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Canada’s three-bronze performance extends medal streak to seven days at Paris Games

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PARIS – A surprise bronze in trampoline set the tone on Day 7 at the Paris Olympics before podium finishes in tennis and swimming gave Canada its second multi-medal day of the Games.

Competing on the eve of her 26th birthday, Sophiane Méthot of Varennes, Que., flipped and twisted her way to the podium with a score of 55.650 in the trampoline single-exercise final. The result confirmed early that Canada would get a medal for a seventh straight day in Paris.

Canadian athletes added two more bronze medals, with Montreal’s Felix Auger-Aliassime and Ottawa’s Gabriela Dabrowski taking bronze in mixed tennis doubles and Kylie Masse of LaSalle, Ont., winning her fifth career Olympic medal with a third-place finish in the women’s 200 backstroke.

And there were a couple of close calls, Toronto swimmer Josh Liendo finishing fourth in the men’s 50-metre freestyle and Moh Ahmed of St. Catharines, Ont., ending up just off the podium in the men’s 10,000 metres.

Canada ended the day ninth in the overall medal count with 11 (three gold, two silver, six bronze).

With medals in seven straight days of competition, Canada is two back of its longest medal streak to start a Games set at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Méthot, ranked 11th in the world, said she put together the “performance of a lifetime” in her Olympic debut. There were nervous moments as she had to sit through one last performer before her medal was confirmed, but China’s Hu Yicheng fell during her final to ensure the Canadian was safe in third place.

“It was really intense,” said Méthot, who earned the sixth and final spot in the final at the qualifying session. “I did everything I could out there, and I’m just really proud of myself for doing a great routine.”

Méthot may not have been a medal favourite entering Paris, but she helped Canada re-establish itself as a leading country in trampoline. Canada had a trampoline medallist every OIympics since the sport debuted in 2000, until Rosie MacLennan finished fourth three years ago in Tokyo in her bid for a third straight gold medal.

Britain’s Bryony Page (56.480), the Tokyo bronze medallist, won gold on Friday. Silver went to Belarusian gymnast Viyaleta Bardzilouskaya (56.060), who is competing as a neutral athlete

In tennis, Auger-Aliassime and Dabrowski scored four straight points in a second-set tiebreaker, including the last two on return, to reach the podium with a 6-3, 7-6 (2) win over Demi Schuurs and Wesley Koolhof of the Netherlands.

The Canadians appeared to be coasting to victory after going up two quick breaks in the second set. But the Dutch dup, backed by a vocal contingent of fans at Roland Garros, got those breaks back to force the tiebreaker.

Canada’s only other Olympic tennis medal came in 2000, when Daniel Nestor and Sébastien Lareau beat the heavily-favoured Australian duo of Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde in the men’s doubles final at the Sydney Games.

Earlier, Auger-Aliassime’s quest for men’s singles gold came to an end after he was decisively defeated 6-1, 6-1 by Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz in Friday’s semifinals.

“I just couldn’t find a way to be comfortable in any pattern, any position. Whether it was trying to dominate the forehand cross-court or change of direction, the forehand inside-out, the backhand side,” Auger-Aliassime said. “Every aspect. The movement. The defence. I was dominated.”

The Canadian will meet Italy’s Lorenzo Musetti in Saturday’s bronze-medal match.

In swimming, Masse fought off a challenge from American Phoebe Bacon to touch the wall third in what was a fast 200 backstroke.

Australia’s Kaylee McKeown won in an Olympic-record time of two minutes 3.73 seconds, followed by Regan Smith of the United States (2:04.26) and Masse, who led after 50 metres and rode her fast start to the podium.

Also Friday, Canada’s track and field team got off to a strong start. Audrey Leduc of Gatineau, Que., set a Canadian record of 10.95 seconds to lead her heat in the women’s 100 metres.

World champion Ethan Katzberg of Nanaimo, B.C., qualified first in the men’s hammer throw at 79.93 metres, ahead of Rowan Hamilton of Chilliwack, B.C., who was second with a personal-best throw of 77.78 metres.

Also Friday, defending Olympic champion Damian Warner of London, Ont., was fourth after the first five events of the decathlon.

Warner had 4,651 points, 27 behind third-place Sander Skotheim of Norway. Geramny’s Leo Neugebauer led with 4,650 while Ayden Owens-Delerme of Puerto Rico moved into second at 4,608 with the best time in the 400.

In men’s basketball, Canada finished the preliminary round atop its group with a 3-0 record after an 88-85 win over Spain in Lille. Canada held on despite being outscored 47-39 by Spain in the second half.

Jordi Fernandez, Canada’s Spanish coach, says the fact that Spain came close to pulling out a comeback win will ultimately benefit his team.

“They (Spain) won that second half,” Fernandez said. “We were not good enough in that second half. I think we were a little loose with our execution. We were not good with rebounding throughout the game.

“But we find a way and when you don’t have experience in this type of games, and you don’t know what this type of games mean, the only way you can get experience is going through it.

“Now we have a group of guys that have gone through a World Cup, now the Olympics and I think right now our experience is taking us to the next level.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 2, 2024.

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World on pace for significantly more warming without immediate climate action, report warns

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The world is on a path to get 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, but could trim half a degree of that projected future heating if countries do everything they promise to fight climate change, a United Nations report said Thursday.

But it still won’t be near enough to curb warming’s worst impacts such as nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts, the report said.

Under every scenario but the “most optimistic” with the biggest cuts in fossil fuels burning, the chance of curbing warming so it stays within the internationally agreed-upon limit “would be virtually zero,” the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report said. The goal, set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The report said that since the mid-1800s, the world has already heated up by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit), up from previous estimates of 1.1 or 1.2 degrees because it includes the record heat last year.

Instead the world is on pace to hit 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. But if nations somehow do all of what they promised in targets they submitted to the United Nations that warming could be limited to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.

In that super-stringent cuts scenario where nations have zero net carbon emissions after mid-century, there’s a 23% chance of keeping warming at or below the 1.5 degrees goal. It’s far more likely that even that optimistic scenario will keep warming to 1.9 degrees above pre-industrial times, the report said.

“The main message is that action right now and right here before 2030 is critical if we want to lower the temperature,” said report main editor Anne Olhoff, an economist and chief climate advisor to the UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre. “It is now or never really if we want to keep 1.5 alive.”

Without swift and dramatic emission cuts “on a scale and pace never seen before,” UNEP Director Inger Andersen said “the 1.5 degree C goal will soon be dead and (the less stringent Paris goal of) well below 2 degrees C will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

Olhoff said Earth’s on a trajectory to slam the door on 1.5 sometime in 2029.

“Winning slowly is the same as losing when it comes to climate change,” said author Neil Grant of Climate Analytics. “And so I think we are at risk of a lost decade.”

One of the problems is that even though nations pledged climate action in their targets submitted as part of the Paris Agreement, there’s a big gap between what they said they will do and what they are doing based on their existing policies, report authors said.

The world’s 20 richest countries — which are responsible for 77% of the carbon pollution in the air — are falling short of their stated emission-cutting goals, with only 11 meeting their individual targets, the report said.

Emission cuts strong enough to limit warming to the 1.5 degree goal are more than technically and economically possible, the report found. They just aren’t being proposed or done.

The report ”shows that yet again governments are sleepwalking towards climate chaos,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, who wasn’t part of the report.

Another outside scientist, Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said the report confirms his worst concerns: “We are not making progress and are now following a 3.1 degree path, which is, with next to zero uncertainty, a path to disaster.”

Both the 3.1 degree and 2.6 degree calculations are a tenth of a degree Celsius warmer than last year’s version of the UN report, which experts said is within the margin of uncertainty.

Mostly the problem is “there’s one year less time to cut emissions and avoid climate catastrophe,” said MIT’s John Sterman, who models different warming scenarios based on emissions and countries policies. “Catastrophe is a strong word and I don’t use it lightly,” he said, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report saying 3 degrees of warming would trigger severe and irreversible damage.

The report focuses on what’s called an emissions gap. It calculates a budget of how many billions of tons of greenhouse gases — mostly carbon dioxide and methane — the world can spew and stay under 1.5 degrees, 1.8 degrees and 2 degrees of warming since pre-industrial times. It then figures how much annual emissions have to be slashed by 2030 to keep at those levels.

To keep at or below 1.5 degrees, the world must slash emissions by 42%, and to keep at or below 2 degrees, the cut has to be 28%, the report, named, “No more hot air… please !” said.

In 2023, the world spewed 57.1 billion metric tons (62.9 billion U.S. tons) of greenhouse gases, the report said. That’s 1,810 metric tons (1,995 U.S. tons) of heat-trapping gases a second.

“There is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a video messaged released with the report. “We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.”

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.



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Hamilton Tiger-Cats sign Canadian kicker Liegghio to extension

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HAMILTON – The Hamilton Tiger-Cats signed Canadian kicker Marc Liegghio to a two-year contract extension Thursday.

Liegghio, 27, of Woodbridge, Ont., remains under contract with Hamilton through the 2026 season.

Liegghio has made 39-of-44 field goals (88.6 per cent) and 37-of-38 converts (97.4 per cent) this season. The five-foot-seven, 198-pound kicker was named Hamilton’s top 2024 special-teams player Wednesday.

He has appeared in 66 regular-season games over four CFL seasons. He has made 117-of-138 field goals (84.8 per cent) and 125-of-139 converts (89.9 per cent). He began his pro career with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (2021-22) before joining the Ticats last season.

Liegghio played collegiately at Western Ontario. He was selected in the fifth round, No. 39 overall, by Winnipeg in the 2020 CFL draft.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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Rogers Communications reports $526M third-quarter profit, up from loss a year ago

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TORONTO – Rogers Communications Inc. reported a third-quarter profit of $526 million compared with a loss a year ago.

The company says the profit amounted to 98 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended Sept. 30.

The result compared with a loss of $99 million or 20 cents per diluted share in the same quarter last year.

Revenue for the quarter totalled $5.13 billion, up from $5.09 billion a year earlier.

On an adjusted basis, Rogers says it earned $1.42 per diluted share in its latest quarter, up from an adjusted profit of $1.27 per diluted share a year ago.

Analysts on average had expected a profit of $1.36 per share, according to LSEG Data & Analytics.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2024.

Companies in this story: (TSX:RCI.B)

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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