Canada

>When it comes to Canada's often tense debate around gun laws, most Canadians likely will not have heard of an RCMP database called the Firearms Reference Table, or FRT.

>The FRT is a database used by the RCMP to help classify firearms. That classification determines whether a gun is non-restricted, restricted or prohibited.

>Technically, the FRT isn't a legal instrument, but instead just an internal RCMP tool based on definitions set out in the Criminal Code and Firearms Act. But in practice?

>"It's both the law and not the law," said A.J. Somerset, the author of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun.

>Clutching a teddy bear and trembling through her story in the witness box, a female former Afghan interpreter who worked for Canada in Afghanistan detailed the harrowing sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of a Canadian government employee.

>For four days this week, the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, recounted to an Ottawa courtroom how the alleged abuse started when she was 17, shortly after moving to Canada in October 2011, and went on until 2013.

>"He called me his sex toy, a whore and a bitch," the woman said of her alleged attacker, whose family she was living with during some of the alleged abuse.

>Isolated, thousands of miles away from her family in Kandahar, she said she couldn't draw on support from her mother, father, siblings or friends. Coming from an honour culture, she said, meant that if word of the alleged abuse reached her father there would be dire consequences.

> Multiple contractors allege they haven’t been paid for millions of dollars worth of work

>If you lived in a neighbourhood where people were dying from poisoned drugs, and over 2,000 were homeless, what would you say the solution is? At the Carnegie Housing Project we asked residents at various Downtown Eastside groups like the Aboriginal Front Door Society, Carnegie Community Centre, Our Streets and the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society.

>They said things like: housing people can afford, places to be, safer drugs, more garbage cans on the streets, jobs and job training, more greenery, more washrooms, access to detox and treatment — not a wait-list — and keeping essential service organizations funded. Aboriginal Front Door’s funding has not been renewed and is set to expire in September, bringing an end to this well-loved Downtown Eastside service that stores belongings for hundreds of homeless people, as well as providing food, rest, cultural programs, advocacy and dozens of emergency shelter beds.

>No one said the Downtown Eastside, or DTES, needs 32-storey market-rental housing towers with only a tiny percentage affordable to low-income residents. But that’s what the city is about to propose in a report to council this fall.

> With the emergence of drug-resistant nits, lice removal has become a booming business, catering to harried, itchy parents willing to pay for relief.