Oh, to be a Toronto Star reader: one gay lifestyle trumps important world events in Pakistan, and multicultural drug gangs

Today, the Toronto Star saw fit to put the dangerous situation that has escalated in severity in Pakistan throughout the last week on its front page. Yesterday, it had more important issues to table: both the issue of Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game ticket prices and an anecdote about an allegedly well-adjusted adopted son of two gay couples (he wanted to be a ballerino) made it to the front page while a story on Pakistan was pushed four pages into the newspaper.

The article that was pushed four pages into the newspaper included the recognition that the US is hard at work trying to determine how safe Pakistan's nuclear weapons really are in the face of an encroaching Taliban threat, and also that "tensions have never been higher -- a bold statement considering Pakistan's history of military coups, assassinations and general political instability." This is not to mention that Pakistan's health is central to the outcome of the NATO mission in Afghanistan and therefore to the health and morale of our troops there.

So, on Sunday -- I assume Saturday was a slow news day when viewed through the peculiar tint of the Star's sunglasses -- they put the story on the front page. Sunday is also perhaps a low-traffic day, readership-wise, so there is no danger toward alienating readers by putting real news at the forefront.

What else? The impressive Danielle Smith won leadership of the Wildrose Alliance party. A small story that you could almost overlook four pages in about an emerging Albertan political party that has already taken a seat provincially and threatens to change the face of Albertan politics -- or perhaps maintain them in the face of a directionless Conservative party that is setting the province adrift. Is this maybe more important than the front-page story about shipwreck hunters looking for a French warship that sank more than 90 years ago in the Great Lakes?

It is an everyday fight to justify my subscription to this newspaper.

Something else that caught my eye today was a story about the affiliation between Canada and Mexico as concerns Mexico's drug wars. It is apparently now not so easy to ascertain whether a drug gang is related to a certain group based on the ethnicity of its members: "Toronto Police have seen no sign of Mexican gang activity here", the story says. But then: "British Columbia has suffered a spate of killings some refer to as 'Mexico-type' gang violence". However, you'd be silly to think that things were so simple: "Much of the bloodshed has involved members or associates of the so-called United Nations gang, centred in B.C.'s Fraser Valley."

I believe this is called multiculturalism.