New York/Calgary  - Eight snowmobilers remained missing on Monday following two avalanches in the Canada province of British Columbia, authorities said.

The first group of victims were trapped in the first avalanche on Sunday, and when others tried to pull them out they were caught in a second, the Canadian broadcaster CTV said.

Three of the eleven were able to free themselves and received medical treatment.

New York/Vancouver - Villagers in Canada's far western province, British Columbia, spent 12 days engineering the rescue of two horses stranded by two metres of snowfall, Canadian media reported Sunday.

The horses, an eight-year-old gelding and three-year-old bay mare, were discovered by villagers on Mount Renshaw before Christmas, trapped and starving in a valley, the Vancouver Sun reported.

A group returned to the horses with hay bales on their snowmobiles, then spent the following days digging out a kilometre- long path in minus-35-degree Celsius temperatures, the newspaper reported.

The horses were brought out by 11 pm Tuesday, two days before Christmas, and spent the holidays recovering in a barn.

Montreal  - The HD age dawned three years ago in the video game world and brought novel gaming concepts, breathtaking graphics and crystal clear sound. Video games had never seemed closer to reality. And then something happened: the technological prowess of the consoles was also harnessed to revive ancient classics of video gaming. That means that today's Xbox, Playstation and Wii aren't just showing off the latest in visual fireworks, but now also have been put to work on long-lost, but well-loved classic titles as well.

That includes a new iteration of the Prince of Persia game, designed to return the series to its roots. It's been almost 20 years since the prince first stumbled his way through dank dungeons to rescue his beloved princess.

Californis, Dec 27 : Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, the prime suspect in the Christmas Eve Santa-suit killings at a suburban L. A. home, who killed himself Thursday, had planned to take a flight from Los Angeles to Canada.

But his Santa suit melted on his body, leaving him with third-degree burns on both arms.

Pardo later shot himself at his brother's home, where authorities found 17,000 dollars on him and a plane ticket, FOX news quoted the police, as saying.

Washington  - A Canadian woman who gave birth to twins on a freezing street in Windsor, Ontario amidst snow and rain was in good condition and the newborns were expected to survive, it was reported Thursday.

Police officers on a routine patrol first thought they were at a crime scene when they saw a woman covered in blood screaming for help and waving them down. The
27-year-old woman was clutching a baby and said she had just given birth, the Windsor Star reported.

London, December 24 : British and Canadian chemists have developed a chameleon-like "opal" that can rapidly take any colour.

The new material can rapidly shrink or swell to change the colour of light that it scatters.

For creating it, the researchers first stacked up silica marbles on a flat electrode, each 270 nanometres across. They then added a polymer on top to encase the sphere and hold them in place, and then dissolve the spheres with acid to leave behind a regular pattern of air pockets inside the polymer.

Finally, the team fill these pockets with a liquid electrolyte, and seal the structure.