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Newsstand: October 21, 2009
Clean diesel trains for all, public schools for boys only, and the RCMP’s very own giant terrorist bomb blows up in a huge “test blast” released on video for you. All this and more from a city that hit the ground running this Wednesday.
But first, did anyone want Toronto to win its bid for the 2008 Olympics? Because if you did, you just might have a bone to pick with IOC President Jacques Rogge. Why? Well, it seems that, when the IOC was choosing which city would get the games, China managed to buy critical votes in exchange for supporting Rogge’s bid for presidency of the IOC. And these allegations are actually coming from the then-president of the Chinese Olympic Committee, who just published a memoir bragging about it. Beijing went on to win and so did Rogge, beating out Canada’s candidate Dick Pound, who, as we know, would later become famous for calling Canada’s First Nations a bunch of savages who weren’t even European. Everyone’s a winner in this story!
The education director of Toronto District School Board just unveiled his plan for a no-girls-allowed public school, or “Male Leadership Academy,” which he hopes to see open by next year. Chris Spence made the announcement as part of a presentation of his priorities, entitled Vision of Hope! In all seriousness, while it’s very easy to level cheap attacks at Spence’s idea, he’s backed up his proposal with data purporting to show boys underperforming in public school test scores and facing suspensions and other disciplinary actions much more often than girls. All of which raises difficult questions about the extent to which public schools put different pressures on boys and girls. So we’ll be watching for more from Spence, bearing in mind that, while his “vision” and his data can and should both be rigorously questioned, the dilemmas he’s contending with are part of a much bigger problem.
By 2017, proclaims transit giant Metrolinx, all its GO Trains will sport cleaner-burning diesel engines that meet Tier 4 standards (that’s the best tier). That’s well and good, says Keith Brooks of the Clean Train Coalition, but where does it leave the study Metrolinx just approved to explore the costs and benefits of electrifying the entire network of GO tracks. Brooks’s complaint is that previous studies already gave electric trains a clear lead in cost-benefit terms, and that both the current study and the Tier 4 announcement are being used as a pretext to stall electrifying the railway.
We promised you a gigantic bomb, and we didn’t forget. This footage is from the RCMP, courtesy of Justice Bruce Durno, who presided over the trial in which Zakaria Amara confessed to attacks with such bombs in downtown Toronto. Justice Durno just released the videos used as crown evidence in the terror trial, including a film the mounties made of the explosion let off by a thousand-pound bomb they built using Zakaria’s specifications, just to see what would happen. Skip to about 1:26 of the footage [VIDEO] for the big blast, but the video also includes surveillance tapes of accomplices Saad Khalid and Saad Gaya unloading sacks of fertilizer, and the conspirators’ test-firing of the bomb’s jury-rigged cell-phone detonator. By the way, that’s a whole shipping container being flipped over in the blast footage. If you really want to take a close look, the National Post opted to show it in dramatic sloooow motion. Hard as it may be to imagine that happening on Bay Street, that was the group’s plan. All in all, that is some good police work.