Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Ralph Wilson Stadium – the home field for the Buffalo Bills football team – seats more than 70,000 people.
If the Bills do not sell every last ticket to a home game, the game is not shown on TV.
This is a rule put in place by the National Football League (NFL). It’s called a “blackout rule.” TV games are “blacked out” – not shown – if the stadium is not full.
One morning when I was 12, I was munching on cereal and flipping through the newspaper in search of the comics.
I couldn’t get past the front-page story. It was about a young boy in Pakistan, a child labourer named Iqbal Masih.
When he was just four years old, Iqbal went to work in a cramped, dusty room for 12 hours a day, six days a week, weaving carpets in a factory.
Iqbal was 12. I was 12.
I knew I had to do something for him. But what?
I hadn’t been looking to make a big difference in the world. I was looking for Calvin and Hobbes!
Still, I tore out Iqbal’s story and brought it to school.
The unofficial start of the golfing season begins on Thursday in Augusta, Georgia, with one of the most prestigious events in golf, the Masters Tournament.
The Masters golf tournament goes all the way back to 1934.
However, it is a recent win by Tiger Woods—perhaps the greatest player in the history of golf—that has everyone talking. They want to know: will Woods win his fifth Masters?
Even though he is a great player, if Woods wins the Masters this year it will be a big surprise.
That’s because until last month, Woods hadn’t won a tournament in nearly three years. It was the longest drought of his career.
About three years ago, Tiger Woods’s career—and his personal life—had a melt-down. He had a very public divorce with many problems. He also had issues with his golf form (in other words, the way he swung the club) as well as injuries.
He stopped winning. And many people wrote him off entirely.
Some kids in London, England are being discouraged from having a best friend at school.
Psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni, a specialist in children’s behaviour, told a London newspaper that some elementary teachers aren’t letting students have a best friend. Instead, they are urging children to play together in groups.
The Sun newspaper reported that Russell Hobby, of the UK’s National Association of Head Teachers, said some schools there have best-friend bans.
Teachers say the reason they do this is so kids don’t get hurt if they split up with their friend.
The Gairdner Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2012 awards.
The Canada Gairdner Awards are given to people who have made a new scientific discovery to combat disease or ease human suffering. It is one of the most important medical awards in the world.
As the Gairdner website puts it, “we’re dedicated to recognizing the world’s most creative and accomplished biomedical scientists.” Biomedical scientists work in medicine and biology (the study of living organisms).
The late James A. Gairdner established the Gairdner Foundation in 1957. Since then, 300 awards have been given. Seventy-three of those award winners have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in either medicine or chemistry.
The awards are selected by Canadians, but they are given to scientists throughout the world.
This year’s seven award winners include three people who broke through mysteries of the human circadian clock, the internal mechanism that controls our sleep and wakefulness, body temperature, and many other functions.
Last week Canada’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, spent $138.98 on a new pair of black dress shoes.
Why? Because he was announcing a new budget.
Flaherty is in charge of presenting Canada’s budget, which is why he bought the new shoes.
It’s a tradition in Canada that the Finance Minister wears new shoes to present the budget.
According to Wikipedia no one really knows why, but it’s something most Canadian Finance Ministers have done since the 1960s. It’s a tradition.
This year, the federal government structured its budget to reduce Canada’s annual deficit to zero by 2015.
A deficit happens when a government spends more than it collects in a year.
March Madness can grip a sports fan from the second week of March through the first week of April.
March Madness is the nickname for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Basketball Tournament. (When NCAA is said out loud, people usually say “N C double-A.”)
The tournament determines the national champion of college basketball.
Millions of dollars worth of coins, and a load of candy, were scattered along the Trans-Canada Highway and in the bush in northeastern Ontario on Wednesday.
A Brink’s tractor-trailer truck was driving along Highway 11 north of Kirkland Lake, when it hit a rock cut.
In this case, rock cuts are steep, rocky cliffs on either side of the highway created when a highway is carved through a hill.
They are common in northern Ontario.
A team of Russian scientists in Antarctica has found an ancient lake buried under more than three kilometres of ice.
The lake – Lake Vostok – has been sealed off from the rest of the world for at least 15 million years.
Scientists think the lake may contain tiny organisms, like bacteria, which are not found anywhere else on earth.
If the organisms exist in the lake, it would be because they have been able to adapt to living in the darkness, saltiness and extreme cold of the hidden lake. In that case, they would likely have developed special features that no other organisms on earth have.
Major League Baseball (MLB) begins on April 4.
Until then, the baseball players are in spring training to fine-tune their skills.
The teams, fans and players are hoping to have a great year—and none more so than 49-year-old pitching hopeful, Jamie Moyer.
If Moyer wins a game this season, he’ll be the oldest pitcher in MLB history to win a regular season game according to the Elias Sports Bureau, an organization that keeps track of baseball statistics.
