Aussie beauty queen turned boxer Avril Mathie reveals the VERY surprising effect breast reduction surgery has had on her fighting
An archbishop's knock formally restores Notre Dame to life as winds howl and heads of state look on
TORONTO — Canada's main stock index lost nearly 250 points Thursday, led by weakness in energy and base metals, while U.S. markets also fell. The S&P/TSX composite index closed down 246.99 points at 25,410.71. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 234.44 points at 43,914.12. The S&P 500 index was down 32.94 points at 6,051.25, while the Nasdaq composite was down 132.05 points at 19,902.84. “I think the markets had some time to now digest where rates could be going into the near term,” said Adelaide Chiu, portfolio manager, vice-president and head of responsible investing at NEI Investments. On Wednesday, the Bank of Canada announced an outsized half-percentage point interest rate cut and signalled it would slow the pace of cuts going forward. “With the policy rate now substantially lower, we anticipate a more gradual approach to monetary policy if the economy evolves broadly as expected," said Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem. And in the U.S., the monthly report on consumer inflation came in largely as expected, helping set the stage for a quarter-point cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve next week. Globally, interest rate cuts are moderating as inflation reaches targets, Chiu said. On Thursday, the European Central Bank cut rates by a quarter of a percentage point while the Swiss National Bank cut by half a percentage point. A year ago, market watchers couldn’t have predicted just how much equities would rise in 2024, said Chiu. “Earnings growth itself has been quite modest, but the market has done very well,” she said. “It’s really a movement of the interest rates that has really impacted valuations for a lot of these companies in the market.” Now, the news is largely focused on the incoming U.S. president and whether his threatened tariffs will come to pass, Chiu said. The Canadian dollar traded for 70.48 cents US compared with 70.65 cents US on Wednesday. The January crude oil contract was down 27 cents at US$70.02 per barrel and the January natural gas contract was up eight cents at US$3.46 per mmBTU. The February gold contract was down US$47.30 at US$2,709.40 an ounce and the March copper contract was down a penny at US$4.20 a pound. -- With files from The Associated Press This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 12, 2024. Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD) Rosa Saba, The Canadian PressHurricanes visit the Panthers in Eastern Conference actionIndiana tries to snap 3-game losing skid to Nebraska
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Xavier Bell had 29 points in Wichita State's 87-72 victory over Friends University on Sunday. Bell shot 11 of 16 from the field and 5 of 5 from the free-throw line for the Shockers (10-3). Quincy Ballard added 17 points, 16 rebounds and three blocks. Corey Washington totaled 16 points, seven rebounds and three steals. Collin Maclin finished with 18 points for the Falcons. Cahlese Lee added 11 points and two steals. Randy Woolf Jr. recorded 10 points, five assists and two steals. Wichita State took the lead with 8:30 left in the first half and never looked back. Bell led his team in scoring with 21 points in the first half to help put them up 45-36 at the break. Wichita State pulled away with a 12-1 run in the second half to extend a nine-point lead to 20. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .
Dallas plays Winnipeg after Marchment's 2-goal performance
VCE results start filtering in as biggest day for students finally arrivesFine Gael won 35 seats in the 2020 election, but 18 of those TDs did not seek re-election in Friday’s poll. An exit poll puts the party’s support at 21%, a fraction of a percentage behind the main opposition party Sinn Fein. Mr Harris, the outgoing Taoiseach, was elected with 16,869 first preference votes, well above the quota. He celebrated with his wife Caoimhe, his parents Bart and Mary, his sister Gemma and his political team at the count centre in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Ahead of his re-election, Mr Harris told reporters he was “cautiously optimistic” about the election result and said it was “clear that my party will gain seats”. “It’s also clear that Fine Gael will top the poll in at least 10 constituencies, many more than we did the last time, that we will gain seats in constituencies where we haven’t had seats in many years, like Tipperary South and Waterford, and that we will add second seats in other constituencies as well,” he said. “I think the people of Ireland have now spoken. We now have to work out exactly what they have said, and that is going to take a little bit of time.” In one of the five consecutive broadcast media rounds he did from the Greystones count centre, he said there were a lot of areas where there were “straight shoot-outs” between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for final seats. He described the Sinn Fein vote as “pretty significantly down”, the Fianna Fail vote as “marginally down” and the Fine Gael vote as “static” compared with its 2020 vote. He said it was “a very close, a very competitive election” and that “we haven’t seen a Sinn Fein surge or anything like it”. He said: “It was predicted by many that I would become the Taoiseach for a brief period of time, take over from Leo Varadkar, and then have to rebuild my party from the opposition benches as Sinn Fein led a government. “We don’t know what’s going to happen on government formation yet, but that is now looking less likely than it was.” He acknowledged that it was “a very difficult day” for the Green Party and paid tribute to their work in the coalition government, alongside his party and Fianna Fail. “Definitely, politics in Ireland has gotten much more fragmented,” he said. Fine Gael minister Helen McEntee said that her party’s campaign had been “positive”. “The feeling on the doors was very much that people were relatively happy with the government,” she said on RTE Radio. “It will come down to the last seats and it will come down to transfers,” she said of the final result, adding that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were performing better than the exit poll estimated.
Their ages vary. But a conspicuous handful of filmmaking lions in winter, or let’s say late autumn, have given us new reasons to be grateful for their work over the decades — even for the work that didn’t quite work. Which, yes, sounds like ingratitude. But do we even want more conventional or better-behaved work from talents such as Francis Ford Coppola? Even if we’re talking about “Megalopolis” ? If Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” gave audiences a less morally complicated courtroom drama, would that have mattered, given Warner Bros.’ butt-headed decision to plop it in less than three dozen movie theaters in the U.S.? Coppola is 85. Eastwood is 94. Paul Schrader, whose latest film “Oh, Canada” arrives this week and is well worth seeking out, is a mere 78. Based on the 2021 Russell Banks novel “Foregone,” “Oh, Canada” is the story of a documentary filmmaker, played by Richard Gere, being interviewed near the end of his cancer-shrouded final days. In the Montreal home he shares with his wife and creative partner, played by Uma Thurman, he consents to the interview by two former students of his. Gere’s character, Leonard Fife, has no little contempt for these two, whom he calls “Mr. and Mrs. Ken Burns of Canada” with subtle disdain. As we learn over the artful dodges and layers of past and present, events imagined and/or real, Fife treats the interview as a final confession from a guarded and deceptive soul. He’s also a hero to everyone in the room, famous for his anti-Vietnam war political activism, and for the Frederick Wiseman-like inflection of his own films’ interview techniques. The real-life filmmaker name-checked in “Oh, Canada” is documentarian Errol Morris, whose straight-to-the-lens framing of interview subjects was made possible by his Interrotron device. In Schrader’s adaptation, Fife doesn’t want the nominal director (Michael Imperioli, a nicely finessed embodiment of a second-rate talent with first-rate airs) in his eyeline. Rather, as he struggles with hazy, self-incriminating memories of affairs, marriages, one-offs with a friend’s wife and a tense, brief reunion with the son he never knew, Fife wants only his wife, Emma — his former Goddard College student — in this metaphoric confessional. Schrader and his editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. treat the memories as on-screen flashbacks spanning from 1968 to 2023. At times, Gere and Thurman appear as their decades-young selves, without any attempt to de-age them, digitally or otherwise. (Thank god, I kind of hate that stuff in any circumstance.) In other sequences from Fife’s past, Jacob Elordi portrays Fife, with sly and convincing behavioral details linking his performance to Gere’s persona. We hear frequent voiceovers spoken by Gere about having ruined his life by age 24, at least spiritually or morally. Banks’ novel is no less devoted to a dying man’s addled but ardent attempt to come clean and own up to what has terrified him the most in the mess and joy of living: Honesty. Love. Commitment. There are elements of “Oh, Canada” that soften Banks’ conception of Fife, from the parentage of Fife’s abandoned son to the specific qualities of Gere’s performance. It has been 44 years since Gere teamed with Schrader on “American Gigolo,” a movie made by a very different filmmaker with very different preoccupations of hetero male hollowness. It’s also clearly the same director at work, I think. And Gere remains a unique camera object, with a stunning mastery of filling a close-up with an unblinking stillness conveying feelings easier left behind. The musical score is pretty watery, and with Schrader you always get a few lines of tortured rhetoric interrupting the good stuff. In the end, “Oh, Canada” has an extraordinarily simple idea at its core: That of a man with a movie camera, most of his life, now on the other side of the lens. Not easy. “I can’t tell the truth unless that camera’s on!” he barks at one point. I don’t think the line from the novel made it into Schrader’s script, but it too sums up this lion-in-winter feeling of truth without triumphal Hollywood catharsis. The interview, Banks wrote, is one’s man’s “last chance to stop lying.” It’s also a “final prayer,” dramatized by the Calvinist-to-the-bone filmmaker who made sure to include that phrase in his latest devotion to final prayers and missions of redemption. “Oh, Canada” — 3 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (some language and sexual material) Running time: 1:34 How to watch: Opens in theaters Dec. 13, running 1in Chicago Dec. 13-19 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.AP News Summary at 6:13 p.m. EST
Stars arrive at the 2024 Royal Variety Performance after Queen pulls out
Lucky Eagle Casino & Hotel installs Quick Custom Intelligence’s Enterprise PlatformPHILADELPHIA — Saquon Barkley rushed for 167 yards to top 2,000 on the season, backup quarterback Kenny Pickett ran and threw for scores before departing with injured ribs, and the Philadelphia Eagles clinched the NFC East title by routing the Dallas Cowboys 41-7 on Sunday. Barkley has 2,005 yards and needs 101 in next week’s mostly meaningless regular-season finale to top Eric Dickerson and his 2,105 yards for the Los Angeles Rams in 1984. The Eagles led 24-7 in the third quarter when Pickett was drilled by defensive end Micah Parsons, ending his first start in place of the concussed Jalen Hurts. Tanner McKee, a career third-stringer, entered the game and the Eagles finished the drive with a field goal. McKee later threw two TD passes, a 20-yarder to A.J. Brown and a 25-yarder to DeVonta Smith, in front of a roaring crowd delighted to watch the Eagles dominate their fiercest rival to wrap up the division title and at least the No. 2 seed in the NFC. Hurts was injured in last week’s loss at Washington and remains in the NFL’s concussion protocol — he didn’t practice all week — which opened the door for Pickett to start. BUCCANEERS 48, PANTHERS 14: Baker Mayfield threw for 359 yards and five touchdowns to help Tampa Bay keep its division title and playoff hopes alive with a home blowout over Carolina. Tampa Bay’s fifth win in the past six weeks nudged the first-place Bucs a half-game ahead of Atlanta for the best record in the NFC South, with the Falcons set to play on the road later Sunday night at Washington. Atlanta holds the tiebreaker in the division race and can end Tampa Bay’s three-year reign as NFC South champions by beating the Commanders and winning again next week at home against the last-place Panthers. GIANTS 45, COLTS 33: New York snapped a franchise-record 10-game losing streak and ended Indianapolis’ slim playoff hopes as Drew Lock threw four touchdown passes and ran for another. New York earned its first home win of the season and it no longer has control of the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. Lock sandwiched touchdown passes of 31 and 59 yards to Malik Nabers around TD passes of 32 yards to Darius Slayton and 5 yards to Wan’Dale Robinson in leading the Giants to their first win since beating Seattle on Oct. 6. JAGUARS 20, TITANS 13: Mac Jones threw two touchdown passes, including one to standout rookie Brian Thomas Jr., and host Jacksonville beat Tennessee in the rain to sweep the season series for the fourth time in 30 years. Jones completed 15 of 22 passes for 174 yards, with most of them going to Thomas. The first-round draft pick from LSU finished with seven receptions for 91 yards. DOLPHINS 20, BROWNS 3: Tyler Huntley scrambled for a touchdown and threw for one while starting for Tua Tagovailoa, and Miami stayed in the playoff race heading into its season finale with a road victory over Cleveland. Miami needs to win next weekend at the New York Jets and hope the Broncos lose at home to Kansas City to get a wild-card berth. RAIDERS 25, SAINTS 10: Aidan O’Connell passed for two touchdowns, tight end Brock Bowers broke two rookie NFL records, and Las Vegas won for just the fourth time this season, beating struggling New Orleans at the Superdome. BILLS 40, JETS 14: Josh Allen threw two touchdown passes and ran for another score, and host Buffalo clinched the AFC’s No. 2 seed with a rout of New York. Get local news delivered to your inbox!
NoneISTANBUL Turkish Airlines' new routes to Australia are vital for the development and expansion of the country’s relations with Türkiye, said the consul-general of Australia in Istanbul. "We not only have people-to-people links that are refreshed and brought closer; the number of people that can travel directly is much further expanded," Tony Huber told Anadolu. "You’re seeing a lot of tourists both ways. You’re seeing a lot of businesspeople that are making their way now, and you’re also seeing a general business expanding between the two in different areas, services related," he said. Huber predicted that as familiarity between the two countries grows, prospective investment opportunities will surpass those of the past. At the end of November, Turkish Airlines began flying to Sydney — the air carrier's second destination in the country after Melbourne. Huber said Turkish Airlines’ connections offer the biggest network in the world, adding: "I think that Australian businesses see the opportunities." Trade relations On bilateral trade and economic ties, Huber said the trade level between Australia and Türkiye is rather modest, and that reflects the distance between the two countries and the fact that there are many other countries that Australia is supplying that are closer to it. But that paradigm is changing, and now the parties are seeing around 2-3 billion Australian dollars ($1.28 billion to $1.92 billion) in trade, and it is roughly balanced. "Last year, we had an increase in agriculture exports, and that reflected the fact that there were competitive and seasonal products that Türkiye needed at the time, and Türkiye has products evenly based across a wide range that are being sent to Australia," he said. There are also new areas of business that Türkiye is engaging with Australia in within the services area, and one of those is aviation, he underlined. He said cargo flights are also in the cards for business relations between Türkiye and Australia. Turkish Airlines is aware of the available slot range, and despite some residual restrictions delaying shipments in certain areas, the skies are largely open, offering numerous opportunities and substantial capacity, he emphasized. Turkish Airlines is serving many routes that Australia has not, he said. He recalled that Australia has a new airport, Western Sydney Airport, which is due to open next year that is interested along with the country's other major airports in supplying air freight. "So we have air freight connectivity. We have all the features," he added. Istanbul hub for Australian businesses Türkiye is advanced in manufacturing and services, and it is taking its strength into new areas of business that it was not doing before and reduces its reliance on other countries, Huber said. Australia is also a great supplier of food and commodities, and it is a particularly fortunate country in terms of supplies of some of the critical minerals that are needed to help fuel the change to green-friendly process to economies all around the world, he stressed. "I think that certainly Türkiye and Australia have complementarity," he noted. On the other hand, Türkiye has become an important market and Australia has some very great strengths, he said. "We hope that we can develop new links with Türkiye, not only in the supply of the minerals themselves, but in the services and the knowledge that we have," he added. Last year, Australia had only hundreds of students from Türkiye, but since the direct flights were implemented, the country has seen an expansion to around 6,000 or 7,000 students from Türkiye, he said. "Istanbul as a hub, I think it will come on the agenda a lot more than had been in the past. "Old shipping is much slower, but the connection that Istanbul offers, with I think around 340 destinations, really does open up opportunities for Australian businesses to link to those other parts of the world," he added. Touching on energy field, Huber said there are great opportunities between the two countries, as Australia has vast reserves of gas and Türkiye has gas pipelines which pass through it. "So we are all participants in the supply chain of the energy market," he said. For both countries' efficiency, the technology can be shared, he added.
Pre-made meals, a convenient dining option widely accepted in many Western countries, have sparked heated debate on China's social media in recent years over concerns about safety, hygiene, and nutrition. Experts attribute the disparity in acceptance to differing levels of industry development and public understanding. China's pre-made meal industry, which experienced a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, is still in its infancy compared to its Western counterparts, according to Zou Jian, an executive expert with China's Pre-Made Meal Professional Committee. Zou noted that similar concerns were voiced in Europe and the United States decades ago when the industry was developing in those regions. "Western consumers have a higher level of understanding of premade meals thanks to decades of industry development and robust information disclosure," Zou said. "In China, however, the industry is new, and public awareness is still growing." Zou emphasized that pre-made meals in China are "very safe and clean," citing three key factors: reliance on physical processing methods by food prep companies like Huayu Holding Co, the use of fresh ingredients directly sourced from plants, and strict government regulations overseeing the sector. Efforts to address consumer concerns are underway. In March 2024, China introduced nationwide standards to bolster supervision of the fast-growing market. On Dec 20, Henan province established a premade dish industrial alliance aimed at enhancing transparency through expert-led research and public outreach. Zou acknowledged the challenges ahead for the industry, particularly given the diversity of Chinese cuisine. "With over 18,000 types of cuisine featuring different cooking methods like frying, steaming, and stewing, the techniques for transforming them into pre-made dishes are inevitably complex," he said. Despite the hurdles, the sector's growth is expected to have broader economic benefits. Zou noted that developing pre-made meals drives integration across primary, secondary, and tertiary industries and supports rural vitalization. Huayu Holding Co, which operates facilities in Henan, Jilin, and Tianjin, has significantly boosted rural employment, employing around 300,000 workers, 85 percent of whom are from rural areas. The company sources an average of five million pigs annually from nearby plants, addressing sales challenges for scattered farms while providing fresh food to consumers, said Liu Chaoyang, the company's general manager. "If the Huayu model-from farm to table-can be replicated nationwide, it will harness idle resources in the countryside and further rural vitalization," Zou said. China's pre-made meal industry generated 550 billion yuan ($69.4 billion) in revenue last year, according to Xinhua News Agency. Zou sees opportunities for international growth, particularly as pre-made meals could serve as a gateway for foreigners to experience Chinese cuisine. Zou shared an anecdote from his time abroad when friends from New Zealand's Silver Fern Farms were surprised by the quality of the premade hotpot he served. "Pre-made meals can make Chinese cuisine more accessible to international consumers, fostering a deeper appreciation for Chinese culture," he said. However, the industry faces challenges expanding overseas due to varying inspection and quarantine standards for meat products. "We are working to smooth out these processes," said He Shaojun, general manager of Henan Dongfang Yichu Food Co, a subsidiary of Huayu Holding.Joe Burrow Is Saddened By His 'Privacy' Being Violated This Week
