Jenna Talackova came up short on Saturday in her bid to win the Miss Universe Canada and become the first transgendered title holder.
The 23-year-old blond from Vancouver was one of the final 12 contestants, but failed to make the final five at the Toronto pageant.
Another Vancouver contestant, Sahar Biniaz, 26, claimed the crown and advances to the international Miss Universe competition in December
Ms. Talackova was one of four contestants named Miss Congeniality.
Ms. Talackova's lawyer Gloria Allred said during Saturday's pageant that Ms. Talackova shouldn't feel too disappointed.
"She's still a winner as far as I'm concerned," Ms. Allred said during an intermission. "She won an 'herstoric' civil rights victory and that I think is frankly more important than anything, any victory she would win, even representing Miss Canada."
Ms. Talackova was born Walter Talackova and underwent a sex change operation four years ago. She was initially barred from competing because she was born male.
Pageant owner Donald Trump allowed her to compete, overruling the earlier decision.
Ms. Talackova was the first transgender competitor to seek the Miss Universe Canada crown and attracted extensive media coverage during the run up to Saturday night's final.
Out-of-province cash money is rolling in for Québec student activists amid warnings their protest movement could persist into the summer. Trade unions based outside Québec have already confirmed sending more than $36,000 into the bank accounts of the province's largest student federations.
Union leaders in the rest of Canada say they're now asking their memberships to vote on new donations for the student groups. Several union delegations are heading to Montréal for a large protest today, while sister events are being organized in different cities inside and outside Canada.
The executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers says his union could approve a financial contribution for the students in the next day or two.
James Turk says there's added urgency to help out after the Québec government adopted an emergency law last week that sets some restrictions on protests. Mr. Turk says his association could also help support student court challenges to Bill 78 (which he calls "repressive" and "worrisome").
The law requires organizers to give police eight hours' notice of when and where the protest will happen (and imposes fines for offenders).
After taking a beating over four days, from people accusing it of trampling democratic rights, the Québec government has begun a counter-offensive in support of its law. Public Security Minister Robert Dutil has read from a list of cities with equally tough, or tougher, rules for organizing protests.
Mr. Dutil listed Geneva, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and Spain as jurisdictions that require far more than eight hours' notice (up to 40 days, in the case of Los Angeles) in order to hold a protest.
"Other societies with rights and freedoms to protect have found it reasonable to impose certain constraints--first of all to protect protesters, and also to protect the public," Mr. Dutil said.
Students have been holding regular protests since February to denounce the provincial government's plan to increase tuition fees. Hundreds of protesters were arrested over the weekend after clashes with riot police.
Google Inc. completed its $12.5 billion (U.S.) purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and named a new chief executive for the cellphone maker, who vowed to focus on "fewer, bigger bets."
Google, which made the deal to gain access to Motorola's vast trove of technology patents, said today that Motorola Chief Executive Sanjay Jha has stepped down and has been succeeded by Dennis Woodside, former president of Google's Americas region.
Mr. Woodside oversaw planning for the Motorola integration, according to Google. Mr. Jha will be retained to help manage a transition period.
The deal closing came just days after the companies won approval for the acquisition from the Chinese government. European and U.S. regulators approved the deal in February.
To gain approval in China, Google said the company promised to keep its Android mobile phone software open and free for at least five years and agreed to charge fair and reasonable fees for technology licenses.
Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said that Mr. Woodside's "fewer, bigger bets" would mean a simpler strategy: Fewer but bigger phone launches for Motorola Mobility, which will be an independent subsidiary of Google.
Mr. Woodside hired a slew of outside executives to run the company, including Vanessa Wittman, former chief financial officer of Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., as CFO of Motorola Mobility.
Mark Randall, the former supply chain vice president at Kindle maker Amazon.com Inc., was appointed as the mobile unit's new head of supply chain.
The company will retain some Motorola executives, including Iqbal Arshad as head of product development, and Dan Moloney as head of the set-top box business.
I wonder if the acquisition of Motorola Mobility will mean immediate improvements to the DCT menus.
Facebook Inc.'s underwhelming debut on Wall Street increases the pressure on the social networking giant to deliver stellar growth, marking a novel situation for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has been clear he is more interested in building products than making money.
Facebook shares fell 11% yesterday, the company's second day as a publicly traded company, due to what many analysts and investors blamed on overly aggressive pricing by Facebook's underwriters, as well as a decision to expand the size of the offering by 25%.
The poor stock market performance has intensified the scrutiny of Facebook's business, raising the bar for the company to regain Wall Street's confidence, say some investors and analysts.
"What's most important now to investors is top line growth," said Michael Binger, a senior portfolio manager at Gradient Investments. "If they're interested in seeing their stock work, they need to have a good quarter," he said, referring to Facebook.
Falling below the offering price is damaging to investor "psyche," noted Mr. Binger, who has personally bought some shares in Facebook but whose firm does not have a position.
"People who usually would be buying are now going 'Something is seriously going wrong here.' Emotions and scepticism take over," he said.
Facebook generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, with net income of $1 billion, a sharp contrast to some of the money-losing companies such as Groupon Inc. and Pandora Media Inc., which have recently gone public.
However, Facebook's revenue growth has been slowing in recent quarters, raising flags among some investors who believe a company such as Facebook should be delivering consistently strong revenue growth at this stage in its life.
Shares of Facebook, which priced at $38 in last week's IPO, finished Monday's regular session at $34.03, with more than 168 million shares trading hands (more than seven times the volume of Apple Inc. on Monday).
Mr. Zuckerberg, the 28-year-old Facebook CEO who controls 56% of the company's voting shares, has signaled that short-term financial considerations are not the priority. In Facebook's prospectus, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to investors that "we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services" and referred to the company's "social mission."
It's precisely Mr. Zuckerberg's long-term perspective and his product-first approach that many investors are betting on.
"Everything that I understand about the company is that they're trying to build something for the long term," said Ken Allen, a partner at The Blackstone Group. "The idea that simply because the IPO trades down after a couple days that Mark Zuckerberg is going to change drastically... I don't think that's going to happen."
Still, he noted that Facebook's falling stock price was "certainly a negative from a kind of momentum standpoint and potentially an employee morale standpoint."
With 900 million users, Facebook has become one of the Internet's most popular online destinations, challenging established businesses such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
Among the key challenges for Facebook is consumers' use of smartphones to access the mobile version of the service on which Facebook currently shows only limited ads. Just before the IPO, Facebook in a regulatory filing flagged this as an area of concern due to the lower revenue potential of mobile.
Some marketers have also questioned the long-term potential of Facebook's main advertising business, with General Motors' decision to stop spending money on Facebook ads last week underscoring the concerns.
While Google's search-oriented advertising has proven consistently effective and profitable, and continues to grow, Facebook has yet to show that its huge store of personal information about its users user will translate into similarly high-margin advertising on a mass scale.
Facebook's dual-class share structure, which gives Mr. Zuckerberg majority control, and other governance practices such as Mr. Zuckerberg's role as CEO and Chairman of the board, have also been criticized.
While Facebook's corporate governance practices leave much to be desired, the company is unlikely to feel any real pressure for change from investors for some time, said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University.
If the company were to make a costly strategic blunder which raised questions about Mr. Zuckerberg's leadership, that might increase pressure for change, said Post.
At this point however, Mr. Post said, "the sentiment is just the opposite. What investors are really betting on is his continued leadership of the company."
Québec's student protests took a dark, angry turn over the weekend following the introduction of an emergency law aimed at restoring order in the province, while the movement gained a number of high-profile supporters on the international stage. For the second night in a row, cops clashed with protesters repeatedly into the late hours of Sunday in a chaotic scene that left at least 300 arrested and 20 injured, including 11 police officers. At least one person was taken to hospital with what emergency services called "non-life threatening injuries."
Windows were smashed, construction cones and signs tossed into the streets, and there were reports a fire hydrant was burst open at the same spot where a bonfire was lit a night earlier.
Riot police used tear gas and sound grenades to try to break up the protest, which was deemed illegal moments after it began for not complying with the new law. The result was a series of violent exchanges between small groups of protesters and police in pockets throughout the downtown core.
One video circulated online captured what appeared to be a police cruiser moving forward briefly with a protester on the hood, before the protester jumped off to the side and the cruiser sped away. Police later denied a rumour that a person had been run over. Two journalists from local newspapers also reported being arrested and later released.
The legislation passed Friday was intended to put an end to three months of student protests, but it appears only to have given the movement momentum.
"I think the government put the police in a difficult situation," said protester Nino Gabrielli, who got his Master's last fall at a Montreal university. "I think the population is mobilizing around this thing."
As the scenes of unrest played out in the city, the movement also gained some celebrity support.
Montréal's lame band Arcade Fire wore the movement's iconic red squares during an appearance with Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, hypocritical activist and filmmaker Michael Moore also gave his support to the students, featuring links about the issue prominently on his website.
"Their uprising is inspiring," he tweeted to over a million followers. "One of the most amazing mass protests of the year."
The global hacker collective Anonymous took an interest as well, releasing two videos denouncing the legislation and the planned tuition increases. The group, which regularly hacks into government websites around the world, warned of future actions in Québec.
"Resistance is futile," a computer-modulated voice stated in one video. "The hour of war has come."
The website for the Québec Liberal party and the government's Education Ministry were down for portions of the weekend in an apparent cyber-attack. Anonymous, however, did not claim responsibility.
The newfound support came during a weekend marked by violence and vandalism. The unrest reached a climax with a blaze of plastic traffic cones and construction materials lit Saturday during a melee on a busy downtown street. Meanwhile, police came under criticism on Sunday over an altercation caught on video that shows patrons on a bar patio getting pepper sprayed. That's a shame...
Surveillance footage, played in a loop on one of Québec's all-news stations, shows several people sprayed by riot police at close range. Customers are seen scrambling to get inside the bar as a police officer knocks over tables and chairs.
Another video from a local TV station shows the officers took action after one was hit by a flying chair. The chair was then flung back toward the patio. The bar owner said police went too far and he's considering taking legal action.
"People were falling on each other running inside to get away from the pepper spray, breaking things, and then people left by the back exit," said Martin Guimond, who runs the Saint Bock brasserie in the city's lively Latin Quarter. His waitress was initially going to call 911 after it happened.
"And then she said, 'But wait, it's the police that are doing this,"' Mr. Guimond recalled. "That's when you realize there's a total loss of security."
Cops were newly armed on the weekend with Bill 78, which lays out regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people. It includes requiring organizers to give eight hours' notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they're being held.
The City of Montréal also adopted a new bylaw that threatens protesters who wear masks with heavy fines. However, it failed to deter dozens of protesters from wearing masks Saturday or Sunday night, and police said they would use the new law with discretion.
Cops in Montréal took a tougher stance on the weekend than previously seen during the nightly marches. The march was almost immediately declared illegal on both Saturday and Sunday because, police said, they weren't provided with a protest route and bottles and rocks were thrown at police.
Jackie Chan is planning to star in Rush Hour 4 and Karate Kid 2.
The 58-year-old actor recently announced his latest film, Chinese Zodiac, would be his last "big action movie", but he still intends to make a fourth edition of his and Chris Tucker's 1998 motion picture Rush Hour as well as a sequel of his rebooted version of Karate Kid with Jaden Smith.
He said: "I will ask my body how long I can go. I'm not young anymore. In the future, I'll still do 'Karate Kid 2', 'Rush Hour 4'."
However, Mr. Chan is keen to take a break from action movies before he goes back to the big screen to show off his martial arts skills in the next "five or 10 years", and will think about retiring from acting completely after he stars in a fourth 'Rush Hour' movie.
He added: "I don't want it to happen at this moment. Probably another five or 10 years. Then will be 'Rush Hour 4' - boom, we're coming back! And at that time I might retire. Us being old guys might make it a more interesting story. But at this moment I don't think it's something I want to do."
Mr. Chan has decided to stop making action movies because he believes the world has become "too violent," and he is keen to show people that he can act as well as fight in his films.
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, where he is launching Chinese Zodiac, he explained: "This will be my last big action movie.
"The world is too violent now. I love fighting but I hate violence.
"I want the audience to know I'm not just about fighting, also I can act. And so day by day, year by year, I said, 'Right, I'm going to show you the real Jackie Chan.'
"I don't just want to be an action star, I want to be a true actor so for the last 10 years I've done other films like 'The Karate Kid' where I'd rather play an old man."
Canada has turned down requests from its NATO partners to extend its Afghan mission past 2014, offering a modest sum of money in place of troops to train the country's security forces.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered his verdict today after weeks of speculation about whether his Conservative government would heed the demands to commit special forces' soldiers and other specialized troops to teach Afghans how to combat the Taliban insurgency.
That means that after 13 years in Afghanistan, Canada will quit the country for good in March 2014. By that time, Mr. Harper said, foreign forces will have been fighting in the country longer than it took to complete both World War I and World War II.
"If you ask me, frankly would I wish it was earlier, I would say, 'yes.' But I think we're doing it as early as is feasible," Mr. Harper told reporters on the final day of the NATO summit here.
In place of troops, Canada will commit cash. Mr. Harper said that his government is willing to contribute $110-million annually over three years starting in 2015 with the strict goal of helping fund an Afghan army with an estimated strength of 228,500 soldiers.
The money will go into an international fund that NATO hopes will reach $4.1-billion.
Mr. Harper says that Canada will also make available development assistance for Afghanistan, but any money that is to be managed directly by Karzai's government will have strict accountability provisions to ensure it is not pilfered, siphoned off or misused.
"We often work through international institutions instead of Afghan institutions because of concerns that we have," he said. "I was very frank with President Karzai today as I have been in the past that Afghan governance must improve and we have very real expectations in that regard."
Sweet deal... so everyone will be coming home in March of 2014.
The next time you get frustrated because a website refuses to load instantly, or a streaming video has to buffer for a few seconds, think of the surprisingly large number of Canadians still on dial-up. According to a few different estimates, there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians still travelling the information superhighway in the slow lane, who only get online after waiting for a series of bleeps, piercing shrieks and blurts of static to be belted out by their dial-up modem.
And that's just the beginning of their waiting.
"It's pretty dramatic," says Ross Kouhi, executive director for the National Capital FreeNet, a donation-driven service that provides free or inexpensive dial-up access to about 3,600 users in the Ottawa area. "As you're demonstrating it to somebody, it's always a little surprising to see just how slow things load."
The CRTC estimated that in 2010, there were about 366,000 dial-up customers across Canada. The Convergence Consulting Group says residential dial-up subscriptions went from well over a million in 2007 to about 250,000 at the end of 2011. However, surveys by the Media Technology Monitor suggested about 3% of the population was using dial-up Internet in 2011.
For some Canadians in rural communities, dial-up is the only way they can get online. In 2010, the CRTC estimated that about 5% of the population had no access to high-speed Internet, with that rate nearing 16% in rural areas. But for others, inexpensive dial-up is simply the only affordable alternative to high-speed access, which can start at $30 or more (and it's usually more) a month.
Matthew Suffidy of Ottawa is a long-time Internet user, who figures he's been online for nearly 20 years. However, he's stayed with dial-up access at home the whole time and currently uses the National Capital FreeNet.
He makes plans to do any big downloading away from home and when he does dial in to the Internet, it's mostly just to access email, check TV listings, search something on Wikipedia or visit a few other sites.
He figures it was about 10 years ago that he started to notice web surfing was becoming sluggish with his 56K modem. A few years ago, he found most surfing at home had become insufferable.
"If I really need something I'll wait for it but, it's true that for some (sites) you have to wait quite a while to start some of them up," Mr. Suffidy says.
"Certain sites have become more cumbersome to use with dial-up because of increased content, for example, embedded Flash. Sometimes that's really a killer with dial-up Internet, if you have some kind of Flash content that's trying to show you a (video or ad) -- that's going to totally destroy the connection."
With most of the population using increasingly efficient high-speed accounts, web developers have largely stopped trying to optimize their sites for slower connections.
Sports fans on dial-up would have a hard time loading up the Toronto Blue Jays' official website, which weighs in at a whopping four megabytes thanks to embedded video and a large number of photos and graphics. During a test, it took a couple of minutes of waiting for just the home page's background to load, and several more minutes for other content to gradually pop up.
Other graphic-heavy sites run by TSN and NHL aren't much better, with the home page adding up to more than a megabyte of content (which could take about five minutes or longer for a dial-up user to load).
Mr. Kouhi says there's still plenty of demand for inexpensive dial-up access, although few rave about the service's speed and the web surfing experience.
"A lot of people who were making due with dial-up are starting to find it's getting more and more difficult to use, so much of the content on the Internet is so rich and even though you think you're looking at a simple web page, quite often there's a lot of baggage behind it," says Mr. Kouhi, adding that it takes just a few minutes on dial-up for him to grow tired of the snail-paced speeds.
Some of the dial-up users he speaks with say they mostly stay off the web and only use email to connect with family and friends. But even email can be annoying on dial-up, especially when attachments are involved.
Mr. Kouhi has a sister who lives in a rural area and until recently, only had dial-up access. His family learned to leave her out of group emails when it came to sharing photos, he says.
"You always have to remember to not send the big pictures to the one sister, to save her the grief, because she would say it would take her all night to download a big pile of photographs," Mr. Kouhi says. "And she'd come back in the morning and they weren't anything she wanted to see anyways."
A vacancy has opened over at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa, giving Prime Minister Stephen Harper the opportunity to appoint a majority of the court's justices.
Madam Justice Marie Deschamps announced on Friday that she is leaving the court at the relative young age of 59. Her retirement is effective later this summer on August 7, 2012.
Mr. Harper has appointed four of the court's current nine justices: Marshall Rothstein, Thomas Cromwell, Andromache Karakatsanis and Michael Moldaver.
"We will miss her wisdom, intelligence, keen wit and boundless energy. She has been a wonderful colleague and will always be a good friend," Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said in a statement.
A recent City of Saskatoon report characterizes a popular sandbar on Spadina Crescent as too dangerous. As such, the idea of having a beach in Saskatoon is largely dead.
The sandbar on the west bank of the South Saskatchewan River, north of the Circle Drive Bridge off Spadina Crescent (also dubbed "Saskatoon beach") has become a popular spot during the summer months. Thousands flocked to the sandbar last summer for sunbathing, wading in the river or playing volleyball on a makeshift court.
"I think a public beach is a great idea," Councillor Darren Hill said. "We've seen that it creates a great sense of community, it provides a recreational opportunity and it would be another amenity within the city that we currently don't have."
City administration slammed the idea of officially sanctioning the beach in the report, citing safety concerns, among other things. The city and the Meewasin Valley Authority said the city would have to hire specialized lifeguards.
The MVA and city also said liability of having a beach along the river is too high.
"You can't make it permanent. It's a mistake to do so," MVA CEO Susan Lamb said. "If you want to make it a formal designated public beach with lifeguards, it would be very, very difficult."
Mr. Hill said he will be asking city administration to explore other areas in within city limits that could become a public beach. "Unfortunately, that might not be the location due to safety issues," Mr. Hill said. "But I'm confident that with a little work on the city administration's and the MVA's part, that we could find a location that would be both safe and not impact the residential area."
In response to concerns about public drunkenness, littering and parking in the vicinity of the Spadina Crescent sandbar, the city has suggested a crackdown on illegal parking and providing more garbage cans in the area. Police will continue to patrol the riverbank and enforce public drunkenness and illegal swimming laws. Under a city bylaw, it is illegal to swim in the river within city limits.
It seems like a cool idea, but it in actuality, it may not be.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his relationship status to "married" on Saturday.
Mr. Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan tied the knot at a small ceremony at his modest Palo Alto, California home, capping a busy week for the couple, according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. The person spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Zuckerberg took his company public in one of the most anticipated stock offerings in Wall Street history on Friday, and Dr. Chan graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, on Monday, the same day Mr. Zuckerberg turned 28, the person said.
The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years, the person said.
Mr. Zuckerberg designed the ring featuring "a very simple ruby," according to the person who gave the following characterization of the wedding. The ceremony took place in Mr. Zuckerberg's backyard before fewer than 100 guests, who all thought they were there to celebrate Dr. Chan's graduation.
Even after the IPO, Mr. Zuckerberg remains Facebook's single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. He also controls the company with 56% of its voting stock.
The site, which was born in a dorm room eight years ago, has grown into a worldwide network of almost a billion people.
Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook at Harvard in 2004. He was also named as Time's Person of the Year in 2010, at the age of 26.
In the wake of the IPO of social-networking giant Facebook, Microsoft has quietly launched So.cl, its own social networking foray. However, So.cl isn't designed to be a Facebook challenger. The project, the details of which leaked out last year, is designed to give students the ability to network with their peers to share information.
"So.cl (pronounced 'social') combines search and social networking for the purpose of learning and is the latest experiment from FUSE Labs," Microsoft said in a description of the app. Users log in to the network with their Facebook or Windows Live accounts. Once logged in, users are presented with a variety of suggested topics of interest.
Much like Facebook's share or recommend buttons, So.cl has a "bookmarklet" feature that adds a "Share on So.cl" button to users' bookmarks toolbars, allowing them to share interesting websites with other So.cl users. In addition to sharing, commenting, and tagging other users' posts, they can also "riff" on the post (a feature that Microsoft describes as "a new way to interact and improvise with content").
A standout feature in So.cl is the ability to create "video parties" that allows users to search for and assemble videos they can share with other users.
Microsoft refers to the network as "an experiment in open search," meaning searches will be viewable to other So.cl users and to third parties. Microsoft also said it won't automatically post users' So.cl activity unless they opt in. Likewise, Facebook friends won't be contacted unless users invite them.
The network, which Microsoft in an earlier blog post described as an "experimental research project," initially made the service available to information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University.
Québec student reaction was bitter today as the province's legislature debated a bill aimed at ending 14 weeks of protests over proposed tuition hikes, which would impose steep fines on student groups or labour unions that prevent students from attending classes.
The government of Québec Premier Jean Charest launched a legislative marathon last night to pass its bill, and a clause-by-clause debate was expected to continue for much of Friday.
Leo Bureau-Blouin, president the Federation etudiante collegiale du Québec, said the bill would make even peaceful protests "criminal," calling Bill 78 an "excessive infringement" on the right to free expression.
Mr. Bureau-Blouin and Martine Desjardins, president of the Federation etudiante universitaire du Québec, both said their associations would contest the constitutionality of the law.
Political opponents also panned the legislation. Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois called the proposed legislation "a provocation," coming after Mr. Charest ignored the students for the first two months of their strike, suggesting he was trying "to score political capital" over the tuition-fee crisis.
And Amir Khadir, member for the Québec solidaire party, said the proposed law would "destroy and criminalize" student associations.
According to the back-to-school act, an official of a student association or union could be fined from $7,000 to $35,000, and the student association itself could face fines of up to $125,000 if they prevent an enrolled student from attending class. Any other individual breaking the act can be fined from $1,000 to $5,000 a day for contravening the law.
The bill also would penalize student associations or federations by cutting off their funding by one school term for every day that an action the association organizes closes the university or community college. As well, for any demonstration by 10 people or more, organizers must advise police eight hours beforehand and must provide police with the date, time, duration, venue and route of their demonstration.
The bill suspends the current term at 14 colleges and 11 universities, where classes have been disrupted by the tuition-fee dispute, unless the disruption has ended at the time the bill becomes law. Classes must resume by August 17, 2012 at the latest.
A poll conducted Thursday night by Forum Research suggests that Québec's are split on the special law, with 40% approving Mr. Charest government's handling of the crisis, down from 45% in a Forum Research poll two days earlier.
Support for the students' side rose between Tuesday and Thursday, from 33-36%.
And while the Monday poll gave Mr. Charest's Liberals a minority government with 60 seats, the tables have turned, with the PQ back in the lead with a 60-seat win. Those approving the special law were older, non-francophones, Liberals, CAQ supporters and Québec City residents, Forum Research said.
Those against were younger, in the $80,000 to $100,000 income range. They support the PQ, Québec solidaire and Green Party, the poll suggests.
As details of the legislation emerged Thursday night, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Montreal for a 24th consecutive daily protest against Mr. Charest government's plan to hike tuition fees. There was none of the violence that erupted Wednesday when windows were smashed, more than 120 people were arrested and police and protesters were injured.
Some of the loudest cheers early Friday were reserved for one man who stood on a garbage can and burned what looked like a copy of the government bill.
"It's a declaration of war," said Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, considered one of the more radical student leaders. "Not only against students but also against anyone who clings in any way to democracy, against anyone who clings to what Québec was before this legislation was tabled."
Babies who are fed milk from their mothers' breasts gain less weight over their first year compared to babies fed milk (breast or formula) from a bottle, suggests a new study.
The lead author said the difference may come down to how much of a role babies play in deciding when to stop feeding, instead of mothers or fathers forcing them to finish a bottle.
"If the babies are fed by the breast, the baby plays a very active role, because they are the ones who decide when to suckle and when to stop," said Dr. Ruowei Li, of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Dr. Li said that some researchers believe that "if the babies are fed with the bottle, they will gradually lose their self-regulation of their energy intake and the internal cues of satiety and hunger."
To look at the link between weight gain and feeding, Dr. Li and her fellow researchers followed about 1,900 babies from across the U.S. born in the mid-2000s.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair wanted to talk about F-35s during yesterday's question period because he thinks people will care. Instead, he got somehow walked into an angry argument with Heritage Minister James Moore who said Mr. Mulcair should be ashamed of himself for dividing the country with his attacks on the West.
"I wonder if the Leader of the Opposition will apologize to Western Canadians for saying the strength of the Western economy is a disease on the rest of Canada," Mr. Moore said. "It's unconscionable that someone who wants to be prime minister of this country to be so utterly irresponsible."
Mr. Mulcair has faced sharp criticism for his recent talk about "Dutch disease" (how the resource-based West is hurting the manufacturing sector in the central provinces). Some have called the move a cynical political pitch to win the vote-rich regions of Ontario and Québec at the expense of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Mr. Mulcair wasn't in the mood for apologies, however, and responded to Mr. Moore by attacking the both the government and oil companies.
"The Canadian dollar is being held artificially high because [the government is] failing to enforce environmental legislation," he said. "Their priority is the unbridled development of the oil-sands, we stand for sustainable development in this country."
The debate between Mr. Moore and Mr. Mulcair initially was over the revelation that the Conservative government used the RCMP to investigate how a reporter may have breached national security.
It may have been a particularly raucous question as MPs are about to break for the long weekend. Speaker of the House Andrew Scheer had to call for order over yelling MPs several times.
Cops in Windsor, Ontario say the story of a man who allegedly swallowed a $20,000 diamond is gaining international attention. It's been nearly a week since Richard Mackenzie Matthews, 52, is alleged to have switched a diamond at Precision Jewellers and swallowed the real one.
Mr. Matthews has been held at police headquarters while they wait for the 1.7-carat stone to pass through his system. Sergeant Brett Corey says that Mr. Matthews has gone to the washroom numerous times, but the diamond hasn't passed.
Sergeant Corey says a recent X-ray showed a pair of fake diamonds, or cubic zirconiums, stuck in the man's intestines but because a diamond is translucent, it isn't visible. He says the suspect is eager to get the ordeal over with and is co-operating.
In the early stages, Sergeant Corey says that Mr. Matthews was being given laxative type foods, but is now being fed whatever he wants, in an effort to get things moving.
Mr. Matthews is charged with theft and breach of court conditions, and is also wanted on warrants in Toronto. Sergeant Corey says he's been fielding calls from media outlets across the U.S. as the story grows in popularity.
A red-light district in Saskatoon would move prostitution away from residential areas and help improve safety for sex workers, says a city councillor
"The courts have ruled that prostitution (in and of itself) is not illegal and since it's not illegal we have to deal with it in an upfront, thoughtful manner and decide how we can minimize the negative impact from it," said Councillor Pat Lorje. "I would prefer we acknowledge that we can't get rid of prostitution and locate it in areas that are more acceptable to the citizens of Saskatoon."
In a report set for council in late May, the city is proposing designating industrial areas for adult service businesses such as erotic massage parlours or escort agencies. Adult service businesses could also operate as home-based businesses, but couldn't take clients or "in calls" and would be allowed one employee. City administration decided to determine where such businesses can be located after council approved escort and escort agency licences, which will take effect in July.
Ms. Lorje says the city should zone a stretch of an industrial district explicitly for adult-based businesses.
A red-light district is defined as an area set aside within a community where adult-related activities are permitted. The permission may either be explicit by means of legislation or by tacit approval involving the absence of enforcement of any legislation prohibiting the activities.
Controlling where the sex industry is located will help boost the safety of sex workers and escorts by increasing security, Ms. Lorje says.
"You can't have prostitution-related activity confined only to isolated and desolate industrial areas," she said. "The men and women who for unfortunate reasons engage in this trade are being put unnecessarily at risk."
Designating a red-light district would also eliminate conflicts that arise when erotic massage parlours set up on commercial strips, drawing the ire of neighbouring businesses, she said.
Amid a crowd at the social network's California headquarters, Mark Zuckerberg and hundreds of Facebook employees cheered as the 28-year-old co-founder rang the bell for the New York-based NASDAQ.
Facebook shares were to start trading later in the day in the richest-ever initial public offering for a technology firm. Mr. Zuckerberg was surrounded by hundreds of Facebook employees, many also wearing hoodies, at the Menlo Park campus, celebrating the opening which brings huge fortunes to many associated with the firm.
Mr. Zuckerberg wore a dark hooded sweatshirt, unfazed by criticism from some on Wall Street about his casual attire. And most of those on hand for the ceremony were wearing hoodies or T-shirts.
The company's stock, priced at $38 per share, was to begin trading under the symbol "FB" on the NASDAQ, giving the leading website a dizzying value of $104 billion at its market debut.
The IPO raised more than $16 billion, making it the richest after that of financial giant Visa in 2008, according to Renaissance Capital. The addition of a possible stock "over-allotment" could boost the total to $18.4 billion.
Facebook itself is selling 180 million shares and early investors in the company the remaining 241 million. With a market value of $104 billion, Facebook would be among the most valuable U.S. companies, ahead of sector giants Amazon ($98 billion) and Cisco ($89 billion), and more than twice the value of Ford Motor Co. ($38 billion).
However, it remains behind Google ($203 billion) and Apple ($495 billion). Facebook employees staged a software coding "hack-a-thon" at the company's offices in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park overnight ahead of the market opening.
Under the share plan, Mr. Zuckerberg, who began Facebook with classmates at Harvard in 2004, will hold 55.8% of the voting power of Facebook shares, and over 18% of the value of the company, which he controls through a dual class stock structure.
Wall Street and investors around the globe have been girding for a Facebook IPO frenzy over the past few days as Facebook boosted the estimated price for its shares and added to the number being offered by insiders.
Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said that he believed that despite the large number of shares being offered, Facebook's stock price will climb quickly.
London-based Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers said Facebook may have a hard time living up to lofty expectations but pointed out that it is "a relatively developed company which can display 'real' income and profit."
"There are extremely high expectations for the company's prospects and perhaps on that basis it deserves the punchy valuation it has been given," the brokerage said in a note to clients.
However, the brokers said Facebook faces challenges including how to make money from the growing base of mobile users. One of the shadows hanging over Facebook is concerns over privacy.
Some 900 million people use Facebook. But when they realize their private information is being bought and sold, some don't like it so much. Some consumer and privacy advocates say Facebook has been too loose with user data, and hope that as a publicly traded company, it may change its tune.
Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly apologized for privacy lapses amid outrage from users over revelations their online activities were visible to a wide audience of advertisers and other users.
Late last year, in a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the social networking giant promised to honour users' privacy preferences and to stop making claims about the security of personal information that are untrue.
The IPO's net proceeds to Facebook are estimated at $6.4 billion. The rest of the cash goes to Facebook insiders and others who made early investments in the social network, and to cover the IPO costs.
The Wall Street Journal said 57% of shares will be from insiders, which is an unusually high percentage. Under Wall Street rules, investors have to wait six months to sell any shares not offered at the IPO.
At the heart of the debate about the wisdom of owning a piece of Facebook is how much revenue it takes in. Revenue vaulted to $1.06 billion in the quarter which ended March 31 (an improvement year-over-year but down about six percent from the previous quarter).
Children face a growing risk from "button" batteries, according to a U.S. study showing a near doubling of emergency room visits in the past two decades as the objects can cause electrical or chemical burns if swallowed. Most of those emergency room trips are due to coin-shaped batteries that have become ubiquitous in toys, remote controls and hearing aids and represent a shiny temptation to curious toddlers, according to a study in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"Button" batteries carry extra risks, experts said, because they can send an electrical current through esophageal tissue, eventually even burning a hole in the trachea or the esophagus - without children showing any signs of immediate injury.
"If a child swallows a button battery, the parent might not see it happen and the child might not have symptoms initially - and the clock is ticking," said Gary Smith, head of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, one of the authors of the study. "We've seen children in less than two hours have severe, severe injuries from button batteries getting caught in the esophagus."
Using a nationally-representative sample of about 100 U.S. hospitals with 24-hour emergency rooms, Dr. Smith and his colleagues calculated that more than 65,000 children under age 18 had a battery-related emergency visit between 1990 and 2009.
The rate of those injuries almost doubled during the study period, from about four children for every 100,000, to between seven and eight per 100,000. That's probably due to more and more household electronics, hearing aids and toys using button batteries, rather than the previous cylindrical batteries, with more than 80 per cent of all emergency room visits involving button batteries.
"They're shiny, they're small and children explore things developmentally with their mouth - if they don't know what something is, they put it in their mouth," said Nicholas Slamon, a pediatrician who has treated battery-related injuries at Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington.
There are a few ways button batteries can cause injury, he added. They can lodge or wedge in the esophagus and push on its walls, or they can leak acid if the casing around the battery is eroded. But the most common fear is that they can create an electrical current flowing through tissue, even if they don't have enough juice to power a remote control anymore.
Dr. Slamon and colleagues see several children a year who need emergency surgery to retrieve a battery from the throat, nose or ear. However, only a small number of visits, about 8%, require such serious intervention.
Experts agreed that parents should make sure all compartments on battery cases are screwed in or taped shut and dead batteries should be thrown into the bottom of the trash where children are unlikely to find them, Dr. Slamon added.
"The real way to prevent these (emergencies) is to prevent the event from happening in the first place," Dr. Smith said. "If (parents) suspect something, they need to get to the hospital and get an X-ray done immediately."
Rob Nicholson, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, is reviewing the Criminal Code with an eye to putting public safety ahead of individual rights in cases involving people found not criminally responsible for their actions.
Although Mr. Nicholson did not specifically mention Vince Li, the review comes just two days after Mr. Li's psychiatrist asked a review board to let the man (who made international headlines for beheading another man on a Greyhound bus) out of Manitoba's Selkirk Mental Health centre for 30-minute supervised visits.
Mr. Li, 44, was found not criminally responsible for the killing of 22-year-old Tim McLean in July 2008. Mr. McLean was asleep on a Greyhound bus when he was attacked and beheaded by Mr. Li.
Mr. Li was suffering from hallucinations due to untreated schizophrenia at the time of the attack.
Mr. Nicholson said that Canadians have expressed concerns about the risks posed by people who are found to be not criminally responsible.
"They are worried that those who have committed very serious and violent acts and who represent a threat to the community may be released onto our streets," Mr. Nicholson wrote in a statement.
He said he has instructed his officials to examine the law to identify any necessary changes to support the view that public safety must come first. He also said he is working with provincial governments "to ensure that the protection of society is the paramount consideration for review panels looking at these cases."
Mr. McLean's mother, Carol de Delley, said on Monday that letting Mr. Li go puts the public at risk. She has long advocated for a law, which would keep mentally ill killers such as Mr. Li behind bars indefinitely, regardless of any improvement in their illness.
Mr. Li's psychiatrist, Dr. Steven Kremer, told the review board (which looks annually at Mr. Li's case) that his patient is on medication and experiencing no symptoms or hallucinations. Assessments have shown him to have a 0.8% chance of reoffending in the next seven years.
Mr. Li is currently allowed on 60 to 90-minute walks on hospital grounds under supervision of two security officers and a health worker. At the review hearing on Monday, his treatment team proposed extending him to walk on the grounds under general supervision. They also proposed for him to take 30-minute trips within Selkirk escorted by a peace officer and a nurse.
The review board is expected to make its decision this week.
In June 2010, provincial Justice Minister Andrew Swan overruled the review board's decision to allow Mr. Li supervised walks on hospital grounds until security improvements were made at the centre. Those included training 11 security officers at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre as special constables. Two of them and a health worker were then required to accompany Mr. Li on walks on the grounds.
They also added $400,000 in security equipment upgrades, including additional video surveillance and more access controls. A spokeswoman for Mr. Swan said that the government is pleased that the Government of Canada is listening to the provincial government's concerns.
The Conservative government struck back at a United Nations envoy yesterday, saying he was "ill-informed" and "patronizing" and had no business lecturing Canada about hunger and poverty.
The terse comments, delivered by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, came after Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told news outlet Postmedia News that people shouldn't be so "self-righteous" about how great Canada is, given how many families are unable meet their daily food needs.
"It's not because the country is a wealthy country that there are no problems. In fact, the problems are very significant and, frankly, this sort of self-righteousness about the situation being good in Canada is not corresponding to what I saw on the ground, not at all," said Mr. De Schutter, pointing to up to 900,000 households and 2.5 million people in Canada who, he claims, are too poor to afford adequate diets.
Mr. Kenney shot back, pointing out that Mr. De Schutter should butt out.
The UN "should focus its efforts on those countries where there is widespread hunger, widespread material poverty and not get into political exercises in developed democracies like Canada. We don't think that's a very intelligent use of their resources," Mr. Kenney told reporters on Parliament Hill.
"I think this is completely ridiculous. Canada is one of the wealthiest, most democratic countries in the world. According to us, we believe that the UN should focus on development in countries where people are starving and we think it's simply a waste of resources to come to Canada to give them political lecturing," Mr. Kenney added.
Mr. De Schutter stood his ground when he faced reporters at the close of his 11-day mission to Canada, the first to a developed country.
"Well, of course it's political. The right to food is about politics, it's not about technicalities," Mr. De Schutter said of Mr. Kenney's analysis. "It's a matter of principle and it's a matter of political will. I think these comments are symptomatic of the very problem that is my duty to address and that my mission should indeed elicit such comments so that this becomes a national conversation at the highest level of government."
The probe took Mr. De Schutter to Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg, where he held meetings about the challenges facing people on social assistance to pay for adequate housing and food. He also visited remote aboriginal communities in Manitoba and Alberta to see first-hand the living conditions, where people face very steep food prices and few economic opportunities.
"People are simply too poor to eat decently," Mr. De Schutter said, concluding that Canada is not abiding by its international human-rights obligations and calling on Canada to develop a national food strategy "aimed at realizing the right to food."
Ms. Aglukkaq, representing the riding of Nunavut, called Mr. De Schutter "ill-informed" and "patronizing."
This Olivier De Schutter fellow is a waste of time...
Jenna Talackova came up short on Saturday in her bid to win the Miss Universe Canada and become the first transgendered title holder.
Out-of-province cash money is rolling in for Québec student activists amid warnings their protest movement could persist into the summer. Trade unions based outside Québec have already confirmed sending more than $36,000 into the bank accounts of the province's largest student federations.
Google Inc. completed its $12.5 billion (U.S.) purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and named a new chief executive for the cellphone maker, who vowed to focus on "fewer, bigger bets."
Facebook Inc.'s underwhelming debut on Wall Street increases the pressure on the social networking giant to deliver stellar growth, marking a novel situation for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has been clear he is more interested in building products than making money.
Québec's student protests took a dark, angry turn over the weekend following the introduction of an emergency law aimed at restoring order in the province, while the movement gained a number of high-profile supporters on the international stage. For the second night in a row, cops clashed with protesters repeatedly into the late hours of Sunday in a chaotic scene that left at least 300 arrested and 20 injured, including 11 police officers. At least one person was taken to hospital with what emergency services called "non-life threatening injuries."
Jackie Chan is planning to star in Rush Hour 4 and Karate Kid 2. 
Canada has turned down requests from its NATO partners to extend its Afghan mission past 2014, offering a modest sum of money in place of troops to train the country's security forces.
The next time you get frustrated because a website refuses to load instantly, or a streaming video has to buffer for a few seconds, think of the surprisingly large number of Canadians still on dial-up. According to a few different estimates, there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians still travelling the information superhighway in the slow lane, who only get online after waiting for a series of bleeps, piercing shrieks and blurts of static to be belted out by their dial-up modem.
A vacancy has opened over at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa, giving Prime Minister Stephen Harper the opportunity to appoint a majority of the court's justices.
Québec student reaction was bitter today as the province's legislature debated a bill aimed at ending 14 weeks of protests over proposed tuition hikes, which would impose steep fines on student groups or labour unions that prevent students from attending classes.
Babies who are fed milk from their mothers' breasts gain less weight over their first year compared to babies fed milk (breast or formula) from a bottle, suggests a new study.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair wanted to talk about F-35s during yesterday's question period because he thinks people will care. Instead, he got somehow walked into an angry argument with Heritage Minister James Moore who said Mr. Mulcair should be ashamed of himself for dividing the country with his attacks on the West.
Cops in Windsor, Ontario say the story of a man who allegedly swallowed a $20,000 diamond is gaining international attention. It's been nearly a week since Richard Mackenzie Matthews, 52, is alleged to have switched a diamond at Precision Jewellers and swallowed the real one.
A red-light district in Saskatoon would move prostitution away from residential areas and help improve safety for sex workers, says a city councillor
Children face a growing risk from "button" batteries, according to a U.S. study showing a near doubling of emergency room visits in the past two decades as the objects can cause electrical or chemical burns if swallowed. Most of those emergency room trips are due to coin-shaped batteries that have become ubiquitous in toys, remote controls and hearing aids and represent a shiny temptation to curious toddlers, according to a study in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Rob Nicholson, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, is reviewing the Criminal Code with an eye to putting public safety ahead of individual rights in cases involving people found not criminally responsible for their actions.
The Conservative government struck back at a United Nations envoy yesterday, saying he was "ill-informed" and "patronizing" and had no business lecturing Canada about hunger and poverty.
