Canadian actress, 18, to lead spinoff of Beverly Hills, 90210

After spreading the net far and wide, America’s CW Network has settled on an 18-year-old Canadian, Shenae Grimes, to play the lead female role in its upcoming spinoff of Aaron Spelling’s steamy, seminal 1990s teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210.

Grimes, who has been playing former good girl Darcy Edwards on CTV’s Degrassi: The Next Generation, will portray Annie Mills, the daughter of character Celia Mills (Full House alumna Lori Loughlin), an ex-Olympic athlete who relocates to Beverly Hills with her husband, the new principal of storied Beverly Hills High.

Grimes’s casting in the role, which promises to be the contemporary equivalent of Brenda Walsh (played by Shannen Doherty in the original series) more or less quashes rumours that Hilary Duff was possibly going to jump on board.

The Toronto native is the second Canadian to join the show. The first cast member CW announced was Yellowknife’s Dustin Milligan, 22, who plays Ethan, a buff, affable star athlete at the high school, which is a bastion of privilege and excess.

Handel’s scandalous divas

They could sing like nightingales and fight like alley cats. They were the superstars of their era, the subject of salacious gossip and the targets of satirical pamphleteers. They were the opera divas of the 18th century, and they could have given some of today’s troubled celebrities a run for their money.

Their lives are featured in Handel and the Divas, an exhibition that opens today at the Handel House Museum (http://www.handelhouse.org) in London where the German-born composer was based for many years, and focuses on the careers and torrid personal lives of the leading ladies of the stage.

“Divas,” however, isn’t a word Handel would have recognized as it didn’t come into popular use until the 19th century.

However, “the time of Handel and his writing operas for these women is when women started playing really significant roles on the opera stage instead of being second fiddle to the castrati,” Martin Wyatt, deputy director of the Handel House Museum, said in a telephone interview from London yesterday.

“Also, at the time, it was the one semi-respectable occupation that an independent woman could have.”

Italian nationals defrauded GTA seniors: police

Five Italian nationals have been arrested in Toronto and charged with defrauding seniors of over $11,000 by making them believe they were the sons of old friends in the home country, police say.

Authorities say the suspects targeted elderly Canadians living in Peel and York regions as well as Toronto. The seniors were all of Italian origin.

During the months of March and April, the men would individually befriend the seniors.

“The approach would be the same,” says a police news release. “(They would pretend) to be the son of an old colleague, then give a gift claiming to be delivering it on behalf of their parents.”

‘The bathtub’s full,’ N.B. residents warned

SHEFFIELD, N.B. — Amid warnings that heavy rain is coming, hundreds of people are being warned that today is the last chance to flee rising flood waters that could soon trap them in their homes.

The prospects for 250 households in the small communities of Maugerville and Sheffield, both southeast of Fredericton, worsened abruptly yesterday afternoon when Environment Canada doubled their worst-case scenario.

“We were anticipating that there will be 25 to 50 millimetres of rain,” said Cindy Abbott, spokeswoman for the nearby municipality of Oromocto. “The latest forecast is that it will be upwards of 100 millimetres.”

The effect on the already swollen waters of the Saint John River is expected to be “significant,” she added. In the worst-affected area, the river is considered to be flooding when it rises to six metres. It was measured at 6.2 on Sunday, and Ms. Abbott said it is expected to climb this week to 6.8 metres.

China blames speeding for train crash that kill 70 people

ZIBO, China (AP) — China could identify less than half the 70 people killed in its deadliest train accident in a decade but had already cleared the mangled cars and laid new track Tuesday, restoring service a day after the collision.

Hundreds of orange-jacketed workers were mobilized at the crash site, working through the night to clear and repair the fractured line linking Beijing to the seaside city of Qingdao — site of the sailing competition during the upcoming Olympics.

The official Xinhua News Agency cited an investigative panel set up by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, as saying that speeding was to blame for Monday’s crash.

Officials bracing for a May Day surge in rail traffic and keen to show their crisis management skills ahead of the Summer Games appeared firmly in command. They sacked a third railway official while trumpeting their success in caring for 416 injured people.

Hills Girls Spread It for Rolling Stone

How did Rolling Stone get sworn enemies L.C. and Heidi into the same room for this undie-tastic cover? We’re guessing it took ego soothing, cajoling and the mediation of several presidents—particularly the dead kind.

Or else some major Photoshop skills.

In any case, this Nair ad gone wrong features Whitney looking for her fallen contact lens, Lauren pretending to have fun, Audrina pretending she’s naked (she’s more comfortable that way) and Heidi suppressing the need to pee. Can I go now, Spencer?

It’ll probably sell wildly well. Or not at all. We’re kinda praying for the latter.

Ontario Arts Council to get $20-million

Ontario’s Liberal government is adding $20-million in new funding to the Ontario Arts Council over the next four years, the province’s Culture Minister announced yesterday.

Speaking at the annual general meeting of the OAC in Kingston, Aileen Carroll said the increase means that by fiscal year 2009-10, the council’s annual budget will be just under $60-million, an increase of nearly 140 per cent from 2003 when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals defeated the Conservative government headed by Ernie Eves. In 2006-07, the council funded 1,224 individual artists and 867 organizations across Ontario.

Ms. Carroll’s commitment is yet another indication of the McGuinty government’s seeming love affair with the arts and culture sector. Last month’s provincial budget included an announcement that her ministry would be getting $64-million in new money over the next four years.

Canadian-made film Blindness to open Cannes

The Canadian-made feature film Blindness will have its world premiere on May 14 as the opening-night gala film of the 61st Cannes Film Festival.

The news, which will be announced today, marks the first time in 28 years that a Canadian movie has been chosen for this prestigious slot that kicks off the glamorous 12-day festival in the south of France.

Niv Fichman, co-founder of Toronto’s Rhombus Media, led the charge to get the Canada-Japan-Brazil co-production off the ground.

The $25-million-plus Blindness, directed by Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles (City of God), tells the fierce and fantastical story of a pandemic of blindness that eviscerates society.

Drawing on the past

AMSTERDAM — From the simple sketches in America’s turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust narrative Maus 70 years on, comic-strip art has long been used as a way to depict Jewish experience.

Jewish artists, as an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum shows, also played a special role in the development of the genre, creating figures such as Superman, Batman and the Hulk, before pioneering the graphic novel.

Early Jewish immigrants expressed their struggles to integrate in the United States in the short comic-strip format, which began to appear in East Coast newspapers from around 1900.

In a strip on show from 1914 in a Chicago evening newspaper, just after the outbreak of the First World War, a youngster looks at a map of Europe and asks his father where Belgium is.

Total snaps up Synenco Energy

CALGARY — Oil sands junior Synenco Energy Inc. has found a buyer at last, announcing Monday that French super-major Total SA will acquire the company in an all-cash deal for around $478 million.

Calgary-based Synenco has been up for sale since last May, when the company said it couldn’t afford to build its Northern Lights oil sands project — a $10.7-billion, 100,000-barrel-a-day oil sands mining and upgrader development that’s 60-per-cent owned and operated by Synenco.

“Significant new capital would be required to develop Northern Lights,” said Synenco chief executive Mike Supple in a conference call. “These resources are more valuable in the hands of a company with the capital to develop them.”

Total will pay $9 a share for Synenco, a 16-per cent premium to the company’s closing price on Friday of $7.79 per share. The boards of both firms have approved the deal, and Synenco has agreed to recommend that its shareholders accept the offer.