[PHOTO] "A star-like garden, on pavement"

While I'm not sure about the aesthetics of the front yard--the concrete makes it awfully barren-looking--the location of the tree squarely in the center of a five-pointed star filled with flowers (pansies, mainly) is eye-catching.

[URBAN NOTE] A note on Toronto's impending budget cuts

The big news in Toronto is the city manager's recent report calling for massive cuts to deal with the $C 774 million budget deficit, cutting down on library hours and on actual library branches, phasing out city-subsidized daycare spaces, cutting down on TTC services, diminishing social spending, cutting back on police and firefighting ...

Journalist Royson James had made the point earlier this summer that, contrary to now-Mayor Rob Ford' campaign promises, there was in fact little waste in the city government, that the only way to reduce spending would be to reduce city services. Reacting to this news, James has been fairly angry.

City manager Joe Pennachetti came clean Monday and dipped his hands into the blood. When he pulled them out, few city services remained untouched by the axe. Ah, yes, Joe P is recommending many of the very cuts, er, opportunities, KPMG listed in July.

Now, the bleeding mess has been dumped in the mayor’s hands, where it belongs.

It is the same mayor who looked voters in the eye a year ago and swore on their votes that he could find close to $2 billion in savings at city hall without chopping a single service. Waste, he said, littered the city hall corridors like the leaves of autumn.

Rob Ford, of course, found teaspoons of “gravy” where he pointed to vats of waste. So, next Monday his hand-picked executive committee of 12 sycophants must vote on Pennachetti’s recommendations and advise city council where to cut:

[. . .]

Caught, hoisted on his own petard, as they say, the penny-pinching mayor must preside over the destruction of the city so many built to become one of the most livable places in the world.

Those heady days are gone — as we’ll discover years hence, when the ranking agencies discover a deteriorating city.

Urban observers already know this: Small grants to community groups are the seeds of peace, social harmony, economic development, and a sense of belonging.

K’naan, he of “Wavin’ Flag” fame, is now a world-scale ambassador. But it was a small city grant that helped him put down roots in Rexdale, germinate, and find his place in the music universe.

Kill those grants and no one knows the dreams that are rendered stillborn in our priority neighbourhoods.

City council is the only buffer against such a future. Many councillors delude themselves into thinking the current ruinous exercise is a careful examination of the city’s fiscal condition. It is not. It is a deceitful exercise devised by a mayor who cares nothing about the collateral damage of his rampage against city services and programs he never needed and never took the time to understand.

Pennachetti has served in all the regions around Toronto. He believes that one way to relieve Toronto’s cash crunch is to reduce service to the levels of its neighbours in York, Durham and Peel.

Another way is to increase Toronto property taxes to the level of its neighbours. Ahh, that, of course, is not on the table in this exhaustive fiscal review.

Instead, we have a mayor who killed a vehicle tax source that delivered $64 million a year and plans to kill a land transfer tax that nets up to $250 million annually.

And to pay for these he sinks the city into a divisive debate that, even if every recommendation were approved, gets us just $100 million this year.

That last figure is correct: all these cuts would cut the projected deficit by less than a seventh.

The pervasive distrust of city government workers and city bureaucracy that helped get Ford elected is going to end by getting rid of many of the little things that matter, the background details in Toronto's urban life that help to humanize the city. Where this will end? I hope only that this might discredit Ford's approach somewhat. The long-term damage is all that remains to be determined, I fear.

[BRIEF NOTE] Towards a HIV vaccine?

The CBC was one news agency of several to report on news that the mechanisms behind a promising partially effective HIV vaccine being tested in Thailand--I wrote about it in 2009--are becoming understood.

At the AIDS Vaccine conference in Bangkok on Tuesday, scientists announced an update to a Thai trial of a "modestly effective" experimental AIDS vaccine.

At the end of the initial 3½-year study, the vaccine prevented infection in about 30 per cent of the 16,000 Thai volunteers who received it compared with a placebo.

The new findings shed light on how the vaccine worked by identifying how the immune system responded to it.

[. . .]

Stephen Kent, a vaccine researcher at the University of Melbourne, described the antibodies produced by the vaccine as "friends with benefits."

"They don't necessarily prevent infection of cells but it allows them to kill infected cells," said Kent. "So it may be that that really helps protection."

[. . .]

Scientists want to take the findings back to the lab or clinic to try to improve the effectiveness of the Thai vaccine. Results suggested that protection against HIV appeared highest at six to 12 months, which investigators hope to sustain or boost.

But the vaccine and the immune response it created were specific to the type of HIV in Thailand, and the vaccine formulation used there, scientists cautioned.

The findings suggested the vaccine had no effect on the amount of virus in the blood of those who became infected with HIV. Vaccination did seem to be associated with lower amounts of virus in genital fluids.

Even a partially effective vaccine like the one described above could be quite effective in altering the contours of the epidemic, especially with the decreased amount of HIV in genital fluids (i.e. plausibly decreased sexual transmission risks). If combined with near-universal treatment of HIV-infected people, as proposed, the number of transmissions could drop off hugely.