Tainted juices pulled from Loblaws’ shelves

Small amounts of it are found naturally in our drinking water, large amounts of it occur predictably in certain murder mysteries, but even a tiny amount of arsenic in fruit juice marketed to children is too much, prompting an official recall this week of two brands of pear juice sold by the Loblaw supermarkets.

The supermarket chain immediately ordered all its stores to pull both juices — President’s Choice Organics Pear Juice for Toddlers, and Beech Nut Pear Juice — from its shelves. A recording on the company’s customer relations hotline urges callers not to drink the juice, and return it to the store for a refund.

“No one has ever heard of this particular element being found in juice before, so when it shows up we move very quickly,” says Rob Moore, senior vice president of communications for the Loblaw Companies Ltd.

X-Files creator credits Lotus Land as one of ‘the secrets of our success’

Vancouver made The X-Files the success it was, according to the show’s creator and producer Chris Carter.

“This city has definitely been one of the secrets of our success … and it’s just one of the reasons why we came back,” said Carter.

Speaking to journalists gathered for what was billed as a “thank you hug” for local media Wednesday, Carter, lead star David Duchovny and co-writer Frank Spotnitz (pictured in that order above) did their best to answer questions about the production of the second X-Files movie without unveiling any plot points of the latest instalment in the paranoia-fuelled franchise.

Pre-Inca Temple Discovered in Peru

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient temple, roadway and irrigation systems at a famed fortress overlooking the Inca capital of Cuzco, according to officials involved with the dig.

The temple on the periphery of the Sacsayhuaman fortress casts added light on pre-Inca cultures of Peru, showing that the site had religious as well as military aims, according to researchers.

It includes 11 rooms thought to have held mummies and idols, lead archaeologist Oscar Rodriguez told The Associated Press.

The team of archaeologists that made the discoveries believes the structures predated the Inca empire but were then significantly developed and expanded.

Verizon fixes P2P problem – on its network at least

Verizon has been experimenting with a new technology called P4P, which localizes P2P file transfers, as many media are reporting today. Essentially, rather than randomly pulling pieces of a file from around the world, Verizon is communicating the locations of their users, so local sources are preferred over distant ones. This reduces the number of hops from an average of 5.5 to 0.89.

Thus Verizon saves serious dough and even better users get their movies delivered an average of twice as fast, in some cases six times as fast. This is a good thing. Which raises the question, does this technological breakthrough solve the whole need for Comcast to throttle BitTorrent?