Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Elon Musk had promised to take away all of Twitter's blue check marks doled out to Hollywood stars, professional athletes, business leaders, authors and journalists unless they start buying a monthly subscription to the social media service.
Musk's goal was to shove the advertising-dependent platform he bought for US$44 billion last year into a pay-to-play model -- and maybe antagonize some enemies and fellow elites in the process.
But the Saturday deadline passed and the blue checks are still there, many with a new disclaimer explaining they might have been paid for or they might not have been paid for -- nobody but Twitter really knows. The company didn't return a request to clarify its changing policies Monday.
Matt Darling has been on Twitter for about 15 years and never cared about not having a blue check, though he'd get a kick out of whenever a verified account of "some real-world importance" started following him.
"People on Twitter will joke about blue checks like they're the aristocracy but I don't think anyone actually thought that," except for Musk, Darling said.
Now, Darling finally got a blue check after paying US$11 last month to try out some of the features that come with a Twitter Blue subscription. But seeing it becoming more of a "scarlet letter" under Musk than a symbol of credibility, he used a technique to scrub the blue tick from his profile.
"Now it's a signal of you're a person who's not making good tweets so you have to pay for engagement," said Darling, an economist at the centre-right Niskanen Center.
Musk has said that starting April 15, only verified accounts will appear in Twitter's For You feed that recommends what tweets people see. Darling is planning to drop the subscription -- it had too many glitches, and he's not looking for more online clout.
"I don't want Twitter to be pay-for-play. I want it to be a place where people writing interesting tweets are getting the engagement," he said.
Instead of taking away the blue check marks, Twitter on Sunday began appending a new message to profiles: "This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter blue or is a legacy verified account."
In other words, singer Dionne Warwick and other high-profile verified users still have their blue checks. But so does anyone who pays between US$8 and $11 a month for a Twitter Blue subscription -- and there's no way to tell the difference. (Warwick, for her part, made clear she won't be paying for a blue check because that money will "be going towards my extra hot lattes.")
That hybrid solution was good enough for Star Trek actor William Shatner, who earlier balked at signing up for a subscription but on Sunday tweeted to Musk: "I can live with this. This is a good compromise". But it's not clear if it is a temporary or permanent measure.
Twitter did take away at least one verified check over the weekend: from the main account of the New York Times. The account, which has 55 million followers, had previously been marked with a gold-coloured check for verified organizations.
But a user pointed out to Musk over the weekend that the newspaper had said publicly it wouldn't be paying a monthly fee for check-mark status, so Musk said he would remove the mark and also disparaged the newspaper's reporting.
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
William Nylander scored twice and Joseph Woll made 22 saves as the Toronto Maple Leafs downed the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Thursday to force Game 7 in their first-round series.
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.
The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.
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.