The latest numbers on COVID-19 in Canada

Industry minister to meet Rogers CEO after outage

TORONTO - Canada's industry minister will convene a meeting with the leader of Rogers Communications in the wake of a massive outage that paralyzed the company's network and hampered several crucial services, his office announced on Sunday, even as some customers continued to report service disruptions.

A statement released from the office of François-Philippe Champagne said he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecom leaders to discuss the importance of improving "the reliability of networks across Canada."

The statement said Champagne found last week's widespread service disruption — which lasted at least 15 hours and knocked out access to numerous law enforcement, health care and banking services — "unacceptable," adding he has expressed that view directly to Staffieri.

"These services are vitally important for Canadians in their day to day life and we expect our telecom industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve," the statement read.

Actor-director Cooper takes new approach to familiar tale

TORONTO — In his self-directed version of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper plays a rock star named Jackson Maine.

Note the name: it marks the character as a member of a cinematic lineage that descends all the way to 1937.

That year, the first A Star Is Born was made, with Frederick March in the role of alcoholic actor Norman Maine. The name stayed in 1954, when James Mason took over the role of an actor who first nurtures the career of Judy Garland’s up-and-coming star Vicki Lester before his drunken shenanigans threaten to derail it. By 1976, Kris Kristofferson played the role of musician John Norman Howard, a rock singer with a musical stake in the ascent of Barbra Streisand’s Esther Hoffman.

Cooper, 43, remembered the Maine name, but also brought his own vision as a first-time feature filmmaker to the new version, which opens Thursday, Oct. 4, opposite Lady Gaga after the originally designated director, Clint Eastwood, dropped out. While actors might not want to see different interpretations of a role, Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the past iterations.

Olympics Overnight: Speedskater Blondin wins silver in the mass start, Bowman narrowly misses podium in halfpipe skiing, Jamaica returns to bobsled track

Here’s what you missed overnight at Day 15 of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

NEW YORK - Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison's family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," the family announced. "The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing."

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her "visionary force" and for her delving into "language itself, a language she wants to liberate" from categories of black and white. In 2012, Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The trick to attracting wee, treat-seeking ghosts and goblins on Halloween is to go all-in

When I was a kid in the 1990s, I lived for Halloween.

My mom, a gifted seamstress, made all of my costumes. Deciding what I’d dress up as involved imagination and a trip to the fabric or craft store.

I loved flipping through the McCall’s patterns, and running my hands along the bolts of fabric that my mom would transform into Little Bo Peep, or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, or, one year, a Christmas tree — complete with the star on top. Old things were repurposed into new things.

Trick-or-treating was my... I don’t know, some sort of sports reference. The goal? Amass as much candy as possible. We’d troll the neighbourhood for hours, dragging snow-sodden pillow cases full of it. We’d target specific streets, lured mostly by the promise of full-sized chocolate bars.