[TOR] Some Monday news links

• It's officially the wettest summer ever in Toronto's recorded meteorological history.

A massive explosion at a propane tank farm in northwestern Toronto (a href="http://torontoist.com/2008/08/explosions_in_north_york_shake_city.php">Torontoist, BlogTo) miraculously resulted in only one dead, a firefighter. Area residents are understandably wondering why the operators of the farm were allowed to set up in a region that (at peak) had produced twelve thousand evacuees.

• According to Forbes, the City of Toronto ranks among the top ten most economically dynamic cities in the world, alongside such cities as Paris, New York City, and London. The expected preening is doubtless still going on.
  
• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer in "Inverting the City of Neighbourhoods" describes Toronto's "demographic inversion,", wherein the well-off flock to the urban core and the poor are shunted off to the peripheries, in words and in maps. He ends his post on the hopeful note that government intervention to arrest this trend is possible.
  
• The above theme is carried over by Murray Whyte at The Sunday Star who explores not only how many of the old multicultural neighbourhoods in the city's core, south of Bloor Street (Little Italy, say) aren't representative of the new and more intense multiculturalism existing in the peripheries of the City of Toronto.


• An Italian mob boss, Calabrian 'Ndrangheta leaderGiuseppe Coluccio, arrested yesterday after three years on the run.

[BRIEF NOTE] Two UAE notes/questions

The Canadian press has been carrying a few articles on a rivalry between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the former suffering a blow to its liberal image with the arrest of the couple having sex on a beach, Abu Dhabi getting a leg up thanks to its hard-hitting newspaper. This rivalry, I discovered upon googling, has been played up in the English-language media (1, 2, 3, 4).

Is this actually going on?

* * *

In other notes, there's an interesting note in Times of India on Indian emigrant populations in the Persian Gulf area.

The population of expatriate Indians in Qatar stood at 419,096 as of July 31, more than double that of the local Qatari population, a minister said.

[. . .]

With the new figure of the expatriate Indian population in Qatar being released, the total Indian population in the Gulf now stands at around 4.82 million.

Saudi Arabia is home to the largest expatriate Indian population in the region at 1.56 million, followed by the United Arab Emirates (1.5 million), Kuwait (550,000), Oman (500,000), Qatar (419,096) and Bahrain (290,000).

These news stories (1, 2, 3) seem to indicate that the Indian populations are mostly impermanent and mostly unskilled, the better I suppose to avoid the formation of a substantially Indian/South Asian polity in generally autocratic contexts.

[META] Welcome [PHOTO]!

Everyone, welcome [PHOTO] to my collection of subject-line tags!

The decision to create this new tag was inspired by the following logic: If a picture is a thousand words, and I easily can write more than a thousand words in a single go, and if legitimate bloggers blog using pictures, then why aren't I busily photoblogging away?

I'll be taking pictures of my environment in Toronto, with explanations as needed. Comments, on preferred subjects of the pictures and on the quality of the final product, are more than welcome.

[PHOTO] On Bloor looking east from Ossington

Bloor Street is a major urban artery, stretching from the western frontier with Mississauga all the way to the Don River in central Toronto. Way back when, before the massive growth of the 20th century, Bloor Street marked the northern frontier of the City of Toronto.

Ossington Avenue is a rather more nondescript street, a relatively minor note perhaps more notable for the more famous streets intersect it: There is the changing intersection of Dupont and Ossington, the Ossington TTC station and then just below that the Ossington Avenue Baptist Church at the intersection of Bloor, and a Toronto Life feature exploring its up-and-coming nature.

The first is taken near the Christie Pits park, and looks at the skyscrapers at the intersection of Bloor Street with Yonge.

The second photo is of a typical streetscape in that area, which hosts a visible Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurant and cafe community alongside those of Portuguese and other ethnic communities.