Photo: "Spectacular sunset over BMO Field" by absinthe**, member of the theGentries Flickr pool.

Your Toronto morning news roundup for Friday August 22nd, 2008:

For you and me and the thousands of other people that rely on the TTC to be working every day to get around, public transit is an essential service. That's not the case for TTC management and the union, who both agree that workers should be allowed to strike as part of labor disputes.

You hear the warnings everywhere: be careful what you put on Facebook and other parts of the web, or it may come back to haunt you. Now, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner make that even more explicit by hosting a one-day conference youth privacy online

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CityNews asks: do Canadians care more about the US election than their own? The answer, if I polled the Canadians I know, is simple: yes. Surprised?

A Toronto travel agent has been charged with fraud after allegedly using his clients' credit cards without their permission. Yes, I know it's shocking: travel agents still really do exist in this world where everyone books online.

Numbers continue to go up. Those numbers include the inflation rate rising by 3.4% (blame oil prices), listeriosis cases going up to about 30 (blame tainted meat), and funding for Canadian research hospitals going up by $554million (blame the excellent research they continue to do). I guess you take the good numbers with the bad.