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Newsstand: February 26, 2015
It is Thursday and news keeps coming. In light of that, here are some headlines that you might find interesting this morning: pieces of the Gardiner are falling, UofT law students are tackling unpaid law internships, a Newmarket building becomes a meme, and Tory MPP Rick Nicholls does not believe in evolution.
It appears that on Tuesday chunks of concrete fell from the Gardiner Expressway, damaging the car of Huma Siddiqi, who was travelling near the intersection of Lower Spadina Avenue and Lake Shore Boulevard at the time. Thankfully, Siddiqi was not injured, but a piece of concrete measuring 30 centimetres long and 15 centimetres wide did shatter her windshield. Police were contacted and filed a report, but no one from the City came to the scene of the accident to inspect the damage. Councillor Jaye Robinson (Ward 25, Don Valley West) says that the incident is under investigation and admits that City response should have been more prompt.
A campaign aimed at tackling the problem of unpaid internships for aspiring lawyers at the University of Toronto is being met with some criticism from students. If approved by faculty, the Students’ Law Society will launch #OneDayofPay, a campaign that will ask students who land paid summer articling jobs to donate one day of their pay to help create a bursary for students who are expected to work for free by employers. One student who objects to the campaign says that it suggests that the problem of asking students to work for free should be fixed by students and not by targeting employers and university administration. Judith McCormack, Assistant Dean for Students, says that the university does not support unpaid positions; still though, current fellowship programs that subsidize students who choose to take on unpaid social justice work are severely oversubscribed.
The Newmarket Health Centre may be known for providing long- and short-term care services to seniors and veterans, but thanks to Google, it has become famous for something entirely different. Satellite images of the centre reveal that when viewed aerially, its design looks like a man with his legs spread out, letting his anatomically correct penis hang out in all its architecturally designed glory. So far representatives for the Region of York—which owns the building—say that they are unable to figure out who created the cheeky design back in 1951.
Congratulations to the people of the Chatham-Kent-Essex on electing some guy to provincial legislature who does not believe in evolution. On Tuesday, MPP Rick Nicholls admitted during debates over new sex education curriculum that he does not believe in the theory of evolution, nor does the think that students should be obligated to learn about it. The admission prompted disbelief from Liberal and New Democrat benches, while it also raised some eyebrows from within Nicholls’s own Progressive Conservative ranks. Since then, his fellow Tories have been quick to distance themselves from his beliefs. Both interim PC leader Jim Wilson and house leader Steve Clark told media that Nicholls’s views were not a statement of party policy, while Barrie MP and current PC leadership hopeful Patrick Brown said he “believes in the theory of evolution, which is well accepted in the scientific community.”