Photo: "Overcast..." by AshtonPal, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):

Some good news for parents affected by the unionized city workers' strike: city hall is going to be issuing refunds to residents who paid for summer programs that were canceled. Whether or not we'll all be getting a partial refund on our annual garbage collection dues is yet to be seen (and I see it as unlikely).

Some bad news for the 100 or so strippers (so far) who are affected by the unionized city workers' strike: those that have had their annual city-issued dancing licenses expire during the strike (i.e. have been unable to renew them) could face fines for operating without one.

Toronto Life Square (the ugly entertainment- and retail-focused building across from Yonge-Dundas Square) is broke and has gone into receivership. But Toronto Star urban development critic and expert Christopher Hume thinks it'll be easy to find a buyer and bring it back afloat. Should I be embarrassed to admit that I've never set foot inside the monstrosity since it opened?

The provincial Liberal party quietly dropped the independently-run probe into spending and non-tendered contracting of eHealth, claiming that it would be redundant since the Auditor General is already conducting an investigation. Looks more like an effort to delay the truth from being revealed, doesn't it?

Today marks the ground-breaking ceremony and the begin of construction of Toronto's "Sherbourne Park", a waterfront park that will run along Sherbourne between Lakeshore Boulevard and the lake. It should be completed and open for frolicking by next summer.

And the Globe and Mail is falling behind on timing it would seem. It's 8:30am, and both the Ontario and Toronto sections of the online edition are showing almost exclusively old (i.e. yesterday's) news. Since the redesign, I've been finding it harder to find and include stories to link to in the Morning Brew. Hopefully the G&M is working on improving this situation, because it's a great newspaper!