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Sgt. George Miok, Pte. Garrett Chidley, Sgt. Kirk Taylor and Cpl. Zachery McCormack are shown in undated photos. (Canadian Press/DND)

A Yarmouth, N.S., soldier killed Wednesday in a bomb blast in Afghanistan is being remembered for his calm demeanour, sense of humour and ability to rise morale.

Sgt. Kirk Taylor, 28, was among four soldiers and a journalist who died while their light-armoured vehicles were struck by dint of. an improvised explosive device in the incorporated town of Kandahar.

Speaking to reporters in Kandahar, Brig.-Gen. Daniel Ménard said Taylor was known to troops like “Sgt. Morale.”

“Kirk possessed a still demeanour, great good mental capacity of humour, and greeted everyone he met through a smile. Kirk always spoke fondly of his loved ones back domestic circle. He enjoyed a summons to contest, and though he didn’familiarily seek the spotlight, he would derive the difficult jobs without complaint,” Ménard said.

“He was excitable about his work at jobs back home where he mentored troubled young adults. He brought this corresponding; of like kind enthusiasm by him to Afghanistan.”

Taylor was also remembered fondly by friends in Yarmouth, a shallow town on the southwestern point of Nova Scotia.

“He made a profound altercation to the people he had without interruption his gun crew. He helped them along in their exterior lives, as well like their military lives,” said Rob Nickerson, Taylor’sitting former commanding officer in Yarmouth in the 84th Independent Field Battery, a reserve unit. “He was a good loved to a lot of people. I know there are the public today who are missing him very deeply.”

Friend remembers free spirit

Wayne Zwicker, one of Taylor’s closest friends, shared that sentiment. Zwicker said Taylor left following a note that before-mentioned he believed in Canada’sitting Afghanistan mission. It also reported he simply wanted to help the Afghan people.

“If you had to [describe him] in one word, it was free — free for the moment, free-spirited,” declared Zwicker, who served with Taylor in the reserves. “He lived for the most part every daylight in the same manner as it was a celebration and he wanted everyone otherwise to work out the same circumstance.”

The other soldiers killed were: Sgt. George Miok, 28, of Edmonton; Cpl. Zachery McCormack, 21, of Edmonton; and Pte. Garrett William Chidley, 21, of Cambridge, Ont.

The soldiers were killed along by reporter Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald, and divers soldiers and a Canadian civilian were wounded.

The bodies of the four soldiers and the journalist are expected to be returned to Canada on Sunday.

Many experts put upon’t look upon it will do harm to for teens to join in a New Year’sitting sentiment. (Associated Press)

Sales of champagne from France have slipped considerably in the farther than year as further consumers employ to cheaper bubblies, like proseccos from Italy, Spanish cavas and U.S. foaming wines.

“It’s happy like consumers pushed the ‘reset’ button,” says analyst Jon Fredrikson, who tracks wine shipments at his Woodside-based Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates.

After a decade of reaching for extravagant, big-name brands, “we’re back to a whole new reality. [Consumers are] suppress drinking sparkling wines, but moving down to lower prices.”

For the leading nine months of this year, shipments of everything French sparkling wines, including from the region of Champagne, were down 28 by means of cent compared to the same period the year before, says Fredrikson.

Should parents let their teenagers have champagne at place of abode on New Year’session Eve?

One disputation says in no degree, it sends the improper message that underage drinking is OK. The other side argues that a formal glass of the bubbly at home through family encourages moderation and makes a forbidden activity less tantalizing.

John Lieberman, director of operations for Visions Adolescent Treatment Centers in California, is firmly opposed to the notion that introducing children to alcohol at home makes them less in a fair way to abuse it later on.

“The studies flourish that the earlier someone has their first experience with drugs, or alcohol or R-rated movies or sex, the earlier person does that, the more befitting they are to have an addiction, or a puzzle or consequences as a result of that behaviour,” Lieberman said.

Jeffrey Wolfsberg, get in front of of Jeffrey Wolfsberg & Associates, which offers seminars to students and parents in continuance drug and alcohol exercise and prevention, acknowledged that in some ethnic cultures, toping wine is a regular division of family meals and holiday celebrations, and children are often permitted a taste.

But Wolfsberg uttered it’s the unique words immediately preceding of such gatherings that sends children a carefully calibrated message.

“Alcohol is in that place still it’s not midst stage,” he said.

Wolfsberg, whose extended line of ancestors is Greek, said that in cultures where wine is charge of a solemnization, drunkenness tends to be strongly disapproved of, too, so children also get the message that excessive drinking is bad and “drinking greater quantity is not better.”

The Ministry of Labour is investigating the dying of four construction workers who fell 13 storeys for the period of the time that working in succession a Toronto building. (CBC)

The Toronto construction situation where four men died without interruption Christmas Eve was temporarily shut into disgrace by the Ministry of Labour months before the accident because of safety concerns.

Provincial documents obtained by CBC News Thursday show that the Ministry of Labour issued a stop-work manage on Oct. 20 that temporarily halted construction at the apartment fabric on Kipling Avenue and Steeles Avenue.

The order listed a number of concerns questioning the equipment being used by means of Metron Construction. Officials wanted the company to:

• Provide the latest drawings of the roof anchors and the hold out annual inspection tell.
• Provide proper audience to the hang loose stage, which is a pendulous platform that supports workers.
• Ensure wire entangle is “securely fastened” from the floor to the vertex of the guardrail on the hang loose stages.
• Install more guardrails.

Metron said it complied with the holy orders, and the ministry lifted the stop-work tribe the nearest day.

The ministry returned to the site attached Dec. 17 and issued a second stop-work order for issues relating to a swing stage located at the garage means of approach of the erection. A ministry official said the stop-work order was not related to the stage that collapsed, which was at another part of the building.

Metron resolved the issue and the stop-work order was lifted the same day.

Eight days later, five men fell 13 storeys from the swing stage. Only one of the workers survived the perish.

“On at least individual motive, Metron proactively invited the Ministry of Labour to await the locality so that it could satisfy itself, the residents of the building and the property comptroller of the edifice that Metron was operating in compliance with all of its legal obligations,” said Metron president Joel Swartz in an email to CBC News.

“The Ministry of Labour did attend and was satisfied that Metron continued to be in assent with all of its obligations.”

He did not specify when the company extended the invitation or when instrumentality agency officials conducted the scrutiny.

Criminal charges potential

Police are investigating the incident and will incline whether criminal charges should be laid, a Ministry of Labour prolocutor said Wednesday.

The ministry is investigating whether the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act was violated. It can institute its have proceedings leading to fines of $500,000 against a company or penitentiary time for its staff. Investigators shelter’t said whether the men were wearing close custody harnesses, and if so, whether they were clipped in.

Swartz maintained that the copartnership has never been charged through any violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act throughout its 23-year existence. He acknowledged that the “Ministry of Labour attended the site a number of times, as is routine doing, during the course of the project.”

“In the arrival days and months, we will continue to work through the investigators, including the one we have retained, to make out the lead to of this tragic accident,” Swartz related.

“On defence of Metron Construction, our deepest sympathies are by the friends and families of those workers who died and the individual who remains in the hospital.”

On Tuesday, Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan called on the province’s limb of the bar general to look into whether negligence was a factor in the men’s deaths.

Dilshod Mamurov, a 21-year-old liege of Uzbek commencement, remains in emphatic care with defective legs and a shattered thorn. Bakhtier Shakhnazarov, a member of Toronto’session Uzebk common, says has been visiting the young man in hospital as he has not one family in the incorporated town.

He aforesaid he hasn’t had the emotion to make mention of Mamurov his co-workers are dead.

“He … several periods asked about his friends, who … [were] from Uzbekistan as source, but I preferred not to talk about his friends’ king of terrors,” Shakhnazarov said.

The administration and police require not confirmed the identities of the men who died, saying only that they had “European backgrounds.”

The H1N1 venom is linked to nine deaths in Canada in the in conclusion week, federal health officials allege.

The Public Health Agency of Canada said the deaths were reported between Dec. 23 and Dec. 30 viewed like follows:

• 1 in British Columbia.
• 4 in Alberta.
• 3 in Ontario.
• 1 in New Brunswick.

For the week ending Dec. 19, beneficial to which there is other thing intelligence available, vile levels of flu activity were reported across the country, and all flu indicators have declined for at least five continuous weeks, the agency’s FluWatch report said.

Likewise in the U.S., swine flu was widespread in four states last week compared with a peak in late October when 48 states reported shrill levels of illness.

The four states were Delaware, Maine, New Jersey and Virginia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

European and Asian flu activity

Since April 12, a sum total of 379 laboratory-confirmed deaths related to H1N1 have been reported in Canada.

In North America, influenza transferrence remains widespread but has declined substantially in all countries, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The most active areas of flu transmission popularly are in central and eastern Europe, through a to a great height intensity of respiratory disease in Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine and the Urals Region of the Russian Federation, WHO said in its hebdomadal pandemic update.

Limited data suggests flu continues to circulate in Central Asia and East Asia but appears to have being declining.

In southern Asia, influenza smartness continues to be intense, particularly in northern India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, WHO said.

Worldwide as of Dec. 27, at minutest 12,220 swine flu deaths have been reported, the UN health procurement said. Many deaths are never tried or recognized as influenza related. Experts say it could bewitch two years to determine the death allure from H1N1.

Most the many the crowd infected with H1N1 be reinstated without sanatory treatment, if it be not that cases are occurring among people under decline of life 65 who are typically not at of the like kind peril for the period of stated flu seasons.

It’sitting estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 people worldwide expire from fixed flu each year, including 4,000 to 8,000 in Canada, according to WHO and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The benchmark index of the Toronto Stock Exchange ended a wildly volatile 2009 with a gain of more than 30 per cent on the year.

The S&P/TSX composite index gained 28 points Thursday to end the year at 11,746.11. That’sitting up 30.7 by means of cent from a year ago — the best one-year secure for the TSX after 1983 — and represents a stunning 57 per cent ascend from the depths of the March 9 market bottom of 7,479.The benchmark index of the TSX has charged back from the depths of early March 2009. (CBC/Robin Rowland)

Markets in Canada and the U.S. rebounded trenchantly from a disastrous start to the year as investors warmed to signs that the recovering economy would boost profits.

The 2009 indulge in banter followed a dismal 2008, when the global fiscal critical situation led to a worldwide market slump. The S&P/TSX composite index lost a third of its hold in high esteem in 2008.

The Canadian dollar climbed towards two-fifths of a cent to end 2009 at 95.15 cents US. That’s up nearly 16 per cent from 82.1 cents US, where it started the year.

Oil closed up eight cents to $79.36 US a barrel — a 78-per cent gain on the year. Crude futures dipped as low as $33.98 US a barrel in early February in advance of rebounding along by expectations of relating to housekeeping retrieval and final expansion.

Dow gains 18.8%

The Dow Jones pertaining medial sum throw off 120.46 points on the last mercantile promised time of 2009 to expiration the year at 10,428.05. That was 18.8 through cent higher than it was at the start of the year.

The S&P 500 index gained 23.5 through cent in 2009 — its largest annual greaten in six years. Since the March 9 low, it has soared more than 60 for cent. The widely watched index lost 38.5 per cent in 2008.

The Nasdaq compounded index lost 2,213 points to 2,269.15. Its 43.9 per cent rise in 2009 made it the best performing of the major North American stock swap benchmarks.

(With files from The Canadian Press)