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Newsstand: July 26, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Good morning, folks! Today, Tony Clement is kind of a hero, five bucks goes a long way, and always keep an eye on your hurley.
Whatever you may think of Federal Industry Minister Tony Clement as a politician, you have to give him props for his extracurricular rescuing activities. Clement was eating dinner in Muskoka on Saturday night when a woman came to the door screaming that her friend was drowning. Clement ran out and jumped into the water fully clothed, joining other bystanders in a rescue attempt that fortunately proved successful.
Check your wallets, people. A century-old Canadian five dollar bill has sold at auction for $150,000. The 1910 bill, from the long-forgotten Bank of Vancouver, set a new price record for Canadian banknotes. If it had been placed in a bank account to collect interest at 3% compounded daily it would have been worth about a hundred bucks by now, so there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
An Irishman living in Banff was surprised when his mother called to tell him that his hurley had turned up in a Toronto police photo of weapons confiscated during the G20 protests. A hurley is a stick used in the Irish sport of hurling (in a similar vein, Irish soccer balls are known as “kickeys” and boxing gloves as “puncheys”) and Padraig Kelleher had brought his over from his hometown near Limerick. However, Kelleher had left the hurley in Toronto with friends, and had himself been thousands of miles from Toronto at the time of the G20 summit, working in Banff. At the time of the story, it still wasn’t clear exactly how the implement had ended up in detention.
Thousands of slightly drunk drivers in Ontario are going to get a break. Beginning next week, automotive inebriates who haven’t been involved in an accident or been convicted of reckless driving will be able to plead guilty and get off with a fine and a three-month license suspension. Once their license is returned, offenders will also be required to install an alcohol monitoring device in their car, at a cost of twelve hundred dollars and a two hundred dollar monthly monitoring fee. While some police feel the program sends the wrong message, with four thousand cases of drunk driving waiting to be heard, the new policy will help to clear the backlog.
If this hotel’s rockin’, don’t come knockin’. A conference on earthquakes being held this week in Toronto is expected to draw one thousand participants from around the world. The tenth Canadian Conference on Earthquake Engineering will see attendees discuss an agenda ranging from how to build more earthquake-proof buildings to how communities can be better prepared for quakes.