Embattled Toronto mayor’s two aides quit

Agence France-Presse

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The Toronto mayor has battled allegations of illicit drug use

OTTAWA, Canada – Two senior aides to Toronto’s embattled Mayor Rob Ford resigned Monday, May 27, as a controversy over a video purportedly showing him smoking crack cocaine showed no signs of abating.

The departure of Ford’s press secretary and his assistant brought the total number of top aides to leave the mayor’s office in recent days to 3, after the firing of his chief of staff on Thursday.

Ford, the mayor of Canada’s largest city, has for more than a week battled allegations of illicit drug use that first surfaced in the Toronto Star. He has vehemently denied using crack.

The newspaper, the country’s largest daily, said it had been approached by drug dealers looking to sell a video allegedly shot by a person who claimed to have supplied Ford with the drug.

The paper said it viewed the 90-second video but declined to pay for it.

US online news and gossip site Gawker also reported that it had seen the footage that reportedly shows a man resembling Ford leaning back in a chair in a room, inhaling from what is believed to be a glass crack pipe.

In the latest twist in the saga, the daily Globe and Mail, citing unnamed sources, reported the mayor’s brother Doug, a Toronto city councillor, dealt hashish in his teens and early 20s. He quickly denied the allegation.

‘Bunch of maggots’

Canadian media also reported that police were now looking into the video at the center of the Ford affair and had interviewed a member of the mayor’s staff as part of that investigation.

A combative Ford initially hit back at the media for hounding him, calling them “a bunch of maggots” during a Sunday radio show.

But on Monday, he changed his tune, telling reporters camped outside his office at city hall: “I sincerely apologize to each and every one of you. I know you have a job to do.”

“This has been a difficult week for myself and my family but that doesn’t justify using the terminology that I did,” he added. – Rappler.com

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