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News Sports

Spectacular Opening Ceremony Kicks Off 2014 Winter Olympics

The eyes of the world are on Sochi, Russia, where the 2014 Winter Olympics are taking place.

Last Friday, the official opening ceremony took the audience on a Russian journey. It began with the Russian alphabet, with each of the 33 letters highlighting a famous Russian person or achievement.

Later, the athletes flooded into the stadium, grouped according to country. Canada, with 220 athletes, has one of the largest teams in this year’s winter Olympics. The Canadians came into the stadium, a sea of red, behind flag-bearer Hayley Wickenheiser.

“It’s an amazing feeling being able to carry the flag and lead in this awesome powerful Team Canada,” Hayley Wickenheiser told CBC News. “I’m a very, very proud Canadian right now. It’s great to be Canadian in moments like this; you realize how lucky we are to live where we live. I hope everyone back home is proud and enjoys the games.”

News Sports

Canadian Athletes Working Through Injuries To Compete In Sochi

The 2014 Winter Olympics begin today in Sochi, Russa. Canadians will be cheering for their favourite athletes.

But several Olympic contenders are receiving a little more attention than others.

They are recovering from major injuries and needed to add extra training so they’ll be fit enough to compete.

At least two slopestyle contenders from Canada are among this group.

Slopestyle is an event in which skiers or snowboarders try to perform the most difficult tricks while flying as high into the air as possible.

News Politics

How Would You Change The Senate?

What would you do with the Canadian Senate? Change the way Senators are chosen? Get rid of it? Keep it as-is?

The Senate is a legislative body of the government that has almost the same powers as the House of Commons.

However, members to the House of Commons are elected; the prime minister appoints Senators.

And these tend to be people from his own party, who have done good things for his party.

Once they are in the Senate, they almost always vote as their party does in the House of Commons.

The Senate was started this way in 1867 when Canada was formed.

It was supposed to be a place for “sober second thought”—thinking carefully about the laws sent to it by the House of Commons and sometimes improving them.

Environment News Science

Microplastics Threaten Marine Life In The Great Lakes

Tiny pieces of plastic – each about the size of a grain of sand – are posing a huge threat to marine life in the Great Lakes.

For the past two summers, researchers from an organization called 5 Gyres have been collecting water samples from the Great Lakes.

They used fine-mesh nets to skim the surface of the water.

When they looked at what they had collected, they found thousands of tiny plastic beads, each less than a millimetre.

At first the scientists didn’t know where these “microbeads” came from. Then they used an electron microscope to compare them to products such as face and body washes or toothpaste that people use to help scrub and polish our skin and teeth.

News Sports

Super Bowl More Like Super Blowout

The Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII in grand style. Seattle crushed Denver 43-8.

Seattle’s number-one ranked defence was commanding. In fact, the defense of Seattle kept Denver scoreless for the first half of the game.

Denver’s number-one ranked offence was pathetic.

It was the first time since 1990 that both the number one-offence and the number-one defence played against each other in the Super Bowl.

Peyton Manning, Denver’s quarterback did try his best, though. He set a record with 33 completions (the number of times a ball is successfully passed to a teammate). Nevertheless, he had a night to forget.

Health News

Sesame Street Characters Help Kids To Eat Right

Sesame Street may be where the air is sweet, but these days it’s also where the food… isn’t.

The children’s television show has started a program to help get kids eating food that’s better for them.

The program is called, “Food for Thought: Eating Healthy on a Budget.”

About one in four children in the United States does not get enough nutritious food to eat, often because parents can’t afford it.

That’s about six million children, according to the Sesame Street website.

News Sports

Get Ready For The Super Bowl This Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday is nearly here.

On February 2, professional football’s biggest and most important game — the Super Bowl — will take place.

The Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks will be battling each other for league supremacy.

Denver enters the game with the league’s number-one offence. Seattle enters the game with the league’s number-one defence.

Denver has one of the best quarterbacks ever to play football: Peyton Manning.

He is the only player ever selected league as the National Football League Most Valuable Player four times. He’s expected to become the first five-time MVP when the league’s year-end awards are announced on Saturday.

News

New Rules Will Protect Clothing Makers

From now on, many companies that want to sell clothing to the Ontario government will have to provide the names of the people who made the clothing.

The names and addresses will be put onto a website so if anyone wants to check them, they can.

The new rules apply to companies selling more than $5,000 of clothing to the government.

If they do not give the information, they may not be allowed to sell the clothing.

Last year, unsafe workplaces in Asia made the news. In one incident, there was a fire in a clothing factory in Bangladesh.

It turned out that some Canadian companies were buying products from the Bangladesh factory even though it wasn’t a safe place. In other workplaces, reports came out about children in factories doing the work, which is against the law.

News Politics

Ukrainian Prime Minister Resigns

The Prime Minister of Ukraine, Mykola Azarov, resigned from his job on Tuesday.

Experts say this should help to ease some of the tensions that have been building in that country.

The tensions began in November when Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, made a surprise move to bring Ukraine closer to Russia rather than European Union (EU).

He asked Russia to lend Ukraine some money, rather than asking the EU for it. Ukraine needed the money to help its economy.

Many Ukrainians had looked forward to a closer association with the European Union because they felt it would bring democracy to their country.

Health News

Mexico Puts A Tax On Sugary Soft Drinks

The people of Mexico drink more soft drinks than people in any other country in the world.

Last fall, the government of Mexico made a decision to increase the taxes on soft drinks with sugar.

They said that soft drinks help to create health problems like obesity and diabetes. That tax is starting now.

In the past, Mexico has done other things to reduce sugar and fat in schools, like removing unhealthy foods from vending machines.

But some people say this kind of tax to make people healthier doesn’t work.

In 2011 another country, Denmark, put a tax on fatty foods for the same reason: to improve people’s health. But they removed it a year later because it caused more problems than it solved.