Taken as the last of the snow was melting in April, the growth of this greenery on the front lawn of a midtown Toronto house just south of St. Clair Avenue West confirms the return of life. We have left the solar system's ice zone.
What was it like growing up in the GTA?
When I grew up in Brampton, it was farmland in between. It’s not like today, where it’s become all one big blob. It was very boring, very middle-class, very white. Nothing ever seemed to happen, and I was always waiting for something to happen.
You said that the Kids in the Hall were very insistent about representing Toronto. What made you so passionate about the city?
When I was a child, honestly, I would dream about the day when everybody wasn’t white. I’d go, ‘I can’t wait for that day when I’m a minority.’ I prayed for it. And now I’m on the cusp of it, and I’m so thrilled. It’s more fun being a minority. It’s better. It’s more interesting when you have to rub up against people of different races and religions and backgrounds. It creates tension, and tension creates art.
My favourite thing about Toronto is that – the fact that all these people from all over the place are getting along, fairly well. I know that sounds kind of sappy, but it’s true. I’ve travelled all over, I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve never seen a place like this.
So what can the city do better?
Here’s what I think is missing: We don’t have enough fun. People are too concerned with doing the right thing, and people are too concerned with fairness. I think we’re too fair. I think that fairness is the enemy of fun, and that life isn’t fair. It’s like when we lost the Olympics. There’s that whole crowd in Toronto, that says ‘bread not circuses.’ I say: bread and circuses. And I think a city needs both ... What I don’t like about Toronto is that super-leftist socialist anti-party atmosphere. We need a big party. We don’t need any more food kitchens or shelters: we need a party. I think we need to invent some sort of a day. A non-denominational sort of day. What I would do is invent a drag day, where everybody goes as the opposite sex.
[. . .]
So have you found that Toronto’s gotten less fun?
Maybe it’s the Scottish history of the city, that kind of no-fun attitude. It’s disappearing, but I think the city could loosen up a little, and stop trying to be world-class. You just are. Do you know what I mean? People that are world-class or are stars, they don’t have to tell anybody, they just are. And I think Toronto, it just is. And it should just accept it, and just let its freak flag fly.
If you talk to the kids wearing [Osama bin Laden] on their T-shirts, you find they admire him as an Arab who took on the United States, who ran his own show, and who wouldn’t bow to anyone else’s agenda. It’s the way many blacks admire Malcolm X, as an icon of self-sufficient resistance, without any interest in the Marxist-tinged racial separatism he sought. Mr. bin Laden will long be remembered, but bin Ladenism is already forgotten.
And so we saw small protests on Friday in the squares of Cairo and in his final hideout in Pakistan, but those protesters were expressing formulaic anger at Americans, not support for al-Qaeda.
[. . .] What is the authentic voice of Muslim frustration? In the early weeks of the revolutions, it was popular to exclaim that the movements in the city squares had rendered al-Qaeda obsolete. “Osama bin Laden died in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, months before he died in Abbottabad,” several scholars said this week.
“The demand for freedom and democracy in a national context has displaced the imaginary umma, the world community of Muslims, in its struggle with the West,” Olivier Roy, the French scholar who’s probably the world’s most reliable chronicler of Islamic politics, writes in an essay to be published this weekend. “Charismatic authoritarian personalities such as bin Laden no longer exert any fascination on an individualistic and rather pragmatic younger generation.”
Al-Qaeda was a post-colonial movement: It spoke to the anger of communities that had won their national independence in the years after the Second World War but that still had a relationship of dependence and ugly subordination to their former colonial masters in the West. The African and Arab dictatorships, with their attempts to withdraw from the world into a closed economy of one man’s personality, were one post-colonial response. A retreat to a mythic past of theocratic purity, and a grandiose theatre of martyrdom, were another.
Al-Qaeda, according to studies of its membership, was almost exclusively a movement of disenchanted Muslim men from the educated upper-middle classes. Osama bin Laden’s warriors were the angry children of prosperous Muslim families who found themselves without the opportunities or hopes of their fathers, forced to the periphery or to foreign migration by the corrupt regimes and growth-starved closed economies of post-colonial countries that had fallen into the shadow of the West.
The Conservatives topped the polls in the May 2 election in part by winning over religious voters, particularly Protestants, but also Jews and longtime immigrants.
The New Democratic Party came in second in part by appealing to those who have no religion, as well as by holding their own among Catholics and recent immigrants.
The Liberals came in third by maintaining support among visible minorities and the moderately religious, especially Muslims but also Jews.
Those are the revealing findings of a massive Ipsos Reid federal election exit poll, which measured the effects of religion, ethnicity and immigrant status on electoral choices.
The online poll of more than 36,000 Canadians, conducted immediately after they cast their ballots, pinpoints changing political preferences that will be crucial for the parties to monitor.
The three major parties appealed to different segments of the country’s expanding immigrant and visible minority populations, which are most influential in large cities such as Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
The New Democratic Party, which won 30.6 per cent of the popular vote, scored highest among recent immigrants, taking 41 per cent of the vote of newcomers who have been in Canada less than a decade.
But the Conservatives, who seized 39.6 per cent of the overall vote, won 43 per cent of immigrants who have been in the country longer than a decade.
When water begins to trickle down the streets of her coastal neighborhood, Yoshiko Takahashi knows it is time to hurry home.
Twice a day, the flow steadily increases until it is knee-deep, carrying fish and debris by her front door and trapping people in their homes. Those still on the streets slosh through the sea water in rubber boots or on bicycle.
"I look out the window, and it's like our houses are in the middle of the ocean," says Takahashi, who moved in three years ago.
The March 11 earthquake that hit eastern Japan was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake.
In port cities such as Onagawa and Kesennuma, the tide flows in and out among crumpled homes and warehouses along now uninhabited streets.
A cluster of neighborhoods in Ishinomaki city is rare in that it escaped tsunami damage through fortuitous geography. So, many residents still live in their homes, and they now face a daily trial: The area floods at high tide, and the normally sleepy streets turn frantic as residents rush home before the water rises too high.
"I just try to get all my shopping and chores done by 3 p.m.," says Takuya Kondo, 32, who lives with his family in his childhood home.
Most houses sit above the water's reach, but travel by car becomes impossible and the sewage system swamps, rendering toilets unusable.
Scientists say the new conditions are permanent.
Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use the Internet’s most popular hangout to share and recommend content.
That’s one of the key findings from a study on the flow of traffic to the Web’s 25 largest news destinations. The study was released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Facebook was responsible for 3 per cent of traffic to the 21 news sites that allowed data to be tracked, according to the study’s co-author, Amy Mitchell. Five of the sites studied got 6 per cent to 8 per cent of their readers from Facebook.
The referrals typically came from links posted by friends on Facebook’s social-networking site or from the ubiquitous “like” buttons, which Facebook encourages other websites to place alongside their content.
The Facebook effect is small compared with Google’s clout. Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30 per cent of traffic to the top news sites, according to Pew.
But Facebook and other sharing tools, such as Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content. By contrast, Google uses an automated formula to help people find news.
Facebook is at the forefront of this shift because it has more than 500 million worldwide users. That’s far more than any other Internet service built for socializing and sharing.
The battle for influence between the world's economic powerhouses, China and the United States, is intensifying across Southeast Asia. Both countries are rushing to take advantage of robust growth rates and rising consumer demand, and the focus of their recent competition is the region's emerging gem: Indonesia.
The country was practically wiped from investors' sights after the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, when the national coffers ran dry and the currency collapsed. But annual growth of around 6%, a middle class of nearly 30 million and a long period of political stability have made it a darling among businesses eager to gain influence and market share.
As Southeast Asia's largest economy and the world's biggest supplier of coal and palm oil, investors have recently plowed into the country as a play on rising commodity prices. More recently, foreign businesses, including from the US and China, have seen the benefits of selling to Indonesia's large and expanding middle class, providing a new boost to manufacturing after falling off steadily since the late 1990s.
"Southeast Asia is in China's backyard," said James Castle, the founder of corporate advisor Castle Asia and one of the leading market-entry strategists in Indonesia. It's natural that the Chinese would want to spread their technological and economic strengths beyond their borders, he said.
The US, meanwhile, is vying for a slice of the pie by promoting technology-sharing deals and investments in commodities and renewable energy.
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