What students are talking about today (Sept. 17 edition)
1. Ryerson lost its radio station CKLN for good last week after the CRTC denied an application to bring it back. “There were feminist programs, LGBT shows, even a series on prisoners’ rights. There was a lot of lefty politics and a lot of loopy politics. Not all of it was good, but you would struggle to hear it anywhere else,” recalls The Ryersonian. The station was shut down after years of fighting between the students’ union and non-students on the board, partly over the question how much airtime students got.
2. It’s officially one year since the Occupy Wall Street movement began. See Twitter for the latest action under #OWS, #OCCUPY and #S17.
3. One of the enduring scenes from Occupy was when University of California Davis students and alumni were violently pepper-sprayed by campus police at a peaceful protest following an eviction in November. The university just announced a settlement with 21 victims. UC spokesperson Jonathan Stein told the L.A. Times, “we did an injustice to our students that day at Davis.” Yes they did.
4. Brigham Young University, presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s alma mater, dealt with a protest of a different kind on Friday. Police officers cleared out students demonstrating against the Mormon-owned university’s no caffeine policy by handing out soda. But not to worry. Romney is a free-enterprise guy so he probably wouldn’t try to enforce a nationwide ban on soda if elected. That would be more likely under New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who banned big sodas in NYC.
5. The NHL lockout became official in the early hours of Monday morning and Maclean’s happens to have a Bettman expert on staff. The issues are always the same—money and envy—writes Jonathon Gatehouse in his new book The Instigator: How Gary Bettman Remade the League and Changed the Game Forever. Read more about Bettman and the economics of hockey here.
6. Officials at SAIT in Calgary are investigating after a student found homophobic comments in a bathroom stall that said “Straight Pride [sic] Happy to be heterosexual and normal.” What kind of loser would write such a thing? Answer: the kind of loser who still writes on bathroom stalls.
7. Two harp seals in an aquarium on Îles-de-la-Madeleine have been saved from being killed (at least for now) after 124,000 people signed a petition over the weekend. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans captured them in the spring, put them on display in the summer, and then decided not to release them back into the ocean this fall for fear they would transmit disease.
8. Apple says that iPhone 5 preorders topped 2 million in just 24 hours, which is more than double the number of iPhone 4S preorders. Poor RIM!
9. Parliament is back. “But before our MPs get back to the serious business of braying like jackasses at one another’s sub-moronic rhetoric amid an appalling display of puerile partisan obstinacy that would make democracy—were it a living being—shoot itself in the face with a cannon, let’s look back on the summer that was,” writes Scott Feschuk. Click for his cleverly jaded recap.
10. Despite the royal family’s decision to sue the photographer who took pictures of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless in the south of France, plus the magazine that published them, Italy’s Chi gossip magazine says it will print 26 pages of the images today. Both publications are owned by former Italian playboy premier Silvio Berlusconi who is no stranger to lawsuits.