Former First Nations leader David Ahenakew insists he's not an anti-Semite, telling his hate-crime trial Thursday he doesn't "hate the Jews, but I hate what they do" - and that he still believes Jews started the Second World War.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tabled a deficit-free fiscal forecast Thursday that contained a political time bomb that could put his government in peril as early as Monday night.

Two men are dead after a shooting late Thursday afternoon in an Ottawa highrise apartment building.

World-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking has been appointed a distinguished research chair at Waterloo, Ont.'s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

When NASA returns to the moon, Canadian-built eyes could show its lunar rovers where to drive.

To anyone else, the photo album found in the truck of Mark Steinberg's car wouldn't be worth much, but the Vancouver lawyer says the album was his only physical link to a fading past.

CTVglobemedia Inc. on Thursday joined the parade of media companies across North America that have chopped staff amid an industry downturn.

Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat sacked his national police chief on Friday, fuelling speculation that the government is preparing to crackdown on protesters besieging Bangkok's main airports.

Russia is satisfied with Washington's refusal to push for allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be official candidates to join the NATO military alliance, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Friday.

The world's oldest person, an Indiana woman, died on Wednesday at the age of 115, according to a gerontology expert.

CBC News has confirmed the identity of a Toronto man - believed to have joined an al-Qaeda-linked group in Somalia and killed in battle - on an insurgent group's online video.

Sidney Crosby's gold medal-winning puck was installed Wednesday as the signature attraction in an Olympic exhibit at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

Chris Bosh scored the decisive points on a jump shot with 2.1 seconds remaining as the Toronto Raptors slipped past the Atlanta Hawks 106-105 on Wednesday.

As many Torontonians were sitting on patios drinking green beer on St. Patrick's Day Wednesday, Eddie Williams was walking.

An arrest has been made in connection with the California investigation into the death of Canadian-born actor Corey Haim, according to a CNN.com report.

Many Canadians enjoyed the warmest St. Patrick's Day ever Wednesday, with many places in the country logging record high temperatures with spring still officially a week away.

Toronto police are looking for two men who stole jewelry from an unconscious patient at Toronto East General Hospital.

Learning about Socrates through Facebook forums and chatting with a professor through Skype is the reality for students as e-learning claims a more dominant role in higher education.

A culture of secrecy prevails at Ontario's Ministry of Correctional Services while conditions in the province's jails get worse for inmates and staff alike, the opposition parties charged Wednesday.

An Edmonton man who flagged down an Ontario police cruiser with his middle finger in hopes of hitching a ride may have been better off asking politely.

The Toronto Transit Commission says it won't make public its decision on any penalty for an on-duty bus driver who had her licence suspended after failing a roadside breathalyzer.

The Canadian dollar marched closer to parity with its U.S. counterpart Wednesday, supported both by higher commodity prices and the prospect of continued low American interest rates.

Police in Peel Region west of Toronto have seized more than $2.5 million worth of an illegal drug called doda.

Students at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus are voting this week on whether or not to increase their fees to help pay for a new Pan Am Games athletic facility, which will include two Olympic-sized pools.

Honda Canada says it is recalling thousands of vehicles in Canada after some of its customers complained about the feel of brake pedals.

SXSW Interactive often sets North American tech trends, and its influence will be seen quickly in a city like ours, filled with early adopters. For 2010, location-based applications were the big story with the two frontrunners being Gowalla and Foursquare. Although both debuted last year, it was this year that the services became entrenched in the SXSW experience.

At the core, both Gowalla and Foursquare do the same thing: they allow users to alert friends of their location (called "checking in"). While this can quickly become tedious in everyday life—who really cares where their friends are eating lunch or how often they're working out?—the service is perfect for massive events like SXSW. The convenience of using Gowalla or Foursquare to find out instantly which sessions or restaurants your friends are at trumps any other social web tool around (no more trolling for location tweets or clumsily mass texting friends!). Even cooler, if you use Sitby.us, you can find out where your friends are sitting at panels to meet up.

Gowalla even reduced ambiguation by allowing users to check in to specific SXSW sessions, rather than by location alone. Imagine how this could change how we interact with Toronto's many festivals. You could share with friends the films you're seeing at Hot Docs or which Nuit Blanche exhibits are unmissable. For many, SXSW was the first showcase for how Foursquare and Gowalla could fit into their life. For festival organizers, the services could provide important feedback on how attendees interact with an event.

But what about when there isn't a major festival going on? There's still potential for location-based services. Gowalla head Josh Williams told an audience at GDC that he hoped Gowalla users would become inspired to try new things and explore the world around them—Gowalla rewards users who, for example, do a walking path along the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. In Foursquare, when you check in a location, the service will recommend something close by you may also enjoy. Venues can catalyze this by placing specials on Foursquare and Gowalla so people who check in get a discount and even reward those who visit the most (called "Mayors" on Foursquare, while Gowalla uses a leaderboard).

Another great use for the services is as a repository for user recommendations and tips, which aren't limited to just a user's friends but can be viewed by any user. Essentially, imagine the power of a food-based service like Yelp, but also for stores, cultural exhibits, and nearly any public space. At its best, a Foursquare or Gowalla could help users make informed choices about venues by organizing, archiving, and allowing instant access to word of mouth.

What both location-based services need is further adoption to allow for more social interactions and to provide more data for the system. Granted, revealing your every location can (and should) make people uneasy. However, this is most problematic when people recklessly add users they don't know or when people link their location to a public service like Twitter. There are people on Foursquare who check-in to their homes, revealing where they live and when they're home, and it demonstrates the need for further conversation on safe behaviour on the social web.

Jaime Woo is a tech and social media writer, and was a panellist at this year's SXSW Interactive conference. He's also a former Torontoist contributor.

Two months ago, our pals over at Londonist set out to find London’s true geographic centre. Their experiment got us thinking about Toronto’s centre, and how for most Torontonians (Torontoist included) the city's symbolic heart is somewhere downtown—at an intersection like Bloor and Yonge perhaps? But while downtown Toronto is the city's cultural, financial, and political epicentre, it’s firmly in the south end and nowhere near Toronto's true midpoint.

To find Toronto’s actual centre we first tried Londonist's method, which involved cutting out a map of Toronto, gluing it to a piece of cardboard, and then finding its centre of mass by balancing the cutout on a pencil. We tried this method twice, and got two, fairly different results. Next, we tried what's called the plumb line method [PDF], which again involved cutting out a map, only this time we found the object's centre of mass by hanging a string with a weight on it from three different points along the cutout's edge. We then traced the different paths formed by the string on the map and marked where they intersected. This method produced more accurate results, but we still weren't satisfied. So we decided to go to a pro, and enlisted the help of Marcel Fortin, a Geographic Information Systems and Maps librarian at the University of Toronto. Using Statistics Canada's border data for the city and a GIS mapping program called ArcMap, Fortin transformed the area within Toronto’s boundaries into a polygon, calculated its centroid, and then plugged those coordinates into Google Earth.

Before we reveal the results, we should note that the method we used is one of several, and that different techniques and data sources can lead to different results. For instance, the City of Toronto's ward definitions produce a slightly different centre than Statistic Canada's, as the ward borders include some of the water between the Toronto Islands and the shore. Ultimately, we chose to use Statistic Canada's border data, as it contains the fewest anomalies and doesn't include parts of Lake Ontario.

But enough stalling.

Torontoist is proud to announce that Toronto’s geographic centre is in…drum roll please…

Lawrence Park! Or more precisely, an island of cedars in the front lawn of 33 Wanless Crescent, the home of Bill and Judy Haust. "I’m stunned to find out that we’re at the centre of the universe," Bill told Torontoist when we presented the Hausts with the news. "Frankly, it’s something we would never even have thought about," continued Judy.

According to the original architectural plans, 33 Wanless Crescent was built between 1922 and 1923 by a Mr. Lowrey during Lawrence Park’s first wave of development—back when the area was still advertised as a refuge from "the Lake Winds in Winter." Judy’s parents then bought the house from the Lowreys in 1952, and Bill and Judy purchased the property from Judy’s mother in 2003.

In addition to being at the centre of Toronto, 33 Wanless Crescent also seems to be a focal point for weirdness. The Haust's home is mysteriously missing from Google Maps latest satellite image, most map services have trouble locating it, and it's situated at the point where Wanless Crescent meets Buckingham Avenue, so the neighbours across the road are actually on a different street. "[It’s] useful when ordering pizza that advertises thirty minutes or it's free," joked Judy. "This is a phantom house."

Of course, we aren't the first organization to make a claim about Toronto’s centre. The Ontario Science Centre argues on its website that it’s "smack in the geographic centre of Toronto." However, when we contacted the Science Centre, they were unable to back up their assertion with any proof. Toronto Suites Apartments also suggests that it’s "situated in the geographic cent[re] of Toronto." But, as we previously discovered, developers and landlords seem to think that half the city is at Toronto's heart.

Now that we've solved the mystery of what's at Toronto's true centre, we're keen on taking on another geography-focused assignment. We don't want to overpromise—the mapping software can only use existing, available, and reliable data sets (think population centre rather than coffee shop concentration), but there are all manner of geographical queries we can try to sort out. So dear Torontoist readers, what should our next mission be?

The subtitle to David Eddie’s Damage Control tells you a lot about his particular approach to the genteel art of proffering advice to the desperate—after all, ”How to Tiptoe Away from the Smoking Wreckage of Your Latest Screw-Up with a Minimum of Harm to Your Reputation” is not a phrase most authors would want emblazoned on their book’s dust jacket. But Eddie, whose popular advice column of the same name runs weekly in the Globe and Mail, believes in cutting through the wishy-washy tone and moral judgements of the typical life-guide expert to get to the heart of the matter: people screw up–quite often actually—and having screwed up, they usually wish to make amends. That’s where Eddie steps in: he names the screw-up in bold-face letters, then talks the red-faced perpetrator back to earth with solid advice.

Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger spoke with David Eddie about his book-length guide to wiping the egg off your face and making good with the people who matter.

MORE AT BOOKS.TORONTOIST.COM >

If you live in or around Toronto, and have at any point in your life a) fantasized about Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation, b) engaged in a debate about who is the best Green Lantern (Hal Jordan, clearly), or c) rolled a die that has more than six sides, chances are you’ve been to Fan Expo. For over fifteen years, Fan Expo Canada has served as Toronto’s premier gathering of the nerds: a multigenre convention/exhibition/costumed carnival for anyone who’s more-than-a-little-bit interested in comic books, anime, science fiction, horror movies, video games, or Warhammer figurines. But there’s a new kid on the block.

Wizard Entertainment, the fan culture behemoth behind Wizard and Toyfare magazines, recently announced that they would be mounting a twelve-city tour, bringing miniaturized versions of their massive Wizard World Chicago convention to cities across North America, including a stopover in Toronto later this month. Setting up shop at the Direct Energy Centre on the weekend of March 26, the inaugural Wizard World Toronto Comic Con offers a chance for those who can’t wait until the Labour Day long weekend to struggle into their ill-fitting superhero tights, shop for comics, and snag autographs from Battlestar Galactica cast members.

In 2009, Wizard founder and CEO Gareb Shamus purchased the homegrown Paradise Toronto Comicon from Peter Dixon (who owns Paradise Comics on Yonge Street, north of Lawrence), rebranding the popular annual event under the Wizard banner. “One of the big cities that we have a lot of fans in is Toronto,” says Shamus. “It’s a great audience and we just wanted to be there.” And though retaining the “Comic Con” angle, and retaining Dixon for his expertise and savvy when it comes to local audiences, Wizard’s fest is a different beast altogether, bringing B-list actors (including Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson, and Sheena from Baywatch), sci-fi scribes, and former WWE superstars into the fold.

Considering the iron-clad lock Fan Expo (organized by corporate parent entity Hobbystar Marketing) has had over Toronto fandom, Wizard’s announcement has raised some issues. “People are hearing that there’s a big show in Toronto, and they’re not finding out the details,” explains Fan Expo co-coordinator James Armstrong. “There’s actually two shows. And we’ve been around the longest and are one of the biggest. But some people are not looking into the details too closely.” While both Armstrong and Shamus remain cheerfully diplomatic about the other’s presence on the local comic convention scene, Wizard’s move into town rattles some of the skeletons hiding in Hobbystar’s closet.

One of the great misconceptions about fan culture, and especially these massive annual expos, is that they represent some grassroots ideology shared by comic readers, hardened sci-fi fans, and toy collectors operating just outside the mainstream of mass culture. While there’s plenty of charm in the idea that Fan Expo or Wizard World are just bloated flea markets of geeky excess for likeminded genre fans, it’s not really the case. In previous years, Fan Expo bigwigs drew criticism by local fan-run conventions for their concerted attempts to steamroll any fan-centric goings-on operating outside of the Hobbystar banner. Local comic shop owners accused Hobbystar of discouraging them from purchasing tables at rival conventions, under threat of losing their spot at Fan Expo, and, indeed, as Fan Expo’s presence has grown with each passing year, the visibility of smaller conventions like Anime North, Ad Astra, and Trekzac Festicon has diminished or disappeared. Some fans even petitioned Hobbystar to desist in what they said was predatory planning maneuvering, only to be met with a combination of indifference and (alleged) harassment.

Though Wizard is by no means some mom-and-pop startup, they stand to give Hobbystar a taste of their own medicine, especially considering their affiliation with Dixon’s bygone Paradise Comicon. In 2007, Paradise co-owner and organizer Kevin Boyd ditched Dixon and decamped to work for Hobbystar. The Direct Energy Centre, Wizard World Toronto’s venue, was also Paradise Con’s old stomping grounds. Given this rich pageantry of betrayals and buy-outs, Wizard’s new Toronto event is bound to conjure memories of more homespun, though no less impressive, fan conventions that seemed less tainted by the inflated admission prices and hundred-dollar autographs that you’d find at Fan Expo.

It’s a bit like DC Comics' recent “Battle For The Cowl” plot-arc, which saw Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, and other Gotham City vigilantes scrambling to fill the utility-belt of the recently deceased Batman. Except, in this case, the powerplayers are skirmishing over the money of local comics fans. “The folks around here have only so much money to spend,” says Armstrong. “So you can only split it so many ways.”

Given that Shamus tactfully scheduled Wizard World Toronto in order to skirt direct competition with Fan Expo, and that both conventions are targeting a demographic predicated on disposable income (nobody really needs a 1:16 scale Wolverine figurine, after all), it may be overstating the case to suggest that the presence of two large-scale fan conventions will result in some corporate version of a Marvel vs. DC superhero slugfest. And considering Fan Expo’s stronghold in Toronto, Armstrong and Co. have no real reason to be shaking in their spandex booties just yet.

Given their high profile and connection with Paradise Comicon, Wizard World Toronto will give local fans more of what they want. And, at the end of the day, despite all the high admission prices, cutthroat competitor quashing, and corporate bullying, it’s all about the fans. Right?

Streeter collects only the finest overheard conversations. Hear something? Send it to streeter@torontoist.com.

Two guys on Bay Street at lunch hour, dressed in business casual.

Tall Guy: His resume was terrible—terrible! He had, on his resume, that he worked at HMV, at a warehouse, in 2001. He's gonna get a hyphenated job with that?