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Weekend Newsstand: July 24, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
In weekend news: Swiss Chalet is safe again, one billion dollars are off to the races, Joe—starts with G.I.—comes to TO, and a Star reporter loses her fight with cancer.
In case you haven’t heard, a three-hour standoff at a Swiss Chalet at the Kipling Queensway plaza ended without incident after the gunman surrendered to police yesterday evening. (Torontoist’s Stephen Michalowicz was there the moment the man turned himself in.) The gunman was eating in the restaurant when he handed a note to his servers telling them he had a gun and to leave the premises. Today, he faces nine charges. Officers were still on the scene last night, searching for explosives.
Veteran Star reporter Dale Anne Freed died at Mount Sinai Hospital on Thursday, after a “ferocious battle” with cancer. Freed joined the paper in 1986, writing about fashion and furniture, but found her calling as a general assignment reporter in the 1990s. Many may remember her coverage of former SCTV and Saturday Night Live actor Tony Rosato, who spent time in prison and struggled with Capgras syndrome. Freed was born in Brampton and graduated from the University of Toronto. She was sixty-one.
How much would you bet on the Woodbine Racetrack? How about one billion dollars? The Woodbine Entertainment Group is making said wager in an attempt to save the horse-racing industry and the ramshackle-ish neighbourhood it sits in. By the summer of 2013, the area could see eighty-one hectares, dubbed Woodbine Live, stacked with a concert hall, four-star hotel, luxury AMC cinema, nightclubs, restaurants, Milan-style galleria (whatever it is, it sounds swanky), skating rink, canal, heated sidewalks (say wha?), bonfire zones (awesomely dangerous), casino, and the list goes on…and oh yeah, there’ll still be a race track. The question on everyone’s mind has to be: how can they pull this off in a piddly three years, while Bloor Street still remains a complete clusterfuck? Amazing.
Are you knowledgeable about the rights of immigrant workers? Well, turns out that neither are they, and many of them are getting ripped off. A survey by the Chinese Interagency Network of Greater Toronto found that awareness was severely lacking on the maximum hours of work, overtime, holiday pay, and current minimum wage in Ontario. Unfortunately, many employees don’t argue their four-dollar-an-hour, seventy-hour workweek for fear of losing their jobs. Many of those approached also declined to take part in the survey for the same reason. The survey is calling for stronger workplace audits and educational outreach.
Two birds with one stone: care to find out what Conrad Black and the black bloc have in common, besides the word black? Take a look at this special in the Star.
And finally, because everyone’s a kid at heart, or because some may not even know this exists and don’t necessarily need to but are about to find out anyway…the G.I. Joe Convention is coming to Toronto for the first time next month. It’s usually held in Hamilton, but on August 7, about eight hundred Joe lovers from across North America will be marching around the Sheraton Toronto Airport Hotel. So get out those action figures, or at least dress like one or something, and head out to one of the most inconvenient spots to get to in the city.