Cauldron lighting ceremony of 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games held in Rome

The cauldron lighting ceremony of the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games was held at the Quirinale Palace in Rome, capital of Italy on Friday morning, heralding the start of the Winter Games torch relay set to begin on Saturday.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella lit the Olympic cauldron at the palace. The ceremony was attended by dignitaries including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry.

"The Olympic flame is arriving to a nation that lives and breathes sport, beautiful Italy, where passion shines through and everything that you do," said Coventry at the ceremony.

"We have planned a very scientific relay route that will pass through all of Italy's UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Italy is the country with the most world heritage sites. I think this is wonderful, not only for Italians but for the people all over the world," said Giovanni Malago, president of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Organizing Committee.

The launch ceremony for the torch relay will be held on Saturday morning at Rome's Stadio dei Marmi, kicking off the start of the Olympic torch's journey across Italy. The relay will pass by multiple Roman landmarks such as the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain, completing the 30-kilometer Rome segment on Saturday evening.

The whole relay will traverse 12,000 kilometers over 60 days across Italy, pass through more than 300 municipalities and feature celebrations in 60 cities, reach all 110 Italian provinces, and light up UNESCO sites along the route.

More than 10,000 torchbearers from all walks of life will take part in the relay, including figures from sectors of sports, culture, film and civil society.

The 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games will take place from February 6 to 22, 2026 in eight locations across northern Italy.

Cauldron lighting ceremony of 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games held in Rome

Cauldron lighting ceremony of 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games held in Rome

Cauldron lighting ceremony of 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games held in Rome

Cauldron lighting ceremony of 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games held in Rome

A small forestry town in southern Canada is edging toward oblivion as a decades-long tariff dispute with the United States drags on and the latest round of Trump tariffs deals a fresh blow to an already battered industry.

That latest blow has fallen on 100 Mile House, a district of roughly 2,000 people in south-central British Columbia (B.C.), where the sawmill shut permanently in December 2025 - the third in the region to close in recent years, costing 165 workers their jobs.

The closure came two months after the Trump administration added a 10 percent tariff on imported timber, citing national security concerns, on top of the countervailing duties the United States has imposed on Canadian softwood for years.

Maureen Pinkney, the mayor of 100 Mile House, said the shutdown has taken a toll on a small community where mill workers are an integral part.

"That's a real hard hit to very small communities where those people are an intricate part. And we had one mill worker leave and so did his wife who was a nurse. In the shortages of health care workers, that's a double hit which we really feel that," she said.

For workers in 100 Mile House, the mill closure brought steady work to an end.

"It's a direct hit against mill workers here for sure. And all of us went from one day working steady here, and to the next day, we're done," said Brundage, a forestry worker in 100 Mile House.

The softwood lumber dispute is among the longest-running and most costly trade conflicts between Canada and the United States.

It began in 1982, when Canadian softwood lumber exports accounted for more than a quarter of U.S. consumption. U.S. lumber producers argued that Canadian provincial governments gave forestry companies access to public timber at below-market prices, amounting to an unfair subsidy.

Canada has rejected that argument, saying its exporters benefit from efficient industry practices and resource management rather than government support.

Terry Kading, an associate professor of political studies at Thompson Rivers University, said the dispute reflects a recurring U.S. effort to protect domestic industries from Canadian competition.

"Once a sector in the United States, like the lumber industry, feels that Canada is doing something with its lumber, that's dumping or using different methods and things like that. The U.S. ended up defending its lumber industry in the States against Canada," Kading said.

That pattern has persisted for more than four decades, through five rounds of U.S. trade investigations, three bilateral agreements, none of which has delivered a lasting settlement.

The United States has imposed countervailing and anti-dumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber for nearly 20 years in total. The prolonged dispute has added to the pressure on British Columbia’s forestry industry.

According to the B.C. Forestry Council, more than 20 sawmills in the province have closed over the past three years, with tens of thousands of jobs lost.

The toll has drawn a response from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who in a video on Tuesday cast the softwood dispute as part of a wider pattern of U.S. trade pressure on Canada.

"Not the first time Americans have tried to use tariffs to break us," Carney said.

That pattern stretches back more than a century, to 1866, when the United States unilaterally cut trade ties with British North America, the predecessor of modern Canada.

Some Canadian scholars said the long history of trade disputes carries a lesson about trust in their southern neighbor.

"Canadians have certainly learned that they can trust the U.S. completely. Trust the U.S. to harm us or stab us in the back. So yes, we can trust that the U.S. to do that. I think that's a lesson for this generation of Canadians that we can't take the U.S. for granted. And we've gone from an era of implicit trust with the U.S. to needing to verify the trust," said Carlo Dade, the Director of International Policy and head of the New North America Initiative from the University of Calgary.

U.S. tariffs deepen toll of long-running Canada lumber dispute