Photo: "The Struggle" by HighPlainsDrifter Photography, member of the theGentries Flickr pool.

What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):

Police have revealed that Furqan Muhammad-Haroon, the 22-year old who was reportedly kidnapped at gunpoint on the weekend (and whose whereabouts still remain unknown), was arrested and charged with theft and fired from his summer job just three days earlier. Is this merely a coincidence, or is it reason to believe that the story is a fabrication and waste of police resources?

In the wake of the tornadoes that ripped through Southern Ontario last week, Dalton McGuinty thinks that we need a better system in place for giving advanced warning when potentially violent storms are approaching. Given that we're not really prone to these kinds of storms, I have to wonder if an elaborate emergency warning system is going to be worth the cost to build and maintain.

The subway platform at Union Station can be crowded and really hard to navigate during rush hour, but the TTC has intentions to fix this within the next 5 years. A new platform will be built, doubling the size of the boarding area. But with the massive, general Union Station renovation project also underway above, the place is going to be a total commuter and construction mess for a while.

There's no shortage of public support and adoption offers for the feline that survived a vicious attack. A woman from the far away land of Australia is one of many people offering to take the recovering cat (that survived a crossbow shooting) under her care. Resilience and luckiness are certainly two of this cat's traits.

A study is suggesting that young people are so keen to be popular online, that their privacy becomes less of a consideration. It may also be that a slew of complicated, buried privacy settings on sites like Facebook make it difficult to retain privacy by default.

And KISS fans in Oshawa are not particularly happy. They won an online contest to have the band add their city to the tour list, but only Toronto appears on the list as of now. Will the band make an appearance at some smaller Oshawa venue as well, or will they give Oshawa the shaft?