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A Toronto rapper is dead after being shot numerous times in his car in what police are calling a “brazen attack” in downtown Toronto. Det. Sgt. Steve Ryan says the victim — identified as Shmar Parris, 25, who social media messages of condolence said also went by the name Murda Marz, a rapper who several videos posted on YouTube — was known to police and the overnight shooting is believed to be a targeted attack. Ryan says a light-coloured SUV was seen driving erratically away from the scene but there are no details on any suspects or how many may...

Malaysian police have expanded an investigation into the missing plane to include ground crew, caterers and the farmers who picked four tons of mangosteens, a tropical fruit, that were in the hold. Despite failing to find any suspicious evidence about the passengers or crew, Khalid Abu Bakar, Malaysia’s police chief, said he was confident that the case would be solved. He said police traced the mangosteens, a tangy Asian fruit with leathery skin around juicy white flesh, to an orchard in the city of Muar and examined both the farmers and the Chinese importers. “Imagine how many people we must...

The Canadian Memorial to the Victims of Communism is one step closer to completion, with the federal government this week soliciting design ideas for the monument to be built near Parliament perhaps as soon as late 2014. Memorials for the victims of communist regimes exist elsewhere in the world, such as the ones in Prague and Washington, D.C., and since 2008 the non-profit group Tribute to Liberty has been gathering support for a similar project in Ottawa. The group says its board of directors represents “key ethno-cultural comunities in Canada affected by communism” and now has backing from the leaders...

Bosnia’s decision to include preventing sexual violence in military training is “groundbreaking” and should become the standard for U.N. peacekeeping missions, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Angelina Jolie said Friday. “Warzone rape has been a taboo subject in all countries. You are helping to break down those taboos and redefining soldiering in the 21st century,” Jolie said as the two addressed a conference on sexual violence in war organized in Sarajevo by Bosnia’s Defence Ministry.

The mother of a transgender child wants the Saskatchewan government to remove any record of a person's sex on birth certificates. Fran Forsberg has filed a complaint to Saskatchewan's Human Rights Commission on behalf of her six-year-old child, Renn, after the province's Vital Statistics Agency refused to change Renn's sex designation from "Male" to "Female" on the youngster's birth records. Renn was born with male genitalia but has identified as a girl since the age of three. According to the Canadian Pediatric Society, children establish their gender identity between 18 to 30 months. When Forsberg sought to change Renn's birth...

Justin Trudeau will tell his “life’s story” in a memoir to be published this fall — one year before he goes to the polls asking Canadian voters to make him prime minister. The Liberal leader’s book will be published by HarperCollins Canada, the publisher announced Tuesday. The “personal memoir” will appear in both English and French. “Mr. Trudeau’s candid memoir will reveal to its readers the experiences that have shaped him over the course of his life and show how his passion for Canada and its people took root,” the publisher said in a news release. “Covering the years from...

WARSAW, Poland — Denouncing Russia’s actions in Crimea as “nothing more than a land grab,” Vice-President Joe Biden warned Russia on Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe will impose further sanctions as Moscow moved to annex part of Ukraine. With limited options, the United States was seeking ways to show it won’t stand idly by as Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty for the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea to join Russia. So far, Putin has been undeterred by sanctions and visa bans levied by the U.S. and the European Union, and there’s no U.S. appetite for military intervention. “Russia...

For failing to broadcast sufficient levels of Canadian-made pornography — and failing to close-caption said pornography properly — a trio of Toronto-based erotica channels has earned a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission. Wednesday, the CRTC issued a broadcast notice saying AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips and the gay-oriented Maleflixxx were all failing to reach the required 35% threshold for Canadian content. Based on a 24-hour broadcast schedule, that translates to about 8.5 hours of Canadian erotica a day. The notice was issued as a result of Channel Zero’s efforts to renew licences for all three...

Middle-aged men who drink the equivalent of two and a half pints a day risk speeding up memory loss and mental decline by six years, researchers have warned. A 10-year study of more than 7,000 male and female civil servants found men who regularly drank significant amounts of alcohol suffered notable mental decline. The study was reported in the journal Neurology. In contrast men who drank less than one and a half pints a day, or a glass and a half of wine suffered no impact on mental ability. The heaviest drinkers were found to have the equivalent memory of...

After refusing to honour a male student’s request to be separated from his female classmates for religious reasons, a York University professor has found himself at odds with administrators who assert he broke their “obligation to accommodate.” “It represents a great leap backwards,” said sociology professor J. Paul Grayson. “When I was a student, you couldn’t have gotten away with that — it wouldn’t even have been considered.” The issue arose last September in the opening days of SOCI 2030, an online course taught by Mr. Grayson. A student, who remains nameless due to privacy reasons, asked to be counted...

OTTAWA - Defence researchers spent almost $14,000 on a survey that asked whether superheroes can leap over skyscrapers. The study for the research arm of National Defence also asked 150 people online whether superheroes can fly through the air; see through walls; hear whispers from miles away; become invisible; and walk through walls. The oddball questions were part of a short study completed in October to help the Canadian Forces "win the hearts and minds" of the local populations it faces when deployed overseas, such as recently in Afghanistan. Some of the questions were designed to probe people's expectations about...

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...