Get holiday baking on a roll with snowballs

RCMP defends N.S. shooting response

HALIFAX - Under fire for how they alerted the public to a 12-hour massacre that took the lives of 22 people, the Nova Scotia RCMP defended their actions Wednesday, saying their use of Twitter was effective.

Since the horrific string of killings started Saturday night and stretched into Sunday morning, questions have been raised as to why the province did not use an emergency alert system to transmit warnings to Nova Scotians' cellphones and television screens.

RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather said Twitter messages from the RCMP started Saturday at 10:26 p.m., when the Mounties warned of a firearms complaint in Portapique, a tiny village about a 130-kilometre drive north of Halifax.

Leather read from a statement Wednesday making it clear he was aware the RCMP's communication with the public was under scrutiny.

Commanders and Jets square off in a matchup of lowly teams looking toward next season

WASHINGTON (4-10) at NEW YORK JETS (5-9)

Sunday, 1 p.m. EST, CBS

OPENING LINE: Jets by 3, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.

AGAINST THE SPREAD: Commanders 5-8-1; Jets 5-8-1.

The Aqua Townhomes a fine option for first-time, move-up buyers

This is a challenging time for buyers looking for a starter or move-up home.

Two factors are making it incredibly difficult for first time buyers or young families to find an affordable home.

First, there’s the local real estate market, where competition for resale homes has been frantic due to a lack of inventory.

There have been several instances in which homes in desirable areas have sold for $100,000 or more over the asking price, with more than 20 offers, leaving many a first-time buyer out in the cold.

French tandem cements place among greatest ice dance duos with Olympic gold medal

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron stayed for another four years after being edged out by Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at 2018 Games.

Racist ingredients baked into Manitoba's 150th birthday cake

The steeple’s cross-tipped spire stabbed the sky, rising high above the domed architecture of old St. Boniface College like the outstretched fingers of the faithful grasping for heaven.

The flames worked quickly, their appetite for destruction insatiable as they licked their way up walls and down halls, shattered stained-glass windows and sucked up oxygen like kindling until the small blaze transmogrified into an inferno.

It was 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 25, 1922.

A Jesuit brother awoke in a flash, startled by what he thought was the sound of an explosion. Instead, he found a fire ripping through the oldest post-secondary institution in Western Canada, which had stood on the grounds of Winnipeg’s Provencher Park since 1880.

Remembering when, where we were when Putin invaded Ukraine

As a child, I learned history through books and movies but lived it vicariously through the eyes of my father, gathering up all his where-were-you-whens with an insatiable hunger. Every time I learned about an event that had shaped the course of the world, my young mind did a hasty calculation and, having verified he’d been alive at the time, I’d ask him the question.

Where was he on May 8, 1945, when news broke that Germany had made an unconditional surrender? He was young, almost too young to remember, except in fragmented pictures: the kitchen of his little house in small-town Michigan, the hem of his mother’s dress, newscasters declaring victory on the radio, people running down the street in jubilation.

Where was he on Nov. 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated? In a classroom at the American university where he was teaching, finishing up a lecture. He went home through stunned streets and yelled at the dog; my mother, seeing this, snapped back that the dog didn’t do it, so he sat and wept and felt the world he knew fall apart.

By the time I was eight years old, I had committed most of these stories to memory. None were dramatic. None of them had my father at the heart of what was the most violent or important or transforming. He was, like many folks in North America and all of those who are lucky, only a second-hand witness to the greatest machinations of geopolitical trauma.