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.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's retirement gives U.S. President Joe Biden a chance to make his first nomination to the high court. It's also a chance for Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to be a justice.
Some things to know about the women seen as leading candidates:
Ketanji Brown Jackson has known Breyer for decades. A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law school, she was a law clerk to Breyer from 1999 to 2000. She is comfortable enough with her former boss to have a little fun at his expense. In 2017, after Breyer accidentally brought his cellphone to court and it rang, Jackson introduced him at an event and pretended to get a call mid-introduction from Breyer's colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
After clerking for Breyer, Jackson was as a lawyer in private practice, worked as a public defender and served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. President Barack Obama nominated her to be a federal trial court judge in the District of Columbia in 2013. Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she has served since June 2021.
Recently, Jackson was part of a three-judge panel that ruled against former U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to shield documents from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.
Jackson, 51, also has the advantage of a connection to Republicans. She is related by marriage to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Jackson's husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, a surgeon, is the twin brother of Ryan's brother-in-law. The judge and her husband have two daughters.
Leondra Kruger would be the first person in more than 40 years to move from a state court to the Supreme Court if she were to be chosen and confirmed as Biden's nominee. The last was Sandra Day O'Connor, a barrier-breaker who was the court's first female justice. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan had promised to put a woman on the Supreme Court. He fulfilled that commitment in his first year in office when he elevated O'Connor from a state appeals court in Arizona.
Kruger, 45, has been on the California Supreme Court since 2015. She was just 38 when chosen for the job by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. She's seen as a moderate on the seven-member court.
Kruger grew up in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of a Jamaican mother and Jewish father; both are pediatricians. She attended Harvard before getting her law degree from Yale. Like Jackson, she was a law clerk to a Supreme Court justice -- John Paul Stevens.
Before moving back to California, Kruger worked for the Department of Justice. She argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government, including one involving religious schools' ability to fire teachers.
Kruger is the first California Supreme Court justice to have a baby while serving on the court. She and her husband have two children.
J. Michelle Childs' resume doesn't include a law degree from Harvard or Yale or service on a federal appeals court, common characteristics of the current justices. But she has a powerful backer who has Biden's ear: Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.
Clyburn and Biden are longtime friends. Clyburn's pivotal endorsement of Biden before South Carolina's Democratic presidential primary in February 2020 is seen as critical in Biden's path to the nomination.
Childs, 55, is a graduate of the University of South Carolina School of Law. She has a master's degree from the school as well as a different legal degree from Duke.
She was previously a state court judge and has served as a federal trial court judge since 2010. In 2014, before the Supreme Court ruled that gay couples had a right to marry nationwide, she ruled in favor of a gay couple seeking to have their District of Columbia marriage recognized in South Carolina.
Biden nominated her in December to be a federal appeals court judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but senators have yet to act. Among the current justices, only Justice Elena Kagan wasn't a federal appeals court judge before joining.
If Biden decided to go outside the judiciary, the choice could be NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund head Sherrilyn Ifill, 59. She is a deeply respected civil rights lawyer who has held the post since 2013. Ifill, who has announced she will step down in the spring, is the second woman to lead the organization.
Ifill started her career at the American Civil Liberties Union, then worked on voting rights legislation at the legal defence fund before she joined the faculty at University of Maryland School of Law, where she taught for more than 20 years. Ifill graduated from Vassar College and earned her law degree from New York University School of Law in 1987. She was among the group of lawyers named to study the Supreme Court by Biden in 2021.
She's a prolific author and writer, and in February of last year wrote an opinion column in The New York Times on how the legal profession must reckon with the fact that lawyers helped President Donald Trump by enabling him to effort "the most dangerous assault on American democracy in more than a century," through his meritless lawsuits challenging the election, efforts to install a sympathetic attorney general who would help him, and by the growing movement in Congress to adopt Trump's election lies.
Holly Thomas, 43, was just confirmed to the largest federal appeals court last week, the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. She is the second Black woman ever to sit on the court.
Thomas is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She had been in the Family Law Division of the Los Angeles Superior Court since 2018, and before that she was the deputy director of executive programs at the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
She has also worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and was as an appellate attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
She overcame a party-line vote deadlock in the Senate Judiciary Committee, requiring an additional floor vote to move her forward after Republicans questioned her ability to separate her prior advocacy for progressive issues from her work as a judge. During her time in the New York Solicitor General's office, she filed briefs advocating for policies that allowed transgender people to use the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. At her confirmation hearings, she said she was more than able to set aside her work in order to fairly serve as a judge.
Eunice Lee, 51, was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in August, the first former federal defender to serve on the court. Her appointment was lauded as a recognition of the need to broaden the judiciary's legal expertise, particularly because defence lawyers are not a common choice for such posts.
Lee graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. She then clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Susan J. Dlott, and later for Judge Eric Clay on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. She spent time from 1998 to 2019 at the office of the appellate defender in New York City and also taught clinical law at New York University Law School.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
As if a 4-0 Edmonton Oilers lead in Game 1 of their playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings wasn't good enough, what was announced at Rogers Place during the next TV timeout nearly blew the roof off the downtown arena.
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.”