A confrontation between Rob Ford and a TTC driver occurred Wednesday because the mayor drove his vehicle past the open doors of a streetcar, the head of the transit workers’ union said Friday.
“My understanding is that Mayor Ford bypassed an open door and the operator then got off the streetcar – left his seat anyways – to advise the motorist, not knowing it was Mayor Ford, of the seriousness of the violation, as well was the concern for our passengers,” Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 president Bob Kinnear told the Star.
Failing to stop behind the open doors of a streetcar is a violation of the Highway Traffic Act, with fines of $109.
Ford’s office said Friday morning that they would not comment on the matter.
The incident happened near Dundas St. W. and McCaul St., according to Kinnear, who said Ford drove past the rear doors but stopped before the streetcar’s front doors as passengers were boarding.
The mayor rolled down his window and “had some comments for the operator,” said Kinnear.
The streetcar driver was “interviewed” by the TTC following standard procedure after Ford lodged a complaint, he said.
Kinnear said he didn’t know the exact nature of the mayor’s complaint.
TTC spokesman Brad Ross has confirmed that the operator left his seat on the streetcar he was driving to speak to the mayor, something the driver agreed he shouldn’t have done.
Rob Ford’s dislike of streetcars had until now mostly been limited to speechifying and pamphlets on LRT crashes, but now he’s quarrelling with the drivers themselves. Last week, a TTC driver told union reps that Ford motored past the open doors of a stopped streetcar on Dundas West, breaking the rule that cars must stay two metres behind any open streetcar door. Ford and the driver allegedly exchanged a few choice words, prompting Ford to call TTC head Andy Byford to complain (it’s against TTC rules for operators to leave their seats to confront drivers). Today, Ford made a rare visit to the city hall press gallery and gave a bare-bones summary of his side of the story: “The back door shut, I went past the back doors, the front doors were open, the front doors were still open and the driver came out and accosted me.” If that’s true, we’d almost feel sorry for Ford—if he didn’t have his own history of accosting strangers while enraged.
I’m also appalled by the level of public fear sown by a few scattered instances of violence. Toronto is a city of over 2.6-million people, yet witnessed just 45 murders in 2011 — a per-capita murder rate of just over 0.0017% — about a tenth of that of Philadelphia and Chicago, America’s per-capita murder capitals. Among the American cities that witnessed more murders than Toronto in 2011 were Nashville (pop. 616,000), Tulsa, Okla (pop. 393,000), and Stockton, Cal. (292,000). In per-capita terms, Toronto has a substantially smaller homicide problem than various other Canadian cities — most notably, Winnipeg and Edmonton.
The media barrage that followed last month’s Eaton Centre and Little Italy shootings was so intense that some of my otherwise intelligent friends told me they were afraid to go downtown, lest they be gunned down in the “WAR ZONE” that apparently is enveloping the city. But as they cower in their basement bunkers, these homebodies might want to check out the eye-opening homicide database maintained by CBC News, listing every GTA killing going back to 2009, complete with geographical markers and links to associated news stories.
Out of interest, I used this database to go through each of the 25 listed 2012 homicides, killing by killing. I’ve done the same thing in previous years, and I always find the exercise oddly reassuring; the act of studying the lists serves to completely debunk the idea that ordinary, innocent Torontonians are at substantial risk of murder.
Aside from a few ambiguous cases each year, the killings generally fall into three groups: (1) domestic violence involving lovers, ex-lovers or parents (accounting for, by my count, a total of four homicides in 2012), (2) settling of accounts among known criminals and (3) violent disputes that erupt suddenly between acquaintances; often late at night; in environments well-saturated with other criminal elements; and fueled by alcohol, drugs or mental illness.
The second category is the biggest. The most recent GTA homicide victim (#25), for instance, a Somali-Canadian man named Hussein Hussein, was apparently a well-known player in the Alberta-Toronto drug trade. Homicide victim #23, killed in Little Italy in an apparent targeted shooting, was “known to police” and “set to stand trial over accusations he beat up a man following a card game at a suburban club.”
Every murder is tragic. But the reporting of these tragedies should not distract us from the fact that non-criminal Torontonians — far from living in a “WAR ZONE” — inhabit one of the safest urban environments in the world.
At 66 and with her parliamentary pension secured, the soon-to-be former international cooperation minister had no major financial incentive to sign up for another two to four years in the federal trenches.
A lacklustre performer in the House of Commons, Oda was never going to acquire the killer instincts of a first-rate political animal.
Up to that point her ministerial career had featured less spectacular hits than glaring misses.
She had turned out to be ill-suited to her initial cabinet mission as heritage minister. Fluency in French and English and an extroverted personality are basic prerequisites for success in that portfolio.
In her second and last ministerial posting, her role in the murky decision to cut the funding of the aid group KAIROS and in the doctoring of the move’s paper trail became the stuff of a full-fledged parliamentary scandal.
[. . .]
With data showing that the KAIROS affair had little legs in her riding, Conservative strategists were better off keeping her inside the tent as a candidate than have her stand as a living reminder of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s opaque approach to parliamentary accountability outside it.
[. . .]
Bev Oda’s pre-empted firing from the cabinet is the clearest signal to date that as far as Harper is concerned the IOUs accumulated over his crossing of the minority desert have passed their expiry date.
The debts of loyalty the Prime Minister has racked up along the way may be about to take a distant second place to the changing staffing needs of a majority government.
In the big picture, belatedly dispensing with Oda’s services in the wake of her travel expenses imbroglio amounts to just one baby step on the road back to a more straight and narrow Conservative spending path.
In a cosmic case of “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t,” a brilliant disk of dust around a Sun-like star has suddenly vanished, and the scientists who observed the disappearance aren’t sure about what happened.
Typically, the kind of dusty haloes that circle stars have the makings of rocky planets like Earth, according to Ben Zuckerman, one of a team of researchers who reported the finding on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Composed of warm dusty material, these disks can be seen by telescopes looking for infrared light. This one was first seen in 1983 by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite around the young star TYC 8241 2652. It glowed for a quarter-century before disappearing in a matter of 2-1/2 years.
An image taken May 1 by the Gemini observatory at La Serena, Chile, confirmed that the disk was gone.
Astronomers are accustomed to watching events that have unfolded over millions or billions of years, so seeing a bright ring depart from view in less than three years was an eye-blink in the astronomical context, Zuckerman said by telephone from the University of California-Los Angeles.
[. . .]
“So much dust orbiting so close to a young star implies that rocky planets similar to the terrestrial planets of our own solar system were in the process of forming around this star,” he said. But all of a sudden, this potential planet-maker was absent.
“We don’t really know where the dust came from in detail, and we certainly don’t know what caused it to disappear so quickly,” Zuckerman said.
Born about 10 million years ago, the TYC 8241 2652 1 system was chugging along just fine before 2009. Its so-called circumstellar disk glowed at the infrared wavelength of 10 microns, indicating it was warm and lay close to a star—in the same sort of region that, in our own sun's neighborhood, gave rise to the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The infrared data reveal that the dust was about 180°C and located as close to its star as Mercury is to the sun.
By January 2010, however, nearly all infrared light from the dusty disk had vanished. "We had never seen anything like this before," says astronomer Carl Melis of the University of California, San Diego. "We were all scratching our heads and wondering what the hell did we do wrong?" But subsequent observations with both infrared satellites and ground-based telescopes confirmed the surprising discovery, he says: "The disk was gone."
Melis and his colleagues report the mystery online today in Nature—but they don't know what caused it. "It's very bizarre," he says. "Nothing like this was ever predicted." He says there's no way something could eclipse the infrared-emitting disk for more than 2 years, because such an object would be immense. Furthermore, the star itself didn't fade.
The most commonly held theory of planet formation is that minute particles of dust left over after a star forms clump onto each other, first through weak electrostatic interactions and later through gravitational forces. The aggregated dust particles eventually grow to become pebble-sized and then car- to house-sized objects. Ultimately, they become planets. The timescale at which this accretion occurs has been theorized and modeled mathematically, and Song said it is commonly thought to occur over hundreds of thousands of years, a time period that spans civilizations on Earth but is an astronomical blink of an eye.
"If what we observed is related to runaway growth, then our finding suggests that planet formation is very fast and very efficient," [study co-author Inseok] Song said. "The implication is that if the conditions are right around a star, planet formation can be nearly instantaneous from astronomical perspective."
[. . .]
Song added that a slightly different version of the "runaway accretion" theory suggests that dust grains accrete onto the central star in a very short timescale, implying that the star effectively eliminates planet-building material. If such events occur frequently, planet formation is much less likely than previously thought.
Another explanation for the sudden disappearance of the dust is that it was expelled from the sun's orbit. Song explained that the particles are so small—a hundred times smaller than a grain of sand—that the constant stream of photons emanating from the sun could push them away and into each other, like pinballs, until they leave the suns' orbit.
Because large clouds of dust can be formed when orbiting planets crash into each other, astronomers have often viewed the presence of such clouds as indirect evidence of unseen planets. If clouds of dust are only fleeting, however, then many more stars than previously thought could harbor planets.
"People often calculate the percentage of stars that have a large amount of dust to get a reasonable estimate of the percentage of stars with planetary systems, but if the dust avalanche model is correct, we cannot do that anymore," Song said. "Many stars without any detectable dust may have mature planetary systems that are simply undetectable."'
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