Thousands of Raptors fans left in the dark as Bell, Rogers outages affect Game 5

Blockade halts rail traffic west of Winnipeg

RM OF HEADINGLEY — It was a satisfying sight for Harrison Powder: a freight train stopped, hundreds of metres up the track from a blockade erected by a group of demonstrators.

Powder was among a group of 10 along a windswept country road, about 25 kilometres west of Winnipeg, protesting RCMP enforcement of a court-ordered injunction in northern British Columbia and the arrests of community leaders from Wet’suwet’en Nation.

A spokesman for CN Rail said train movements on the line stopped Wednesday because of the blockade.

“Canada should remember this, so should the RCMP and industry the next time they go invading Indigenous territory trying to force a pipeline through,” said Powder, a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Alberta, and a Winnipeg resident. “They should remember what happened here with this incident, because it can happen again.”

Veterinarian petitions Ottawa to consider four-legged patients in legal cannabis regime

An Ontario veterinarian has launched a formal petition asking the government to include animals and the physicians who care for them in Canada's cannabis regulations.

"What we're hearing repeatedly from Health Canada... is that the entire framework surrounding cannabis legalization was focused on human consumption," said Sarah Silcox, who practices palliative and hospice care for companion animals in Ajax, Ont., and serves as president of the Canadian Association of Veterinary Cannabinoid Medicine.

"And so they hadn't even considered animals being involved in this, or veterinarians being involved in the medical side of things. And what that's left us with is this catch-22, because now it's perfectly legal for a Canadian adult to go out and purchase cannabis, and to give it to their animal, and yet veterinarians have no legal pathway to authorize its use... Therefore we're really limited in terms of the education and support that we can give our clients to ensure that they're doing that safely."

The online petition on the House of Commons e-petitions website was launched May 27, and already has more than 500 signatures — enough to require the government to table an official response in Parliament.

A guide to some of television’s greatest Christmas sitcom episodes

Many of us return to the well-loved holiday specials every year — your Rudolphs, your Charlie Browns — but the Christmas Episode is also tradition.

Most sitcoms do them; in the days before streaming, they aired in the weeks leading up to The Big Show.

Encountering a Christmas episode in reruns in July or during an unseasonal series binge watch is a bit like eating a candy cane in April, but it’s no accident that many holiday episodes end up being the classic, well-quoted ones. The holidays, with their pressures and relatives and parties, are loaded with comedic potential, sure, but they’re also a chance for a sitcom to show its heart.

Thanks to streaming, you can pretty much watch anything, anytime, so we’ve assembled a little advent calendar of seasonal episodes to get you into the spirit.

Track records keep falling in fast Tokyo Games

Sweden’s Madelene Sagstrom grabbed the first-round lead with a five-under-par round of 66, the conversation mostly revolved around the 42 C conditions in Tokyo.