[PHOTO] In memoriam for a homeless man at Yonge and Dundas

Two homeless people died of Monday night's cold. The first was a man whose cold body was found in an abandoned truck at Davenport and Lansdowne, not very far by foot from my home. The second was a man who was found unconscious in a TTC shelter on the southwestern corner of Yonge and Dundas, amid the glowing but heatless lights and screens of that neighbourhood's square, later dying.

The man, believed to be in his 50s, was taken to hospital after he was found slumped in a bus shelter at Yonge-Dundas Square.

Police at the scene said the freezing temperatures undoubtedly played a role in the death of the man, who was dressed only in jeans and a T-shirt.

Police say the man was also wearing a hospital bracelet.

He was transported to St. Michael's Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Temperatures reached a low of -14 C overnight with a wind chill around -18 C.

This display of flowers and candles was visible on a seat in that shelter last night.



NOW Toronto notes that as a result of the deaths, the City of Toronto has opened up its warmest shelters for the season.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Claus Vistesen's Alpha Sources considers the arguments for thinking stock markets will continue on their current course.


• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of eight potentially Earth-like worlds by Kepler, as does The Dragon's Gaze.


• Crooked Timber considers the future of social democracy in a world where the middle classes do badly.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at a redesigned American anti-missile interceptor.


• Joe. My. God. notes that same-sex marriage in Vietnam is no longer banned, but it is also not yet recognized.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reacts to reviews of bad restaurants favoured by the ultra-rich.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla provides updates on Japan's Akatsuki Venus probe and China's Chang'e Moon probe.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the immediate impact of political turmoil last year in Crimea on the peninsula's demographics.


• Mark Simpson suggests that straight men want attention from gay men as validation.


• Spacing Toronto reviews The Bohemian Guide to Urban Cycling.


• Torontoist looks at a Taiwanese condo tower that featured on-tower gardening.


• Towleroad and Joe. My. God. both note that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami has told its employees it might fire them if they comment favourable about same-sex marriage.


• Why I Love Toronto really likes downtown restaurant 7 West.


• Window on Eurasia notes turmoil in the Russian intelligence community and a higher density of mosques than churches in the North Caucasus.

[LINK] "California breaks ground on first US bullet train project"

Al Jazeera reports on the inaguration of a high speed rail project in California.

Officials marked the start of work on California’s high-speed rail project, the nation’s first bullet train, which is designed to whisk travelers at 200 mph between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours.

The ceremony in Fresno came amid challenges. Central Valley farmers in the train's path had sued to block it and are contesting that those behind the project have fallen short of responsibilities under a 2013 legal settlement, according to The Fresno Bee.

[. . .]

Dan Richard, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, acknowledges the authority has been slow to buy up most of the land needed for laying track. But he is confident the system will be built, making California a model for high-speed rail across the country.

"The voters are going to get exactly what they asked for," Richard said. "We have never, ever stepped away from that vision, not one inch."

To make way for tracks, some demolition started last year in Fresno. But officials say work this year will be more intensive along the project's first segment — a 28-mile stretch from Fresno north to Madera. A second phase of work will occur along the 114 miles from Fresno south to Bakersfield. Plans call for completing the first 520 miles linking San Francisco and the Los Angeles Basin by 2029.

[LINK] "What Retirement? Singapore Older Workers Stay on the Job"

Rina Chandran's Bloomberg article looking at efforts in Singapore to encourage older workers to stay in the workforce, pressured by rapid aging and hostility to immigration, may provide us with a look at the future of the developed world.

Everyone calls her Auntie Helen. At 69, she’s one of the oldest employees at the food court at Raffles Place in Singapore, where office workers grab sandwiches and bowls of soba noodles in the lunchtime rush.

As she cleans and stacks cutlery, Helen Wong might seem to represent the workforce of the city’s past. For a government grappling with an aging population, rising costs and curbs on immigration, her generation is the future.

“Food, transport, medicine are all more expensive now,” said Wong, who works seven hours a day, five days a week in the canteen-like basement, where diners can choose dishes from more than a dozen different vendors. “If I’m healthy and my body allows it, I’d like to work for as long as I’m able.”

In a culture that traditionally expects children to look after elderly parents, Singapore’s employment rate for those between ages 55 and 64 is now 66 percent, among the highest of the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The government has made it mandatory for companies to offer three more years of work to those turning 62, the official retirement age, and plans to extend that to five years by 2017.

“The earlier mindset that having elderly people working indicates a lack of respect by younger people has changed,” said Theresa Devasahayam, editor of “Gender and Ageing: Southeast Asian Perspectives” and a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. “There are fewer children to take care of the elderly.”

[LINK] "Children Stolen by Chilean Dictatorship Finally Come to Light"

The Inter Press Service's Marianela Jarroud reports on how in Chile, young people today are growing up to discover that they were abducted from their disappeared parents by the Pinochet dictatorship. Argentina, as Jarroud notes, engaged with this at a much earlier date than its neighbour.

The suspicion that babies of people detained and disappeared during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship were stolen is growing stronger in Chile, a country that up to now has not paid much attention to the phenomenon.

“There has always been a suspicion that something similar to what happened in Argentina also occurred in Chile, and that many women who were pregnant when they were detained actually gave birth in detention centres,” a 70-year-old woman who asked to be identified simply as Carmen told IPS.

“No one dug into that issue much back then, because we were afraid, and nobody would have listened to us,” she added.

[. . .].

According to the official investigation, 40,000 people were tortured during the 17-year military dictatorship, and 3,095 of them were killed, 1,000 of whom are still disappeared.

It has been confirmed that at least 10 women were pregnant when they were detained and disappeared. They were between the ages of 26 and 29, and were three to eight months pregnant.

[URBAN NOTE] "‘Crazy Indians Brotherhood’ dole kindness to Winnipeg’s homeless"

CBC reports on an effort at outreach by a First Nations organization in Winnipeg to that city's substantial homeless population.

Winnipeg’s Crazy Indians Brotherhood took to the streets Tuesday to give out food and clothing to the city’s homeless.

The brotherhood was founded in 2004 as a support network for young men with criminal pasts, fresh out of gangs or just getting into trouble.​

“Everybody wakes up with a hungry stomach. Everybody goes to bed with a hungry stomach. We all know that, and we're all just trying to give that back,” said Justin Brown, 29, a member of the brotherhood, which brings together men across Canada to help their communities.

“I had a bad past with thievery and a bunch of other stuff,” said Tyler McKinney, 20. “I was looking for somewhere I belonged, and I could have ended up somewhere far worse — I could have ended up with these street gangs, but I saw the brotherhood … and heard so many good things.”

McKinney and Brown spent Tuesday handing out sandwiches and oranges to the city’s homeless with Keith Proulx, another member of the brotherhood.

[LINK] "This Curiosity Image Suggests Microbial Life Once Existed On Mars"

io9's George Dvorsky reported on the thought-provoking analysis by an American geologist of imagery of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover. One image, she argues, may well preserve in fossilized form the remnants of an ancient Martian marine ecosystem.

Working under the (fairly safe) assumption that Mars once featured extensive and persistent surface water, Old Dominion University geobiologist Nora Noffke examined photos taken by Curiosity as the rover traveled through the Gillespie Lake outcrop in Yellowknife Bay in hopes of finding signs of MISS — microbially-induced sedimentary structures.

These geological layers formed from "microbial mats" and can be found here on Earth in any number of environments, including tidal flats, lagoons, riverine shores, and lakes. Billions of years ago, these highly diverse microscopic communities of bacteria became trapped and were rearranged in shallow bodies of water. Their fossilized remnants are still identifiable today.

Noffke reasoned that if Mars once harbored early-stage microbial life, it probably looked a lot like Earth's early-stage microbial life, and that it would have left behind these tell-tale remnants.

Indeed, the Gillespie Lake outcrop would be a great place to look. It's one of many playas on the Red Planet — a dried up lakebed that was filled with water about 3.7 billion years ago. Noffke took a look at Curiosity's Gillespie photographs hoping to find similarities between similar structures here on Earth, specifically 3.48-billion-year-old MISS that she herself discovered in Western Australia's Dresser Formation. It's considered the oldest ecosystem ever found, and about 300 million years younger than previous finds. She also compared the images to sedimentary features found in Germany, the United States, and other locations in Australia.

In the ensuing study, Noffke shows dramatic similarities between Martian sedimentary structures found in the lakebed to microbial structures found on Earth. These features included geological remnants like cracks, chips, pits, pockets, domes, and roll-ups.

[LINK] "Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris"

If there was a single essay on today's massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo I would recommend to my readers, it is Juan Cole's essay. Al-Qaeda wants the world to react with anti-Muslim hate, the better to find footsoldiers and support. Don't let them win.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.

The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.

[DM] "Houellebecq is as wrong today as he was yesterday"

I write at Demography Matters.