[PHOTO] Looking out of the back door of the laundromat, Monday morning

[PHOTO] The bright shiny tunnel under Grafton Street, Charlottetown

This bright shiny tunnel connects the Confederation Centre of the Arts with the Confederation Court Mall, stretching under Grafton Street.

[BLOG] Some Monday linls

• blogTO notes the five longest TTC routes in Toronto.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes evidence that objects detected by Kepler are gravitationally bound to their parent stars.


• The Dragon's Tales tracks the migrations of raccoons and their kind from North to South America, and notes that Pacific Island nations are hoping to find places they can evacuate their populations to.


• Joe. My. God. notes that the computer of the anti-gay papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic has been found to be filled with child porn, and observes apparent success in treating Ebola with HIV medications.


• Language Log looks at gendered pronoun usage on Facebook.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes depression.


• Marginal Revolution links to an article examining the lives of lightning survivors.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at Russian-Ukrainian energy wars and isn't hopeful for Ukraine.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes war-related mortality patterns in Iraq.


• Savage Minds notes that anthropologists at the University of Chicago have played a leading role in getting that university to disengage from its Confucius Institute.


• Torontoist notes how 1971 thinkers thought Toronto could be made more pleasant.


• Towleroad considers if Britney Spears is a proper gay icon.


• Window on Eurasia suggests the death of civic nationalism in Russia, notes the refugees in Ukraine displaced from the Donbas, suggests that there is sympathy in Tatarstan from Crimean Tatars, looks at Russian official support for the far right worldwide, and suggests that Eurasianism and Dugin are of falling importance.

[URBAN NOTE] blogTO on trendy west end Toronto neighbourhoods

Over the past few days, blogTO writer Erinn Beth Langille has been writing a series of brief guides to different trendy west-end Toronto neighbourhoods that aren't Queen Street West: first Roncesvalles Village, then Dundas West and Ossington, then Parkdale. It makes for diverting reading: these neighbourhoods, too, are trending up.

[LINK] "In Jungles of India, New Phone App Helps Indigenous Tribes Embroiled in Maoist Insurgency"

National Geographic's Anthony Loyd shares news of a new phone app that might give India's adivasi tribes a greater chance to survive the Naxalite uprisings that affect many of their territories.

An Android app designed to give voice to tribes at the heart of India's Maoist insurgency was launched September 20 as part of a campaign by activists to end the conflict through the combination of oral tradition and new technology.

The new app allows tribes living in the remote jungle interior of the Dandakaranya forest to become citizen journalists, posting and sharing pictures and stories on CGNet Swara, a mobile phone-based reporting platform cofounded by Indian digital activist Shubhranshu Choudhary and American computer scientist Bill Thies.

"We're trying to reach out with this new technology to solve so many of the smaller problems that have given rise to such anger in this area," explained Choudhary, winner of this year's Google Digital Activism Award.

"We want to bring hope back to a society where hopelessness has led [many to] resort to violence."

The conflict, pitting Maoist cadres—better known as Naxalites—against Indian security forces, is centered in India's mineral-rich heartland and has cost more than 10,000 lives over the past decade.

Exploiting popular discontent among impoverished rural communities and marginalized tribes, the Naxalites have seeded themselves in Dandakaranya, the 39,000-square-mile (100,000-square-kilometer) forest that encompasses parts of several Indian states, including Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh.

[LINK] "Rejected by their families, gay teens in the South flock to Atlanta"

America Al Jazeera's Betsy Kulman reports on the desperate migration of many rejected LGBT teens from across the American South to Atlanta.

Ryan Peterson's first low point happened in California in 2011 when he woke up on the roof of a house he didn't recognize, still high, after being awake for what he says was around five days.

He started to cry and called his cousin who bought him a plane ticket home to Georgia. He had just started to get his life back on track, he said, when he found out he was HIV positive. It crushed him.

"Not because of the fact that I was positive," he said. "Because of the fact that I couldn't have kids. That's what really crushed me the most, because I've always wanted kids. And I always will."

For HIV-positive men, having children can be a costly and difficult procedure.

His second low point was earlier this year, crashing on couches in Atlanta and dealing crystal meth to support his $300-a-day drug habit.

Peterson, now 23, is one of many young people in Georgia, and other Bible Belt states, who flock to the big city – Atlanta – after coming out as gay. But each night, some 2,000 children and youth in Atlanta are homeless. Nationally, about 40 percent of homeless youth identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, according to a survey by UCLA's Williams Institute.

Religious families are more likely to kick out gay children, making the Bible Belt a particularly tough place to be young and LGBT. In what activists say is a crisis of gay homeless youth in America, some call Atlanta "ground zero."

But the South also has few emergency shelters for LGBT youth in need. Lost-n-Found Youth is the only Atlanta nonprofit dedicated to getting homeless gay kids off the streets. The group's three founders created the organization in 2011 after all of them had experiences trying to place LGBT youth in shelters, only to have them turned away.

[LINK] "California, Quebec Seek Partners to Grow Carbon Market"

Bloomberg's Frederic Tomesco and Lynn Doan describe how some subnational jurisdictions in North America, noting the apparent inability or unwillingness of national governments to try to manage greenhouse gas emissions, are trying to set up a continental network of subnational jurisdictions.

Less than a year after establishing North America’s largest carbon market, Quebec and California are aggressively recruiting the province of Ontario and other U.S. states to join, Quebec’s premier said.

Quebec is discussing a regional market with the governors of New England states and leaders in Ontario while California is working with Oregon and Washington in the western U.S., Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York.

California spent almost a decade searching for other U.S. states to help it establish a regional carbon market before beginning one on its own last year. States including Arizona, Oregon and Washington backed out of a regional initiative in 2011. On Jan. 1, California and Quebec established a joint market that regulates more than 180 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from industrial plants including power generators, oil refineries and cement factories.

“Having a market with only California and Quebec is not ideal,” Couillard said. “We are working very hard to recruit new partners. If we just add a couple of Western states, a couple of provinces, Ontario, and maybe some New England partners, we think that’s good enough.”

The governors of New England states, particularly Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, are “very interested” in discussing a partnership with California and Quebec, Couillard said.

Vermont is part of a regional carbon market that regulates emissions from power plants known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. Other states in that market include New York, Maryland and Massachusetts.

[LINK] "Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud: Hamilton youth reported killed as ISIS fighter 'not the son ..."

CBC's Jeff Green describes the grief and confusion felt by the people who knew Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian from Hamilton who was a student at York University before he left to become a jihadist for the Islamic State in Syria and died there in recent airstrikes. No one seems to know what set him off.

Roughly one year ago, Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, then 19 years old and a biology student at Toronto's York University, met a group of friends at a hip-hop dance audition, and later partied and grew close with them. But he eventually cut them off — through the spring and summer of 2014.

By July, while those friends thought they lost touch with an athletic, outgoing man, who at times seemed unsure of himself and his identity, his family in Hamilton was frantically trying to warn the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and RCMP that their eldest son may have taken up arms with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria militants.

Earlier this week, CSIS, albeit unofficially, told the family there were reports he was killed by the anti-ISIS military campaign, apparently dying during attacks from Kurdish forces in northern Syria last week.

His extended family has gone into seclusion to deal with their loss, said Hamilton lawyer Hussein Hamdani, who tried to help the family once they realized he was "crossing over."

What happened that led to the change remains a mystery, he said.

"That is an important question that we must look at and try to find the answer to."

[LINK] "Sun Media to apologize to Justin Trudeau for Ezra Levant rant"

Canada.com's Ishmael N. Daro reports that Sun Media will issue an apology for the disgusting tirade made by Ezra Levant on their television network against the parents of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Daro's article goes on to note that Levant has made other off-colour remarks, most recently condemning Romani as a people of thieves.

Quebecor, the parent company of Sun News Network and the Sun Media newspaper chain, will issue an apology Monday evening to federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau over an on-air tirade by columnist Ezra Levant broadcast earlier this month.

According to CTV News Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife, Quebecor chairperson Brian Mulroney reached out to Liberal Party brass over the weekend over the incident. The cable news channel will make the apology on Levant’s 8 p.m. ET Sun News Network show, saying his rant was in poor taste and should not have aired. It will apologize to Sun News Network viewers, Trudeau and his family.

Levant took to his Sun News program The Source Sept. 15 and railed against Trudeau for appearing in a wedding photo in which he kissed the bride on the cheek. The photo had been cleared with the family, including the groom, but Levant suggested Trudeau had forced his way into the scene and stolen the kiss for his own publicity.

“Justin Trudeau thinks he’s in the movie Wedding Crashers, that sex comedy where slutty men go to weddings uninvited to bed the maids of honour. But even they had enough class to give the bride herself a pass,” Levant said in the five-minute rant.

He also called Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a “slut” who “banged anyone” and mocked his mother Margaret in similar terms.

Trudeau responded to Levant’s comments by vowing to boycott all employees of Sun News and Sun Media, including the non-partisan reporting staff, although he had been avoiding questions from the news channel’s correspondents for some time already.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Al Jazeera notes anti-Muslim ads in the New York City subways, China's likely counterproductive crackdown on Uighurs, Kosovo's efforts to stem the flow of fighters to the Islamic State, and observes the spread of Buddhist anti-Muslim chauvinism from Burma to Sri Lanka.


• Bloomberg notes Japan's strengthening of sanctions against Russia, notes that super-yacht sellers in Monaco are disturbed by anti-Russian sanctions and looks at the freezing of an oligarch's assets in Italy, observes that Italian economic reforms are proceeding slowly, notes the relative strength of the Mexican economy, observes the travails of the economies of NATO-looking Ukraine and credit-crunched Russia and Bulgaria.


• Bloomberg View considers the right of migrants from countries drowned by climate change to go to polluters, looks at Japan's debt trap, an examines Ukrainian options in the wake of Russian victory in the Donbas.


• CBC reports on Iraqi claims of Islamic State plans to attack subways in the United States and Paris.


• The Inter Press Service notes the rapid growth of the world's urban population, the rapid growth of the population of the Sahel region, and the growth of intra-Caribbean migration.


• MacLean's fears that constitutional reform in the United Kingdom may complicate the Scottish question and shares Indian Mars probe MOM's Twittered photos of Mars.


• National Geographic notes the relationship between poverty and poor food, observes the role played by guano in securing American territorial claims, and looks at the eventually rapid divergence of birds from dinosaurs.


• Open Democracy is skeptical about the prospects of Ukrainian accession to the European Union, considers Ukraine's security options, looks at the Azerbaijani perspective on the Ukrainian crisis, and considers strategies for the Scottish left and South Tyrolian separatists.


• Universe Today looks at Russian contributions to the International Space Station, dates ancient Earth water, and notes that the ESA's Rosetta mission will see the Philae lander touch the surface of its target comet on the 12th of November.

[FORUM] Do you think women's representation in politics should be legally mandated?

The Guardian of Charlottetown carried the news that Kim Campbell, the last Progressive Conservative prime minister for five months in 1993, proposed at a women's leadership conference on Prince Edward Island that Canadian ridings should have two representatives, one man and one woman.

Former prime minister Kim Campbell says Canada needs more women in Parliament, so she proposes federal ridings should be split to include one woman and one man elected in each riding.

Campbell is in Prince Edward Island this week for the women’s leadership conference, A Bold Vision.

In her keynote address Wednesday evening entitled Time to Colour Outside the Lines, Campbell said dual-member ridings would be the simplest way to shift the country’s electoral system to gain true gender parity in Ottawa.

“I think we need something that we can actually implement and I think the process would make a powerful statement that Canada really believes what it says when, in its Constitution, it is enshrined prohibition of discrimination based on sex,” Campbell said.

“I think it would be a beacon to other countries.”

She added her belief that such a move could also help to change the combative tone that often dominates debate among MPs on Parliament Hill.

Facebook's Ryan, who linked to this news, compared to this to how, on Prince Edward Island until 1997, local electoral ridings had two representatives, one traditionally Protestant and one traditionally Catholic. Ensuring representation for the two major Christian factions on the Island, the only Canadian province equally split between the two, did ensure a significant measure of peace.

What say you?