[TOR] Some Monday news links

[rfmcdonald]

• It's officially the wettest summer ever in Toronto's recorded meteorological history.

A massive explosion at a propane tank farm in northwestern Toronto (a href="http://torontoist.com/2008/08/explosions_in_north_york_shake_city.php">Torontoist, BlogTo) miraculously resulted in only one dead, a firefighter. Area residents are understandably wondering why the operators of the farm were allowed to set up in a region that (at peak) had produced twelve thousand evacuees.

• According to Forbes, the City of Toronto ranks among the top ten most economically dynamic cities in the world, alongside such cities as Paris, New York City, and London. The expected preening is doubtless still going on.
  
• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer in "Inverting the City of Neighbourhoods" describes Toronto's "demographic inversion,", wherein the well-off flock to the urban core and the poor are shunted off to the peripheries, in words and in maps. He ends his post on the hopeful note that government intervention to arrest this trend is possible.
  
• The above theme is carried over by Murray Whyte at The Sunday Star who explores not only how many of the old multicultural neighbourhoods in the city's core, south of Bloor Street (Little Italy, say) aren't representative of the new and more intense multiculturalism existing in the peripheries of the City of Toronto.


• An Italian mob boss, Calabrian 'Ndrangheta leaderGiuseppe Coluccio, arrested yesterday after three years on the run.