Here’s a little bit of music psychology. Studies on the power of opinion have found that you are more likely to say that you like a song if you know other people like it. Here’s a sample of one of those studies from Columbia University.
They found 14,000 individual people to sample downloads of 48 unknown songs, tracks no one in the study had ever heard before. And this is important: everyone could see what everyone else was downloading. When all the results were tallied up, there was broad agreement about which songs were best, and it seems that the quality of the music had nothing to do with it. It was all about what other people said they liked as they sought validation for their choices.
It’s a complete bandwagon effect, a herd mentality. Weird, huh? But somehow, deep down inside, you probably knew that.
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the old-style non-digital jukebox. They used to be in bars and restaurants everywhere. It was usually a big metal-and-plastic-and-glass box more than half the size of a refrigerator, made by companies with names like Wurlitzer and Seeburg, that was essentially a coin-operated record player.
A typical jukebox could hold (at most) a couple hundred seven-inch singles. A single play of a song used to cost a nickel, then a dime and maybe three for a quarter. They were big, clunky, needed lots of servicing, and really didn’t sound all that good because the speakers tended to be terrible and could only reproduce music in mono. But in the era before personal music devices, they were tremendously popular, responsible for millions of dollars in revenue for operators, record labels and publishers. For example, the first music charts were largely based on the number of jukebox plays a record got.
Now these old machines are highly collectible and often sell for thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Within hours of the U.S. announcing a plan to sanction countries still doing business with Iran, Tehran is vowing to fight back. And if this doesn't work, it could put further pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump to find a solution to his war. Reggie Cecchini explains.
Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest hubs, said Wednesday it saw a sharp drop in passengers during the second quarter as the Iran war disrupted air travel and prompted many travellers to choose routes that avoided the Middle East.
The airport recorded 13 million passengers during the second quarter, following 31.5 million passengers in the first half. That was a 31.3 per cent drop over passenger traffic in the first half of 2025, the airport said.
Air traffic in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the Gulf region was disrupted by shutdowns and restrictions after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. The Dubai airport itself suffered minor damage in attacks from Iran.
Aircraft movements totaled 150,600 in the first half, down 32.1 per cent year on year, with only 62,500 in the second quarter, the airport said.
CEO Paul Griffiths noted, however, there has been a steady increase in passenger volume each month in the second quarter, and said the momentum is expected to continue.
“The events of the disruption, which lasted two months, that had an impact on traffic,” Griffiths told The Associated Press. “However, the trajectory now is universally positive.”
He said the airport was waiting for overseas airlines, particularly from Europe, to restart operations.
“I’m very confident we’ll be back to full operation in a very short space of time,” he said.
People gather outside a nursery in the gynecology ward following a fire at a hospital in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/M.A. Sheikh)
A fire triggered by an exploding air conditioner killed 14 newborns in a hospital nursery in the capital of Pakistan on Wednesday, officials said.
One baby of the 15 who were in the nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences was rescued, the hospital said.
Television footage showed rescue workers using ladders to reach the third-floor nursery through broken windows. Grieving parents and relatives gathered at the hospital, some weeping while others demanded answers about how the fire began and whether the nursery had adequate firefighting equipment.
The government has opened an investigation, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered Health Secretary Aslam Ghauri, the Health Ministry’s highest civil servant, to be removed from office.
A woman who identified herself as Mrs. Mohammad Sami said she gave birth three days earlier and her baby was receiving intensive care in the nursery when the fire broke out.
“I don’t know what to say or whom to blame,” she said through tears. “I have lost my child.”
The fire was confined to the nursery at the institute, which is one of Islamabad’s largest public hospitals. The rest of the facility was unaffected with no other injuries reported, according to hospital officials and witnesses. The blaze was later extinguished, Islamabad Chief Commissioner Suhail Ashraf said.
It was among Pakistan’s deadliest recent tragedies involving children. In June, 14 schoolchildren were killed when the roof of a tutoring center under construction collapsed in the eastern city of Lahore.
Health Minister Mustafa Kamal, who confirmed the death toll, told the Geo News channel that he was traveling from Karachi to Islamabad to oversee the investigation.
Dr. Aneeza Jalil, a hospital spokesperson, said a doctor rescued one baby. She said the bodies of six babies had been handed over to their families, while the remaining bodies would be released soon.
The Islamabad district magistrate appointed a fact-finding committee and asked it to submit a report within 24 hours. The panel will investigate the cause of the fire and its spread, determine whether adequate fire-safety measures were in place, and evaluate the emergency response, according to a government order.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi and Sharif, the prime minister, expressed sorrow over the fire.
“A tragedy involving children is an irreparable loss,” said Sharif, who held a high-level meeting with officials from relevant agencies hours after the fire.
President Asif Ali Zardari also offered condolences to the families, describing the deaths as “heartbreaking and an irreparable loss.” He called for those responsible to be brought to justice and urged hospitals to ensure effective fire-safety measures and emergency procedures.
WATCH: Alberta Separatism: Growing evidence of foreign interference ahead of referendum
Alberta’s Opposition leader says now is not the time to hold a referendum on leaving Canada as the country wages a consequential trade war with its southern neighbors.
NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi says Premier Danielle Smith needs to cancel it or, at the very least, postpone it.
“It’s time to call off the referendum,” Nenshi told reporters Tuesday in Calgary.
“The premier’s pandering to separatists just shows weakness; it shows that Canada is not united.”
Albertans are to vote Oct. 19 in a provincial referendum that asks whether the government should start the legal process to hold a future binding vote on separating from Canada.
Nenshi said Canada has to send a message of unity as it resumes the trade war with the United States.
The US has levied import fees on $28 billion worth of Canadian goods, with Canada announcing counter-tariffs that are to kick in Sept. 8 on an array of items, ranging from American steel and aluminum products to video game consoles and fishing rods.
When asked for a response to Nenshi, Smith’s office referred to the premier’s comments on her radio talk show last weekend. Smith said the thousands of referendum will continue, because hundreds of citizens have signed petitions demanding a resolution.
“Citizens signed one of two petitions saying they wanted to have this question now, and that’s what the vote is going to be on Oct. 19,” Smith said Saturday.
“I think we need to make sure that we are clear about what Albertans want us to do. That’s part of the reason why we’re having the vote.”
Smith has said she’ll personally be voting to remain in Canada.
Nenshi’s criticism piggybacks on comments last week from Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
St-Pierre Plamondon said if his separatist party takes office in the Quebec general election in October, he would postpone a promised referendum on secession until the end of US President Donald Trump’s presidency.
The unpredictable nature of the Trump administration could harm Quebec’s referendum process and discussions about the province’s future, St-Pierre Plamondon said.
Trump is about midway through his four-year mandate.
The Alberta NDP has accused Smith of holding a separatist vote not to resolve a profound question preoccupying Albertans, but rather to place hardline separatists in her United Conservative Party.
That contrasts with the long-standing separatism concerns of Quebecers, said Nenshi.
“If real separatists (in Quebec) understand the danger of doing this, how come a separatist of convenience, like Danielle Smith, doesn’t understand that danger?” he said.
The battle for hearts and minds of Albertans ahead of the referendum has seen groups on both sides organize advocacy campaigns.
That includes two former Alberta political foes.
Former NDP premier Rachel Notley and ex-UCP premier Jason Kenney announced are co-chairing a Canadian Chamber of Commerce campaign to encourage Alberta stay in Canada.
Both say they have had their differences but agree on the value of Alberta staying in Confederation.
An Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) patch is seen in Ottawa, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby
SC
A 19-year-old woman has died following an afternoon car crash with a tractor-trailer in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Ontario Provincial Police say officers and paramedics responded to the crash between a passenger vehicle and tractor-trailer at Mapleward Road and Highway 11-17 around 12:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Officers say the woman from Thunder Bay was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Police have not released the woman’s name or provided details about what led to the collision.
A section of Highway 11-17 was closed for several hours for the investigation, but has since reopened.
Police are asking anyone who witnessed the crash or has dashcam footage from the area to contact them.
RELATED: 6 Marineland beluga whales swimming in new U.S. homes
Two belugas and four dolphins from Marineland are being moved today to an aquarium in Spain.
This is the fifth move of whales from the shuttered theme park in Niagara Falls, Ont., as it moves all of its animals off the property.
Marineland is up for sale and has said it is running out of money and can no longer afford to care for its animals.
The park had originally sold all of its 30 belugas and four dolphins to an aquarium in China, but the federal government blocked the move, saying it violated the spirit of a 2019 law.
That law banned whale and dolphin captivity, and forbade breeding and performances.
After today’s move to Oceanografic Valencia, there will be six belugas remaining in Marineland, which are soon set to head to an aquarium in the United States.
Echo, Lida, Marina and Tsunami are the dolphins leaving Canada, the last captive dolphins in the country. They will be joined en route by belugas Cleopatra and Jelly Bean.
The remaining belugas are the last captive whales in Canada.
After Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson nixed the move to China, Marineland threatened to euthanize all of its belugas and whales unless the federal government provided an emergency infusion of cash.
The park then turned to a consortium of American and Spanish aquariums for help.
The world’s largest collective move of captive whales has so far seen belugas shipped to SeaWorld locations in San Diego and San Antonio, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.
The history of consumer electronics is littered with devices that just didn’t make it. This is one of the most obscure ones I’ve ever heard of.
Back in 1964, while the world was just getting into 8-tracks and cassettes, Sanyo came out with something called the Micro-Pack. This was a portable tape machine that used a cartridge featuring a continuous loop of tape that was somewhere between an 8-track and a cassette. It was never meant for music. No pre-recorded music was ever released in this format. Instead, it was marketed as an “audio camera,” something that could be used to capture things like a baby’s first words, speeches and letters that were spoken instead of written.
Unfortunately, audio quality was horrible, and outside of a few units that were sold in Japan, the Sanyo Micro-Pack died a very quick and deserved death.
RELATED: The ongoing rhetoric surrounding the U.S.-Canada trade war drifted toward a bizarre subject Tuesday when President Donald Trump threatened to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Like so much of what Trump says on social media, it's not clear whether he's serious, or if he's just "trolling” – though he did rename the Gulf of Mexico in his second term. Touria Izri has more on how Canadians and Americans are reacting to the suggestion.
U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” but the name has centuries of history behind it.
He later posted a graphic depicting the Great Lake under the proposed “Lake America” name.
U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday showing a graphic of "Lake America," which he said the United States is considering using as a name for Lake Ontario amid a trade war between the two countries.
Ford dismissed the proposed name change during an interview with CNN on Tuesday. “I think it’s a lot of rhetoric,” Ford told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
For Mary Baxter, a PhD candidate in Western University’s history department who specializes in Great Lakes environmental history, the threat immediately brought to mind the Republican president’s executive order last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
“My first reaction was to think of the whole Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America incident,” Baxter told Global News.
“There are times when we’ve heard Trump back down, but there are also times where he moved ahead with things. And this is one of those things that he could move ahead on,” she said.
Trump signed an executive order last year directing the U.S. government to use the name Gulf of America. But Lake Ontario’s name has a much longer history than either Canada or the United States.
Baxter said the name Ontario comes from an Iroquoian language term and roughly translates to “sparkling waters.”
The lake has been known by several names over its history, including different names used by First Nations before European exploration.
Baxter said French explorers also used different names for the lake, while the French and British had competing names for it during their conflicts in North America.
The French often referred to it as Lac Frontenac, she said, while the British at times used Cataraqui Lake, another name with Iroquoian origins.
By the mid-1700s — before the American Revolution and the eventual creation of Canada and the United States — Lake Ontario had emerged as the name that stuck.
The first known appearance of “Lake Ontario” on a map dates to 1656, Baxter said, and the name has been used intermittently ever since.
Baxter said the name was appearing on maps more than a century before the United States declared independence and long before there was a province called Ontario.
“I think that there can sometimes be a perception out there that the Great Lakes have been named after the communities that surround them,” Baxter said.
But she said the opposite is true.
“These communities got their names from the lakes. These names are older.”
Ontario, the province, was named for the lake, and not the other way around.
Lake Ontario is one of five Great Lakes and straddles the Canada-U.S. border, with Ontario to its north and New York state to its south. The Great Lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — are a chain of five freshwater lakes that hold roughly one-fifth of the world’s surface fresh water.
Daniel Macfarlane, an environmental historian at Western Michigan University and author of The Lives of Lake Ontario, told Global the lake occupies a much more central place in Canada’s history and identity than it does in the United States.
“It’s far more important to Canada than it is also to the United States,” Macfarlane said. He described Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River as forming the heart of early Canada.
“We’ve got like a quarter of the Canadian population living near Lake Ontario, which far outnumbers the New York side,” Macfarlane said.
Canada and the United States do not necessarily have to use the same name for a geographic feature they share, Baxter said, pointing to international examples in which countries use different names for the same body of water, such as the Sea of Japan, which South Korea refers to as the East Sea.
That means a U.S. decision to adopt “Lake America” would not necessarily require Canada to follow suit.
Baxter said disputes over geographic names are not unusual, but they frequently emerge within broader political conflicts. “There is a lot of global history of that happening, but it frequently happens during conflicts, which is what we have here,” she said. “So it reflects significance.”
In this case, Baxter said the history embedded in the Great Lakes’ names makes the question more complicated. “There is an Indigenous heritage that is embedded in some of these lakes’ names. So when you change that name, there’s a rewriting of a very long history,” she said.
She said changing the name could be seen as dishonouring Indigenous communities that have lived along the lake for centuries and continue to make its shores their home.
Baxter said those communities should have a central voice in any discussion about changing the lake’s name.
In Plattsburgh, N.Y., meanwhile, some Americans said they were embarrassed with the increasingly heated rhetoric between the two countries.
“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous what’s going on. Canada and the U.S. have always been friends,” one resident told Global News.
Another was even more critical of Trump. “He’s America’s bully. We’re losing all respect across the world because of one man.”
There could also be business consequences if the United States goes ahead with a name change. Baxter pointed to businesses and organizations that have incorporated Lake Ontario into their names and could be forced to decide whether to adapt if the U.S. government began officially referring to it as Lake America.
“There’s a bureaucratic process that goes into that,” she said, describing the potential consequences as “a lot of make-busy work.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended trade talks Friday, accusing the United States of introducing last-minute demands that would limit Canada’s ability to make trade agreements with other countries and protect its culture and sovereignty.
The United States imposed a new round of 50 per cent tariffs on $28 billion worth of Canadian exports Saturday, while Canada announced retaliatory measures Tuesday that are set to take effect Sept. 8.
–With files from Aaron D’Andrea, Isaac Callan and Colin D’Mello
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