The autonomous Dominion of Canada, a confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec, is officially recognized by Great Britain with the passage of the British North America Act.

On July 1, 1867, with passage of the British North America Act, the Dominion of Canada was officially established as a self-governing entity within the British Empire. Two years later, Canada acquired the vast possessions of the Hudson's Bay Company, and within a decade the provinces of Manitoba and Prince Edward Island had joined the Canadian federation. In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, making mass settlement across the vast territory of Canada possible.

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Hertz Rental Cars will no longer charge an extra fee to fuel cars returned with less than a full tank, according to Hertz Chairman and CEO Mark Frissora in an interview with FOX Business Network this afternoon.

“Instead of charging $7.99 a gallon, we are going to bring it down to price at the pump,” Frissora said. He said he hopes this will lead the industry to having more honesty when it comes to gasoline prices.

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Americans are the world's top consumers of cannabis and cocaine despite punitive US drug laws, according to an international study published in the online scientific magazine PLoS Medicine.

The study, released Monday, revealed that 16.2 percent of Americans had tried cocaine at least once, and 42.4 percent had used marijuana.

In second-place New Zealand, just 4.3 percent of study participants had used cocaine, and 41.9 percent marijuana.

The research was conducted at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, based on World Health Organization data from 54,068 people in 17 countries.

Rates of participation differed from country to country, and researchers noted uncertainty over how honestly people report their own drug use.

"Nevertheless, the findings present comprehensive data on the patterns of drug use from national samples representing all regions of the world," a PLoS statement said.

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No matter who is elected president in November, his foreign policy team will have to deal with one of the most frustrating realities in Iraq: the slow pace with which the government in Baghdad operates.

Iraq's political and military success is considered vital to U.S. interests, whether troops stay or go. And while the Iraqi government has made measurable progress in recent months, the pace at which it's done so has been achingly slow.

The White House sees the progress in a particularly positive light, declaring in a new assessment to Congress that Iraq's efforts on 15 of 18 benchmarks are "satisfactory"—almost twice of what it determined to be the case a year ago. The May 2008 report card, obtained by the Associated Press, determines that only two of the benchmarks—enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenues—are unsatisfactory.

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For a decade it appeared there was no such thing as too many Starbucks for U.S. coffee drinkers, whose willingness to buy its $4 lattes and dark drip brews rationalized a second green-and-white mermaid awning just down the street - and sometimes even a third.

But in a sign that those days are over, Starbucks Corp. announced Tuesday it will close 600 company-operated stores in the next year, as the faltering U.S. economy hastened the pain caused by the company's own rapid expansion.

Starbucks did not say which stores will be closed, only that they are spread throughout the country. But it did say 70 percent of those slated for closure had opened after the start of 2006.

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Us Weekly reports in its new issue, on newsstands tomorrow, that Madonna's seven-year marriage to Guy Ritchie has stalled out – and the singer has been hosting late-night visits from New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez at her Central Park West apartment in New York City.

A ringless and grim-faced Ritchie, 39, arrived in New York City from London yesterday after several weeks apart from his family. A source tells Us that the $28-million-a-year Rodriguez, 32, has made numerous solo nighttime visits to Madonna, 49, at her spacious home and would sneak out "as late as midnight." Says the source, "All the doormen are talking."

Rodriguez attended Madonna's April 30 NYC concert; the singer sat in his seats at a Yankees game on June 22 (it was the first time she ever was photographed at a Yankees game). Her son Rocco, 7, also sported Yankees gear on June 25 while playing in Central Park.

Rodriguez, married with two young daughters, has already faced speculation about cheating: In 2007, he and a stripper were reportedly spied in Toronto, Miami and Dallas.

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Oscar Stohler was raised in a sod house in western North Dakota and ranched there for nearly seven decades. He never gave much thought to what lay below the grass that fattened his cattle.

When oilmen wanted to drill there last year, Stohler, 83, doubted oil would be found two miles underground on his property. He even joked about it.

In less than a year, Stohler and his wife, Lorene, 82, have become millionaires from the production of one well on their land near Dunn Center, a mile or so from the sod home where Oscar grew up. A second well has begun producing on their property and another is being drilled — all aimed at the Bakken shale formation, a rich deposit that the U.S. Geological Survey calls the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

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Helicopters and a bomber attacked insurgents massing in eastern Afghanistan under cover of darkness, killing an estimated 33 people, the U.S.-led coalition said Tuesday.

Reconnaissance aircraft spotted "large groupings" of insurgents armed with heavy machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades on Monday night in Khost province, the coalition said.

"After positively identifying the militants, coalition forces engaged them with attack helicopters and a close air support bomber, killing approximately 33 militants," spokesman 1st Lt. Nathan Perry said.

Fighting between militants and security forces is intensifying in the southern half of Afghanistan. More than 2,100 people died in the violence in the first six months, according to an Associated Press tally.

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The World Trade Center's owner on Monday scrapped the schedule for the prolonged rebuilding of the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, saying nearly every project is delayed and over budget and that the latest estimates are unrealistic.

Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, issued a report listing more than a dozen issues that have slowed rebuilding and have raised costs. These included an over-budget transit hub, the process of dismantling a condemned tower where another is going to be built and construction around a city subway line.

"The schedule and cost estimates of the rebuilding effort that have been communicated to the public are not realistic," Ward wrote Monday to Gov. David Paterson.

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With a few exceptions, Windows XP will be unavailable to computer makers and retail shoppers after Monday -- a fact that will force many Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) PC users to migrate to the widely maligned Vista operating system or wait until the arrival of Windows 7 in 2010 to upgrade their systems.

Implementing a move that's been planned for months, Microsoft will no longer make Windows XP available to large computer makers, such as Dell, Lenovo, or Hewlett-Packard, or to software retailers, after June 30. It will continue to offer the OS to "system builders," that is, small, independent PC makers, through July of next year.

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Sheriffs in Phoenix, Ariz., have launched an aggressive crackdown on illegal aliens as part of a growing movement by local officials to help prevent illegal immigration.

Maricopa County sheriffs have instituted a zero tolerance policy — knocking on doors and arresting those suspected of living in the country illegally.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the law is clear cut. “Our policy is if we come across any illegal ... you are arrested. You don’t get a ticket. You get to appear before a judge later on.”

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California's 30-year-old death penalty, which costs more than $100 million annually to administer, is "close to collapse," according to a new report issued Monday.

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, appointed by the state Legislature to propose criminal justice reforms, issued a 117-page report detailing a deeply flawed death penalty system that has the biggest backlog of cases in the nation.

The commission stopped short of calling for the abolition of the state's death penalty, but did note that California would save hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the criminal justice system if capital punishment were eliminated. It said most condemned inmates are essentially given life sentences because so few executions are carried out.

The commission blamed inadequate legal representation, a broad death penalty law that makes nearly all first-degree murder cases eligible for the death penalty and a host of other issues that has made California capital punishment system "dysfunctional."

"It is the law in name only, and not in reality," the report stated.

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A British high school student received credit for writing nothing but a two-word obscenity on an exam paper because the phrase expressed meaning and was spelled correctly.

The Times newspaper on Monday quoted examiner Peter Buckroyd as saying he gave the student — who wrote an expletive starting with f, followed by the word "off" — two points out of a possible 27 for the English paper.

"It would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for, like conveying some meaning and some spelling," Buckroyd was quoted as saying.

"It's better than someone that doesn't write anything at all."

Buckroyd said the student would have received a higher mark if the phrase had been punctuated.

Buckroyd is a senior examiner for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, one of several bodies that grade British high school exams.

He said the expletive was used in 2006 by a student in response to the question: "Describe the room you are sitting in."

The alliance confirmed the newspaper's story was accurate, but said Buckroyd's decision to award the student marks was not official policy.

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