As we drift into a gray autumn - our San Diego sunshine fading, our mayoral race stripped of suspense - here’s one bit of cold comfort:
At least Toronto is having fun.
You may not have heard about the juicy bone fate has thrown to our northern brethren. Say what you will about Buffalo and Toronto making up one big metropolitan corridor, there’s still a news blackout between us.
So I’ll fill you in: A romance was discovered between two senior Toronto bureaucrats - Pam Coburn, a 45-year-old divorced mother of two, and Joseph Carnevale, a 33-year-old married guy with three kids. Coburn was the executive director of municipal licensing. Carnevale was her department’s director of investigations.
They were caught when a probe unearthed what was described as “incriminating e-mails.” In a shocking confession, Coburn said they were “soul mates.”
Canadian justice being swifter than U.S. justice, both lost their jobs immediately. Technically, they were fired because of conflict-of-interest and illegal-hiring issues. But reading the Toronto Star, you just know it’s all about sex.
Like their first cousins, those scandal-mad British journalists, the Canadian papers have been smacking their lips over the story. They quote self-help books, romance writers and “The English Patient.” One headline blared: “City fires “soul mates.’ ”
A Toronto Star teaser screamed: “Pam Coburn is hardly the first to swoon her way to disgrace and self-destruction. And she won’t be the last.”
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The day after she convened a news conference to discuss her relationship with a married employee, suspended Toronto bureaucrat Pam Coburn hopes the scandal is behind her.
"I'm hopeful that I've confronted the allegations publicly," Coburn told CTV's Canada AM early Tuesday, referring to suggestions of cronyism stemming from her office romance with Joseph Carnevale, 33, a married man who rose from temporary status to become her second-in-command in just 10 months.
According to Coburn, she was involved in just one of Carnevale's promotions during that time.
"The only promotion of his that I was involved with was the most recent and it
The romance of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn may be for real after Vince Vaughn reportedly took Jennifer Aniston home to spend time with his parents.
Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, both 36, became close friends after meeting on the set of new film The Break-Up. Jennifer Aniston repeatedly insisted she is "not a rebound girl" and it does seem that the romance with Vince Vaugh is more than just a fling.
Jennifer Aniston flew from a magazine shoot in Mexico to join Vaughn is his native Chicago, Illinois. The couple were spotted enjoying each other's company in the actor's favourite haunts.
An older man and a much younger woman caught in the glare of a scandal often makes the headlines and shocks the public, but the motivations behind the relationship are an old and oft-told story.
The allegations involving Monsignor Eugene Clark, a high-ranking Roman Catholic Church official, and his secretary, Laura DeFilippo, who are caught up in an ugly divorce case filed by the woman's husband, follow a relatively familiar pattern, say observers of the marital scene.
"Infidelity between older men and younger women is often charged by power and is based on inequality," said Renee Pepper, a Mount Kisco social worker
Aries (March 21-April 19). The hard knocks of life can't be avoided, but it's how you react to them that makes you special. Enthusiasm lifts you up along with anyone in your presence. (If you think nobody is watching, you're wrong!)
Taurus (April 20-May 20). Time to spoil yourself. If you can't do it just for the heck of it, then do it because you can prevent illness by taking excellent care of yourself. There's romance in tonight's sunset.
Gemini (May 21-June 21). You've got a sixth sense about other people's business. You're right, but you've got to make the other person
An op-ed chart in the morning’s New York Times bore sobering news for President Bush: when compared with previous two term presidents, Bush just isn’t very appealing. Of the last three reelected presidents–Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton–only the scandal-ridden Nixon had a more precipitous decline in second-term support, from 67% to 39%. Bush currently stands at just 44% approval.
But the NYT chart contained another juicy piece of information: favorable ratings for Congress have steadily declined over the same 30-year period. They’ve fallen from 79% (in 1973), to 57% (in 1985), to 52% (in 1997), to a current-day