According to the Inside the CBC blog and the National Post, Toronto's favourite boyish-looking provocateur, Avi Lewis, is back on the airwaves with his newest show, Frontline: USA. The show promises to "strip away the spin and highlight real issues such as poverty, violence, race, health, and immigration" in America. Considering that Lewis is involved and that the show airs on Al Jazeera English, chances are that Frontline: USA won't be a Dobbsian exercise......

With Toronto in the midst of a nasty heat wave, this cooler beckoning walkers-by in Yorkville with "Free Water" seemed like a desert mirage. But sure enough, the lid pulled back to reveal perfectly-chilled bottled water care of The Body Clinic, a high-end spa and salon. At first, the cooler seemed a sweet gesture to us sun-beaten, sweat-soaked pedestrians, bringing back memories of the refreshing Freezies given out on hot days in elementary school. But......

Well! Considering we got in so much trouble in the comments the last time we mentioned the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival 2007 in conjunction with zombies, we think this time we’re going to be really careful with what we say about the exciting news that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is to play this year’s Midnight Madness program. So all we'll say is that we think that’s going to be really......

Nelly Furtado wins five Junos. Clearly, we will respect her if we get it. In other news, Jim Cuddy won the Juno for best adult alternative album, which means he did the best job of taking actual alternative music, dropping it to quarter-speed and setting it to acoustic guitar. Toronto is number fifteen! In the annual Mercer Human Resource Consulting review of best cities in Canada the world to live in, that is. Every Canadian......

Jim Jones was not your typical self-proclaimed messiah. The man preached love for all races and classes, freedom of speech and socialism through Christianity. In 1978, Jones and more than 900 followers, known as Peoples Temple, moved from California to Guyana. They were going to build the ideal society. Dubbed Jonestown, after Jones himself, it was to be a utopia for the disenfranchised; a place where believers of all races and classes could lead self-sufficient......

Yesterday, Jorge Garbajosa was named the Rookie of the Month for the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and he has been leading NBA.com’s unofficial Rookie of the Year Race for the past month. Garbajosa, however, is not a typical rookie; he doesn’t look like one and he doesn’t play like one. He just turned 29 years old, making him about seven years older than most of the league’s other leading rooks. Perhaps that is why he never......

Former Toronto police chief and current OPP commissioner Julian Fantino is being sued for allegedly using a Police Services board case to maliciously advance his own career. The suit accuses Fantino of multiple skullduggeries, including wiretapping the chair of the Police Services Board. Now, I know what you're thinking - "but Julian Fantino was such a nice police chief. Except for the corruption scandals and the racial profiling and the homophobia." TTC considering leasing out......

A man was stabbed to death in North York at a party celebrating Ghana's victory over the USA at the World Cup. Apparently gang colours may have been a trigger for the tragic attack. A memorial to the victims of the Air India bombing has started construction in a Toronto park. Bombardier defends itself against its rivals and their claims that they can build the TTC's subway cars cheaper. Siemens acknowledges that its estimates might......

This week in film we come to you first of all with news from the last week in film (uh…) Most of which we slightly embarrassingly forgot to mention, as it’s all good stuff. First up, if you happen to know any filmmakers (or budding ones) who are also children somewhere between grade 3 and 12, submissions for this coming April’s Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers’ Showcase, part of the Sprockets Children's Film Festival, are......

The Bloor Cinema is heavy with festivals so shortly after the celebration of its 100th birthday, with The One-Minute Film and Video Festival starting tonight,as blogged below, and last night’s opening night gala of the Reel Asian Film Festival, The Motel. Michael Kang’s debut is a strange little indie film set in the depths of the nowhere, USA that most Americans know – endless freeways linking motels and other road side ‘attractions’, with the......

So tonight is the big opening of the Festival, with certain sections of the city all abuzz with poseurs yammering into cell phones, except now not in Canadian accents! All the staff and hardworking volunteers will be hoping it all goes off without a hitch, terrified and excited at the thought of nearly two weeks of celebrities, parties, networking… oh, and films, I guess. The opening night Gala tonight is Deepak Mehta’s Water, a......

Canadian cities, this one included, seem defined by winter or at least the colder times of year. So when the sun and heat does arrive we are caught physically and psychologically off-guard. The Toronto of Darren O’Donnell’s 2004 novel, Your Secrets Sleep With Me tries desperately to cope with summer. Throw in a refugee crisis from a paranoid USA, a freak tornado which castrates that phallic tower near the lake, an increasingly disturbed government and......

Toronto city councillors don’t like graffiti. So what? Torontoist doesn’t like paying $2.50 to ride our underfunded and ailing transit system and we don’t like riding our bikes over the streets’ many exposed potholes. Oh, and we especially don’t like our city councillors deciding what does and does not constitute art. A new bylaw will require store owners to remove unsolicited graffiti from buildings within 72 hours of discovery by enforcement officers. If it’s not......

TOist went to Disneyworld as a kid. And we loved that downtown thoroughfare, Mainstreet USA, with its timelessly garish fake storefronts. Kind of a downer it was, though, when you went to open a door, and discovered you couldn't - it was just a facade. Where are we headed with all this, you ask? Well, behold the Disneyfied splendour of the newly-fronted St. Andrew's Meat Market! They've taken advantage of the city's new Commercial......

Le Drake hôtel a ouvert ses portes dans le quartier ouest de la rue Queen il y a environ un an. Pour ajouter à son style distinctif, les propriétaires du Drake se sont associés avec le magasin de jouets sexuels installé dans les mêmes environs depuis 1997, Come as you are (Venez tel quel), pour offrir à leur clientèle un service de chambre d’objets sexuels. Les clients peuvent alors commander pratiquement n’importe quel item......