■CANADA
Woman gives 18th birth
A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province’s most prolific mother in 20 years. Proud dad Alexandru Ionce said on Saturday that his 44-year-old wife, Livia, gave birth on Tuesday. Their daughter Abigail weighed in at 3.5kg. “We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that’s the reason we did not stop the life,” Alexandru Ionce said. The couple immigrated from Romania in 1990 and now live in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
■UNITED STATES
Randy Pausch dies
Randy Pausch, a computer science professor whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died on Friday. He was 47. Pausch died at his home in Chesapeake, Virginia, said Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer who co-wrote Pausch’s book. Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet. In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death. The book The Last Lecture leaped to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists after its publication in April and remained there last week.
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