Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
The Bank of Canada introduced a new $100 bill recently – and it has a window in it.
It’s Canada’s first “polymer” (a type of flexible plastic) bill.
The new $100 bill features a picture of Sir Robert Borden, who was the Prime Minister from 1911 and 1920.
The back of the bill celebrates innovation in medical research, including the Canadian discovery of insulin, which is used to treat diabetes.
For more than a month, the people of Occupy Toronto staged a peaceful protest on behalf of what they call “the 99 per cent.”
They built a tent village in St. James Park in downntown Toronto and camped there.
They set up a media centre, so TV news stations, newspapers and websites like Teaching Kids News could get information about them and their cause.
They used “social media” tools like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other.
This allowed them to talk to each other and let people know what was happening at all times.
Canadians — whether they were hockey fans or not — were glued to their TV sets on Monday night.
One of the sport’s greatest players was making his comeback.
Sidney Crosby had been off the ice since early January after suffering two blows that left him with a concussion.
On Tuesday night, the Pittsburgh Penguins’s captain came back into the game. And boy, did he put on a show!
Crosby scored a goal in the first five-and-a-half minutes of the game against the New York Islanders, flipping a backhander over the glove of goaltender Anders Nilsson.
The Penguins ultimately won 5-0 against the lacklustre Islanders.
Crosby took home four points, with two assists and then another backhand goal in the third period.
Not bad for a guy who hadn’t played in 10 months.
Nat Atherton is a Canadian living and working in Thailand. He gave TKN a first-hand account of the day-to-day havoc this year’s floods have caused.
The flooding here has been horrible. It hasn’t yet come into the centre of the capital (Bangkok), where I live, but has affected many of the people I work with.
Many of the poorer Thais live in the surrounding areas, which are flooded chest deep (1.5 metres) in some places.
I know a great many people who have lost their houses.
Many others haven’t been able to go home to check on their homes since rivers of dirty water separate their work from their houses.
Many well-known tourist districts have also been affected, including the world’s largest outdoor market, Chatuchak.
A brand new political party, the Coalition pour l’avenir du Quebec (Coalition for the Future of Quebec), was launched last Monday.
A coalition is a group of people, often from different backgrounds, with the same goals.
This makes six registered political parties in the Province of Quebec, where the Liberals are in power and the Bloc Quebecois is in second place.
The leader of the the new party is Francois Legault.
He is known to Quebecers as a separatist, someone who would like to see Quebec separate from Canada to become its own country.
But last week Legault spoke as though separation was not as important to him as it once was.
Students at Earl Beatty Public School in Toronto aren’t allowed to play with balls in their school playground any more.
The school has banned balls – including soccer balls, footballs, baseballs and tennis balls – from its playground.
Kids can only play with soft, foam balls such as Nerf balls.
The ban was put in place after a parent was hit in the head with a soccer ball and suffered a concussion.
The school’s principal, Alicia Fernandez, said kids were often getting hurt by balls in the playground.
She said they were sometimes scared.
She also pointed out that the school has a very small outdoor play area.
Some parents say the ban is an overreaction.
On Monday, the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York were evicted.
“Evicted” means made to leave. Anyone who didn’t leave the park was forcibly removed by the police.
The people in the park had been there for months. It was a peaceful protest against what they see as the gross differences in wealth between the “one per cent” of very wealthy people and everyone else (the “ninety-nine per cent”).
Zuccotti Park is owned by a company called Brookfield Properties. Brookfield had allowed the protesters to camp there since September.
Now that the protesters are gone, Brookfield is cleaning up the park. Brookfield said in a letter to New York’s mayor the park had become “unhealthy and unsafe.”
Curve Lake is a First Nations community half an hour north of Peterborough.
People who live there no longer have to go all the way into the city when they run out of their medicine and need a prescription filled.
They can get their medicine from a machine, similar to a bank machine – except that what comes out isn’t money, it’s pills.
Curve Lake gets a lot of snow in the winter.
In bad weather, it can be difficult for the community’s residents to get to the nearest pharmacy if they run out of their medication.
In the 1970s, a space project called the Phobos-Grunt project was proposed by Russian space experts.
At the time, it represented a dream for the Russian space program. To build a vehicle that could go all the way to Mars, to collect information from one of its moons, Phobos. It would be Russia’s first deep-space mission, developed entirely in the post-Soviet era.
The project had lots of problems over the years. They include mismanagement, political issues and serious technical problems, according to Russian journalist Anatoly Zak.
However, the Russian space agency persisted, and eventually the Phobos-Grunt became a reality.
The Phobos-Grunt launched on Nov. 9.
Unfortunately, the unmanned vehicle would not make it to Mars.
A number of countries in Europe are having problems with their finances and their leaders.
This year, four prime ministers in Europe have quit their jobs or been forced out of office.
That’s because their countries have spent more money than they make and now they can’t pay their debts.
Some of the countries are making deals with other countries in Europe and the International Monetary Fund for a “bailout.”
A bailout is a loan to a country to keep it from going bankrupt.
The richer countries agree to put in more money to save the poorer countries.
