Libraries victorious, except for the brothers who can't read

Late last night, Toronto City Council gave a huge vote of support for our public library!

Council voted to increase the budget for our public library in 2014 and to launch a study to explore opportunities to re-invest in our library!

It was almost unanimous – only the Ford brothers voted against.

Thanks to you and thousands of vocal library supporters, our public library can move forward with confidence and stability and hope for the future.

I am humbled by your support for our public library and delighted with last night’s result!

Thanks to you, we stood up to those who would diminish our public library and we won!

Best regards,

Maureen.

Can you imagine, the Fords voted against libraries? Well, yes, of course we can imagine that.

And, in literary news from elsewhere:  A drunken row over the merits of literary forms in Russia ended in a poetry-lover stabbing a champion of prose to death, investigators say. A 53-year-old man in Irbit, a town in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals, has been charged with the murder of another man, 67, said to have been a friend. They were drinking spirits in the friend's flat when he reportedly said only prose was "real literature". The accused, a former teacher, allegedly stabbed him before fleeing. Police found him hiding at an acquaintance's house in a nearby village. According to a local police report, the accused has confessed to the murder and faces a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. The victim of the attack, which took place on 20 January, had had pieces of his own prose published in a local newspaper. He was described as someone who had led an "anti-social lifestyle and abused spirits". The alleged killer had apparently been lodging with him for several months before the fatal dispute. In September, in the south Russian town of Rostov-on-Don, a reported argument about the philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in an air pistol being fired and one man being injured. Someone with an "anti-social lifestyle" who "abused spirits" - hard to imagine a writer like that. Must be specific to Russia.