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Newsstand: January 12, 2015
Did your picks win last night at the Golden Globes? Or do you not watch shameless parades of wealth and celebrity? If you don't, this news might be more up your alley: the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is already impacting real estate, Toronto actor Stephan James discusses his role in Selma, and Canadian resident Khaled Al-Qazzaz has been released from Egyptian prison.
As construction continues on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, land developers are already looking to capitalize on the improved transit prospects in the area. More than 40 re-zoning requests have been made to the City’s planning division—most of them developers looking to build condo towers, rather than the six- to eight-storey residential and office buildings much of the area is currently zoned for. The Eglinton-Yonge strip is already awash in high-rise condo towers, and developers seem eager to take advantage of the lower real estate rates along the 19 kilometres of Eglinton that will be serviced by the LRT. Meanwhile, University of Toronto Scarborough professor of human geography Steven Farber says the exploitation of cheaper real estate and projected residential interest in the area could lead to overcrowding in the area.
Toronto actor Stephan James spoke to CTV News Toronto about his supporting role in Selma as John Lewis. Lewis was a civil rights organizer—he was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and is the only living member of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders—and has been a member of the U.S. House of Congress for 28 years, serving three-quarters of Atlanta, Georgia. James also discussed the unreleased biopic in which he portrays Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Khaled Al-Qazzaz, a Canadian resident who had been serving as an aide to ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, has been released from jail after more than a year in custody. Morsi, Al-Qazzaz and eight other aides were arrested in July 2013, when the military deposed Morsi. Al-Qazzaz was never charged and it was never explained to him why he had been arrested, but he was kept in jail until this week, despite an order given on December 29 by the Egyptian attorney general to release him. Al-Qazzaz spent the last two months of his incarceration in a hospital rather than in solitary confinement, and appears to be suffering from a severe spinal condition related to his incarceration.