Toronto Caged:

Toronto Uncaged

It seems much faster. The wife tells me it’s not sexy and magic. I beg to differ.

a few pictures from todays sunny outing…

Look, green grass. In January!!!?!!?!!!

Northern Manitoba residents desperately hope for some cold weather, because milder than normal temperatures are leaving the opening of northern ice roads in doubt.

The two recent deaths of Canadians in Mexico has many B.C. residents rethinking travel to that country.

It may be that one of Oscar Bartholomew's trademark bear hugs sparked the tragic chain of events that led to his beating death in a police station in a quiet hamlet Grenadians view as the cradle of their revolution.

Strangers in Toronto are helping to honour Leanne Freeman, a 23-year-old homicide victim originally from Winnipeg, with a permanent memorial in the area where she was killed.

The Harper government has hired a Toronto theatre expert to inject a little war into this year's Canada Day bash on Parliament Hill.

A fish farm opponent is slated to appear at the Supreme Court of B.C. to defend himself against allegations he defamed the province's second largest salmon-farming company.

This is the last day hunters can legally shoot moose in two national parks in Newfoundland.

A large crowd packed the Halifax waterfront Sunday to wave goodbye to their loved ones as HMCS Charlottetown departed for a mission in the Mediterranean Sea.

Archbishop Martin Currie has issued a message to Newfoundland and Labrador parishioners about the Raymond Lahey child pornography case, expressing "sadness, disappointment and anger."

Little bit more Toronto, day and night….

Fans filing into the Bell Centre on Saturday hoping for a Montreal Canadiens win were met by protesters with another goal in mind: They want the organization to be more French.

The widower of Jassi Sidhu, whose mother and uncle have been arrested in connection with her slaying, still fears for his own life, according to the co-author of a book about the case.

A barn fire north of Lethbridge, Alta., killed 21,000 chicks just after 9 a.m. Saturday.

Newlywed defence minister Peter Mackay, once known as Canada's most eligible bachelor, made public a picture of his marriage to Nazanin Afshin-Jam, on his official Facebook page Saturday morning.

While a crisis continues to grip families living in the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat, at least one Conservative MP acknowledges there is a communications problem between the First Nations leadership and the federal government.

Brian Topp, who is seeking to lead the federal New Democratic Party, says if he became prime minister he would reverse the decision to end the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Dorothy Woods — the Saskatoon woman police say was murdered — was looking for help prior to her death, a friend says.

A new zipline between St. John's and Petty Harbour is stirring up some controversy.

So, I’m about to dive right in with both feet. I’ll let you all know how it goes, well, unless I get stinking rich of course, because then it’s time to purchase an island. And then, anything goes….

Click here to try it out with me!

Former provincial auditor general John Noseworthy's examination of spending by the band council in Sheshatshiu has resulted in more questions than answers.

The Conservative government quietly planned to sell a pair of historic paintings by Quebec modern master Alfred Pellan after replacing them with a portrait of the Queen in the main reception area at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is investigating after a Quebec mayor and talk show host said on the air that Israel doesn't deserve to exist.

Lobster fishermen in P.E.I. and New Brunswick are disputing the number of traps set on each line.

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence has sent Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan a five-page letter expressing her frustration at the conduct of the federal government and its third-party manager.

The mother and uncle of Jassi Sidhu, a Canadian woman killed in India in June 2000, have been arrested and are being held in custody in B.C. pending an extradition hearing.

A skier from the United States has been killed in an avalanche in Golden, B.C.

The ex-husband of Ximena Osegueda was one of the two men who found the body of the slain University of British Columbia student in Mexico last week, CBC News has learned.

A new study suggests that people in certain Toronto neighbourhoods are at a higher risk for cardiac arrest.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed seven new senators Friday, including an elected senator from Alberta and Ottawa's police chief.

George, the cat who went missing for three months after getting loose at the Edmonton International Airport, was reunited with his owner in Fort McMurray Friday.

A man was killed and a police officer slashed with a knife Friday at Montreal's Bonaventure metro station, a public transit hub serving the Via Rail train station.

At least two construction workers were injured and one was rushed to hospital following an accident at a subway tunnel excavation site near Toronto's York University.

The Ontario government has scored a victory in its ongoing battle to recoup $50 billion in health-care costs from tobacco companies.

NDP members will choose their candidate Monday to succeed the late Jack Layton in his Toronto-Danforth riding, and the five-way contest is shaping up to be a tough one.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his government will look into measures to prevent the approval process for energy projects from being "hijacked" by opponents of the developments.

About 60 workers at Ottawa's Salvation Army Booth Centre went on strike at 3 p.m. Friday but the shelter assures it will continue to fully serve the homeless.

A man had to be rescued from an ice floe in the Bay of Chaleur in McLeods on Friday.

A sentence will be handed down Monday as pre-sentencing wrapped up in the case against Sommit Luangpakham, found guilty in the 2009 Kanata, Ont., crash that injured five cyclists.

The war of words between the Attawapiskat First Nation and the federal government continues.

The Pope has named Toronto Archbishop Thomas Christopher Collins as one of 22 new cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican has announced.

A Tim Hortons official is commending a Fredericton man for his plan to document all the used coffee cups that he finds, but says it's difficult to change consumers' mindsets.

A wayward puffin that had been found on the streets of Montreal and made national headlines when a rescue operation flew it to Newfoundland was released into the ocean east of St. John's Friday.

A forensic audit ordered by Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose of some $6 billion in federal building maintenance contracts has found overcharging, missing documentation and record-keeping errors.

The "Ramnit" worm has infected about 45,000 Facebook accounts stealing usernames and passwords primarily in the U.K. and France.

Another female RCMP officer has come forward with a lawsuit claiming years of harassment by a male colleague and inaction on the part of her superiors when she complained.

A man accused of playing a role in the Rwandan genocide could be deported next week unless he convinces Canadian officials he won't receive a fair trial at home.

Paramedics found high levels of carbon monoxide in the blood of four Ottawa family members, but treated them at the scene with high concentration oxygen.

An increase in part-time work offset a loss of 26,000 full-time jobs in Canada in December — but it wasn't enough to stop the unemployment rate from ticking higher to 7.5 per cent.

The Earth's crust bends and deforms in response to ocean tides, and this barely noticeable warping affects other bodies of water as well as the land, according to a new study. With exacting precision, scientists in the UK have measured the way Loch Ness sloshes around as all of Scotland bends under the strain of the North Sea's tides. The lake could be used like a level to gauge the planet's response to the back-and-forth movement of all its water.

Eliminating the tidal effects of the sun and moon, not to mention hydroelectric facilities, scientists found the 21-mile-long loch surface goes up and down by 1.5 millimeters, according to a report published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. That's because the whole of Scotland heaves in response to ocean tides.

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Philip Woodworth and colleagues from the UK National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool placed six pressure sensors a few meters under the loch surface and measured the change in the water above them for 201 days, the BBC says. They noticed clear spikes attributable to the moon and sun, but there was a much fainter spike, too - stemming from the tilting of the land. The measurement was precise to one millimeter across the loch's entire surface, quite a feat.

The goal is to use this information to learn something new about the Earth's crust, the team says. Maybe it is more malleable than we thought.

[BBC]

Long checkout lines, difficult-to-find salespeople, and unfriendly customer service rank among Canadians' biggest pet peeves when it comes to retail service, according to a poll done for CBC Marketplace.

You have to hand it to the Japanese; Last March's Tohoku earthquake and associated tsunami wasn't the first natural (or unnatural, for that matter) disaster to befall the island nation, but as just as before the country isn't simply rebuilding. Instead, it's rethinking and improving upon what was there before. The latest example: Japan's agriculture ministry is building a fully robotic experimental farm on a swath of farmland inundated by the tsunami.

After salt is removed from the soil of the 600 acre plot, the agriculture ministry's plan calls for unmanned tractors to work fields lit by LEDs that will keep insects at bay in lieu of pesticides. The robotic tractors will till, plant, and tend to rice, soybeans, wheat, and various fruits and vegetables that will then also be harvested by their robotic overseers.

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Getting more out of each square foot of agricultural real estate isn't just a Japanese imperative, of course. As the global population increases, increasing the per-acre yield of agricultural space is becoming more and more crucial. Leave it to tech-savvy Japan to understand fundamentally that technology is the way forward in farming.

As such, the "Dream Project," as the robo-farm initiative is known, will be built by partners like Panasonic, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, and Sharp--technology companies most of us would probably wouldn't associate with agriculture. But perhaps we should start thinking that way. The Japanese certainly are.

[AFP]

A University of British Columbia student who once lived in Montreal was found stabbed and strangled with her hands tied behind her back near a Mexican beach, in a slaying local news media say may be linked to organized crime.

A mosque in Gatineau, Que., that has been a target of vandalism was spray-painted with graffiti overnight Thursday, prompting a condemnation from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Shayna Conway, the only survivor of a murder-suicide in Alberta last month that claimed four young people, is determined to attend a memorial service for two of the victims on Jan. 14.

HMCS Charlottetown and its crew of approximately 250 will depart Halifax on Sunday for a six-month mission to the Mediterranean Sea.

CBC News has released a video showing a black Vancouver man being beaten by an alleged white supremacist who has since been charged in connection with a string of apparently racially motivated attacks.

Moncton started phasing fluoride out of its water supply in December, a process that will take another six weeks.

Nearly 2,000 people — about half of them firefighters and emergency personnel — gathered in Enderby, B.C., on Thursday to honour a local volunteer firefighter who died battling a fierce blaze last week.

Two government audits show Ottawa is earmarking about a billion dollars a year to build and repair First Nations infrastructure, but its myriad of officials are not keeping proper tabs on how the money is spent.

The crew of a 737 that crashed on approach to the airport in Resolute, Nunavut, tried to abort the landing attempt two seconds before impact, according to a progress report by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

Jinagh Navas-Rivas, the former foster son of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, is in police custody after an arrest warrant was issued on him for drugs and weapons charges.

Members of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers are celebrating the end of the Canadian Wheat Board's monopoly power.

Three people arrested in a home invasion robbery of world poker champion Jonathan Duhamel appeared in Quebec court Thursday seeking bail.

A Federal Court of Canada judge has set aside the 2010 Natuashish band council election in Labrador, saying the vote "was not conducted in accordance with the principles of natural justice."

Officials and residents are beginning to pick up the pieces and survey the damage done by three large grass fires that left wides swaths of scorched earth in southern Alberta Wednesday.

A depleted Canadian team dug into its reserves to beat Finland 4-0 and capture the bronze medal at the world junior hockey championship Thursday.

Scientists have produced the world's first chimeric monkeys, developed from stem cells harvested from separate embryos. They contain genetic material from as many as six genomes. The infant rhesus monkeys are totally healthy and could hold great promise for future stem cell research in primates, researchers say. They also carry an interesting and controversial message for future stem cell research: Those cultured stem cell lines in labs throughout this country, such a crucial scientific tool and such a cultural flashpoint, may not be as potent as the ones inside embryos.

The monkeys, named Roku, Hex and Chimero, were born at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University. They're the result of mashups made from separate rhesus monkey embryos. Researchers took very early stem cells, called totipotent stem cells, from separate developing embryos and basically glued them together, implanting the mixed embryos into surrogate mother monkeys. The cells - from totally different sources - didn't fuse, but worked together in harmony, forming fully fledged, normal, healthy animals. Watch them do baby monkey things in the video below.

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Chimeras are nothing new to science - chimeric mice are created all the time to form knockout models with deleted gene sequences. Nobody would ever create a chimeric human, but chimeric mice and other animal models can be used to study diseases and regenerative medicine.

Scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov tried to reproduce the mouse method in monkeys, implanting cultured embryonic cells into existing monkey embryos, but it didn't work. It turns out primate embryos prevent cultured embryonic stem cells from becoming integrated the way they do in mice. This is a surprising and important finding, and Mitalipov said scientists need to study why it's the case.

Dividing Cells in an Early Embryo:  © OHSU/Mitalipov Lab

This has implications for ongoing stem cell research. This research suggests that existing embryonic stem cell lines, some of which are two decades old, might not be as potent as the stem cells found inside new embryos. These are used as standards for comparison with induced pluripotent stem cells, a type of adult cell (often derived from skin cells) that can be forced to become a stem cell. But if they aren't implantable in primates, and primates require totipotent zygotic cells, well, this raises some interesting questions.

"If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do," Mitalipov said. "We need to study them in humans, including human embryos."

The study appears in the early online edition of the journal Cell.