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Newsstand: November 6, 2009
Our pets are catching the swine flu! And not just our pet swine! Confirmed cases of housepets gettin’ sick with H1N1 are giving us some kibble for thought today. Maybe it’s time to make some new flu-naming rules, though, because this is pretty complicated. While humans can’t get equine flu from a horse, apparently we might be able to catch swine flu from a parrot and then give it to our cat. Dogs are virtually people-flu proof, but humans deliberately infect ferrets with our influenza germs. Rabbits are just a total wild card. And don’t even get us started on the iguanas. People are being cautioned to take steps to protect their pets from the Pig, but the vaccine is still for humans only—felix no can haz.
Speaking of the vaccine, unadjuvanted doses of it are now available for pregnant women. Got a fetus? Your best shot at one of the shots is at these clinics, but you may want to try calling ahead of time. However, if you’re past twenty weeks, doctors say you’re better off getting any vaccination, adjuvanted or not, as soon as possible (now that the adjuvanted formula has been through further testing, the Ontario Health Protection and Promotion Agency says either form of the vaccine is safe for pregnant women). Of course, those of us who aren’t members of priority groups or private clinics for the rich are stuck at the back of the line for innoculation. If this keeps up much longer, we may have to turn to desperate measures, like joining the Raptors.
We interrupt this blog post to bring you the news that CP24’s twitter feed demands your tweets for Adam Giambrone’s travelling TV show. Ask him a question about talk radio, and the media triangle will be complete.
Yesterday, you read here about the new user fees the City is considering to balance the budget without cutting services, but now Toronto councillors are seriously discussing a proposal to create a new Municipal Sales Tax. The MST, however, won’t be an easy sell. Aside from resistance from councillors and voting Torontonians who do not feel too great about paying a new tax right now, the provincial government has threatened block the tax if Toronto tries to introduce it.
All of which means we still have plenty of time to buy these Olympic torches for sale on ebay without paying City Hall the extra percentage! And at the markup those runners are charging, man, would this guy be getting a great deal. Anyway, shouldn’t the taxes from those go to Vancouver, or something? We’re pretty sure we can bargain the seller down to a cheaper price–those things are looking a bit tarnished.
Four-hundred-fifty kilos is a lot of weed to take the blame for. That, plus $2.5 million (presumably in Canadian dollars, though Metro isn’t specific) is what U.S. authorities have seized in a drug bust that’s got fifteen people accused of running drugs and laundering money in a cross-border crime ring run by a Toronto man, Hassan Mohammed Abboud. There’s no word on whether or when Abboud will be put into custody and extradited to the U.S., but, really, we’d rather hear a bit more about the “personal submarine” the group could have been using.
It looks like Rae Days could be coming back, in Dalton form! But the mandatory days of unpaid vacation are as popular now as they ever were with the province’s labour unions, who say the Liberals need to bite the bullet and raise taxes instead of making their members sacrifice wages.
That’s about where Newsstand normally gets capped off, but, today, we’d like to take a quick look at the gun registry. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a Toronto-specific issue. In fact, it’s probably closest to the marrow in Montreal, where politicians have pledged to fight tooth and nail against a very credible Conservative effort to kill Canada’s long-gun registry—the one created in the wake of the Polytechnique massacre. According to the Canadian Press: “Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan attempted to undermine a report to Parliament on the federal gun registry Thursday – calling into question the agenda of its authors after refusing to make the report public before a crucial parliamentary vote.” That was a long link and it may therefore be a little hard to click on, so here’s the short, live-action version [VIDEO]. Van Loan maintained that “only 2.4 per cent” of police gun-registry checks were for long-guns. Which means police made eighty thousand long-gun checks last year. But they made more handgun checks. Therefore the long-gun registry is useless. Van Loan also said the report he suppressed only reiterated the same thing it says every year (that the registry works), so MPs had no need to read or be made aware of it. And that’s the news today.
Today’s Newsstand originally included an item about Giorgio Mammoliti, Frank Di Giorgio, and Cesar Palacio’s “industry facility tour” of a strip club, with a link to a Toronto Star story. In fact, the story was from March, but a technical error at the Star (since fixed) caused their article to be republished this morning under today’s date on both their website and in their RSS feed—which we mistakenly assumed meant the story was new.