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Newsstand: September 10, 2015
It's officially sweater weather. In the news: Toronto moves to regulate Uber services, a bomb scare prompts hours of travel delays, and a celebrated high school teacher loses his job over racist tweets.
Toronto city council is taking the first steps that could lead to the eventual regulation of the taxi service Uber. At a City Hall press conference Wednesday morning, John Tory announced plans to bring the unlicensed company under city regulation, stating, “Today, we’ve taken the first step forward to first bring Uber inside the law and regulate it.” The Mayor also applauded a City staff recommendation to reduce licensed taxi fares (from the current $4.25 to $3.25 starting fee) in a bid to make their services more competitive. Sam Moini, a representative from the Toronto Taxi Alliance, was not as enthusiastic, saying, “This will kill us. This report is absolutely the death of the taxi industry.”
GO train service was temporarily halted yesterday afternoon due to a bomb scare at Exhibition Station, prompting hours of delays on all seven GO lines. Toronto Police’s bomb squad was called to the area around 3 p.m. after a suspicious package was found near the Exhibition GO Train tracks; the package was detonated shortly after 6 p.m. Police say the package was made to look like a pipe bomb, and confirmed that the incident was a hoax.
A celebrated high school teacher from Richmond Green Secondary School has been fired by the York Region District School Board following a 10-week investigation into his Twitter account where he allegedly posted racist and Islamaphobic content. Michael Marshall, who supervised a GSA club and a slam poetry society, had been awarded an “Unsung Hero” award by the Educational Services Committee of District 16. But the investigation found he had also posted racist messages on his public Twitter account, including, “I get sad when girls I teach decide to wear the hijab. I feel like a failure,” “Hijabs make me sad,” and “Just have a trailer full of guns role down the street and arm the ghetto. Oh wait that’s black ppl.” The Twitter account, @firstatheist, has since been deactivated.