Beat family to death, Aurora family gets life
Toronto Star -3 hours ago
An Aurora father was sentenced to life in prison today after pleading guilty to beating his wife and two children to death with a baseball bat.
In light of the takeover the WSJ by Rupert Murdoch the ripples are happening even in Canada.One of Torstar Corp.'s five controlling families has signalled it will soon begin selling off shares in the tightly held newspaper publishing company in an effort to diversify their investments. The Thall family, part of the voting trust that steers Canada's largest newspaper by circulation, the Toronto Star, informed the company that it intends to divest "some or all" of its non-voting shares in Torstar Corp.
Following an annual business review of the paper, Post management decided to limit sales to only one Atlantic Canadian market — the metropolitan area of Halifax — as of the end of July.
This latest move follows another decision, announced in late March, to limit Atlantic Canadian distribution of the Post to provincial capitals only.
At that time, the paper blamed the prohibitive costs of distributing the paper regionally after circulation numbers are factored in. Home delivery to the Atlantic region was also discontinued in 2006.
"As we took a look at our business model, looked at how and where we're distributed across the country — and frankly no newspaper has 100 per cent distribution across the country, it's just too big — we made some hard decisions," said Steven Hastings, National Post vice-president of marketing and reader sales.
Similar reasons were cited this time, with the paper also blaming difficulty distributing the Toronto-produced and printed paper in a timely manner.
Wow that was some business plan. Typical of the right, overwhelmed by all their pompous social conservative blathergab when it comes to good old fashioned capitalism they are utter failures, bleeding cash and blue bloods.Upon its much ballyhooed introduction in October 1998 by media mogul Conrad Black, the National Post offered a bold new, neo-conservative voice in Canada's national newspaper landscape, offering a different take on the news and current affairs as well as a jazzy, colourful look compared to venerable newspaper the Globe and Mail.
However, the Post soon began amassing large debts from the heavy spending incurred during its startup period. Black eventually sold the paper to fellow media scion Izzy Asper and his CanWest Global Communications (in two stages over the course of 2000 and 2001).
In 2001, management of the still-young newspaper imposed severe budget cuts, laid off a significant percentage of its staff and nixed several sections, with a plummet in circulation the ultimate result.
