Will Metrolinx take over the TTC subway?

 

Metrolinx

A couple of weeks ago, City State posted a comparison of the TTC’s logo with transit logos from other cities around the world. The conclusion: the TTC’s art deco identifier, while distinctive, lacks simplicity and ease of recognition. Meanwhile, in an unrelated yet completely related development, Metrolinx—the regional transportation body that is poised to take over the GO system and implement road tolls and parking taxes everywhere and will soon run our frickin’ lives—recently unveiled a new logo of its own. As it happens, the new Metrolinx logo is everything the TTC’s is not. More conspiracy theorizing after the jump.

 

The new Metrolinx logo, so far as I can tell, appears nowhere on the organization’s Web site. I discovered it in an e-mail the organization sent me just this week, inviting me to a transit conference. It immediately struck me as an excellent candidate for membership in the International Brotherhood of Transit Logos: simple, stylish, uncluttered, and starring the letter M, used globally to signify transit. Take one look at that encircled-M design and try to convince City State that it’s not perfect for marking the entry points to such transit hubs as train stations, bus terminals and, oh I don’t know, maybe subway stations?!

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Free trade Canada – Europe – Secret agreement in the works?

DOUG SAUNDERS

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

September 18, 2008 at 2:00 AM EDT

LONDON — Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada’s economy with the 27 nations of the European Union, with preliminary talks to be launched at an Oct. 17 summit in Montreal three days after the federal election.

Trade Minister Michael Fortier and his staff have been engaged for the past two months with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and the representatives of European governments in an effort to begin what a senior EU official involved in the talks described in an interview yesterday as “deep economic integration negotiations.”

If successful, Canada would be the first developed nation to have open trade relations with the EU, which has completely open borders between its members but imposes steep trade and investment barriers on outsiders.

The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA by encompassing not only unrestricted trade in goods, services and investment and the removal of tariffs, but also the free movement of skilled people and an open market in government services and procurement – which would require that Canadian governments allow European companies to bid as equals on government contracts for both goods and services and end the favouring of local or national providers of public-sector services.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080918.wtrade18/BNStory/International/home

LHC ready for trial collisions

Let’s smash some atoms!

The Large Hadron Collider is back on track for trial collisions this week, after a glitch with the cooling system, Times Online reports. Once the two beams had been inserted into the LHC ring last Wednesday, the next task was to “capture” them so that protons could be fired in neat pulses or “bunches”.

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Minister forced to apologize for ‘tasteless’ listeria jokes – Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz

TONDA MACCHARLES
OTTAWA BUREAU
SAGUENAY, QUE.–Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz was forced to apologize yesterday for “tasteless and completely inappropriate” jokes on an Aug. 30 government conference call during the listeriosis crisis.

“This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts,” Ritz quipped after fretting about the political dangers of the crisis.

And when told during the conference call about a new death in Prince Edward Island, Ritz remarked: “Please tell me it’s Wayne Easter.”

Easter, the Liberal MP for the P.E.I. riding of Malpeque, is his party’s critic shadowing Ritz’s Agriculture Department.

The Canadian Press reported the comments last night, citing sources who took notes during the call.

So far, 17 deaths, including 14 in Ontario, have been linked to the listeriosis outbreak, which sparked a massive recall of food products from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto.

The plant where the listeria bacterium was found embedded deep inside slicing equipment was closed Aug. 20 and reopened yesterday.

Listeriosis causes high fever, headache, neck stiffness and nausea that is of particular concern to the elderly, pregnant women and the infirm.

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Tainted Chinese milk products in Toronto stores

Yogurt products from two Chinese companies suspected of distributing melamine-tainted milk powder are still being sold in Chinese supermarkets in and around Toronto.

Yogurt products from Mengniu and Yili were discovered by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in a Richmond Hill import company.

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Melamine

Melamine is an organic base with the chemical formulaC₃H₆N₆, with the IUPAC name1,3,5-triazine-2,4,6-triamine. It is only slightly soluble in water.Melamine is a trimer ofcyanamide. Like cyanamide, it is 66% nitrogen (by mass) and provides fire retardantproperties to resin formulas by releasing nitrogen when burned or charred. Dicyandiamide (or cyanoguanidine), the dimer ofcyanamide, is also used as a fire retardant.

Melamine is a metabolite of cyromazine, a pesticide.

 

Read more at Wikipedia

China formula scare spreads to ice-cream, yoghurt

BEIJING (Reuters) – Hong Kong has ordered the recall of a Chinese company’s products after milk, ice cream and yogurt were found to be contaminated with melamine, the compound responsible for killing four children in a China health scandal.

Tainted milk powder produced in China has made thousands ill, and triggered sackings and detentions and rocked public trust already battered by a litany of food safety scares involving tainted eggs, pork and seafood in recent years.

Now the scandal has spread to milk, ice-cream and yoghurt ice-bars. Hong Kong ordered the recall of a Chinese company’s products on Thursday after tests found that eight of 30 of its products, including milk drinks, were tainted with melamine.

The company, Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co Ltd, was a Beijing Olympic Games sponsor and is one of 22 Chinese firms implicated in the scandal.

A regional Chinese health authority said on Thursday a fourth child had died at a hospital in remote northwestern Xinjiang. The report on the authority’s website (www.xjwst.gov.cn) gave no further details.

Milk tainted with melamine, a compound banned in food, has killed three other babies, two in China’s northwestern Gansu province and one in eastern Zhejiang.

The health scare erupted after Sanlu Group last week revealed it had produced and sold melamine-laced milk, and a subsequent probe found a fifth of 109 Chinese dairy producers made adulterated products with the substance.

At the latest count, 6,244 children have become ill with kidney stones after drinking powdered milk laced with melamine, with three deaths and 158 suffering “acute kidney failure.”

“It’s just a terrible situation, it’s really scary,” said a 34-year-old father surnamed Zhou, cradling one of his eight-month twins outside a Beijing children’s hospital.

“You expect small brands to have quality issues, but these are big brands, name brands. The authorities need to improve their oversight,” said Zhou, queuing to have his children examined.

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