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Weekend Newsstand: May 7, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
My Saturday brings all the boys to the yard! Damn right, it’s better than yours! Unless you count the Toronto Zoo elephants, daycare tuberculosis, and perverts at York, I guess. But at the very least, Toronto the Good has received some international props.
Toronto Zoo elephants Toka, Thika, and Iringa may be packing their trunks and shipping out if a staff report’s recommendations are taken up by the organization’s board of management. Seven elephants have died at the zoo since 1984, but until now, the zoo insisted that there was no problem with huge, southern-hemisphere animals living in captivity in Canada. Now, after looking at the costs associated with building and maintaining facilities that would be genuinely appropriate for the animals ($16.5 million for construction and $930,000 a year to operate), they’ve had a change of heart. The interesting things is this: despite former game show host Bob Barker’s offer to help pay for the animals to be sent to a sanctuary, the report suggests they simply be transferred to different zoos. Perhaps the price is not right.
In more tales of abuse and creepiness at York University, another female student has reported being the victim of a sexual assault. The woman was walking into a school building on Thursday when she was assaulted in broad daylight, at about 4 p.m. As she tried to get away, the suspect followed her to a different building and assaulted her again. The school appears to be doing little to combat its image of being an unsafe place for women: in recent months, a woman was killed in her apartment just off campus, and another woman was gay-bashed while on her way to the washroom in a campus pub. And that doesn’t include a rash of other rapes there over the years.
Lock up your kiddies! Someone at a daycare somewhere has tuberculosis! Parents are being warned to monitor their children for illness after an employee at a University of Toronto Scarborough campus daycare was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Public health officials say it’s unlikely the children will be infected, even though internationally, tuberculosis is one of the most-transmitted diseases there is. While we lucky ducks in Toronto hit the panic button when one case is discovered, the World Health Organization says about one third of the earth’s population is infected with the disease.
And, despite what seem like constant complaints from some camps about how the city has gone to the dogs, Toronto has managed to place second in PricewaterhouseCooper’s annual Cities of Opportunity list—beaten out only by the Big Apple. The report ranks factors such as livability, research and development, education, size, and economic influence. Our city did the best in areas like innovation, air quality, health, and the ease of doing business. Where we screwed the pooch will come as a surprise to very few: transportation, where we ranked near the bottom. Meanwhile, comedian Scott Thompson is encouraging us to stop taking ourselves so freaking seriously. He suggests an annual Drag Day as a start (mark your calendars for February 18, folks).