[PHOTO] Victoria Row, Charlottetown

Victoria Row is the name given to a stretch of Richmond Street between Queen (at west) and Great George (at east) that was transformed into a popular pedestrian mall in 1997. The vintage late 19th century buildings located on the south side, along with the Confederation Centre of the Arts on the north side, makes it a hub of activity, especially during summer.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Fresh from a redesign of his blog, Andrew Barton's Acts of Minor Treason features an icestorm photo, of a tree encased in ice.


• BlogTO observes that a plan to tear down the Hotel Waverly and the Silver Dollar nightclub, located at Spadina and College, and to replace it with a 22-story building including student housing, has been turned down.


• Far Outliers notes the German role in fomenting jihadist sentiments against the British and French in the early 20th century and the multiple irreconcilable political goals of the Young Turks.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Italian Olympics committeeman Mario Pescante has criticized the US for sending out non-heterosexuals to Sochi.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen considers (1, 2) which countries will be experiencing recessions, as opposed to financial crises. (Canada features, as do the Nordic countries and Singapore.)


• Registan's Reid Standish notes that fish are returning to the northern Aral Sea, an area that has seen extensive rehabilitation under Kazakhstan as a new small self-enclosed sea.


• Torontoist traces the history of the large retail space at the north end of the Eaton Centre, once Eaton's flagship store, then a major Sears location, now set to become a Nordstrom's.


• Towleroad notes that Nigeria is already seeking out gays for persecution and observes that Russia is upset with the European Union's inclusion of gay rights in its human rights platforms.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that an ingenious effort to find evidence of time travel from the future through social networking posts has found nothing.


• Window on Eurasia notes the arguments of many that a Russia that established a Eurasian union without Ukraine would become much less Slavic and Orthodox.

[URBAN NOTE] Three notes on the Toronto economy, and incidentally, Rob Ford

First comes CBC's announcement that Toronto has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Canada.

Toronto’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the country, rising to 10.1 per cent, just as Mayor Rob Ford says the city is “booming.”

Unemployment in the city rose from 8.9 per cent in September 2013 to 10.1 per cent this past December, according to a recent Statistics Canada report.

The unemployment rate for Canada overall is 7.2 per cent.

But on Tuesday, Ford painted a much more optimistic picture of the city’s employment situation — especially during his time in office, taking credit for close to 60,000 jobs added to the local economy last year.

“Toronto is booming today. We're a global powerhouse,” he said.

“More people are employed in this city, more than three years ago….There are 58,000 more residents employed this year than last year, that’s also a fact that, you know, and we have experienced three consecutive years of positive growth.”

Next comes the Toronto Star analysis, by Dana Flavelle and Laura Kane, of these figures.

Despite the Toronto area’s relatively high unemployment rate, more residents found work, and at a higher than average pace, in 2013, according to Statistics Canada data.

Employment rose an impressive 3.8 per cent in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, which includes most of the GTA’s suburban regions, with the exception of Oshawa.

“You find a city that’s had more employment growth in 2013, on average,” Derek Burleton challenged. “Even Calgary had less employment growth,” said the deputy chief economist for TD Bank, referring to the city that’s been one of the country’s economic hot spots in recent years, thanks to the oil boom.

[. . .]

One of the explanations for Toronto’s rising rates of both employment and unemployment is simple population growth, says Peter Viducis, manager of economic research for the city of Toronto.

More people are coming here looking for work, he said, particularly young people, recent graduates and new immigrants. Some have more success than others.

[. . .]

Another factor in Toronto’s growing labour market is the way Statistics Canada gathers data, Viducis speculated.

The labour force survey is based on where people live, not where they work. Thus, a person living in Toronto is counted as part of Toronto’s workforce, regardless of whether they’re employed in Toronto or Mississauga or Pickering.

As more people move into the city, reversing a decades-long flight to the suburbs, they’re counted as part of Toronto’s labour force, Viducis noted.

The third, another Toronto Star article by Jane Gerster, focusing on issues in Ford's home community.

Shoppers taking cover from a wet Sunday morning inside south Etobicoke’s busy Sherway Gardens mall criticized a lack of communication from public officials, particularly on power outages, wires dangerously entwined in tree branches and other aspects of the ice storm cleanup.

[. . .]

Half a dozen residents named emergency planning and cleanup as their top priority, while another six listed lower taxes as their priority. Many who picked emergency cleanup over lower taxes listed lower taxes as their second priority, and vice versa.

[. . . Boisie] Tehackoor, who works in shipping and receiving, is convinced the city is bungling the ice storm cleanup and believes it also mishandled the summer storm.

Fixing downed power lines, picking up fallen branches and fixing the roads is taking too long, he said, and city employees aren’t working hard enough.

“If I go to my job, then for eight hours I have to work very, very hard to earn my money,’ Tehackoor said. “But they can sit on their butts and get money?”

[. . .]

In the smaller and quieter Albion Centre, near Albion Rd. and Kipling Ave., Raham Najum said lower taxes is his priority because he no longer trusts the government to use his money for something “worthwhile.”

[. . .]

His friend and fellow student and sales associate, Ehtisham Waqar, agreed, saying that, since he’s skeptical his taxes are being used properly, he wants them lowered.

“It’s always the same issue,” he said. “Quality of life needs to increase and I think the only way to do that is to decrease taxes.”

[BRIEF NOTE] On three Canadian converts to Islam turned jihadi

This morning as I was riding the subway to work, I read of one Canadian convert to Islam turned, a Nova Scotian-born Calgary resident born Damian Claremont who just died in Syria.

A 22-year-old Canadian-born Muslim convert who left Calgary for Syria in November 2012 has been killed by Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces during rebel infighting, CBC News has confirmed.

Mustafa al-Gharib​, born in Nova Scotia as Damian Clairmont, was an Acadian who spent his first years in Wedgeport, N.S.

According to sources in Syria and Canada, al-Gharib was injured in battle and subsequently captured and killed by an unknown faction of the FSA in the city of Aleppo.

Al-Gharib was reportedly fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel group consisting of largely foreign extremists.

[. . .]

Al-Gharib converted to Islam following a two-year period of personal anguish in his teens that included him dropping out of high school, a diagnosis for bipolar disorder and a suicide attempt at age 17.

“He had some trouble as a teenager. When he converted to Islam, initially his family thought that this would be the thing that would calm him down. And eventually it did,” said CBC News senior correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, who interviewed al-Gharib’s mother last year.

“He did seem to find some peace. And then he changed.”

(Being killed in infighting in the Free Syrian Army bodes ill for the movement.)

Checking my Feedly RSS feed, I soon found that news of another, this one a man from northern Ontario who died in August.

By the time of his death in Syria, Andre Poulin from Timmins, Ont., had become a battle-hardened jihadi known as Abu Muslim.

He arrived in Syria in late 2012, and joined a unit of foreign fighters controlled by a Chechen.

He spoke freely with an American filmmaker last spring about what his family thought of what he was doing in Syria.

"Well, on the one hand, they are happy I have found my path and doing my own thing, you know, helping people, but at the same time they don't understand entirely why I am here," he said in a Channel 4 documentary.

Last August, he was part of an attack along with other Islamist groups on a government-controlled airport in the country's north.

He died in the attack, and his body was found and buried by other jihadis.

He is said to have left behind a wife and young child in Syria.

In Timmins, from 2008 to 2009, when he was barely 20 years old, the young man was already on the path toward a strict interpretation of Islam. He worried about how he was dressing and how others around him behaved. His language also started to change and harden, said CBC's Adrienne Arsenault.

He developed a separate identity, calling himself Uncle Umar. His Arabic signature read: "Martyrdom, if God wills it."

And CBC's Nahlah Ayed has an interview with an Irish-born engineer at the Algerian gas plant that was at the focus of the u>In Amenas hostage crisis who testified that one of the three Canadians known to have been there was very enthusiastic indeed.

As CBC News previously reported, the London, Ont. native acted as a negotiator and translator for the militants, who called themselves The Signatories in Blood Brigade, a group with links to al-Qaeda.

[Xristos] Katsiroubas also assisted in building bombs and appeared to handle explosives and weaponry — including a heavy machine gun — with knowledge and ease.

It has now emerged that he also helped string hostages together with explosive cord wrapped around their necks, and threatened one at gunpoint against fleeing, said Stephen McFaul, a Belfast-born electrical engineer who spent hours as one of the hostages observing and occasionally speaking to Katsiroubas.

The militant also deftly used a machine gun to try to bring down an Algerian army helicopter, says McFaul.

"The Canadian terrorist in particular, he had actually seated himself … and put the machine gun between his two feet like a tripod, and was trying to shoot up at the helicopter once it was coming in," McFaul said.

The one common factor in the lives of Clairmont, Poulin, and Katsiroubas seems to be that the act of conversion to Islam gave their chaotic, depressing, and often violent lives a certain amount of focus. The focus would normally be a good thing, too, if not for how their lives would be brought to an end.

I know it's terrible of me to think so, but I'm glad that they're ended. I just wish they'd not taken so many with them.

[LINK] On a possible gas giant planet in the Luhman 16 system

Universe Today's Shannon Hall reports on the possible discovery of a planet in the system of Luhman 16, a binary brown dwarf discovered late last year to exist just 6.6 light years away.

Astronomers only discovered the system last year when the brown dwarfs were spotted in data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE). Check out a past Universe Today article on the discovery here. They escaped detection for so long because they are located in the galactic plane, an area densely populated by stars, which are far brighter than the brown dwarfs.

Henri Boffin at the European Southern Observatory led a team of astronomers on a mission to learn more about these newly found dim neighbors. The group used ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal in Chile to perform astrometry, a technique used to measure the position of the objects precisely. This crucial data would allow them to make a better estimate of the distance to the objects as well as their orbital period.

Boffin’s team was first able to constrain their masses, finding that one brown dwarf weighs in at 30 times the mass of Jupiter and the other weighs in at 50 times the mass of Jupiter. These light-weight objects orbit each other slowly, taking about 20 years.

But their orbits didn’t map out perfectly — there were slight disturbances, suggesting that something was tugging on these two brown dwarfs. The likely culprit? An exoplanet — at three times the weight of Jupiter — orbiting one or even both of the objects.

“The fact that we potentially found a planetary-mass companion around such a very nearby and binary system was a surprise,” Boffin told Universe Today.

The next step will be to monitor the system closely in order to verify the existence of a planetary-mass companion. With a full year’s worth of data it will be relatively straightforward to remove the signal caused by the exoplanet.

The paper in question is here.