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Newsstand: January 22, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
Unless someone has printed out this post and left it in your mailbox, you obviously have internet access. So there’s a good chance you’ve seen this photo, showing a ticket collector who fell asleep while performing brain surgery sitting in the fare booth in McCowan station on the night of January 9. Torontoist spoke with the shot’s photographer yesterday, as Twitter and various blogs lit up with the fury of a thousand angry commenters. Now, the TTC has opened an internal investigation of the man whom the National Post, apparently without irony, calls the “alleged napper.” The public has spoken! Too bad the poor chump wasn’t just looking at Facebook when his boss thought he was working. Then he’d be blameless, right?
Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi wants to cancel all plans for major bike lanes, ditch the provincially backed Transit City program, privatize the TTC board, sell Toronto Hydro, and…funnel developer money to help out poor neighbourhoods. Yes, Rossi’s speech to the Empire Club yesterday was a tough nut to crack at times (when he wasn’t just promising private-sector donors everything they’ve ever wanted). Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan will have the goods on all of this and more later today, so check back if you, like many of our readers, use bikes, transit, electricity, or neighbourhoods on a regular basis.
Councillor “Off-Leash” Doug Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre) is suing to prevent city council from reimbursing three fellow councillors for their legal costs. Adrian Heaps (Ward 35, Scarborough Southwest) faced a defamation lawsuit from another candidate. Sandra Bussin (Ward 32, Beaches-East York) lodged a defamation suit against a local paper. And both Heaps and Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) got stuck with bills from compliance audits of their election spending. Holyday wants all of these payments cancelled, and is putting up his own money to challenge them in court. This despite the fact that something called the “Toronto Party” has already launched its own legal challenge, which Holyday called “flawed,” to stop the payouts. Yikes.
We wish we had more to report (we really do!) about the TTC’s upcoming trip planner, a web service we told you about yesterday that automagically finds routes and travel times for any public transit trip in town. First announced by the TTC in 2008 (after a group of city blogs including Torontoist took up the idea a year earlier), the feature-packed trip planner promises plenty to look forward to, with one or two disappointing omissions, so stay tuned.
The Globe and Mail reports that Venkat Milligan, a former Don Jail inmate who is suing the prison for $17 million, was allegedly caught selling drugs out of his hospital room. Milligan claims that he was treated with horrendous neglect and had to be hospitalized for a year and a half after leaving the Don Jail. A paraplegic, he says he was denied his wheelchair and left in unsanitary and inhumane conditions. Police now say they found cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana in Milligan’s room at St. Michael’s Hospital, along with a loaded handgun and bulletproof vest. They have accused Milligan of trying to sell drugs to an undercover cop.
Michael Schmidt, Durham’s dairy-farming, German version of Che Guevara, has been found not guilty of selling raw milk, despite all the raw milk he gives to people who pay him because they want it. Schmidt sells shares of his dairy co-op, whose paid members are effectively co-owners of the cows there, which entitles them to a share of the sweet, untreated, unregulated milk. The decision doesn’t legalize the sale of raw milk or products made from it, but instead recognizes that Schmidt’s legal work-around was not sneaky, but clever. As such, it could have far-reaching implications for consumer rights and protections.
Metro reports that a crowd of U of T students gathered yesterday to protest an extension of David Naylor’s term as the school’s president. Naylor has taken considerable flak from student groups over repeated tuition hikes and a change in the way fees are calculated that will result in (surprise!) students paying more. On the downside, Metro doesn’t seem to have contacted Naylor or the university’s executives for the article, which dampens its impact somewhat.
And finally, in that same spirit, we got all excited about the headline “Anne Mroczkowski talks about being fired from Citytv,” only to read in the piece’s first sentence that what Mroczkowski says is that she is “not yet ready to talk” about the firing. I see what you did there, National Post.