news
Newsstand: February 16, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Today is the first Wednesday of the rest of your life, but why is it always about you anyway? In the news, downtown development discussed, suitcase sorters strike, and torrid temperatures tomorrow.
City councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27,Toronto Centre-Rosedale) is promoting a working group, including a planner and architect, to look at how best to develop Yonge Street between Dundas and Gerrard. However, Primaris Retail REIT, the shopping mall developer which owns much of the property between Gould and Gerrard, has not yet not been invited to participate and hasn’t shown much interest in being proactive about it. The group will look at ways to build up the area that will serve all stakeholders while avoiding the example of the former Empress Hotel at 335 Yonge (i.e. letting buildings collapse into the street and then burning down whatever is left).
You could be disappointed if you’re hoping to have your baggage handled this weekend. Sorry if that sounds suggestive, but it’s true. Four hundred Handlex baggage handlers have walked off the job in Montreal and Toronto, including those who normally move luggage for a number of airlines at Pearson. Management will be filling in for the striking workers, but you may get slowed down if you’re flying somewhere for Family Day festivities.
Maybe this guy can help with the luggage. A British man is stranded in the T-dot after he turned up on the U.S. no-fly list and was not permitted to board an Air Transat flight. Dawood Hepplewhite, who was subsequently turned down by Air Canada and British Airways, was visiting his wife and children in Toronto when he was stopped as he tried to get on his flight back home. Hepplewhite says he doesn’t know exactly why nobody wants him on their planes, but speculates that it’s because he’s a “white Muslim” who once applied for a teaching job in Yemen. You know, we usually use adjectives like “Kafka-esque” because we think it makes us look smart, but once in a while it really applies.
Roller blades? Check! Spangly thong? Check! It’s still cold right now but the weather should be getting balmy enough over the next couple of days to get you thinking of summer. Forecasts call for temperatures as high as 12 C by Friday, which would smash the previous record of 10.4 C and prove once and for all that climate change benefits everybody.
And the National Post publishes a gushing tribute to a Woodbridge man who is “credited with helping take the Calabrian Mafia in Toronto from a poor group of immigrants to a global criminal powerhouse” and whose “soft smile and grey hair meant many did not realize the warm businessman, father and grandfather carried such history and respect within the underworld.”