as finalists for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, the award’s organisers said on Thursday. The £60 000 award is presented every two years to highlight a living writer’s continued contribution to fiction on the world stage.
Real men don’t pose for the cover of a Harlequin romance. And that’s something the publisher wants to change. Representatives of Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest publisher of romance novels, inspected the assets of about 200 men who lined up at a casting house on Saturday to prove they could flutter readers’ hearts.
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/ 31 January 2007
Twin 10-year-old boys threw a tantrum on Tuesday after being expelled from university and are seeking reparations for age discrimination from a human rights tribunal. With the help of their mother, Sebastien and Douglas Foster filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after the University of Ottawa expelled them.
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/ 22 January 2007
Canada will spend 30-million Canadian dollars (United States $25,5-million) to preserve the world’s largest coastal temperate rainforest, home to aboriginal communities and tall trees, the federal government announced last week. "We know there is a strong link between a healthy ecosystem, a healthy society and Canada’s economic prosperity," Environment Minister John Baird said in a statement.
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/ 16 January 2007
Cellphones that contain toxic chemicals are still being sold in Latin America and other developing regions. But thanks to strict European regulations, there are progressively fewer phones being made with cadmium, lead and other dangerous materials.
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/ 13 January 2007
A California skunk that hitched a ride aboard a commercial truck to Canada this month is causing a stink, unable to find safe passage back home. The 1,8kg female travelled nearly 5 000km in five days without food or water in a sealed container, arriving slightly dehydrated but otherwise unharmed, a newspaper said.
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/ 8 December 2006
While world attention has focused on the HIV/Aids pandemic, public health experts say that United States political interference and declining financial support for family planning, abortion and prevention of other sexually transmitted infections has contributed to shockingly high death and disability rates in developing countries.
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/ 2 December 2006
Mixing a cocktail is no minor undertaking for a new breed of bartenders — it’s a matter of science. In kitchens and bars across North America, bartenders, or ”molecular mixologists,” are tinkering with liquid nitrogen, syringes and sodium chloride to make drinks while shunning powdered mixes and commercially flavoured alcohol.
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/ 27 November 2006
A prolonged drought in East Africa in the 1890s not only killed tens of thousands of the native Maasai people, it also reshaped the ecological and political landscape, according to new research published in the African Journal of Ecology. Droughts and disease outbreaks took place from 1883 to 1902.
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/ 24 November 2006
Iceland and a few other fishing nations have successfully undermined a three-year international effort to place a moratorium on destructive deep-sea trawling. Critics say the agreement reached at a United Nations meeting on Thursday puts the commercial interests of a few hundred trawlers ahead of the international community.
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/ 11 November 2006
Can global conflicts be settled by rock, paper, scissors? Maybe not. But organisers of a RPS tournament in Toronto this weekend want the centuries-old children’s game applied more often to settle lesser fights. "It’s the simplest, fairest way to make a decision or resolve a conflict," said tournament director Graham Walker.
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/ 2 November 2006
A Canadian man marked the 80th anniversary of the death of magician Harry Houdini on Tuesday by escaping from a sealed glass-and-metal box containing two tonnes of wet cement, according to reports. Dean Gunnarson was handcuffed, his body wrapped in chains and his cell locked shut with six padlocks.