Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the case of a man who said he lost interest in sex after he found two dead flies in an unopened bottle of drinking water. Waddah Mustapha sued the bottling company, saying he had suffered psychological damage, including depression, phobia, anxiety and damage to his sex life after the unpleasant 2001 discovery.
Food prices should stay high for the next two to three seasons but should eventually ease as stocks are replenished, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Thursday. Senior officials from the United Nations agency said corn prices would be supported this year by lower US plantings and by increased demand for ethanol.
Canada will probe how blueprints for the new headquarters of an elite military counter-terrorism unit ended up in a pile of garbage, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said this week. The Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, housed inside an armed forces base in Trenton, Ontario, is designed to cope with the aftermath of an attack using weapons of mass destruction.
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/ 24 January 2008
Canada on Wednesday bowed out of the United Nations 2009 conference on racism in Durban, saying it would likely ”degenerate into … expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism”. Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity Jason Kenney said that, to his knowledge, Canada was the first country to announce it would not take part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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/ 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.
Wild buffalo have taken over a small town in Canada’s far north, but unlike stray cats, pigeons, and other nuisance animals, these massive bovine pests can smash a truck, a local official said on Tuesday. The so-called wood bison wandered into Fort Providence in the North-west Territories in May.
United States aerospace giant Boeing is well placed to win a multibillion-dollar deal to provide strategic transport aircraft and helicopters to Canada. The Canadian government last week announced plans to purchase 16 helicopters for Can,7-billion (,2-billion), and 21 military transport planes for Can,3-billion (,4-billion).
The last male child in a family of many boys is likely to be gay, Canadian researchers have found. The study found that ”the most consistent bio-demographic correlate of sexual orientation in men is the number of older brothers [one has]” and not social influences.
More arrests were expected following the detention of 17 people over an alleged al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb high-profile targets in Canada. Amid media reports that the Canadian Parliament was on the group’s hitlist, Mike McDonell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said: ”This investigation is not finished.”
Twelve men and five youths arrested overnight face charges for plotting al-Qaeda-inspired ”terrorist attacks” on several locations in Ontario, Canada’s economic hub, officials said on Saturday. The group is alleged to have acquired three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a common fertiliser ingredient, and ”components necessary to create explosive devices”, police said.
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/ 24 January 2006
Canada’s next prime minister, Stephen Harper, promised on Tuesday to deliver change after voters swept his Conservatives to power, ending 12 years of Liberal rule. ”Tonight, friends, our great country has voted for change,” he told a cheering crowd in Calgary after his party emerged as the single largest grouping in the new Parliament.
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/ 10 January 2006
Colourful Canadian poet Irving Layton, twice considered for a Nobel Prize in literature for his provocative verse, died on Wednesday in Montreal at the age of 93, according to media reports. Layton, who once described himself as "a quiet madman, never far from tears", wrote about 50 books of poetry and prose over five decades.
A Federal Express cargo plane crashed in downtown Winnipeg on Thursday, killing the female pilot and narrowly missing nearby cars and buildings, police told Agence France Presse. The Cessna 208 was en route from Winnipeg in central Canada to Thunder Bay in neighbouring Ontario province when it went down at about 5.45am (10.45am GMT) in the trendy Osborne Village neighborhood of the city.
De Beers announced on Tuesday that it will team up with Canada’s Cameco Corporation to look for uranium for the first time in the far North. De Beers will allow Cameco to search its Aberdeen Lake property in the eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut for the mineral that is becoming increasingly valuable.
Canada’s placid and innocent society was shattered with the release from prison of the country’s most notorious female sex killer this week. Reporters camped for days outside the Ste-Anne-des-Plaines penitentiary north of Montreal, waiting for the release of Karla Homolka who raped, tortured and murdered teenage girls with her ex-husband Paul Bernado.
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/ 9 December 2004
Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that government plans to allow same-sex marriage are constitutional, in a landmark ruling in the long battle for equal rights for gays and lesbians. The government had asked the court to examine its Bill before it enters Parliament, a step expected to follow early next year.
Senior members of Canada’s three largest parliamentary parties called Wednesday on the Canadian government to indict Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A Canadian teenager, reported to be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be announced Friday, has apparently been advised to keep a low profile.