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The Royal Canadian Navy is looking to buy 180,000 pairs of grey, lightweight underwear with “good moisture management.”In an online notice published Friday on the government’s public works website, the Navy outlined its undergarment needs and asked for industry input on how it can develop and buy “temperate drawers” that comply with its rigorous standards.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he is taking legal action against the former staffers who made stunning allegations about the mayor in a police document, saying he consorted with escorts and used sexually explicit language to a woman working for him. In a profane media scrum aired live on television that left journalists gasping, Ford, wearing a Toronto Argos jersey, denied many of the allegations laid forth in the court documents, although he admitted to occasionally drinking and driving. He was particularly angry about his staffers telling police that they thought a young friend of his was a prostitute. “I...

Karl Subban knows the cost of being a hockey parent in Canada. The patriarch of one of Canada’s most successful hockey families – his boys P.K., Malcolm and Jordan have all been drafted by NHL teams – he and his wife paid $5,000 each in one year just to register them in minor hockey in the Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL). “And that’s not including equipment and what not,” Mr. Subban says. “It was very expensive. But you make sacrifices. That’s what we did.” It’s widely known that Canada’s national winter sport is expensive to play. But various factors have...

OTTAWA — Women are bitchy by nature. No, that’s not a sexist remark. That’s science. Or at least that’s what University of Ottawa psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt more or less concludes in her latest research on “intrasexual competition” among women. Derisive comments on another woman’s appearance, spreading rumours about her sex life, giving her the silent treatment — all this and more reflects the kind of “indirect aggression” women deploy against each other in the competition for a mate, she says in a report published this week in a Royal Society journal. “Human females have a particular proclivity for using indirect...

An immigrant living in America sent her daughter home to Novosbirsk in 2011 because she allegedly misbehaved. She tried to commit suicide in Siberia, according to reports from American television company WUSA 9 and publication USA Today that Sib.fm’s correspondent examined. 17-year-old Sofia Roberts was born in Russia, but left to live in America when she was two years old with mother Natalia. According to the broadcaster, in 2011 the mother sent her daughter, then 15, from the town of Chantilly, Virginia to Novosibirsk to meet her biological father. But after Sofia arrived in Russia, her mother changed her plans...

Montreal — The Quebec college of physicians has issued a warning to doctors to stop performing virginity tests, a practice linked to bridal purity and family honour. Gynecological exams for virginity certificates contravene the profession’s code of ethics on several grounds, including breaching patient confidentiality, said Charles Bernard, president of the Collège des médecins, in an interview. The practise is outrageous, repugnant, irrelevant and unacceptable, he said. “Imagine a doctor who does a gynecological examination with the sole purpose of … it goes beyond the imagination. And it’s degrading to women,” Dr. Bernard said. The College was responding to a...

Celebrating consent? Whatever happened to celebrating keeping it in your pants?

With his house now transformed into an intensive-card ward, Nelson Mandela has been discharged from hospital and moved by ambulance to his home in a Johannesburg suburb where he remains in critical condition. The 95-year-old anti-apartheid hero is still sometimes slipping into “unstable” condition, needing medical intervention to revive him, but his entire medical team will now continue to care for him at his home, an official South African statement said. A report in a South African newspaper on Sunday said the Mandela family and its doctors had decided that “it is now time for Mandela to be moved home...

A former local Scout leader was sentenced to eight years in prison this afternoon for sexually assaulting three scouts. Provincial court Judge Ray Wyant said Stuart Garret Young’s actions were "reprehensible, degrading and disgusting and abhorrent." Court was told that Young, 40, was trusted and admired by the boys, and that he singled them out, grooming them to become his victims. Young had been a volunteer with a Southdale Scout troop. The boys were subjected to a program Young had developed that they were told was to build up their self-confidence but instead the boys were "brainwashed" while Young subjected...

Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Email Comments More . Susan Stewart collects fresh human placentas, takes them home and steams them with lemon, ginger and cayenne pepper. Once cooked, she puts the organs in a dehydrator overnight then grinds them and measures the powder out into gel capsules. The service – the Calgary single mother makes a living at this – costs about $200. Within a day, she presents new moms with their placentas in pill form – an average human placenta yields about 150 capsules – with promises of renewed energy, better lactation and no post-partum depression. They keep indefinitely. Placenta-eating...

This morning, Margaret Thatcher died at age 87 owing to complications from a stroke. One of the lesser-known accomplishments of Britain's first female prime minister is her role in the creation of soft-serve. Thatcher, an Oxford chemistry grad, supported herself financially in the fifties by working at food manufacturer J. Lyons and Co. There, she became part of a team of chemists that developed key emulsifiers for ice cream. By increasing the amount of air and making it possible to churn soft-serve out of a machine, Thatcher paved the way for Britain's Mr. Whippy trucks. Her work also had financial...

A former student at Oakland University in the suburbs of Detroit is suing the school for over $2.2 million after he was kicked out in September 2011 for penning a salacious essay entitled “Hot for Teacher.” Joseph Corlett, 57, a builder who now resides in Florida, filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Detroit, reports the Detroit Free Press. He claims the public university violated his First Amendment right to freedom of expression. He says he also suffered mental anguish and humiliation when he was forced to leave the school. The suit names the school’s board of trustees...

One year after Toronto subway fare collector William Anderson was shot and badly wounded in a botched robbery at the downtown Dupont station, a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the masked gunman - or gunwoman - was renewed Tuesday, with a fresh appeal for tips. Now 53, Mr. Anderson remains off the job, still recovering from being shot in the neck and shoulder by his balaclava-clad assailant, who’s believed to have targeted that same station twice before. The description of that person, glimpsed on video, has been revised and the perpetrator may be male or female,...

The first people affected by the Canadian government’s decision to close the Iranian embassy in Ottawa were Iranian international students who had come to the capital to renew their visas. Canada announced it would close Iran’s embassy in Ottawa on Friday and asked all embassy staff to leave the country within five days citing, among other reasons, Iran’s “increasing military assistance to (Syria’s) Assad regime.” According to the Citizenship and Immigration Canada, in 2010 (the most recent statistics available) 3,247 international students from Iran were studying at the university level in Canada. .... For international students, some of whom receive...

Catherine Hakim is a controversialist. She says prostitutes are role models, most women don’t want to work in career jobs and feminists are an elitist minority whose battles are irrelevant to all but a small group. In her latest book The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power, she argues in favour of adultery. In what is probably the first academic guide to what she calls “good infidelity,” Hakim, a social scientist at the Centre for Policy Studies, says a love affair “requires some skill and savoire faire. A successful affair while married is one that makes both parties...

A large quantity of maple syrup in a Quebec warehouse has gone missing. Following a routine inventory check, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syup Producers found empty barrels at the St-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse, where the syrup is temporarily being held, suggesting that their contents had been emptied into other containers before being taken away for illegal distribution. The warehouse held over 10 million pounds of maple syrup worth more than $30-million. .... The FQMSP is responsible for the global strategic maple syrup reserve and represents approximately 10,000 maple syrup producers from within Quebec.

OTTAWA — The Liberal leadership in the Senate allowed a veteran senator to vote on legislation and spend public dollars for four months after she was diagnosed with dementia and declared legally incompetent. Sen. Joyce Fairbairn regularly attended Senate sittings and voted along party lines before the Upper Chamber rose for the summer at the end of June. Fairbairn was diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type by her geriatric psychiatrist in February, according to a letter sent to Senate officials by her niece, Patricia McCullagh. It is unclear when the Liberals knew about the diagnosis, but by April, the...

RAWDON, Que. - A bride-to-be has plunged to her death, tumbling down from a cliff into a waterfall while wearing her wedding dress. The woman was being photographed Friday at Dorwin Falls in Rawdon, Que., which she had chosen as the backdrop for her wedding pictures. During the photo shoot, around 2 p.m., she slipped on some rocks and plummeted into the water. The falls, at their highest point, are just over 18 metres high. The immediate rescue team included firefighters and provincial police, and divers were soon on their way. The woman's body was found several hours later. A...

CAMBRIDGE BAY, Nunavut — The search for the remnants of an ill-fated British expedition that failed to cross the Northwest Passage — and a seminal moment in Canada’s history on Arctic sovereignty — will start anew. In the coming weeks, a group of researchers will scour Canada’s Arctic waters to find Sir John Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and the Terror, led by a ship named for an Arctic researcher who perished in a plane crash last year. The renewal of Parks Canada’s search for the lost Franklin vessels, anticipated last week by Postmedia News, follows three recent federal expeditions that...

TUNIS, Tunisia — Islamist extremists have targeted two Tunisian Olympic medalists for behaviour and dress seen as un-Islamic, as debate grows over the role of religion and women in the country that unleashed the Arab Spring uprisings. Radicals on social media networks called on the government to strip Habiba Ghribi, the first Tunisian woman to win an Olympic medal, of her nationality because her running gear was too revealing. She won the silver in the 3,000-metre steeplechase.