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Social-media creators, podcasts won’t be regulated under Liberal online streaming law

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

OTTAWA — Canadian Heritage has released its final policy direction for the Liberals’ controversial Online Streaming Act, which aims to modernize the country’s broadcasting laws. The final direction for the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to implement the legislation was issued today.This marks the end of the government’s direct role with the law formerly known as Bill C-11, the Liberal government’s second attempt to bring major online streaming services into Canada’s broadcasting system alongside traditional media such as TV and radio. The final policy direction explicitly instructs the CRTC to not impose regulations on social-media content creators or podcasters. The law will require online broadcasters to contribute to the creation, production and distribution of Canadian content.It also seeks to support Indigenous content and original French-language programing.This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14,...

A woman killed in Belgium decades ago has been identified when a relative saw her distinctive tattoo

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

LONDON (AP) — A woman killed 31 years ago in Belgium has been identified after a family member recognized details of her tattoo, Interpol said Tuesday.The police organization said the cold case was known as “the woman with the flower tattoo” because of the distinctive art on her left arm. Her body was found in a river in Antwerp in June 1992.She was finally identified recently as Rita Roberts, a 31-year-old British woman, following a joint appeal for help in more than 20 cold cases by Interpol and police in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.A family member in the U.K. recognized details of her tattoo — a black flower with green leaves — on the news and contacted police, officials said.The appeal for information in May covered 22 cases across the three countries. Most of them involved women who were killed.Roberts had moved to Antwerp from Cardiff in Wales. She last had contact with relatives with a postcard she sent in May 1992.Her family said that although the news was difficult...

Airstrike kills renowned doctor in Gaza and relatives who sought shelter together

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

CAIRO (AP) — It was the call Shaymma Alloh had been dreading, the news from Gaza she hoped would never come: The house where 26 members of her family were sheltering was hit by a missile strike.Among the four confirmed deaths from the strike late Saturday was her 36-year-old brother, Hammam Alloh, a renowned physician who stayed in northern Gaza to help treat patients at Shifa Hospital, which has been encircled by Israeli troops for days.He and many of his relatives were staying at his in-laws’ home near the hospital because they had nowhere else to go. And that’s where surviving family members found their bodies. One was disemboweled by the blast, two more buried in rubble, she said.The dead included Shaymma Alloh’s father and two in-laws, she told The Associated Press by phone Monday as she pieced together the tragedy from her home in the U.S. She declined to disclose her exact location out of concern about possible repercussions.Her brother was a well-known kidn...

‘A noisy rock ‘n’ roll’: How growing interest in Formula One is felt across the music world

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Beyond the engineering, the athleticism, the speed, the luxury — fans love the sound of Formula One.The fierce rhythms of a V6 turbocharged hybrid engine; the sticky staccato of a rushed downshift; sexy, loud zooms. There’s a real musical appreciation for the elite motorsport. Engines are described using RPMs, the same way vinyl records are.It is no wonder that F1 has long been an enthusiasm of musicians and music fans for decades — the Beatles ’ George Harrison wrote “Faster” about the series, what he called “a noisy rock ‘n’ roll”; the same spirit that inspired a Mario Andretti namecheck in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Award Tour.” But in the last few years, an accelerating interest in F1, particularly among young Americans, has made its influence on the music world — and vice versa — impossible to ignore.There’s Bad Bunny ’s “Monaco” and Carín León’s “Por La Familia,” both of which feature Red Bull driver Sergio “Checo” Perez in their videos. The up-and-coming indie...

Biden, Xi early headliners as leaders gather in California for Asia-Pacific summit

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO — Its 21 member economies represent nearly three billion people and 62 per cent of the world’s GDP, generating US$30 trillion in global trade last year alone. But as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders gather in San Francisco, the focus — for now, at least — will be on just two of them.U.S. President Joe Biden sits down Wednesday with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, hoping to iron out some of the kinks in their fraught bilateral relationship.White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan calls it “intense diplomacy” aimed at ensuring that healthy competition doesn’t devolve into dangerous conflict.Experts say that dynamic will likely make it difficult for Canada to make much of a geopolitical splash in the Bay Area this week. But federal officials say they expect tangible progress from  a busy slate of bilateral meetings during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s three-day visit. The summit comes one year since the Liberal government unve...

Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Let Us Descend’ is among the finalists for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Jesmyn Ward’s slave narrative “Let Us Descend” and Jake Bittle’s exploration of climate change’s impact “The Great Displacement” are among the finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence. The medals are presented by the American Library Association and given for fiction and nonfiction, with winners in each category receiving $5,000.On Tuesday, the library association announced that Ward’s novel was a fiction nominee, along with Amanda Peters’ “The Berry Pickers” and the mixed media “Denison Avenue,” by author Christina Wong and illustrator Daniel Innes. In nonfiction, the finalists are Bittle’s “The Great Displacement,” Darrin Bell’s memoir “The Talk” and Roxana Robinson’s investigation into the foster system, “We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.”Finalists will be announced Jan. 20. The awards, made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York, were estab...

Global hacker investigated by federal agents in Puerto Rico pleads guilty in IPStorm case

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A man with Russian and Moldovan citizenship pleaded guilty to illegally taking control of thousands of electronic devices worldwide to rent them to clients who want to hide their internet activity, U.S. prosecutors in Puerto Rico said Tuesday.The scheme ran from at least June 2019 to December 2022 and generated more than half a million dollars, with unidentified customers paying hundreds of dollars a month for the service, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Puerto Rico said in a statement. Authorities said Sergei Makinin developed and deployed malicious software to gain control of people’s devices via an extensive network known as a “botnet,” which was dubbed IPStorm. He then sold illegal access to the hijacked devices to clients seeking to keep their Internet activities private, advertising that he had more than 23,000 “highly anonymous” proxies available worldwide, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.The case was investigated by the FBI’s San Juan o...

Parkland expects $6B in cumulative available cash flow from 2024 to 2028

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

CALGARY — Parkland Corp. says it expects $6 billion in cumulative available cash flow from 2024 to 2028 that it plans to use to fund dividends, share buybacks, growth and debt reduction.The company says it plans to use 25 per cent of the expected cash on dividends and share buybacks and 25 per cent to pay for organic growth initiatives.Parkland says the priority for the remaining $3 billion or 50 per cent will be reducing its leverage ratio to the low end of its two to three times target range by the end of 2025. Beyond that and looking forward through 2028, it says it expects capital will be allocated toward opportunities that generate the greatest shareholder returns.For 2024, Parkland says it expects adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $2 billion and capital expenditures between $475 million and $525 million.Parkland has made a number of changes to its business since last March, when U.S.-based activist investor Engine Capital LP publi...

US climate report offers dire outlook, with temperatures expected to cross key thresholds

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

A major federal climate report shows that the U.S. is unlikely to meet national or international climate targets and warns of dire consequences for the country.The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released Tuesday, finds that the planet is very likely to heat up by an average of between 4.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 and 4.0 degrees Celsius) compared to pre-industrial times — outpacing goals of both the U.S. and international community.While it puts the likely warming window in that range, the report notes that scientists cannot rule out further warming and “potentially catastrophic outcomes.”“Higher values are not definitively ruled out, and feedback loops such as changes to cloud cover may lead to more warming in the future,” it said. It noted that “tipping points” such as the loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, loss of the Amazon rainforest and cloud disappearance risk creating further accelerations to planetary warming. Yet, ...

Unlikely duo continue viral Thanksgiving meal - here's how to join

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:24:15 GMT

Above: Keys to cooking a tasty turkey - Chef Brandon reveals his secrets.PHOENIX, Ariz. (WJW) — Nearly eight years ago, an Arizona grandmother named Wanda Dench sent a text message to what she believed was her grandson’s phone number, inviting him over for Thanksgiving dinner. However, the text ended up going to a 17-year-old teen she didn’t know. Thanksgiving deal: Meijer offering 59-cent per pound turkeys As the story goes, Jamal Hinton was at school when he received the message, and he responded trying to clear up the confusion. To his surprise, he was invited to Dench’s house for a plate, and to her surprise, he came over.Dench lost her husband to COVID in 2020, but she and Hinton continued their tradition. The unlikely friends confirmed they are meeting up again this Thanksgiving, as they have annually since 2016. This year, however, they're inviting others to join in the tradition.Hinton announced on social media that he and Dench are hosti...