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Newsstand: March 8, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
A senior official at the TTC helped a close friend land a lucrative job taking photos of the agency’s meetings and construction sites, and personally signed over at least $50,000 to her. A Star investigation reported yesterday that project manager John Cursio recommended the fledgling firm West Point Photography, run by Robin Thoen, with whom he’d had a relationship and for whom his daughter did photo-editing work. Cursio did not disclose any conflict of interest, and is off work for the time being. Thoen’s website has removed all of its photo galleries, which the Star said were mainly full of pictures of shells in water, dogs, birds, and a flower. There’s always the chance that the pictures were stolen from the internet by art thieves. Either way, it’s the world’s loss.
In advance of International Women’s Day today, roughly two thousand women rallied at U of T and marched down Yonge Street on Saturday, calling for job and benefits equity. Andrea Calver, a longtime Toronto activist, was among the event’s organizers, and said that this year’s march focused mainly on economic issues affecting women, particularly in the wake of the recession.
OSAP gives students on financial assistance a food budget of just $7.50 per day, leaving them to either make up the rest (which can have severe effects on their loan status) or get really, really comfortable with pasta. Protesting for higher funding is nothing new to student activism, so calling attention to the food problem in a way that doesn’t seem stale was no easy task for the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. Their solution: try to live by the unrealistic budget, and be very public about it. The five students living by the “OSAP diet” will be blogging about the experience daily.
On Friday afternoon, it was announced that the trial of former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant is still not ready to advance to the next stage—the one in which Bryant may eventually appear in court, about eight months after bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard died after a collision with Bryant’s vehicle. Sheppard and Bryant had allegedly gotten into a fight before the collision. The case has been put over to an April 14 court date. Bryant is charged with criminal negligence causing death.
Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) kicked his mayoral campaign into high gear yesterday. Oh, no, wait, he visited two North York churches, where he groused about how neighbourhoods should fund and organize their own community services. If Mammoliti is determined to phone in his run for office, then the media seems willing to return the consideration: the article this mention appeared in is under a hundred words long and looks like no one even bothered to proofread it.
A house fire in North York last night left a father dead and one of his children in critical condition. The man rescued his infant son and left him with a neighbour before going back into the burning house to try to find his daughter. Firefighters found the two on the building’s second floor with no vital signs, but were able to revive the girl, 12. The children’s mother also survived the blaze. And that’s the news in Toronto this morning.