Toronto

MOORE, OKLA.—At least 10 people were killed when an enormous tornado 1½ kilometres wide roared through the suburbs of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon.The mega-storm, with winds up to 320 km/h, flattened entire neighbourhoods, set buildings on fire and heavily damaged a hospital and two elementary schools.There were scenes of devastation in Moore, Newcastle and Oklahoma City. Block after block of Moore, a suburb to the south, lay in ruins, with heaps of debris piled up where homes used to be. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.The U.S. National Weather Service issued an initial finding that the tornado was rated at EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, the second most-powerful type of twister.Dozens of people were injured, according to officials at three hospitals. Integris Southwest Medical Centre in Oklahoma City, which has the biggest emergency room in the state, was receiving numerous patients, said Integris spokeswoman Brooke Cayot. A number of them were in critical condition.“They (injured) are coming in minute by minute,” said Cayot.An Associated Press photographer saw several children being pulled out of what was left of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore. Rescue workers lifted children from the rubble and passed them down a human chain to a triage centre set up in the school’s parking lot.CNN reported 75 students and staff had sought refuge in a hallway in the school upon hearing that the tornado was approaching.The other school hit by the tornado was Briarwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City. Local newscasters reported that children were trapped inside.Police said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk to searchers.“They are still in the process of picking through the rubble to try to find survivors,” said Jerry Lojka, a spokesman for Oklahoma Emergency Management. “We know (the tornado) was on the ground for 40 minutes. It was a mile and a quarter wide. It traveled across the entire city of Moore.“There are entire blocks that are wiped clean to the foundations,” he said. “It went through residential areas, business areas. We know a hospital is heavily damaged, two elementary schools are heavily damaged.”Even for Oklahoma, famous for tornadoes, this was a significant storm. Some people likened it to a massive cluster of tornadoes that hit on May 3, 1999, one of the largest and deadliest storms in state history.“Our house is gone,” one woman in Moore told a reporter with KWTV, crying and clutching her two children’s hands. “Everything but where we were is gone.”The woman said she and her children hid in their bathtub with a mattress over them. Had they been anywhere else in the house, they would have been killed, she said.The tornado struck about 3 p.m. and was on the ground about 40 minutes, the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla., tweeted.A tornado warning was in effect for 16 minutes before the tornado developed, according to the National Weather Service. People sought refuge wherever they could: in hallways, shelters, horse stalls.In southwest Oklahoma City, cars were smashed and sitting upside down atop houses that had been reduced to rubble. People dug through destroyed homes even as strong storms remained a threat.Giant hail was falling as Chad Bartlett and his wife, Helen, were driving to his son’s high school in Oklahoma City on Monday afternoon. The drive was treacherous.“With the rain you couldn’t see the car in front of you,” Bartlett said.The roads were congested as other people tried to flee the area. “There was wind and hail. The radios were blaring with the National Weather Service and sirens,” said Bartlett, a pastor. “I drove to the school just praying the whole way.”In a phone interview, Bartlett said they arrived to see teachers taking students down the basement for shelter. He and his wi

They came, they saw, they tangoed. In the final week of the "Dancing With the Stars," it all comes down to these four: Zendaya, Kellie, Aly, and Jacoby. Who knew they had these kind of moves? Join Marianne Dowling for some of the final dances of Season 16 starting at 8 PM ET. Click the "Comment Now" button to join in the conversation. The mirror ball trophy is in sight.

OTTAWA—Calls for Stephen Harper to come clean about the Mike Duffy affair are zeroing in on what the prime minister knew about the secret $90,000 payment that has touched off the worst scandal faced by his seven-year-old government.The NDP urged the RCMP Monday to investigate the circumstances around the $90,000 cheque that Nigel Wright, the former chief of staff in Harper’s office, gave Duffy.And NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus said Harper owes Canadians a full explanation of his role in the effort to secretly help Duffy pay back improperly claimed expenses.“Canadians deserve the truth — something they have not gotten yet from the prime minister or the Conservatives,” he said Monday.Angus seized on the wording of Wright’s resignation statement, in which the former official said he “did not advise the prime minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy’s expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact.”At an Ottawa news conference, Angus said the statement appears deliberately vague.“The language around Mr. Wright’s resignation is very disturbing. It suggests a prevarication on both the part of the prime minister and Mr. Wright,” Angus said.Noting that Wright said only that the prime minister was not told how the payment was made, Angus asked, “What was Mr. Harper aware of?“Does it mean he wasn’t aware of whether they were $20, $50 or $100 bills that were being paid out,” Angus said.However, the Prime Minister’s Office insisted Monday that Harper was in the dark about the payment.“The PM had no knowledge whatsoever of Mr. Wright’s intent to use his personal funds. Full stop,” Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s director of communications, told the Star.“He wasn’t aware that Nigel had made the payment.”Angus also called on the Prime Minister’s Office to release the reported written deal at the heart of Wright’s deal with Duffy, made earlier this year.CTV News has reported that Wright had a PMO lawyer prepare a letter of understanding with Duffy’s lawyer. That agreement would see Duffy reimburse taxpayers with Wright’s help and included a pledge that the spending investigation, then ongoing, would go easy on him, CTV said.“Where is the paper trail? Who was involved,” Angus said.“If there is a signed agreement between Mr. Duffy and Mr. Wright or Mr. Duffy and the Prime Minister’s Office, we need to see that documentation,” he said.However, a source told the Star that the only stipulation Wright put on the cheque, delivered to Duffy’s lawyer, was that Duffy write a cheque for an equivalent amount to the Receiver General of Canada for the expense money he owed.Yet once the repayment was made, Duffy stopped cooperating with independent auditors examining his expense claims. When a Senate committee met behind closed doors in early May to write the final report on the results of the audit, Conservatives used their majority to soften the conclusions about Duffy’s misuse of taxpayers’ money.Angus released a letter he wrote Monday to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson asking the Mounties to look into possible illegal actions arising from the payment from the Prime Minister’s Office to Duffy. “I request that the RCMP take these concerns into account, investigate promptly and take all appropriate action.”The Liberals have also asked the RCMP to dig into the Senate misspending for potential criminal wrongdoing.The RCMP is believed to be assessing the results of the Senate reviews of the living expenses of Duffy, former Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau and former Liberal Sen. Mac Harb. Brazeau and Harb were ordered to repay thousands of dollars in improper expense claims, which they are challenging.However, the Mounties have not said whether they will launch an investigation.The Sena

MOORE, OKLA.—A monstrous tornado 1½ kilometres wide with winds up to 320 km/h roared through the suburbs of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon, flattening entire neighbourhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school.There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths, but the storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore to the south. Block after block of the suburb lay in ruins, with heaps of debris piled up where homes used to be. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.The U.S. National Weather Service issued an initial finding that the tornado was rated at EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, the second most-powerful type of twister.Volunteers and first responders were searching through debris looking for survivors. Television footage showed first-responders picking through rubble and twisted metal.Oklahoma City Police Capt. Dexter Nelson said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk in the aftermath of the system.The storm seemed to blow neighbourhoods apart, scattering shards of wood and pieces of insulation across the instantly scarred landscape.The same suburb was hit hard by a tornado in 1999. That storm had the highest winds ever recorded near the Earth’s surface.

If the New York Rangers are going to win their Eastern Conference semifinal with the Boston Bruins, they are going to have to make history to do it. No team has won back-to-back series in which it has gone down 2-0. The Rangers were in a 2-0 hole to the Washington Capitals in their Eastern Conference quarterfinal before coming back to win the serie

Maybe it's the palm trees outside the rink.

MONTREAL—A philosophy professor who famously wore a panda costume to lighten the mood throughout last year’s Quebec student protests has found a new cause.Anarchopanda, the unofficial mascot of the Quebec student strikes, has completed a fundraising campaign to contest fines levied against protesters in recent months.More than $31,000 has been raised according to Anarchopanda — whose real identity is Julien Villeneuve, a philosophy professor at the Collège de Maisonneuve.He became a local celebrity during the student strikes where, clad as the bamboo-munching bear, he peacefully marched with students, offered hugs to police, and spread the authority-resisting gospel of anarchism.Although the strikes ended last year, the most committed core of protesters carried on this spring. First they fought the smaller tuition hikes introduced by the Parti Québécois and, lately, have been contesting an alleged crackdown on civil liberties.Villeneuve was detained last month and fined $637 for not respecting a Montreal bylaw that has become the focus of the civil-liberties dispute.He is now fighting that local bylaw, P-6 — which bans masks at protests, and requires that an itinerary be submitted before any demonstration in Montreal.The case challenging the constitutionality of the bylaw is set to resume in October before Quebec Superior Court.Villeneuve says he has been pleasantly surprised by the amount collected in less than a month. That offers him some hope that he might be able to cover the legal bills if the case persists.“Initially, I expected (to raise) $10,000,” he said. “But we will need more than that, especially if the city appeals.”Both of Villeneuve’s lawyers are working as volunteers on the constitutional case.The money will help pay for assorted court costs such as service and interrogation fees, in that case, as well as the lawyer fees in the cases fighting the more than 1,000 tickets handed out.“We will need to pay the lawyers’ salaries because these trials are going to last for a very long time,” Villeneuve said.The most controversial provisions of P-6 came into existence in May 2012, at the height of the student strikes.However, the Montreal police started applying them systematically only this spring. A motion to strike down the bylaw, introduced last month by an opposition party at city hall, failed.Villeneuve said the bylaw gives too much arbitrary power to the police. That suspicion of power is consistent with the anarchist credo that inspired the name of Villeneuve’s mascot alter-ego.“The executive (municipal body) and the (police) can declare any gathering of three or more people illegal,” he said.“They apply it like they want — and that’s a problem.”He said masks provide protection for people who, for whatever reason, might fear reprisals. The bylaw takes away their ability to demonstrate anonymously, he said.Villeneuve also criticized the fines, which range from $500 to $1,000 for a first offence.“How fast do you have to speed on the road to get that kind of fine?” Villeneuve asked, rhetorically.He also criticized the police methods and the long hours protesters have had to wait before being processed, handcuffed and without access to water, food, or bathrooms.The practice known as kettling — where police encircle protesters to limit their movement — has been widely used by the Montreal police.“They could just take our addresses and mail us the fines,” he said. “Essentially, it’s repression to take away people’s desire to demonstrate.”The bylaw was passed at a time that Montreal was on edge, with daily demonstrations occasionally devolving into street scuffles, blocked downtown traffic, smashed commercial windows, and transit interruptions.Marvin Rotrand, a city councillor who voted in favour of the

LONDON—A first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that contains author J.K. Rowling’s notes and original illustrations is going on sale at a charity auction.The personal annotations from Rowling included comments on the process of writing and a section from an early draft of the novel.They also included a note on how the bestselling author came to invent the game of “Quidditch.”Rowling’s 22 illustrations included a sleeping baby Harry on a door step and an Albus Dumbledore Chocolate Frog card.Tuesday’s auction at Sotheby’s London will also include other personalized books including Kazuo Ishiguro’s, The Remains of the Day and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.Sotheby’s said Monday the funds raised will benefit the writer’s association English PEN.

The Doors star Ray Manzarek has died following a secret battle with cancer.

In the NBA, size does matter, especially when a team has length on the perimeter and an offence that runs through its bigs.