Photo: "The Ticket Master" by ~EvidenceE~, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

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

After six years being tied up in the courts, charges against two Toronto police officers accused of all kinds of corruption and witness intimidation have been stayed. I guess we'll never know if they really were bad cops or not.

The city's 58th homicide of the year is a particularly disturbing one. A woman was shot in the head near her vehicle, while her toddler was inside. A witness claims to have seen a man fleeing in a purple compact car.

A study has found that a staggering number of deaths in Ontario are attributed to overdoses of prescription opioids including Oxycontin. Each year, some 300 people die after taken such painkiller drugs - a number that represents more than HIV/AIDS and H1N1 combined.

It's coooooomiiiiing! A winter storm will hit our area tonight, and Wednesday's commute is pretty much guaranteed to be a nightmare because people either don't have winter tires on and/or don't adjust their driving to the conditions. It happens every year. If there isn't at least one temporary closure on one of the GTA's 400-series highways, I'll eat my summer shorts.

If you happen to see what looks like 25 feet high, 30 feet wide explosions east of the downtown core tonight (near Queen Street and Broadview Avenue), it's either a film crew doing some special effects for Resident Evil: Afterlife or terrorists capitalizing on our expectation that it's a film crew doing special effects.

And the billboard bylaw and tax has been approved by city council. But will the arts see some of that revenue? That's still to be determined.