LOCAL
Councillor Paul Ainslie said Tuesday the mayor crossed a line when he “carpet-bombed” his ward with the robo-calls last week, and he plans to take his case to the city’s integrity commissioner. “I am here to start the fight back against a bully and a liar,” Mr. Ainslie said. [Globe and Mail]
Toronto city staff are recommending against burying a portion of the eastern Gardiner, calling it a technically challenging and overly pricey fix for the crumbling expressway. Leading bureaucrats fleshed out details on the various ways to deal with a two-kilometre stretch of the Gardiner from Jarvis to the Don, with price-tags that ranged up to close to $1-billion. [Globe and Mail]
Transportation Services at the City of Toronto gave a $23,000 grant this year to Brooklyn street artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, who collaborate under the name Faile, to paint a mural on Bathurst Street, but the two “couldn’t make it” here and sent others to do the actual painting. Murals, the city argues, will slow the spread of “tagging,” i.e. meaningless graffiti scrawled on city walls. In 2013, city council approved $375,890 in grants to paint 22 outdoor murals in Toronto, including works in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. [National Post]
NATIONAL
Eleanor Catton, a Canadian-born writer who grew up in New Zealand, was named the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize on Tuesday evening at a gala reception in London. Ms. Catton, 28, is the youngest-ever Booker winner. She takes home the award for The Luminaries, an epic-length Victorian-era murder mystery set amid the 1860s New Zealand gold rush that is structured on the astrological zodiac. [Globe and Mail]
A man and a woman were shot and killed at a doctor’s office in Newfoundland. Police have blocked off the road about one kilometre away from where the incident is said to have occurred, and are asking people living near the Villa Nova Plaza in Conception Bay South to stay inside their homes and lock their doors as police look for one person involved in the shooting. [CBC]
The federal Liberal party appears headed for a repeat of the 2006 fiasco over unpaid leadership campaign loans, with three candidates in this year’s race reporting large debts they have been unable to pay off. The three now face the onerous task of raising money to finance a campaign they have already lost – the same circumstance that befell six candidates in the 2006 leadership race, including eventual winner Stéphane Dion. [National Post]
INTERNATIONAL
House Republican efforts to pass legislation averting a U.S. debt default and ending a partial government shutdown collapsed Tuesday night, and a top ratings firm warned of a possible downgrade in the country’s creditworthiness. Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, stood on the Senate floor at mid-afternoon and declared, “We are 33 hours away from becoming a deadbeat nation, not paying its bills to its own people and other creditors.” [CBC]
Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who broke the first stories about the U.S. National Security Agency’s global spying program, says he is leaving the Guardian newspaper. Greenwald described his partnership with the Guardian as “extremely fruitful and fulfilling,” saying in a statement Tuesday that he would take up a new opportunity in journalism, but would not say what it is. [Maclean’s]
Negotiations in Geneva are due to go into a second day on Wednesday after the first “very detailed” technical discussions between Iran and major powers over Tehran’s nuclear programme for years. Iranian and US diplomats were holding face-to-face meetings last night after a day of multilateral talks in which Iran unveiled a PowerPoint presentation of proposals to end the decade-old deadlock. [The Guardian]
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