China vows to continue the international Olympic torch relay despite lots of protests. The International Olympic Committee suggested that they might do away with the international route in upcoming games, because from now on, all Olympic games will be held in authoritarian dictatorships and they "don't want to look bad" when they award the next few Games to Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, and the Equatorial Republic of Hate-Land. (The President-For-Eternity of Hate-Land responded by saying, "ooooooh,......

Photo of Owen Pallett by Heidi Slimane from his MySpace. News of Owen Pallett's OHIP being revoked has been quickly met with a reaction: an open letter sent today to George Smitherman, the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, from France Gélinas and Rosario Marchese, NDP MPPs who insist that Pallett is "an award winning artist who deserves our support" but who has instead been "unfairly treated." The letter takes issue both with the......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. By all accounts, John Tory is an individual of impeccable character and integrity who planned to restore civility to......

Policy Monday is a weekly feature during the lead-up to the provincial election where Torontoist will dive into the mean and gritty world of public policy, turning a critical eye at a specific area of the policies and machinations of the four major provincial parties. Photo by Jay Morrison from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Saskatchewan may have given us Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare, but we in Ontario are a bit obsessed with......

J. K. Rowling to come to Toronto on her reading tour. It's her only Canadian stop, so expect an audience that is 30 percent younger readers and 70 percent aging, obsessive fanboys and fangirls, most desperately wanting an explanation as to why Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were not revealed to be secret gay lovers. By-elections happen, Liberals get trounced big-time. The NDP won Outremont—their second seat ever in Quebec, and the first time the......

John Tory says any religious schools must stick to the Ontario curriculum or lose their funding. Thus, creationism would not be allowed to be taught as science. That having been said, non-religious faith-based teaching (like "the invisible hand of the market can fix all economic problems" or "one day the working class will rise up and create a proletarian utopia") is fine! Luciano Pavarotti is dead at 71. The opera star finally succumbed to pancreatic......

A soccer game between Toronto and Los Angeles was played last night in honour of the Becks-Posh royal visit to Toronto. Although an injury prevented Beckham from taking the field, his handsomeness remains unimpaired. And oh yeah, the final score was 0–0. A 19-year-old man was shot to death in a stairwell near Parliament and Gerrard on Saturday afternoon. The sad thing—apart from somebody being dead—is that a single shooting in a weekend is......

Michael Moore’s much anticipated Sicko hits, and having seen it, we can say it’s not particularly essential for Canadian viewers to watch, unless you want to feel smug about our lovely health care system, or slightly surprised that it only takes an hour or so in London (Ontario) to be seen in an emergency room. Yes, the film is chock-a-block with anecdotal evidence, and it’s probably to the film’s fault that, as usual, Moore......

ARR! Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End hits this week and as the third second sequel to hit this summer it’s got some stiff competition. Nice to see though that they’ve made sure it beats Spider-Man 3 in at least one respect, in that at 2 hours and 47 minutes long, it’s a good half hour longer. It’s nearly as long as Inland Empire (which is finished at the Royal now, so we......

City budget passes: 7.9 billion smackers for the year. Noteworthy: city councillors decided that keeping their free golf passes was extremely important. I don't think most of Rob Ford's proposed budget cuts are anything but hamfisted, but come on, City Council—pay for your own goddamned golf game, willya? TTC worker killed, causing shutdown of the city's busiest subway line for an entire day. Most interesting note: he was part of the only asbestos removal team......

Sometimes it feels like time is slipping away faster than ticket sales for tonight’s Al Gore talk at Con Hall. Catch time while you can! Hurry over to *new* gallery to bid on a selection of tick-tockalicious clocks created by 50 artists, such as It’s Almost Time by Lily Yung (above, left) or 4-D Comic by Donald Brackett (above, right). As a fundraiser for the Artists’ Health Centre Foundation, this first annual silent auction,......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur, the......

Apple unveils the iPhone. Entire bunches of interwebs go nuts over possibilities created by what is, when you get right down to it, just another fancy cellphone. Seriously, this isn't the iPod. This isn't a new class of product. This is at best a slight improvement on existing things to which we already had access. The iPhone will not do your hair, manage your diet or make you generally sexier. (Okay, it might make......

The Bloc will support the Stephen Harper motion to recognize Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada. In other news: Pope Catholic, bears poop in woods, General Franco still dead. Also under predictable news: Jim Flaherty promises that interest savings from federal debt reduction will be used for tax cuts. Cops busted six and a half million dollars worth of marijuana grow-ops yesterday. Of course, what they're not telling you is that two million......

Think you're the world's biggest Metric fan? Here's a rare chance to prove it. There's a copy of the very first, super-rare, debut CD of Emily Haines for auction on eBay courtesy of Toronto music blogger (and ex-Torontoist staffer) Chromewaves. No, we're not talking about her latest, critically-acclaimed release, Knives Don't Have Your Back. This is something much more special. Circa 1997, when Metric was but a twinkle in her eye, Emily Haines released a......

A very clear message from the Council of Canadians on health care reform. At Bay, north of Dundas. We had originally planned to write a sprawling account on the maintenance of free public health services - including the possible fines for private clinics and the provincial leadership-aspiring George Smitherman's warning of such fines - but we thought of the already omnipresent emphasis on the issue. It's such issue with such emphasis that perhaps we......

With SH, it's one present after another. Here's what the big guy has passed down over the past two weeks: - Minimum sentences for drug offenders. (Obviously targeting Andre Boisclair here.) - Eliminating conditional sentences, or house arrest, for all indictable drug offences. - A promise NOT to decriminalize marijuana. - Shut down safe-injection sites in Vancouver. - Reduce wait lists for cancer treatment, diagnostic testing and other health care treatment, with or without......

What would be worse: Watching Laura Prepon as Karla Homolka in Deadly, or watching Plague City, a "medical thriller [that] humanizes the struggle of heroic health care workers during SARS crisis"? From the sounds of each, it's like choosing between eating diarrhea or drinking pee. Now that's pretty gross. But if we had to drink pee, we'd probably consume a little drop each day, perhaps adding some to our milk or apple sauce to ease......

TOist had the opportunity to visit the Lost Articles Office at the TTC a few weeks ago. It's a vast repository for things lost and unloved, where the finds range from the mundane (hundreds of pairs of gloves) to the magnificent (a super vintage apple laptop, similar to the ones presently starring in Bruce Mau's massive change). But while the TTC formerly offloaded the unclaimed items with bi-annual sales, they're now, like much of the......

As part of his current "image building" tour of the East, gonzo Alberta Premier Ralph Klein stated he would not propose a smoking ban in Alberta. When further questioned about his views on cigarettes, Ralph "the Dean" Klein said that people who smoke are "stupid." If Klein's analysis seems presumptive and flawed, that's because it is. Using the Socratic Method, and the information that Klein himself is a long-time smoker, Torontoist is able to assert......