There was probably a time when the idea of using Tasers to subdue violent troublemakers would have been welcomed unequivocally.

But the 2007 death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski on the floor of Vancouver's airport crumbled any hope the powerful electric stun guns were a non-lethal panacea for controlling agitated subjects. Now the police shooting of mental health patient Michael Eligon in Toronto last February has revived the question of whether "conductive energy weapons" are a better alternative than pistols for cops confronting aggressive civilians?

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair this week called for a public debate on whether officers responding to such incidents should carry Tasers.

"I can't say with some certainty — or any certainty — that Taser was the answer (in the Eligon case), I don't know," Blair said after a Toronto police services board hearing, according to the National Post.

"But I think it's worthwhile to have the broader public discussion about the use

Security was at a maximum after 500 rioting prisoners held 6 guards hostage in 1971.Kingston Penitentiary looks like Hollywood's idea of a prison; high stone walls, menacing guard towers, imposing Victorian buildings.

It's Canada's San Quentin, Alcatraz and Sing-Sing rolled into one.

It's hard to believe the Kingston Pen — which the government announced this week will be closing in two years — was considered at the leading edge of penal science when it opened in 1835, more than three decades before Confederation.

Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, called the prison "an admirable gaol, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated in every respect," as quoted in Canadian Literary Landmarks.

Incarceration was evolving from merely punishing criminals towards trying to reform them. Dickens noted prisoners were engaged in meaningful jobs such as shoemaking, stonecutting, cabinetry and blacksmithing. Women prisoners did needlework.

But the prison was the furthest thing from a comfortable place to ease wrongdoers back into society.

The Toronto Star notes Peter H.

The furry little guy may have been small, but those boilerplate eyes and cute webbed feet quickly turned Ook the ookpik — an Inuit handicraft depicting a snowy owl — into the beloved mascot of Edmonton's Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

And that was just the surface stuff. Ook's real value stemmed from his origins. As the Edmonton Journal reports, the doll was a gift from Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources in 1964 and quickly worked his way into the fabric of the school's identity.

All NAIT sports teams are called the Ooks, while one good-humoured cheerleader spends each game riling up the crowd in full ookpik regalia.

Perhaps that's why the NAIT community has taken Ook's disappearance so hard. The mascot went missing without so much as a tuft of fur left behind from its perch in the alumni relations office, leaving staff and students baffled as to his whereabouts.

Though the disappearance has remained a campus affair for some time, the school decided to go

When you build one of the world's coolest cars for one of the world's most popular superheroes, it can come as a shock to be reminded just how vulnerable we regular humans can be.

But that's exactly what happened to special effects whiz Andy Smith, the London-born, Vancouver-based talent who built the Batmobile for Christopher Nolan's recent Batman trilogy.

As the Globe and Mail reports, Smith went to his doctor three years ago complaining of a sore throat. Instead of a bad bout of the flu, Smith was diagnosed with cancer in his throat, lymph nodes, and tonsils. The prognosis did not look good.

Thanks to chemotherapy and a group of excellent doctors, the 52-year-old told the paper he's now in good health.

To show his gratitude toward the medical team who helped him through his battle, Smith arranged for the Batmobile to take a road trip from Los Angeles all the way to Burnaby, B.C. on Tuesday.

The B.C. Cancer Foundation charged a minimum $50 a pop for 100 fans to see the car, with the

She was born when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, she was a teenager during the First World War and a senior citizen when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Cora Hansen, considered Canada's oldest person, died Wednesday at the age of 113 in a Medicine Hat, Alta., nursing home, Postmedia News reported.

"When you consider the things that happened in the course of her life, quite literally, it went from horse and buggy to space travel," Hansen's grandson Jim MacArthur told the Calgary Herald.

Hansen was a prairie pioneer. Born in Minnesota, she came to Canada with her family in 1912.

Her journey included a two-day wagon ride with her mother and sister to reconnect with the men of the family who'd gone ahead to set up their homestead near Jenner, Alta., where she lived with her husband, Richard, until 1972.

Hansen became a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She was widowed in 1975 but lived on her own until she was 97, MacArthur said. She moved into the Medicine hat care

It was an amazing sight. The U.S. prosecutor responsible for sending Canada's Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, to a federal penitentiary was sitting beside Emery's wife, Jodie.

Even more surprising, John McKay was there to advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

McKay, the top federal prosecutor in Washington state for five years and now a law professor, believes continuing to treat marijuana users as criminals has only enriched drug-trafficking gangs and fueled violence.

"As a person who is knowledgeable of the facts underlying our failure in marijuana prohibition, I am free now to speak out," McKay told a public forum in Vancouver, The Canadian Press reported.

After a long legal battle and a complex legal negotiation, cannibis-legalization advocate Marc Emery was extradited to the United States and jailed in 2010 for operating a cross-border marijuana-seed mail order business. He's serving a five-year term in a Mississippi federal prison.

McKay said he has no regrets for prosecuting

It sounds like the opening scene in a 1950's horror film: Stinging jellyfish populations are growing and threatening fishermen, surfers and ocean-going tourists.

But it's true, according to a group of University of British Columbia researchers who report the growth in jellyfish numbers in almost every ocean, especially in areas with heavy concentrations of human activity, according to the National Post.

The results of the research were published this month in the journal Hydrobiologia.
"There has been anecdotal evidence that jellyfish were on the rise in recent decades, but there hasn't been a global study that gathered together all the existing data until now," lead author Lucas Brotz, a PhD student with the Sea Around Us Project at UBC, said in Science Daily.

"Our study confirms these observations scientifically after analysis of available information from 1950 to the present for more than 138 different jellyfish populations around the world."

According to Science Daily, they found

Smuggling 101: If you're going to try to mail an illegal wolf pelt over the Canadian border, it helps to wait until the pelt stops bleeding through the package.

Those basics appeared to evade a Washington state couple, who recently pleaded guilty to killing a pair of endangered grey wolves and trying to smuggle one of the hides into the country.

As The Canadian Press reports, Twisp, Wash. resident Tom White, 37, admitted to slaughtering two of the creatures — one last May and the other in December 2008.

Federal prosecutors also revealed that his wife, Erin White, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to export an endangered species.

In 2008, a woman walked into an Omak Fed Ex and tried to mail a package that she said contained a rug. An employee became suspicious when the "rug" started leaking blood, and called the police.

When an officer opened the package, he got an eyeful of freshly killed wolf hide.

The Seattle Times writes that security managed to trace video camera footage of the woman