More than 115 cases of eye damage reported in Ontario after solar eclipse
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
Starting in January, Venice will oblige day-trippers to make reservations and pay a fee to visit the historic lagoon city, in a bid to better manage visitors who often far outnumber residents in the historic centre, clogging narrow streets and heavily-used foot bridges crossing the canals.
Venice officials on Friday unveiled new rules for day-trippers, which go into effect on Jan. 16, 2023.
Tourists who choose not to stay overnight in hotels or other lodgings will have to sign up online for the day they plan to come and pay a fee. These range from 3 to 10 euros (US$3.15 to $10.50) per person, depending on advance booking and whether it's peak season or the city is very crowded.
Transgressors risk fines as high as 300 euros ($315) if stopped and unable to show proof they booked and paid with a QR Code.
Roughly four-fifths of all tourists come to Venice just for the day. In 2019, the last full year of tourism before the pandemic, some 19 million day-trippers visited Venice and provided just a fraction of the revenue from those staying for at least one night.
Venice's tourism commissioner brushed off any suggestion that the measure would seek to limit the number of out-of-towners coming to Italy's most-visited city.
"We won't talk about number cutoffs. We're talking about incentives and disincentives," Simone Venturini told a news conference in Venice.
The reservation-and-fee approach had been discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. COVID-19 travel restrictions saw tourism in Venice nearly vanish -- and let Venetians have their city practically to themselves, for the first time in decades.
Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. Visitor numbers kept climbing, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering food and other goods in car-less Venice, and frequent flooding that damages homes and businesses.
Since guests at hotels and pensione already pay a lodging tax, they are exempt from the reserve-and-fee obligation.
With the new rule, Venice aims to "find this balance between (Venetian) resident and long-term and short-term" visitors, Venturini said, promising that the new system "will be simple for visitors" to manage. He billed Venice as the first city in the world putting such a system for day-only visitors in place.
The tourism official expressed hope that the fee-and-reservation obligation will "reduce frictions between day visitors and residents." In peak tourism system, tourists can outnumber residents 2-to-1, in the city that measures 5 square kilometers (2 square miles) in area.
Venice's resident population in the historic city numbers just over 50,000, a small fraction of what it was a couple of generations ago.
Exceptions to the day-tripper fees include children younger than 6, people with disabilities and those owning vacation apartments in Venice, provided they can show proof they pay real estate taxes.
Cruise ships contribute to the hordes of visitors swarming Venice's maze of narrow streets, especially near St. Mark's Square, when they disembark day-trippers for a few hours. Those visitors will have to pay, too, unless their cruise liner company pays a set fee to Venice.
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s. Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest.
A Sherwood Park family says their new house is uninhabitable. The McNaughton's say they were forced to leave the house after living there for only a week because contaminants inside made it difficult to breathe.
A man has been handed a lengthy hunting ban and fined thousands of dollars for illegally killing a grizzly bear, B.C. conservation officers say.
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
A loud explosion was heard across Hamilton on Friday after a propane tank was accidentally destroyed and detonated at a local scrap metal yard, police say.
Sophie Gregoire Trudeau says there is 'still so much love' between her and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as they navigate their post-separation relationship co-parenting their three children.
An emergency slide fell off a Delta Air Lines jetliner shortly after takeoff Friday from New York, and pilots who felt a vibration in the plane circled back to land safely at JFK Airport.
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) says it's investigating an interaction between a uniformed officer and anti-Trudeau government protestors after a video circulated on social media.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.