UPDATE: Toronto has won the bid to host the Pan Am Games

By the time most of the city is leaving work today, we'll know whether Toronto has won its controversial bid for the 2015 Pan Am Games. Phoning from the Toronto bid team's headquarters in Guadalajara, Mexico, mayor David Miller is succinct about why he thinks the Toronto games would be a good thing.

"I have to look at that from the city's perspective. Sports has an important part to play, and the way these games have evolved, Toronto will get the benefit of hosting them. We'll have our name known around the Americas, we'll build very strong bonds between Latin America and Toronto, which is very significant with immigration from South America."

The fight to save Toronto's architectural heritage is a bitter one; passion is often the sole remaining motivation for so many fighters on the front line of this endless battle. This is a good thing, because it quickly becomes plain that reason and common sense don't stand a chance, especially in a system that's become increasingly stacked against them.

Over two years ago, a notice was put up in the window of a building on King Street East in Toronto's old downtown that a developer was seeking city permission to erect a condo on the site. This was the beginning of a battle for Robert Cishecki that continues to this day. A real estate broker and local resident, he's collected signatures and started a website to publicize the cause of forcing the city to enforce its own bylaws.

The best hotels in Toronto are a mixed bunch, ranging from arty boutique hotels to slick suite spaces in the Financial District to local outposts of international chains. They have one thing in common, though - every one of them is downtown, with none more than a few steps north of Bloor Street.

As the mass vaccination program begins ahead of schedule, we're getting a glimpse of how prepared the city's health authorities are for an outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus, which can't help but make you wonder how deep the preparations go, and how carefully they've planned for the worst.

Certainly, health care authorities have had a full season of the virus working its way through the southern hemisphere to draw on for precedents, and almost everyone agrees that SARS - probably a more disastrous experience for Toronto - left them prepared. "I think that since SARS has happened a lot has happened across the province when it comes to infection control," says Herveen Sachdeva, Associate Medical Officer of Health for Toronto Public Health. "There's a lot more awareness out there and a lot more resources dedicated to infectious diseases in healthcare environments."

No one will deny that Little Italy - the stretch of College Street between Bathurst and Crawford - is looking more than a little threadbare these days. Empty storefronts dot the once-bustling blocks, and pigeon droppings stain the signs above the cafes and martini bars that are still managing to hang on after the strip's 1990's boom.

Rocco Mastrangelo has seen it all . His family opened the Café Diplomatico in 1968, just as the street began losing its Italian constituency to St. Clair West and then Woodbridge, and hung on long enough to ride the boom into the new century's bust. He's the vice-chair of the local BIA, and he's watched the roller coaster ride from the Dip's patio tables.

I drink a lot of coffee. Not as much, I'm sure, as my wife, and nowhere near as much as fellow Canadians, whose thirst for java in all its forms means that major coffee franchisees can open on competing corners from each other, and no up-and-coming urban neighbourhood has truly arrived until it has at least one stylish, serious shop selling latte with artful little swirls etched in foam.

Te Aro opened last spring in a former garage in Leslieville, a neighbourhood with no shortage of coffee shops. Given this saturation, owners Jessie and Andy Wilkin decided to offer coffee tastings to educate their customers on what goes into a cup - and showcase their beans. I managed an invite to the first test run of the tasting - or "cupping," as it would more properly be called - as a way of addressing the fact that, for all of the java I down, I don't really know much about the stuff.