Morning Brew: September 19th, 2008

Photo: "DSC_1734" by fotograf.416, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

Your Toronto morning news roundup for Friday September 19th, 2008:

Being a teenage bully may cost you more than school friendship and your reputation. An Oshawa mom allegedly hunted down the alleged bully (who'd been harassing her daughter) and beat her and stuck a knife in her a several times. Rage can most certainly rear its head.

The idea of doing random drug testing of TTC employees has been dropped, but the commission still wants to pursue drug screening of potential new recruits and post-incident testing of frontline employees. Giambrone calls it a compromise between public safety and employee privacy, and I tend to think he's right. But if a bus driver smokes weed on Monday night and crashes a bus on Wednesday morning, he'll still read positive for THC without it actually affecting his performance. Can of worms for sure.

$70billion over 10 years. Apparently that's what it takes to get the mayors of some of Canada's largest and most ailing cities on your side in the federal election. Can this happen, or will it prove to be another empty election promise? We may never know.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls will be coming to Toronto's ROM in the summer of 2009, for the largest exhibit of the relics outside of Israel. Some people will undoubtedly find this pretty cool, but I'm not so sure how many will agree that "Toronto will not be the same after this exhibit."

Police divers helped kick off a volunteer-driven lakefront cleanup effort, by pulling borderline obscene objects out of the water. It was an exhibit of everything AND the kitchen sink. Does Lake Ontario have such a bad reputation as being a toxic cesspool that throwing a toilet in there seem justified, or are people just complete ignoramuses?