news
Newsstand: December 28, 2009
Pearson airport is practically a triage ward, according to some of the hungry and frustrated people still waiting around hours after they showed up there expecting—silly them!—to get on a plane. Following the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a plane over Detroit, the TSA has whacked travellers with a new set of restrictions that would have thwarted the attempted bombing, fix the underlying security issues it revealed, and mainly prevent passengers from using the bathroom during the last hour of their flights and have caused no end of confusion and (who could’ve predicted?) stupefying delays.
A mentally unstable man grabbed two women, one after the other, and tried to wrestle them onto the tracks in the St. Andrew subway station in front of an onrushing train on Christmas Eve. Both women got away, and police are still looking for the second one in the hopes of learning more about the attack. Sean Duck, 29, is under arrest and currently charged with a single count of aggravated assault.
Homocidal maniacs aside, TTC riders can rest easy, since public transit fares are among the small number of exemptions from the new Harmonized Sales Tax that will kick in next July. But for some products and services that used to be subject to GST but not PST, consumers will now pay the full 13% harmonized tax. Sadly, these include electricity, internet fees, gasoline, and haircuts. We had a tax break on haircuts? Who knew?
And just as gasoline sales taxes shoot up province-wide, the penalties for bad driving will become so steep that even some traffic cops say they’re going too far. An official police spokesperson, however, said the new fines are needed to reign in dangerous drivers who “seem to forget that driving is a privilege.” Maybe a two-thousand-dollar fine for obstructing an ambulance (and possible jail time for two-time offenders) will set a few people straight on that issue.
Pending city approval, Maple Leaf Sports is planning to add 1,244 new seats to BMO field ahead of the 2010 season. Not bad, right? It’s expected to cost them two million dollars, or $1,448 per seat, so we (and MLS) hope you can be enticed to watch a whole lot of soccer in the near future. The city’s executive committee will vote on the project next Monday.
Do we get to end on a tentatively positive note today? Really? Not a single Toronto media outlet has any bad news to surprise us with? Well, then I guess—arg! No such luck: the Washington Post has decided it can no longer let the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal go unmocked. While we at Torontoist have a complicated but usually loving relationship with the museum’s spacey newish gallery, the WaPo have come right out and called our spiny, shiny hedghog the worst building of the decade. At least they spelled out their objection: in their eyes, the Crystal’s exterior looks “dramatic,” which we’ll take as a halfhearted compliment, but once inside the structure “you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.” Touché, Post, but just you wait ’til we finish writing our devastating counter-review of the Lincoln Memorial. Speaking of which, we should get back to that. That’s the news for now.