Darryl Doolittle of Valley City Branch in Dundas, Ont., ran the table in five of six playoff games to take the singles title at the 2024 Legion national eight-ball championships in Hartland, N.B. (STEPHEN J. THORNE)

The eyes have it: A pool pictorial

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Apparently concerned yet unfazed by Robert Preston’s cautionary message, Darryl Doolittle’s mom deposited her eight-year-old son at Jigger’s pool hall in Hagersville, Ont., more than half a century ago and told him to “keep an eye on” his dad.

Darryl Doolittle never looked back.

“Since I picked up that cue, I loved this game,” he said after sweeping all three titles—team, doubles and singles—at the 2024 Legion national eight-ball championships May 24-27 in beautiful Hartland, N.B.

“All my life—that’s 52 years ago. That’s a true story.”

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Canadians in South Africa. (CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM)

Canada and the Boer War

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

On May 31, 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging formally ended the Boer War, leaving the British Empire victorious against the South African Republic (or Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.

The Afrikaans-speaking Boers, descended from Dutch settlers, were now British subjects, while the resource-rich lands belonged to the Crown.

Fuelled by imperialism, numerous atrocities had been committed during some three years of bloody battles, scorched earth policy and in concentration camps run by the British.

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An aging fleet of rusting, uninsured tankers are smuggling sanctioned Russian fossil fuels to international markets. (Canva)

Russia’s shadow tanker fleet skirts sanctions, fuels war—and more

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Britain and Finland are discussing ways to foil a shadow fleet of tankers that has been skirting Western sanctions and smuggling Russian crude oil and diesel fuel out of the Baltic Sea to international markets.

Estimates of the number of tankers running illicit Russian oil vary wildly between 100 and 1,400. Uninsured and masked behind opaque ownership structures, they are believed to be transporting 90 million tonnes of oil through the Danish straits into the North Sea each month—and spying in the process.

The European Union slapped a US$60-a-barrel price cap on Russian oil in December 2022 to curtail Moscow’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine and avert a surge in global oil prices after embargoes on Russian crude.

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• Russia’s Black Sea fleet falls back amid staggering losses
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Kanao Inouye, known as the Kamloops Kid, is pictured while in custody in 1945.(Wikimedia)

The rise and fall of the Kamloops Kid

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

It was on or around Sept. 10, 1945, when the former Canadian prisoners of Ohashi prisoner-of-war camp in Japan laid eyes on their salvation.

The men, having been imprisoned since the fall of Hong Kong almost four years earlier, expected an American liberation. This they would receive but, for now, their visitors turned out to be a single Canadian army captain and a corporal.

The pair’s arrival confirmed that the war was indeed over. That unto itself was hardly a surprise, however, as Ohashi had been one of the first camps to learn of the Japanese capitulation on Aug. 15, 1945.

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