East Van Has Spoken

Saturday, Vancouver elected itself a shiny, new Olympic mayor. Lovable smoothie-maker Gregor Robertson led a leftist coalition to a stunning victory over the city’s traditional governing party, the Non-Partisan Association. A single NPA voice remains on the city’s ten-person council.

 

 

 

France: Still Smug: The Paris rag, Le Figaro, delighted by remarks by British Olympic minister Tessa Jowell, who, last week, acknowledged the British government would “almost certainly not” have bid to stage the 2012 Games had the decision come post-economic crisis, gleefully announces: “Olympics already too expensive for London.”

*Paris is, of course, still seething over the loss of that bid.

Murder At The Drum Tower: Trying to find meaning in tragedy, Newsweek devotes three pages to the life of Tang Yongming, who, during the Beijing Games, savagely knifed a visiting American couple inside Beijing’s 13th-century Drum Tower before leaping 130 feet to his death.

Will Campell Steal Page From Dalton’s Playbook? Jim Sinclair, head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, is taking a VANOC suggestion one step further, calling for a provincewide statutory one-day “Olympic” holiday in February 2010. B.C. heads to the polls in May …