news
Newsstand: August 3, 2012
Happy Fryday, the least healthy day of the week. In the news: a subway gets delayed by maybe a couple of years; farewell to the west end, garbage truck-driving pinkos; meet your future bosses; park vs. condo; Enbridge, your pipe is showing; and baby animals are so cute.
The planned 2015 opening of the Spadina Subway extension is up in the air as the TTC tries to make up the months lost to an investigation into the death of a construction worker. Kyle Knox died at York University last October when a piece of construction equipment fell on the loader he was operating. Torkie and Yorkie, two of the TTC’s gigantic tunnel-boring machines, are sitting patiently at the university while work that was supposed to be done months ago on a campus building is completed. We have faith that the deadline can be met if the tunnelling machines can just pull an all-nighter and knock out a solid C+.
Very soon, residents of Toronto’s west end will be able to throw out their unsavoury items without the fear that they might be picked up by someone on the public payroll. That is because privatized collection of the city’s garbage west of Yonge Street is beginning next week with an estimated savings of about $11 million per year. Residents in the area can expect slight adjustments to both the garbage collection time and the number of garbage collectors that can afford braces for their kids.
Big congratulations go out to Run Ze Cao and Sean Goldhar, this year’s top TDSB students. The boys each had a 99.7% average and will probably some day invent a thing to do another really, really important thing, or something.
Residents near a vacant lot on Wellesley Street are calling on the province to allow the City to turn it into a park. Local councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) feels that the provincial government is ignoring residents’ concerns by (likely) selling the land to a condo developer rather than leasing the space to the City. A second environmental assessment has been requested to take into consideration the effect that selling the land will have on the locals.
The oil spill-preventing geniuses at Enbridge have come up with a finely crafted solution to an exposed oil pipe running through one of Toronto’s largest wilderness areas, Rouge Park. The company has decided to place a bunch of concrete blocks on the naked tube as protection during the months it will take them to install the cover they claim to have already developed. However, the image from the CBC article shows that the concrete blocks do not even cover the entire exposed section of the pipe.
A whole bundle of cute animals at the Toronto Zoo have names now. Two rare female white lion cubs kittens (kittens sounds cuter), Makali and Lemon, along with their brother Fintan, are joined in receiving names with a Babirusa piglet named Muna, and two penguin chicks, Chupa and Matata. Awww.
