[PHOTO] Rainbow Flags at the Bay

Rainbow Flags at the Bay
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Bloor Street East entrance to The Bay's flagship store had the flags, too. Is there any more visible sign of Pride's mainstreaming?

[LINK] Maurer on Honduras

In two follow-up posts, Noel Maurer considers (1, 2) continues to consider the question of the coup's legality, and seems to have come to the conclusion that it was legal.

[T]he Supreme Court has the power to remove officials from office when it determines that they have broken the law. President Zelaya pretty clearly broke the law when he refused to obey an order from the Supreme Court to call off the referendum, and as I pointed out earlier, the Honduran constitution clearly (if stupidly) bans any consultatory referenda touching on presidential term limits.

So my new version is: Zelaya broke the law, the Supreme Court called him on it, and the military took the initiative in enforcing the Court's order. (Maybe too much initiative.) That interpretation will depend on how closely the armed forces and the Supreme Court cooperated in the ouster. (The more it looks like the Court got the ball rolling, the more legal the coup will seem.) Given the legal fog, the Obama Administration seems to be taking a pitch-perfect tone here.

[LINK] "Tim Hortons makes move back to Canada"

This news will certainly pleased a very large number of Canadians.

Tim Hortons Inc. (THI-T28.62-0.13-0.45%) is returning to the land of hockey, where seemingly every street corner houses, well, a Tim Hortons.

Tims, the coffee and doughnuts icon, is currently incorporated in the United States, but it's returning to its Canadian roots to take advantage of falling corporate tax rates.

Co-founded in Hamilton in 1964 by hockey legend Tim Horton, the company announced yesterday that it is proposing to reorganize itself as a Canadian public company.

“Will other corporations do this? Maybe, maybe not,” Brian Yarbrough, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis, said in an interview.

Apart from the tax issue, there are compelling administrative reasons for Tims to restructure, given that the company derives more than 90 per cent of its revenue from its Canadian operations, Mr. Yarbrough said.

“However, the tax rate is the biggest thing they are going to see the most savings from.”

After the immediate costs of the reorganization are absorbed, Tim Hortons' tax rate could initially be two or three percentage points lower than its current tax rate of 33 per cent in the U.S., he said. “And as tax rates continue to come down in Canada, obviously … that will benefit them even more.”

Up to this point, Tim Horton's was run as a subsidiary of American-owned Wendy's. No more.

[LINK] "Yale Makes First Quantum Processor?"

Will Baird's The Dragon's Tales reports that a research team at Yale claims to have made the first solid-state quantum computer processor.

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.

"Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons," said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics & Physics at Yale. "But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor."

Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics & Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits ("quantum bits"). While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states. These states are akin to the "1" and "0" or "on" and "off" states of regular bits employed by conventional computers. Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a "superposition" of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

One reason that I read Will Baird's very informative blog is because it lets its readers know about amazing innovations and discoveries like the above. Wow.

[BRIEF NOTE] Forty years since Stonewall

Slap Upside the Head commemorates the fact that Sunday was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City that helped galvanize the American, thus international, gay movement. There had been increasing militancy following the 1950 foundation of the Mattachine Society and the rise of 1960s student radicalism, but the protest of patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village against police harassment spectacularly accelerated this change.

Raymond Castro was a regular at The Stonewall Inn in 1969, finding it a haven from a world where gay men and women could be arrested for kissing or holding hands in public. Inside the bar, where plywood covered the windows, warning lights served as a signal for couples to stop dancing.

When police raided the bar in the past for selling liquor without a license, patrons normally submitted to arrest or dispersed quietly. But on June 28, Castro recalled, people fought back.

As officers tried to throw him in a police wagon, Castro used the vehicle as a spring to push back, knocking them to the ground.

"They literally carried me into the ... wagon and threw me in there," recalled Castro, now 67. "It must've been the motivation of the crowd that inspired me to resist. Or maybe at that point enough was enough."

The several days of disturbances that followed the uprising at the bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village became one of the defining moments of the gay rights movement. Thousands of people are converging on the city for gay pride events to mark the riots' 40th anniversary, while a bill is pending in the Legislature to make New York the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Castro said the demonstrations became a catalyst for years of progress allowing gays and lesbians to live more open lives — although he didn't see it at the time.

"I never thought 40 years ago that it would turn out to be much of anything," he said in a phone interview. "I had no clue of history being made."

[LINK] "Murdering journalists"

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, highlights an article by Ralph Peters in which he suggests that killing journalists might well be okay in the nearish future.

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies.

Long-time readers of this blog might remember my 2003 fisking of a foolish article that Peters wrote attacking Europe as decadent, et cetera, because the continent didn't embrace the Iraq war.. More recent readers might remember the map of a Middle East with redrawn borders that helped trigger another wave of anti-Americanism across the region. Great guy, don't you agree?

[DM] Two Foreign Policy Links

Over at Demography Matters, I've a post up referring readers to two articles at Foreign Policy regarding gender roles and the demographic transition. Go, read.