[PHOTO] Looking from City Hall's landing

What the subject line says.



The Canada Life Building, west of Toronto City Hall as seen from the deck Universiry and Queen Street West, is one of the more notable office buildings, a fifteen-story Beaux Arts building with a colour-coded weather beacon visible to right. (Flurries were impending.)



Peering south over the platform's wall, one can see the ever-popular ciry ice skating rink just in front of city hall. It's popular, almost paradigmatic, for Torontonians.



Finally, the Old City Hall is just east of the 1960s vintage city hall across Bay Street, miraculously preserved from the demolitionists. To compare, I have two pictures of Old City Hall looking from Queen Street West.

[LINK] "China Takes Lead in Race for Clean Nuclear Power"

There's enugh thorium for a thousand years, I've been told. Wired Science's Richard Martin is to be thanked.

China has officially announced it will launch a program to develop a thorium-fueled molten-salt nuclear reactor, taking a crucial step towards shifting to nuclear power as a primary energy source.

The project was unveiled at the annual Chinese Academy of Sciences conference in Shanghai last week, and reported in the Wen Hui Bao newspaper (Google English translation here).

If the reactor works as planned, China may fulfill a long-delayed dream of clean nuclear energy. The United States could conceivably become dependent on China for next-generation nuclear technology. At the least, the United States could fall dramatically behind in developing green energy.

“President Obama talked about a Sputnik-type call to action in his SOTU address,” wrote Charles Hart, a a retired semiconductor researcher and frequent commenter on the Energy From Thorium discussion forum. “I think this qualifies.”

While nearly all current nuclear reactors run on uranium, the radioactive element thorium is recognized as a safer, cleaner and more abundant alternative fuel. Thorium is particularly well-suited for use in molten-salt reactors, or MSRs. Nuclear reactions take place inside a fluid core rather than solid fuel rods, and there’s no risk of meltdown.

In addition to their safety, MSRs can consume various nuclear-fuel types, including existing stocks of nuclear waste. Their byproducts are unsuitable for making weapons of any type. They can also operate as breeders, producing more fuel than they consume.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States carried out extensive research on thorium and MSRs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That work was abandoned — partly, believe many, because uranium reactors generated bomb-grade plutonium as a byproduct. Today, with nuclear weapons less in demand and cheap oil’s twilight approaching, several countries — including India, France and Norway — are pursuing thorium-based nuclear-fuel cycles. (The grassroots movement to promote an American thorium power supply was covered in this December 2009 Wired magazine feature.)

China’s new program is the largest national thorium-MSR initiative to date. The People’s Republic had already announced plans to build dozens of new nuclear reactors over the next 20 years, increasing its nuclear power supply 20-fold and weaning itself off coal, of which it’s now one of the world’s largest consumers. Designing a thorium-based molten-salt reactor could place China at the forefront of the race to build environmentally safe, cost-effective and politically palatable reactors.

Go, read.

[DM] "On illegal immigration in Israel"

I've a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at illegal immigration in Israel, beginning after 1990 with foreign workers from eastern Europe and Asia who overstayed their visas, more recently involving Sudanese and Eritrean refugees crossing from the Egypt's Sinai peninsula. Will these influxes continue?

Go, read.

[MUSIC] "Michael Jackson's Billie Jea Vs The Final Countdown (Ben Liebrand Mix) Tribute mix"

The Ben Liebrand mashup of the vocals of Michael Jackson's brilliant 1982 "Billie Jean" with the instrumentals of Europe's iconic 1986 hit "The Final Countdown" has become one of my favourite songs in the space of a day.

There's something about mashups when they're good that gets me, the wonderful juxtaposition--recreation, even--of the familiar in ways that bring insight onto the originals. What makes a song tick? The proper mashup can illustrate this.

[LINK] "U.S. discovers the undefended border"

The CBC's Greg Weston has a somewhat snarkish take on the latest American identification of the Canadian border--unsecured, open--as a threat to the United States. Ceding national sovereignty's not much more palatable than having to deal with a much, much tighter border.

Canada is once again being painted a code-red terrorist threat to the United States, this time after a U.S government watchdog agency discovered that the world’s longest undefended border is, ahem, largely undefended.

This week, the American government’s accountability office reported the obvious — most of the Canada-U.S. border is not exactly the Berlin Wall, especially the several thousand kilometres that run through wilderness and down the middle of the Great Lakes.

Nonetheless, the revelation prompted a couple of prominent American senators to proclaim the U.S. is facing a clear and present danger of terrorists pouring over the northern border from Canada.

Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the powerful U.S. homeland security committee, called the report “absolutely alarming,” and suggested an urgent call for action by both countries.

[. . .]

[T]he U.S. accountability report comes just as the Canadian and American governments are about to embark on formal discussions about creating a continental “security perimeter” around both countries.

Whatever that ultimately means, this week’s study and the over-wrought political horror that greeted its findings may become a persuasive club in the hands of U.S. negotiators.

If you can’t stop terrorists at a porous Canada-U.S. border, then both countries need to find ways to keep undesirables out of both countries to start with.

Practical as it may seem, the concept of a fortress North America is political dynamite in this country, sure to provoke debates over Canada’s ceding sovereignty to the U.S. on issues such as immigration.

[URBAN NOTE] "What ails Little India?"

According to blogTO's Robyn Urback, the problem with downtown Toronto Little India neighbourhood, east-end Gerrard Street is that the suburbanization of South Asians is leading to the creation of diasporic neighbourhoods far removed and independent from Toronto's first Indian neighbourhood.

Little India on a Monday afternoon is a ghost town. Granted, it's the off-season. Plus, on days like today, when it feels like -15°C and the wind is blowing furiously across Gerrard Street East, I can understand why the sidewalks aren't overflowing with pedestrian traffic. But the storefront windows covered with newspapers and scattering of "For Lease" signs, several within one block west of Coxwell Ave., give the impression that something is amiss.

After speaking with several restaurant owners along the bazaar, the consensus seems to be that competition outside of Toronto--such as in Brampton and Mississauga--is sucking up the business Gerrard's Indian Bazaar once enjoyed exclusively.

It's very bad now," one of the owners of Moti Mahal tells me as we chat by the buffet of his nearly empty restaurant. "Even the weekends aren't good. Everyone is struggling." The restaurant has been a fixture in Little India for several decades, undergoing a remodel about five years ago. "Now there is just so much competition; in Malton, in Rexdale, Mississauga. Now we have to rely a lot on tourists." He says he's noticed the change happen over the past few years, and at its worst over the past seven or eight months. "I'm hoping more festivals or something can revive the area."

I get a similar impression talking to the men at Nitya, the restaurant that moved into the space previously occupied by Skylark Restaurant. "There's an Indian bazaar in Brampton, an Indian bazaar in Mississauga, an Indian bazaar in Markham. So people can find places to shop closer to their homes." Though Nitya has been around for under a year, its owner is an area veteran, and these men say there's been a marked different in recent years. "There's been fewer people," one says. "Especially when people hear in the news that the DVP is under construction, the Lakeshore is under construction, it becomes very difficult to come out here, so they stay in their communities. Plus parking is bad and they don't want to risk getting a ticket."

I've blogged a fair bit about Little India, mainly in terms of it being somewhat folkloric and not cutting-edge. This diffusion of South Asians away from Little India is even happening downtown--in 2008 I blogged about the coalescence of a "Little Bangladesh" further to the north on Danforth Avenue. Outside of Toronto, the demographics of South Asian-origin communities can be quite concentrated, with more than a quarter of Brampton's population speaking Punjabi as their mother tongue. Even in the city of Toronto itself, relatively cheaper real estate prices make the growth of diasporic neighbourhoods easier--I know that when taking the bus from Warden subway station to Shakespeare's vet, I see fairly extensive Afghan and Tamil concentrations. Combine that with, as commenters suggest, a conservatism on the part of the local business association preventing the influx of the sorts of businesses--Tim Horton's, say--that don't cater to a traditionally South Asian population, and the neighbourhood's decline and eventual regentrification as a South Asian-flavoured community seems inevitable.

[LINK] "Serbs Turn Back to Arms for Money"

Serbia's arms industry is flourishing, Inter Press Service's Vesna Peric Zimonjic reports.

A long-running joke in Serbia goes that the country’s most successful export products are berries, grains, maize, and world-renowned tennis players like Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic.

But things appear differently when one takes a look at the country’s economic statistics, which show that there is one profoundly stable and steadily rising industry in Serbia: the military industry, which has witnessed an export growth of 30 percent annually, providing jobs for close to 9,000 workers.

"We've sold this year's production of our sniper rifles in advance," Rade Gromovic, head of the Zastava weapons factory, told IPS. The factory is situated in the central Serbian town of Kragujevac and specialises in rifle production for both military and civilian purposes.

"Our prime export items are machine guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles, CZ 999 pistols, and automatic or semi-automatic snipers," he added. The factory has been licensed by the United Nations (UN); most of its products are used by UN peace-keeping forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several African countries, Gromovic said. In several meetings with journalists earlier this month, Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac explained that the major export products of the military industry are "ammunition… M-92 automatic machine guns and M- 84, gunpowder, rocket fuel, explosives, bullet-proof vests and protective body armour, and the training aircraft ‘Lasta’ (sparrow)."

Sutanovac stated that the annual figure of exports rose from 75 million dollars in 2007 to 183 million dollars in 2008, and again, to 246 million dollars in 2009.

During the Cold War, the Yugoslav People's Army was quite large, with some of the largest ground and air forces (regular and reserve) in Cold War Europe, and possessed a very large industrial base in keeping with Yugoslavia's doctrine of military self-sufficiency. Interestingly, it appears that future Serbian arms exports will depend on the restoration of those same pan-Yugoslav military industries.

This year may witness big ventures for Serbia: it is close to signing a 500 million dollar agreement to build a military hospital in at least one Arab country; three military factories are to be built in Algeria; and Sutanovac said that he hopes Serbia will win a 400 million dollar contract to modernise 150 M-84 tanks that Yugoslavia exported to Kuwait in 1991.

The tanks were typical of former Yugoslav cooperation, as they were assembled in Croatia from components made throughout the federation. Now the ties are being restored, and Serbian, Bosnian, and Macedonian arms companies are working together. A Serbia-Croatia defence agreement signed in June also envisages co-operation.

If Serbia wins the Kuwait contract, Sutanovac said, some of the work will most likely be shared between Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovene companies - a cooperative effort that looks forward, to the future.