Kent Karemaker, 44, quit his job and sold his condo in Victoria, B.C., to restore the Grand Hotel in Shaunavon, Sask. Karemaker says the project is helping him manage his depression and anxiety.

China said on Sunday it was taking countermeasures against two Canadian institutions and 20 people involved in human rights issues concerning the Uyghurs and Tibet.

Hampers went to Indigenous families across Winnipeg Saturday as part of the 23rd annual holiday drive led by Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre and Bell MTS. Volunteers also packaged and delivered 579 Christmas gifts for children. Demand has for hampers and help during the holidays has increased along with the cost of living, according to Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata executive director Tammy Christensen.

Wildlife officials are collecting and testing animal carcasses as part of an ongoing study to determine the extent of the spread of Avian flu in land animals in the province.

Trappers are encouraged to submit skinned carcasses of a variety of species including fox, beaver, Lynx, Labrador marten, mink, muskrat and weasel.

Memorial University is offering hunters and trappers $10 a carcass, for each specimen, up to a total of 1,000 specimens.

The program will only apply for the rest of the 2024-25 trapping season.

Payment will be on a first-come first-served basis.

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It looks like Santa might have some contend with some significant winter weather as he makes his way around southern New Brunswick on Tuesday night, according to the federal weather service.

Environment and Climate Change Canada issued a special weather statement early Sunday morning for the southern band of the province, including Fredericton and surrounding communities.

“A developing system may affect the province on Christmas Eve,” it said.

“While it is too soon to provide specific details, the potential exists for significant amounts of snow.”

At this point, the weather service is predicting the snow will begin Tuesday morning and continue to Tuesday night.

The same system is expected to have a similar impact on central and western Nova Scotia, so bear that in mind if you’re planning on travelling in the Maritimes on Christmas Eve as well.

The Fredericton Independent can be reached at [email protected].

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Join the Yellowknifers who take time each Christmas to figure out which birds – and how many of them – are calling the city home in winter.

NEW YORK (AP) — A NASA spacecraft aims to fly closer to the sun than any object sent before.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun. Since then, it has flown straight through the sun’s corona: the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.

The next milestone: closest approach to the sun. Plans call for Parker on Tuesday to hurtle through the sizzling solar atmosphere and pass within a record-breaking 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface.

At that moment, if the sun and Earth were at opposite ends of a football field, Parker “would be on the 4-yard line,” said NASA’s Joe Westlake.

Mission managers won’t know how Parker fared until days after the flyby since the spacecraft will be out of communication range.

Parker planned to get more than seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft, hitting 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) at closest approach. It’s the fastest spacecraft ever built and is outfitted with a heat shield that can withstand scorching temperatures up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 degrees Celsius).

It’ll continue circling the sun at this distance until at least September. Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles constantly blasting away from the sun.

The sun’s warming rays make life possible on Earth. But severe solar storms can temporarily scramble radio communications and disrupt power.

The sun is currently at the maximum phase of its 11-year cycle, triggering colorful auroras in unexpected places.

“It both is our closest, friendliest neighbor,” Westlake said, “but also at times is a little angry.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

When Dean May’s team of cleaners entered the home, dressed head to toe in protective suits, thick green dust covered every surface.

“We literally left footprints when we were walking in the house,” he recalled.

They were traipsing through the toxic remnants of an illicit fentanyl pill-pressing operation in northern British Columbia three or four years ago, and May says it was one of the worst scenes he’s been to.

For 14 years, May, who co-owns Calgary-based Mayken Hazmat Solutions, has been cleaning the mess left behind by drug labs in Western Canada after police are done with the scene.

As clandestine drug labs become larger and more complex, so does the toxic mess they leave behind and the tools required to clean them up, creating expensive and dangerous situations for both people and the environment.

In B.C., the RCMP say they’ve spent millions over the last five years disposing of chemicals found in labs, but the rest of the hefty cleanup bill is often left to property owners who call private companies like May’s.

B.C.’s real estate association says consistent provincewide rules are needed for how to remediate properties back to being livable.

May said hidden labs making synthetic drugs including fentanyl and methamphetamines using industrial chemicals are both more toxic than mouldy marijuana grow operations and quicker to set up, meaning it’s easier for rented properties to be turned into labs without property owners knowing.

“Somebody can turn a home into a lab in a matter of days, whereas back in the grow-op days, it took quite a bit of time to set up the grow-op and wire it,” he said.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Derek Westwick runs B.C.’s Clandestine Lab Enforcement and Response team, which investigates synthetic drug labs.

He grew up in the area of Langley, B.C., where a single-family home was turned into a large ecstasy lab 10 years ago.

He remembers the “cook” in that case was pouring chemicals through a pipe into the big backyard, allowing chemicals to seep into a ditch.

A neighbour complained in a letter to the local Langley Advance Times about “open toxic ditches and putrid brown sludge oozing” around the home.

She wrote that her neighbour’s koi fish and trees had died, and that when it rains “the smell comes and we are coughing.”

The province stepped in when then-environment minister Mary Polak declared the location a “high-risk contaminated site” a year after it was found and warned that the home itself as well as three neighbouring properties could be contaminated.

Experts would find soil and water containing chemicals that included dichloromethane, a colourless liquid used as a solvent in paint and furniture-stripping products, as well as other industrial applications.

The province footed a $930,000 bill for remediation, though the Ministry of Environment said in a statement that it got the money back when the property was later sold and torn down.

‘THEY’LL PENETRATE OUR SUITS QUITE FAST’

Westwick said his team has come up against increasingly toxic chemicals in recent years, with the rise of fentanyl labs.

Under the wrong set of circumstances, ingredients can melt officers’ protective gear.

When the team first enters a property, they’ll wear breathing apparatus similar to those worn by firefighters. Their chemical suits are attached to their boots and gloves with tape that is specially designed not to melt.

When investigators are unsure exactly what chemicals they’re dealing with, the team will layer up with a variety of gloves, each designed to protect from something different, he said.

“It’s not fentanyl itself, it’s (that) these chemicals have such different properties and hazards they quickly can permeate our chemical suits. Any one of them, they’ll penetrate our suits quite fast,” he said.

In his 15 years with the team, Westwick said it has become less common for criminals to leave their toxic ingredients in barrels for someone else to clean up.

Fear of being identified through the barrels means they are more likely to just dump it, he said.

“So now that’s worse, because now they pour it down the drains, pour it in a septic field, pour it out in the backyard,” he said.

In 2017, provincial environmental officials had to excavate 30 cubic metres of contaminated soil from a former meth lab near Rock Creek, B.C., after liquid and solid waste was dumped near a drug lab.

Health authorities ordered residents of about 25 properties to stop using their water.

Earlier this year, Mounties dismantled a drug “superlab” in Falkland, in B.C.’s southern Interior, calling it the largest, most sophisticated in Canada.

Police said they seized “massive” amounts of precursor chemicals used to make the drugs, adding that environmental mitigation and cleanup cost would be at least $500,000 and possibly “significantly higher.”

Westwick said that in the last five years, the RCMP had paid just shy of $2 million to remove chemicals from clandestine labs in British Columbia.

He said Mounties are only responsible for disposing of chemicals covered under search warrants, meaning homeowners are in charge of cleaning up whatever damage to the building or the environment is left behind.

“I do not clean up labs, they’re left half as messy. I take all the chemicals to render them safe. I’ll take all the precursors and the offence-related property. But if the grounds are dirty, or there’s fridges or freezers that are used, that are contaminated, we don’t take that,” Westwick said.

“So that’s just a fraction of what is spent.”

Westwick said whenever his team finds evidence that chemicals from drug labs have been dumped, they’ll call the Ministry of Environment, which then decides whether to get involved.

A statement from the ministry says it has been involved in disposing of material from four illegal drug labs since 2015. It said it’s “monitoring” the case of the Falkland superlab and is “available to support the RCMP upon request.”

“All contaminated sites follow the same legal requirements and processes for site investigation and remediation. It depends on the future use of a site and what substances and their concentrations are found,” the statement says.

“Specific substances are regulated under the contaminated sites regime, and if drug labs materials keep evolving, keeping up with new emerging substances is part of the considerations for updates to regulations.”

May, a certified hazmat technician, said homeowners are often shocked by the bill for tens of thousands of dollars to clean a house after police have left.

His company follows decontamination guidelines laid out by Alberta Health, while in B.C. they have plans approved by whichever authority is in charge of a site, he said.

After first being cleaned by a “sacrificial” HEPA-filter vacuum, a drug lab will be sprayed to neutralize any drug remnants left behind, he said. Then every item in the home must be removed and decontaminated separately before getting thrown out.

“All the contents, they all get disposed of,” he said.

‘PATCHWORK OF POLICIES’

Trevor Hargreaves, the senior vice-president of government relations with the British Columbia Real Estate Association, said there needs to be provincewide rules around how former drug labs and grow ops are remediated.

In October, the association released a study by researchers from the University of the Fraser Valley that reviewed 20 B.C. municipal bylaws and found differences in how municipalities require unsafe properties be remediated.

“Each municipality is setting their own remediation standards. So how they go about identifying remediation, the steps to remediate, what qualifies as remediation or what qualifies as a remediated home — all of those standards differ slightly between municipalities,” Hargreaves said.

The inconsistencies, he said, make banks and insurance companies squeamish, creating challenges when it comes time to sell a property that used to be a drug lab.

“Because there is such variability in terms of the way that these homes are treated, lenders don’t like to lend. Insurers don’t like to to insure. They’re extremely cautious and scared of these properties,” he said.

Hargreaves said standardizing the rules for cleaning up all labs, ranging from marijuana, to mushrooms, to chemically based drugs, would make the process easier for both sellers and buyers.

As larger drug labs are found in rural locations, he said, the need for provincial rules increases.

“For the municipalities that are very spare on resources … why are we depending on that, where we know they’re stretched thin?”

A followup joint statement from the Environment and Housing ministries said if soil or groundwater remediation is conducted on a drug lab property, it will appear on the province’s public registry.

“Local governments have the authority to create bylaws regulating certain activities within their boundaries, including the condition and general appearance of property,” the statement says.

“This includes … the authority to impose remedial action requirements on a person or landowner in relation to hazardous conditions and declared nuisances on specific properties.”

In a letter sent to B.C. Premier David Eby as well as the ministers of health, housing and the environment this month, Hargreaves argues a standardized, provincial multi-step remediation policy would get many much-needed homes back on the market.

The report also calls on the government to create a training and certification process for professionals involved in home remediation.

“Remediation standards are necessary to ensure homes used in drug operations are safe to reintroduce into the housing market,” the letter says.

“The current patchwork of policies at the municipal level are insufficient to ensure the health and safety of residences and their occupants.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2024.

Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press

Host to one of only three full-length indoor ovals in Canada, Fort St. John now plans to harness that facility to launch a college speed skating program — believed to be the first in the country.

Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians, eight of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said, as the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of a hospital in the north.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Capitol buildings are almost always an imposing presence. The seat of government, they tend to be elegant and stately — and frequently capped by a dome.

Visitors to Pennsylvania ‘s Capitol are drawn to its priceless artwork, polished marble and intricate carvings, but hidden behind the doors of some of its most ornate offices and chambers are another treasure: hundreds of antique clocks that were part of its original design.

The 273 working clocks include many that are integrated into fireplace mantels and other building features.

They are not low maintenance, requiring regular oiling and occasional mechanical overhauls.

And every week, in a throwback to a time before wristwatches and cellphones, clock winders roam the halls — ensuring the century-plus-old timekeepers keep ticking.

On a recent morning, Bethany Gill demonstrated how it’s done — going room to room with an array of ladders and custom tools. She opens the glass covers, rotates the mechanisms enough to keep them going for about a week and checks their accuracy before moving on to the next one.

Gill is a former art student who works for Johnson & Griffiths Studio, a Harrisburg firm that just received a five-year, $526,000 winding and maintenance contract renewal from the Capitol Preservation Committee.

She’s also a lifelong clock lover who looks forward to the semiannual transitions between daylight saving time and Eastern Standard Time.

Why?

“My dad was a clock collector growing up,” Gill said. “And every Sunday we would go around the house and wind the clocks. And that was always just a nice thing that I did with my dad.”

Pennsylvania’s Capitol was crafted by architect Joseph M. Huston, who won its design competition in 1901 with a vision for a temple of democracy — a palace of art that would be as fancy as what could then be found in Europe.

Among countless other fine touches, Huston designed at least 180 custom clock cases, including smaller so-called keystone clocks that are shaped to remind people of Pennsylvania’s early and critical role in the formation of the United States, leaving it with the nickname of the Keystone State.

“The clocks are just part of why the building’s so unique and so intricate,” said Capitol Preservation Committee historian Jason Wilson. “The mantels surrounding the clocks are all custom designed.”

Every so often the clocks, most of them built from mahogany or stained mahogany, are carefully removed from their spots around the Capitol and taken to a facility for cleaning, maintenance and repair. They seem to run better when kept wound.

Huston, the architect, achieved his goal. The Capitol is a showpiece that draws thousands of visitors every year to where 253 state lawmakers convene to debate and pass legislation.

While the buildings and the clocks are his lasting legacy, Huston was convicted of a conspiracy to defraud the state during the Capitol construction project and spent several months in another Pennsylvania landmark, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

Mark Scolforo, The Associated Press

Danita Frost-Arey says she wants to address the stigma of substance use by creating a range of supports for Inuvik residents through her new business.

China said on Sunday it was taking countermeasures against two Canadian institutions and 20 people involved in human rights issues concerning the Uyghurs and Tibet.

The measures, which took effect on Saturday, include asset freezes and bans on entry and the targets include Canada’s Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and the Canada-Tibet Committee, China’s foreign ministry announces on its website.

MADRID (AP) — For weeks, Spaniards had anticipated the arrival of “El Gordo” or “The Fat One.”

But unlike Santa Claus, El Gordo arrived three days before Christmas, before noon on Sunday.

El Gordo is the first prize of Spain’s hugely popular national Christmas lottery, which is said to be the world’s largest based on the total prize money involved, even though other lotteries have larger single prizes. This year’s draw will spread riches totaling 2.7 billion euros (around $2.8 billion), much of it in small winnings.

Several ticket holders with the number 72480 won the top prize, worth 400,000 euros (roughly $417,000) before taxes. The winning tickets were sold in Logroño, a city in northern Spain’s La Rioja region that is known for its wines.

Multiple tickets with the same number can be sold to different groups and full tickets are divisible into 10 parts. Buying and sharing these fractions, known in Spanish as “décimos” or tenths, is a popular tradition in the run-up to Christmas. Families, friends, and co-workers often take part, usually spending 20 euros (about $21) each.

On Sunday, young students from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school selected the numbers from two revolving orbs in the capital’s Teatro Real opera house and sang them out in turn for nearly five hours in a cadence familiar to Spaniards. After “El Gordo” was announced, audience members — some dressed in costume as Don Quijote, Christmas elves, Biblical wise men and the lottery itself — began streaming out of the venue, from which the event was televised nationally.

María Ángeles, a teacher from the southwestern province of Badajoz, said she waited for hours in line to get a seat inside the opera house to watch the event with a group of 14 friends and family members that she traveled with to Madrid.

“The point of coming to see the lottery is the hope,” Ángeles said. She reckoned no one in her group won more than 140 euros ($146).

The lottery works on the premise of distributing the most winning numbers to the largest number of people possible. There are hundreds of small prizes and 13 major ones, including the “El Gordo” winner.

In the weeks leading up to the draw, lines form outside lottery offices, especially those with a history of selling prize-winning tickets in previous years.

Spain’s Dec. 22 Christmas lottery began during the Napoleonic wars in 1812 and has continued largely without interruption since then, even during the Spanish Civil War. Students from the San Ildefonso school have been singing the prizes since the start.

Spain’s national lottery was first established as a charity in 1763 by the Bourbon monarch King Carlos III. It was later used to shore up state coffers. Today, it supports various charities.

Suman Naishadham, The Associated Press

A man suspected of driving a car into a German Christmas market in an attack that killed at least five people and injured scores of others faces charges of murder and attempted murder, police said on Sunday.

A new program is being launched in the St. John’s region to help people reverse their body’s march toward type 2 diabetes.

About 2.5-million Canadians live with prediabetes, but the program “Small Steps for Big Changes” can help reverse the trend through lasting exercise and dietary change.

The 4-week program is available at YMCAs across Canada including the Ches Penney Family Y in St. John’s.

Dr. Katie Wadden, who is with the Faculty of Human Kinetics and Recreation at Memorial University, is the program’s Eastern Canada Regional Research Lead. She says prediabetes is a condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not yet high enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes.

Dr. Wadden says without intervention, people with prediabetes are at increased risk of progressing to type 2.

BEIRUT (AP) — A prominent Lebanese politician held talks on Sunday with the insurgent who led the overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, with both expressing hope for a new era in relations between their countries.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was a longtime critic of Syria’s involvement in Lebanon and blamed Assad’s father, former President Hafez Assad, for the assassination of his own father decades ago. He is the most prominent Lebanese politician to visit Syria since the Assad family’s 54-year rule came to an end.

He held talks with Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who led the Sunni Islamist rebels who swept into Damascus earlier this month and forced the younger Assad from power.

“We salute the Syrian people for their great victories and we salute you for your battle that you waged to get rid of oppression and tyranny that lasted over 50 years,” said Jumblatt, a key figure in Lebanon’s Druze minority and the former leader of a leftist party.

He expressed hope that Lebanese-Syrian relations “will return to normal.”

Jumblatt’s father, Kamal, was killed in 1977 in an ambush near a Syrian roadblock during Syria’s military intervention in Lebanon’s civil war. The younger Jumblatt was a critic of the Assads, though he briefly allied with them at one point to gain influence in Lebanon’s ever-shifting political alignments.

“Syria was a source of concern and disturbance, and its interference in Lebanese affairs was negative,” al-Sharaa said, referring to the Assad government. “Syria will no longer be a case of negative interference in Lebanon,” he said, pledging that it would respect Lebanese sovereignty.

Al-Sharaa also repeated longstanding allegations that Assad’s government was behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which was followed by other killings of prominent Lebanese critics of Assad.

Last year, the United Nations closed an international tribunal investigating the assassination after it convicted three members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah — an ally of Assad — in absentia. Hezbollah denied involvement in the massive Feb. 14, 2005 bombing, which killed Hariri and 21 others.

“We hope that all those who committed crimes against the Lebanese will be held accountable, and that fair trials will be held for those who committed crimes against the Syrian people,” Jumblatt said.

Iran’s leader predicts trouble for new Syrian rulers

Separately, Iran’s supreme leader said that young Syrians will resist the new government emerging after Assad’s overthrow as he again accused the United States and Israel of sowing chaos in the country.

Iran had provided crucial support to Assad throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, which erupted after he launched a violent crackdown on a popular uprising. Syria had long served as a key conduit for Iranian aid to Hezbollah.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an address on Sunday that the “young Syrian has nothing to lose” and suffers from insecurity following Assad’s fall.

“What can he do? He should stand with strong will against those who designed and those who implemented the insecurity,” Khamenei said. “God willing, he will overcome them.”

He accused the United States and Israel of plotting against Assad’s government in order to seize resources, saying: “Now they feel victory, the Americans, the Zionist regime and those who accompanied them.”

Iran and its militant allies in the region have suffered a series of major setbacks over the past year, with Israel battering Hamas in Gaza and landing heavy blows on Hezbollah before they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon last month.

Khamenei denied that such groups were proxies of Iran, saying they fought because of their own beliefs and that the Islamic Republic did not depend on them. “If one day we plan to take action, we do not need proxy force,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s Syria coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/syria

Sally Abou Aljoud, The Associated Press

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will be in Washington, D.C., for Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, attending a series of events over six days including the swearing-in at the Capitol building and state society balls. In the months ahead, her office says there will be numerous other trips to the United States, too.

She will be making the case that affordable raw products from Canada, including oil imports from her province, allow for trillions of dollars in American wealth creation. She believes Mr. Trump’s promise of a 25-per-cent tariff on all Canadian goods is not an idle threat and will be put in place – even for a short period, in some form – after the incoming president takes office.

Food bank executive director Marjorie Bencz said about 45,000 people are being served through the organization's hamper program, roughly 10,000 more than at this time two years ago.

Over the holiday season, Mission to Seafarers says it will deliver gift bags to more than 1,500 ship crew members passing through Vancouver, as a gesture of gratitude for their work and effort to ease the loneliness seafarers may experience while far from home over the Christmas season.

When James Whittingham's children began to learn how to drive, he played up the dangers. He wanted them to know life is precious and driving was likely the most dangerous thing they’d ever do, next to getting a tattoo.

Balatro, a card-based video game, was made by a single developer from Saskatchewan. It took home the best independent and best mobile game at this year's Game Awards, and was nominated for game of the year. The CEO of the Saskatchewan ESports Association also reviews other games that made their mark.