National Lifestyle News

TORONTO — A couple dozen sportswriters sat physically distanced at a makeshift work area on the 200 level at Rogers Centre for the Toronto Blue Jays' first intrasquad game of summer training camp.

NEW ORLEANS — Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was 91.

“A Saint from Texas,” Edmund White (Bloomsbury Publishing) There is a lot to appreciate in Edmund White’s “A Saint from Texas:” the artful prose, the vivid storytelling, the darkly whimsical tone.

Watching Mark Rylance play a man of basic decency getting swallowed up by an evil world — and a sadistic Johnny Depp — in “Waiting for the Barbarians," I absent-mindedly jotted down in my notes: “Nobody does basic decency like Mark Rylance.

NEW YORK — Pete Hamill, the self-taught, street-wise newspaper columnist whose love affair with New York inspired a colorful and uniquely influential journalistic career and produced several books of fiction and nonfiction, died Wednesday morning.

When Liam Neeson sits down with a script, he usually knows within five pages whether he wants to do it. He calls it his “cup of tea” test. If he finds himself eager to get one, it’s not a good sign.

Anthony McCartney, The Associated Press' West Coast entertainment editor who as a reporter covered the legal aftermath of Michael Jackson's death and many celebrity trials, has been appointed the news co-operative's global entertainment and lifestyle

OTTAWA — Health Canada is recalling more than 50 hand sanitizers that contain ingredients "not acceptable for use" that may pose health risks.

A man who was fatally shot as he stood with another man on one of Chicago's most fashionable streets was a local rapper, police said. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office identified the man as 26-year-old Carlton Weekly of the suburb of Markham.

TORONTO — Canadian filmmaker Stella Meghie is set to direct a highly anticipated biopic on the late singing legend Whitney Houston. The Oshawa, Ont.