Unpublished Newswire

Newfoundlanders living near St. John’s International Airport say Transport Canada has failed to track a plume of toxic “forever chemicals” seeping into local drinking water, leaving residents and a university chemist to do the work themselves. The town of Torbay is one of dozens of sites near airports and military bases where firefighting foams laced with polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) leached into the groundwater and, in some cases, contaminated the drinking water of nearby property owners.

It was a prompt and persistent Swedish reporter who alerted Peter Howitt to the fact that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Economics, before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences managed to reach him with the news. The Canadian economist turned off his phone when he went to bed on Sunday night, but a reporter got through to his wife’s number right after the announcement in Sweden on Monday morning. Prof. Howitt was completely caught off guard, without a bottle of champagne in the house.