According to a study published today in the journal Science, washing your hands or showering after impure thoughts or deeds can scrub your mind of guilty pangs on a subconscious level.

"We showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behaviour and reduces threats to one's moral self-image," says the study, co-authored by , an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the U of T's Rotman School of Management.

"Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they may seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality," Zhong writes.

Zhong has labelled the phenomenon the "Macbeth Effect," after Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, who famously scrubbed away at that "damned spot" on her hands in the wake of her role in the murder of a Scottish king.

Small businesses may be leaving themselves open to information theft because they don't see themselves as being at risk, experts say. While information is a key ingredient to success, many small businesses are lax about protecting what is rightfully theirs.

There are two main risk areas, experts say. The first is an employee making off with internal information, such as databases, designs or details of manufacturing processes. The second is fraud from outside the business that steals protected material...

Intellectual property is a huge concern for businesses of all sizes, said, associate professor in strategic management at the 's Rotman School of Management.

Stunned disbelief and profound personal loss were two immediate by-products of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Five years on, there may be another: a Canadian identity crisis.

Some say the signs are everywhere. After watching civil liberties traded away in the name of national security, they're urgently questioning whether Canada wants to be a country of indefinite detentions and secret trials, two components of the country's anti-terrorism arsenal. They are measures that seem as much at odds with Canadian values as the changing nature of its military missions, now known as peacemaking as opposed to peacekeeping ventures, with soldiers dying, it seems, by the day.

If that weren't enough, the prospect of electronic eavesdropping entered the mix this summer, when the country's largest Internet service provider announced it would turn over users' data to the government upon request.

And if Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plan to arm border guards comes to fruition, Canada will no longer be able to boast of having the world's longest undefended border....

The War Measures Act is one example. But at an earlier time, political activity even targeted groups like Masons, a fraternal order considered by some to be the evildoers of the day; New York State had an anti-Masonic party committed to the lodge's elimination, Bothwell said.

"I'm not saying that, one time out of ten, the alarmists aren't right. Obviously, Sept. 11 came from somewhere, and it turned out we had no means of defending ourselves against it."

"I'm going to run in the next election and I hope I'm running as leader," the former Ontario NDP premier told the Toronto Star editorial board yesterday.

"I very much want to be part of the team. I'm very committed to renewing the Liberal party and to defeating (Conservative Prime Minister) Stephen Harper. Those are two things which are very, very critical for my sense of well-being in life."

Rae and Ignatieff, lifelong friends who were roommates as students at the , are seen as two of four frontrunners among the 10 candidates. Former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy and Montreal MP Stéphane Dion are the others.

The 200 invited guests were offered cake, a barbershop quartet and boating hats as the club unveiled its new coat of arms and logo -- knowledge and friendship, written in Latin, of course.

The party -- held on the grounds of the nearby Canada Life Insurance Company -- celebrated one of Toronto's most intimate and congenial private clubs.

Founded in 1906 by alumni, its founding members settled down in its current location, sandwiched between the U.S. Consulate and the multi-storey Bank of Zurich building at 380 University Ave., in 1929 after needing a permanent residence to accommodate the club's growing membership.

fixed my shoulder. While studying at Knox College, Toronto, from the fall of 1973 to spring 1976 to be a Presbyterian minister, I played goal on the college soccer team. During a game, I hurt my shoulder and went to a sports clinic at The 's Hart House. I was told to keep my left arm in a sling for six weeks. It was something to do with a rotator cuff...

The first couple of days proved very painful, but he was right. I was back playing soccer the following week. That was long before anyone heard of Ben Johnson, and any talk of dope in sports usually meant a teammate who had done something dumb. Recently, as a result of too-strenuous exercise, I've been suffering from a strained muscle in my lower back, right-hand side. I suspect that if Jamie Astaphan were still around he could fix it.

When elected in 2003, Premier Dalton McGuinty's government announced a two-year freeze on tuition. Prior to this freeze, there had been a period of deregulation of tuition in professional schools in Ontario, leading to rapid increases at some law schools. The , for instance, quickly increased tuition fees to $16,000 from roughly $4,500. York University's Osgoode Hall Law School bumped its fees up to $12,000.

A University of Windsor student spent the first day of class in police custody yesterday after he was arrested in his campus residence and charged with robbing three banks. Detectives arrested the 21-year-old after they traced the steps of a bank robbery suspect in Sarnia, Ont. Police said a young man walked into a CIBC branch on Tuesday, told a teller he had a gun and demanded money. Although no weapon was seen, he took off with an undisclosed amount of cash. The brazen theft was similar to two Windsor bank robberies in May and June. Micah Ahmad is facing three robbery charges. The slim man made his first court appearance yesterday and is scheduled to make another appearance today.

The professor -- already criticized for claiming whites are intellectually superior to blacks, and that higher AIDS rates in Africa are due to a more insatiable sexual appetite in the black community -- believes the "glass ceiling" phenomenon is probably due to innate ability rather than discrimination.

"We have to find the truth about the normal distribution in society," said the professor, whose study is published in the September issue of the academic journal Intelligence. "It's not right to simply say, 'it must be discrimination and don't dare say anything else.' One should really look at the facts."

Rushton, who was surprised by the findings, said the results reinforce similar studies carried out by Richard Lynn at the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, and Helmut Nyborg at Aarhus University in Denmark.

"We still have to be cautious, but it's difficult to believe this is wrong. But it would very nice to be confirmed by additional teams before we can be 100 per cent certain."

"It looks like up until late adolescence, the females have the advantage over males because they mature faster, which masks the underlying difference."

While the bulk of Rushton's work has pertained to race differences, he also published a study in 1992 with zoologist Davison Ankney that claimed men's brains weighed, on average, 100 grams more than women.

A student group at Concordia University has rallied around a controversial author who claims the school censored an on-campus reading from his novel . The Graduate Students Association and author David Bernans have called for a review of the school's risk assessment committee, a group established after violent protests and a riot on Sept. 9, 2002, cancelled a planned speech by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. An e-mail dated July 25 cited the committee as the group responsible for declining Mr. Bernans' request to conduct the reading, planned for Monday -- the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The university subsequently informed Mr. Bernans the e-mail was sent in error. "The risk assessment committee never met to discuss the Bernans' event," Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota said, adding Mr. Bernans had always been welcome to speak on campus. But Mr. Bernans and a GSA representative said the committee needs review. "Nothing is made public about the risk assessment team," said Chaher Alzaman, the GSA's vice-president of services. "Their membership and decisions are kept secret. This is a cause of concern for us." Mr. Bernans' novel examines the repercussions of the U.S. terrorist attacks on the Concordia campus.

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