[PHOTO] On losing my telephone landline

Last Friday, it took two phone calls and thirty minutes for me to cancel the landline I had with Bell Canada for the past decade. I had not used the line in months, I even tossed away the old broken telephone at the beginning of this billing cycle, and there was no reason for me not to opt for an Internet-only package with Bell. I have my cell phone on a different provider, and Skype if I want to phone from my apartment. What else do I need?

[LINK] "German Tourists Cool on Greece as ATMs at Risk of Crunch"

Bloomberg's Marcus Bensasson notes one consequence of Greece's ill-planned leap under Syriza: Declining tourist numbers, particularly from Germany.

Greece’s standoff with creditors is threatening the surge in tourism that helped drag the country out of a six-year slump in 2014.

A strong start to the year has tailed off in recent months with potential visitors deterred by the risk of being caught up in a cash crunch. Bookings from Germany were 0.7 percent higher than last year at the end of the first quarter after jumping 12 percent in January, prompting the Greek tourist lobby to consider ditching its forecast for a record number of visitors this year.

“We’re seeing a slowdown in some markets, particularly in Germany,” Andreas Andreadis, president of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises, or SETE, said in a telephone interview last week. “We’ve been losing ground in the last few months, we’re losing momentum, as long as the big picture remains unclear.”

Greece’s economy fell back into recession in the first quarter as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s attempt to win better terms from the country’s creditors squeezed financing and deterred investment. The contraction raises the pressure on Tsipras to reach a deal, while also forcing deeper budget cuts to meet the conditions for aid.

The crisis has left Greece’s banking system hanging on the thread of emergency liquidity support from the European Central Bank, and raised the prospect capital controls may be imposed. Such an outcome could limit the amount of cash that visitors could withdraw from ATM machines.

[LINK] "How Berlin's Muslims Are Tackling Jihad"

Bloomberg's Donna Abu-Nasr looks at the various strategies used by Muslims in Berlin to prevent disaffected young people from going off to join ISIS. Engagement, it seems, is key.

Security services say it’s crucial that imams and Muslim families help combat extremism in a way they can’t, even if that means they are blamed inside their communities for selling out - while at the same time confronted by growing animosity toward Islam in their adopted homelands.

“If I had to learn about Islam from the movies and the media, I would be afraid of myself,” said Mohammed Matar, 25, a university student who attends the Dar Assalam Mosque. “They see over there people claiming to speak for Islam. They see Muslims here and they lump us all together.”

From the bombing of London a decade ago to the slaughter at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, home-grown militants have long been on the radar of security forces. The rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq means it takes more to combat the extremism at its root.
[. . .]

So far more than 650 Germans have traveled to Syria, according to a senior German security official. They’re among an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 European Muslims, many with Arab immigrant backgrounds, who have exchanged life in a stable country for a place where dissenters are killed.

[LINK] "What Is China's Navy Doing in Mediterranean?"

Noah Feldman of Bloomberg View notes the geopolitical and economic rationale behind China's naval exercises in the Mediterranean.

[T]he Chinese-Russian exercises also look like a symbolic response to U.S. efforts to strengthen security relationships with China’s Asian neighbors. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to Washington is a case in point. Abe has begun a genuine discussion within Japan about whether to amend the pacifist constitution, transforming the country’s self-defense force into something more like a standard military.

The impetus for this change is China’s increasing security threat to its Asian neighbors -- and a nagging uncertainty on the part of Japanese about whether the U.S. would go to war to defend Japan in a pinch. Abe’s visit is part of an attempt by the Barack Obama administration to reassure the Japanese, but also to implicitly to lend credibility to Abe’s defense initiatives.

[. . .]

Yet this geopolitical angle doesn’t necessarily explain why the Mediterranean. Naval exercises almost anywhere could’ve expressed the same thing, perhaps even more strongly, because China’s naval assets in the Mediterranean aren’t particularly significant.

The better explanation for why the Mediterranean is much more local. China has twice in recent years had to send its ships to rescue and evacuate significant numbers of Chinese workers who fell into danger as a result of regional instability. The first time was in Libya, where 35,800 Chinese workers had to be evacuated after the 2011 uprising and subsequent bombing campaign to bring down Muammar Qaddafi. The second time was in late March and early April, when Chinese ships helped offload several hundred Chinese workers from Yemen as the situation there further deteriorated and Saudi airstrikes escalated.

These episodes brought home China’s evolving role in the Middle East and North Africa. So far, Chinese policy makers have shown no interest in inheriting the traditional U.S. role of maintaining hegemony in the Middle East to create stability and facilitate the flow of oil. However, China has to some degree included the Middle East in its strategy of building infrastructure projects in less-developed countries and establishing substantial settlements of Chinese workers there.

[LINK] "The Blue Amazon, Brazil’s New Natural Resources Frontier"

The Inter Press Service's Fabiola Ortiz has a nice overview of Brazil's growing interest in the resources in the exclusive economic zone off the Brazilian coast, on its continental shelf and beyond.

The Atlantic ocean is Brazil’s last frontier to the east. But the full extent of its biodiversity is still unknown, and scientific research and conservation measures are lagging compared to the pace of exploitation of resources such as oil.

The Blue Amazon, as Brazil’s authorities have begun to call this marine area rich in both biodiversity and energy resources, is similar in extension to the country’s rainforest – nearly half the size of the national territory.

And 95 percent of the exports of Latin America’s giant leave from that coast, according to official figures.

Brazil’s continental shelf holds 90 and 77 percent of the country’s proven oil and gas reserves, respectively. But the big challenge is to protect the wealth of the Blue Amazon along 8,500 km of shoreline.

“We haven’t fully grasped just how immense that territory is,” Eurico de Lima Figueiredo, the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the Fluminense Federal University, told Tierramérica. “To give you an idea, the Blue Amazon is comparable in size to India.”

“But we aren’t prepared to take care of it; it isn’t yet considered a political and economic priority for the country,” the political scientist said.

[LINK] "Kamchatka, Home to Russian Version of Alaska’s Iditarod, Frets Over Growth"

Neil MacFarqhar in

The New York Times took an intruiging look at Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, positioning the remote territory as being on the verge of being the next Alaska.

When Vladislav Revenok, an Orthodox priest, first participated in the obscure Russian version of Alaska’s Iditarod, he found himself in places so isolated that he was mobbed by villagers demanding to be baptized. They told him he was the first priest to visit the outback of the already remote Kamchatka Peninsula in about 50 years.

“Only a few small villages see us,” Mr. Revenok, a veteran musher, said by telephone after finishing the arduous 17-day race in late March. “When I arrive at the finish line and see all those people waiting — journalists, the crowd, so many cars — I feel like I am arriving back on a different planet.”

Kamchatka’s very isolation once afforded a measure of protection for its astounding beauty: a crown of 300 volcanoes, including around 25 that are still active; a central valley of erupting geysers; rivers so red and so thick with spawning salmon that walking on water seems distinctly possible; oceans inhabited by crabs the size of turkeys.

Even many locals do not know the peninsula that well. About 80 percent of the population lives in three southern cities. But isolation no longer provides the same insurance. Kamchatka is caught between ambitious plans to develop untapped resources like gold and oil, and efforts to preserve its natural splendor.

Oil exploration has started in the Sea of Okhotsk, which separates the peninsula from mainland Russia, and the first natural gas wells now operate onshore. Two gold mines are already working, and 10 more are in the planning stages.

Local officials want Petropavlovsk to become the main transit harbor for hulking container ships that can deflect ice as they ply the Arctic route between China and Europe. In addition, the government is trying to raise the number of tourists to 300,000 from 40,000 annually.

[LINK] "How Syrians Saved an Ancient Seedbank From Civil War"

Lizzie Wade of Wired shared this encouraging story from Syria.

When civil war erupted in Syria, Ahmed Amri immediately thought about seeds.

Specifically, 141,000 packets of them sitting in cold storage 19 miles south of Aleppo. They included ancient varieties of wheat and durum dating back nearly to the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and one of the world’s largest collections of lentil, barley, and faba bean varieties—crops that feed millions of people worldwide every day. If these seeds were decimated, humanity could lose precious genetic resources developed over hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years. And suddenly, with the outbreak of violence, their destruction seemed imminent.

[Ahmed] Amri is the director of genetic resources at the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), one of 11 international genebanks charged with conserving the world’s most vital crops and their wild relatives. Each center has a speciality—you’ll find the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, for example, while the International Potato Center is based in Peru—and this one focuses on preserving and protecting crops from arid regions, mostly in developing countries. The Center’s crown jewel is its genebank, where its samples are identified and stored for future use, either by the center’s scientific staff or plant breeders around the world.

[. . .]

At the beginning of Syria’s civil war, the fighting was concentrated in the south, far from the Center’s headquarters in the north. But Amri knew it wouldn’t take guns or bombs to destroy the genebank. All it would take was a power outrage that knocked out the facility’s air conditioning. The seeds, preserved in cold rooms for decades, would warm quickly and become unusable. The bank had backup generators, but how long would they last? What if it became impossible to buy fuel? What if the generators were stolen, or commandeered by soldiers?

Luckily, the Center had been preparing for its own destruction since day one. It already had sent emergency backups of about 87 percent of its collection to genebanks in other countries. Even under the best political conditions, “you worry about fire, you worry about earthquakes,” the Center’s director general Mahmoud Solh says in this video interview. Creating emergency backups is standard practice for international genebanks, from Mexico to Nigeria.

But that left 13 percent of the Syrian collection—more than 20,000 samples—that hadn’t been backed up. As soon as the fighting started in the spring of 2011, the genebank’s staff switched gears from collecting and distributing seed samples to devising a rescue plan. People there became very familiar with northern Syria’s back roads as they drove the seeds out of the country.

[URBAN NOTE] "Early 19th-century schooner discovered in condo development site"

The Toronto Star's Alyshah Hasham wrote about the discovery of a schooner nearly two centuries old near Fort York in a condo development site.

It is the oldest ship ever discovered in Toronto, an early 19th-century schooner found this week by archeologists doing a routine exploration of the site for a condo development near Fort York Blvd. and Bathurst St.

It the ship’s day, everything south of Front St. would have been underwater, with several wharves jutting into the lake, the largest of which was the Queen’s Wharf, a major commercial hub built in 1833.

“We suspect this ship was scuttled deliberately to provide a scaffold for the workers building the wharf,” said David Robertson, senior archeologist at Archeological Services Inc.

The archeological dig began in early March with the intent of documenting the wharves built there in the early 1800s, Robertson said. On Monday, they discovered the wooden skeleton of the schooner.

Only a small portion of the ship remains: the ship’s keel, or spine — which runs about 15 metres from bow to stern — and a portion of the hull.

Patty Winsa wrote earlier this week about how the site was and will be preserrfved.

[URBAN NOTE] "Your Misplaced New York Nostalgia Will Get You Nowhere"

At the end of March, Vice hosted an essay by one Zachary Lopez talking about how cities change. The New York City of now is going to be removed--transformed, priced out, whatever--and that is perfectly normal.

Someday, somewhere, in the not so distant future, on a social media forum not so foreign from the ones we know, someone is typing "RIP NYC." Someone is typing, probably in all caps, "I can't believe Darkroom/Motor City/St. Jeromes/that crepe place on Ludlow is gone! I did something there, once! RIP NYC!"

I understand this sentiment, mostly. My capacity for nostalgia is the same as yours, which is to say it colors how I perceive every little thing. Before basic human empathy and the occasionally (very) correct online scolds kicked in, I myself felt a cold fear that B&H Dairy might disappear in last week's Second Avenue disaster and with it my favorite square footage in New York City. Even if the wanting seems trivial in the light of actual suffering, it is not unreasonable to want everything to stay right where it always was.

You know, in your hearts and heads if not your status updates, that the world erodes. Even Chinatown will someday be replaced by one enormous Thai restaurant. I will go there, and I will tell my grandchildren that I did lines of cocaine where the peanuts on their papaya salad sit. My corpulent grandchildren will listen, the fat in their ears expanding. I am old and angry and can't be expected to remember that, by this point, everybody is allergic to peanuts. Probably the only thing they won't be allergic to is cocaine. Social mores change. I hope I won't bore them.

I remember the blackout of 2003, the big fun inconvenience of the early aughts, the great liberation from having to pretend that cops and firemen were our friends, whatever name history will settle on, maybe just "Goodbye to All That Ice Cream." I was talking to a long-past friend on a landline—he'd gone from a Robitussin problem to an American military problem to a God problem so I was relieved as hell when the phone went dead and not all that nonplussed to see that the relief had spread, all those problems avoided, on a citywide scale. Good for us! I remember how all the punks and the gays at Mars Bar were feverishly working together on their rapidly dying phones to find that last working coke dealer in Manhattan and huzzah, they found him and he had bags of special blackout paste for sale and well, whatever, if you closed your nostril long enough something happened for sure, so here's to unity. I remember helping hide Dash Snow behind the bar when the cops came. And then I remember how a friend and I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge together at 3 AM, no one around, no lights but those of the theretofore estranged sky, and it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

To live in the city is to be displaced by the city, to rage against market forces, to be sure that things were irretrievably better in the impossible-to-pin-down-to-a-specific-date "then."