[PHOTO] Last night's snowfall

We did get quite a lot of snow last night, as it turned out. The solid blanket of white, along with the moderately cold temperatures, felt pleasantly retro.

Winter snows, looking down Walmer Road west of Spadina Avenue at Bloor.



Looking up Walmer Road.



Looking from a friend's patio, on Dupont just west of Bathurst.

[URBAN NOTE] "Defamation suit against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford dismissed"

The libel lawsuit against Mayor Rob Ford that went to trial in November has concluded, as CBC notes, with Ford being cleared.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been cleared in a defamation lawsuit after the complaint against him was dismissed Thursday by the Ontario Superior Court.

"I welcome today’s decision by the court to dismiss the Foulidis lawsuit against me. I will continue fighting to represent the best interests of Toronto taxpayers at city hall. There is still a lot of work to be done and I will continue to focus on this," Ford said in a statement issued by his office.

Restaurateur George Foulidis sued Ford over critical comments made in August 2010, while Ford was in the midst of his first mayoralty campaign, concerning a deal between the city and Foulidis's business, Tuggs Inc.

The comments were made when Ford was invited to discuss campaign issues with the Toronto Sun editorial board.

Ford was incensed at the time that the city gave an untendered 20-year lease extension to Tuggs Inc. for the continued operation of the Boardwalk Café along Woodbine Beach. Foulidis said Ford suggested he won the contract as a result of illegal activity.

Ford's lawyer, Gavin Tighe, argued the defence of fair comment, telling the court that Ford's comments were opinion. He cited defamation case law from the Supreme Court of Canada, saying Ford's remarks were not libellous unless the primary intent was to hurt Foulidis.

Steve Kupferman at Torontoist quotes what seems to be a key passage from the judge's ruling: "The defendant voiced only a suspicion of corruption which he, immediately and in clear terms, admitted was without factual foundation or insufficient for him to be able to say that anyone had done anything wrong."

[LINK] "Are the Palestinians Ready to Share a State With Jordan?"

Daoud Kuttab's article in The Atlantic suggesting that a Jordanian confederation with the West Bank might be a partial solution to the Palestinian impasse strikes me as unlikely, not least because even if a West Bank state--presumably viable, with adequate land and resources for its population--was federated with Jordan, the question of what to do with Gaza would remain. The 2008 downing of the Egypt-Gaza border fence and more recent rapprochement doesn't mean that Egypt is going to take up Gaza as a protectorate.

In the summer of 1993, I was granted a rare scoop as a Palestinian journalist: an exclusive interview with the prime minister of Israel at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, the first ever given to a reporter working for a leading Palestinian newspaper. Midway way through the one-hour meeting, I asked Rabin for his vision as to the ultimate political status of the West Bank and Gaza in 15 or 20 years. Rabin, who at the time, we later discovered, had approved the Oslo back-channel, took a puff at a cigarette given to him by one of his aides, and answered that he envisions It being part of an entity with Jordan.

I remember this response almost 20 years later, and at a time now when the Oslo Accords -- which Rabin signed on the White House lawn in September 1993 -- have all but been declared dead by all parties involved. Mahmoud Abbas, who signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Israel on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that fall, is now on the verge of leaving political life with no clear successor for him or for the Palestinian Authority that has been established in parts of the West Bank since the agreement's implementation in 1995.

The failure of this approach has led some to suggest other avenues of breaking up the logjam -- the result of U.S. President Barack Obama's lack of political will and the failure of the rest of the world to pick up the pieces without U.S. involvement. It is in this political limbo that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finding itself toying with an old-new formula: A role for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

In a meeting with members of the Ebal charity in October, which is made up of Jordanians of Palestinian (Nablus) origin and hosted by Jordan's speaker of the upper house, Taher al Masri, Jordan's Prince Hassan bin Talal opened up the issue. In the speech, recorded and posted on the jordandays.tv website, the prince stressed that the West Bank is part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which includes "both banks of the [Jordan] River." He added that he "did not personally oppose the two-state solution," but that this solution is irrelevant at the current stage.

The October 9 talk received little attention until a former PLO leader repeated the idea, albeit in a different tone. Farouk al Qadoumi, one of the founders of the PLO's Fatah movement, gave an interview to the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi, in which he suggested the return of the West Bank to Jordan as part of a federation or a confederation. Qadoumi, who opposed the Oslo Accords and has refused to step foot in the Palestinian Authority areas, has little clout in the PLO, and at one time accused Abbas of being behind the poisoning of the late Yasser Arafat. Qadoumi's statement was quickly opposed by the secretary of the PLO, Yaser Abed Rabo, who called it "naïve."

But earlier this month, Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that Abbas informed several PLO leaders "to be prepared for a new confederation project with Jordan and other parties in the international community," and that his office has already issued reports that evaluate "the best strategies to lead possible negotiations with Jordan" toward "reviving the confederation." He has reportedly asked PLO officials to prepare themselves to pursue this strategy. This report, if confirmed by official sources, could be a watershed moment for the Palestinian national movement, and the highest profile endorsement of this persistent proposal.