Viking settlement predates latest discovery: archeologist

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

A co-author of a groundbreaking study that pinpointed Viking activity in North America to the summer of 1021 AD says Norse explorers likely arrived at the Newfoundland site years before they cut the wood on which the finding was based.

Longtime Parks Canada archeologist Birgitta Wallace, one of the world’s foremost experts on Vikings (Norse) on this continent, said the finding using a new form of radiocarbon dating may well represent the last year the Norse explorers spent at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

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Setting an exact border

Story by Sharon Adams

Canada and the United States famously share the longest undefended border in the world—but the exact location of that border has been in dispute many times.

One of those disputes ended with Yukon being cut off from sea access by the Alaska Panhandle. It’s a border dispute that Canada lost more than a century ago that has ramifications reverberating to this day.

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Vikings settled Newfoundland centuries before Columbus sailed: new research

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

Vikings conclusively settled in Newfoundland nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas, says new research that disproves once and for all the myth that the Italian explorer was the first European to discover the Americas.

By radiocarbon dating wood the explorers harvested at the L’Anse aux Meadows archaeological site in Newfoundland, scientists pinpointed the felling of trees to precisely 1021 AD, long before Columbus dropped anchor in the Caribbean in October 1492.

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The U.S. invasion of Grenada

Story by Sharon Adams

The United States invaded Grenada in 1983, its first military action since the Vietnam War. Canada opposed the act alongside the majority of the United Nations.

Grenada gained independence in 1974. In 1979, after a coup, the constitution was suspended and Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist government took power. Allied to Cuba and the Soviet Union, the country began to significantly beef up its small army, causing U.S. President Ronald Reagan concern over a potential Soviet military build-up in the Caribbean.

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Militarization, not commercialization, is the problem in space

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

Recent jaunts into near space by entrepreneurs, actor William Shatner and the ultra-wealthy have inspired waves of criticism among those who claim their fortune could be better spent on Earth.

How, they say, can Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk spend billions on next-generation space technology when so many in the world are starving? How can the privileged few blow US$250,000 a head for 10 minutes outside Earth’s atmosphere—barely long enough to say they’ve been there—when others are in need?

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The liberation of Campobasso

Story by Sharon Adams

Firmly established on the Italian mainland in the fall of 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division turned its sights on Campobasso in southern Italy, rumoured to be the headquarters of German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

“With it in our hands, the Allied Force in Italy would no longer have to use the roads of the Foggia plains, some 50 miles (80 kilometres) to the south…and we would have the mobility required for the forthcoming fight for the German winter line,” recalled Captain G.K. Wright of the Royal Canadian Regiment on The Regimental Rogue website.

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