Photo: "For the drop" by sjgardiner, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

Your Toronto morning news roundup for Tuesday September 2nd, 2008:

Toronto's urban densification, lack of green infrastructure like trees and green roofs, and our antiquated sewer systems are responsible for massive amounts of raw sewage making its way into the Great Lakes. Unfortunately our solutions (making jokes about growing a tail from swimming in Lake Ontario, and relying entirely on water treatment/filtration) aren't cutting it.

The Maple Leaf Gardens revitalization project, which involves the creation of a massive Loblaw grocery store, hasn't seen the lift of a hammer yet. Speculation that unforeseen construction challenges are the reason have been dismissed by Loblaw, who are saying that they're simply waiting for the right time to proceed.

--

The Conservatives have continued to eliminate funding for Canadian arts programs, this time axing $14.5million in Telefilm's new media funding. Fiscal responsibility seems to often trump creative expression with this government (although the opposite seems to be true when it comes to Harper's seemingly inevitable calling of an October 14th federal election).

In what some are calling the final move to gain complete world dominance, Google is set to release the beta version of its own web browser called Chrome. If you want to learn more about the project, read about it (in comic book format?) and watch for the program to be available later today.

In sports, the University of Toronto Blues won their first football game since 2001, ending a 49-game losing streak by narrowly defeating Waterloo. Fans rushed the field, and players celebrated rather awkwardly because they had to wait so long to do so.

And after someone switched the coffee to decaf, our friends over at Torontoist have decided to no longer post a cheeky morning news roundup, instead opting to post newsworthy tidbits throughout the day. blogTO has been working on a similar microblogging feature (which we hope to integrate into the site soon), but we'll continue to do the Morning Brew as well.