Photo: "Final Lap" by blogTO Flickr pooler Adam Schwabe.

Your morning news roundup for Wednesday February 27th, 2008:

Sometimes the cheque actually is in the mail, and sometimes the cheque actually is "lost" in the mail. A Canada Post employee in Ajax is being accused of pilfering as many as 150 pieces of mail containing cheques totaling almost half a million dollars, which she allegedly cashed under assumed identities.

The federal budget had one nice surprise for cities. Vancouver is to get funding for their LRT transit, Montreal will score cash for their airport transit links, and Toronto... we'll be getting money to re-establish the rail link between Peterborough and Union Station. [sarcasm]I was rooting for a solution to the missing transit link between Orangeville and Toronto, but federal finance minister Jim Flaherty doesn't live in Orangeville.[/sarcasm]

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We all have our stories to tell about good and bad experiences of riding the TTC. Here's a detailed account of a really horrible subway ride, told by Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito. I'm not sure what I would have done had I been there.

A Brampton woman who, when referring to one of the premier's staffers, used the phrase "I'll kill her" in an email to premier Dalton McGuinty is attributing her poor choice of words to cultural differences in slang usage. I have quite a few close friends from India, but have never been on the receiving end of any such death threat slang. How common is this kind of talk amongst Indians?

The Toronto Maple Leafs truly suck. Fletcher, who pretty much had his hands tied, didn't do much for Leaf fans to talk about leading up to the NHL trade deadline. Gone are Belak, Gill, and Kilger, and coming our way are a 2nd round pick, a 3rd round pick, and a 5th round pick in 2008; and a 5th rounder in 2009. If any good comes out of this move, it'll be a few more loses in the remaining games of this season that will make the Leafs "you suck" draft pick better by default.