[... Lola] LeLievre fears [... r]ug hooking in Cheticamp is an endangered skill.
“It’s dying, and it’s dying really fast,” she told me last summer.
She estimates that 20 years ago, there were about 100 hookers in Cheticamp. Now, there are about 30, and most are in their 70s, 80s or 90s.
LeLievre explains that rug hooking in Cheticamp was once an industry; residents, including LeLievre and her mother, hooked rugs to obtain money for the bare essentials.
“But for the children and anybody that’s taking it up now, they don’t need that money to survive,” she said. “They won’t work that long for that little bit of money. It’ll never happen again.”
[A]n uglier truth is that Greece is in a real a mess and even debt restructuring will not be enough to get its economy going again. Aside from facing a severe competitiveness problem and mass unemployment, its pension system is on the brink of collapse.
In addition, Greece is a country with a uniquely rapidly ageing population while many of its best and brightest young people are leaving.
The country also needs to undertake deep reforms in its public sector institutions whether it stays in the euro or returns to a national currency.
These are issues and problems which any government would have to face regardless of its ideological orientation, and surely will not be solved on account of Sunday's referendum.
“People are spending the money they have in the bank because otherwise they’re afraid they won’t get it out,” said Natasa, 33, a shop assistant at electronics retailer Plaisio Computer SA in central Athens. She asked not to be identified by her full name. “A Mac is something that keeps its value,” she added, pointing to a gleaming 27-inch screen.
It’s the latest chapter in five long years of crisis for Greeks as their government resists calls from creditors for more austerity in return for rescue money.
Greeks have pulled about 40 billion euros ($44 billion (U.S.)) from banks since December, when it became clear elections would be held and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, was set to take power.
Daily withdrawals at cash machines have been limited to 60 euros since June 29, while credit and debit cards payments weren’t restricted. A shopping spree took place in the run-up to Sunday’s referendum, in which Greeks rejected more austerity, Antonis Zairis, vice-president of the Hellenic Retail Business Association, said in an interview.
“It was a short-term phenomenon caused by panic and threats,” he said, adding that he expects shortages on shelves in the next 10 days.
The NDP is seen as the party that offers the best-defined alternative to the Conservative government before an election in which Canadians will be asked to choose between political stability and renewal, a Globe and Mail/Nanos Research poll has found.
Fifty-two per cent of respondents said the NDP “represents the clearest change from the current Stephen Harper government.” The Liberal Party was far behind at 19 per cent, with the Green Party at 10 per cent.
[. . .]
Both the New Democrats and the Liberal Party are positioning themselves as agents of change after 10 years of Conservative rule, but the findings suggest the Liberals have failed to differentiate themselves clearly from the Harper government to this point.
The poll also shows the NDP is nearly tied with the Liberal Party on economic issues. Asked to name the opposition party that they “trust most on matters related to the Canadian economy,” 30 per cent of respondents named the Liberal Party, and 27 per cent opted for the NDP. (Thirty per cent said none of the opposition parties had earned their trust on economic issues.)
Confirming that Canada is headed for a three-way contest, the poll found a tight race to be the party with the “most appealing” policy platform. The NDP came in first at 28 per cent, followed by the Conservatives at 27 per cent and the Liberals at 25 per cent.
In 1852, civil engineer John G. Howard drew a colour map of his plan for the Toronto waterfront. The sketch showed a park stretching from Bathurst to York Sts., awash in green and webbed with footpaths. In his very Victorian way, Howard imagined “Pleasure Drives, Walks and Shrubbery for the Recreation of the Citizens.”
Unveiled last Friday, the renovated Queens Quay recaptures some of Howard’s concept. If it isn’t quite a consummation of his dream waterfront — less shrubbery, for one thing — it’s certainly an approximation of it.
[. . .]
That it took more than 150 years to build a central waterfront “for the recreation of the citizens” is testament to the ambiguity of purpose that has dogged the shoreline for generations. Long pulled between competing jurisdictions and priorities — now a patch of wharves and factories, now a route for city highways, now a federally run tourist draw — the area bordering the lake has struggled to find an identity.
Those tensions have been given new life this summer, amid the fight over the eastern Gardiner, the Queens Quay reopening, and last week’s vote by city council’s executive committee to continue supporting Waterfront Toronto — but commission a value-for-money audit.
At stake is the future of the lakefront, which advocates say is crucial to staying competitive in the 21st century, particularly in attracting skilled workers. Broadly speaking, should the lakeshore be more like a back alley or a cottage dock? Cheap and functional, and mostly used for transportation? Or leafy and leisurely — a place to hang out on a summer’s day?
Things like forest fires, and the smoke they generate. For Vancouverites, forest fires are something that happen someplace else — in the interior of the province, or its north. But present wind patterns have been pushing smoke from three large fires on the Sunshine Coast and Sea-to-Sky area into the metropolitan region, creating a situation where the air quality is abysmal — the elderly, young, and people with respiratory problems are being urged to stay indoors — and the overriding vibe around town is downright apocalyptic.
Emily Murgatroyd is an executive recruiter. She woke up Sunday morning in Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was hot, and sunny, but within 15 minutes of rolling back toward the ferry terminal in Nanaimo and Vancouver beyond, the atmosphere had shifted. The haze appeared. The sun bled orange. At the ferry docks it started raining ash, fine white particles that blanketed cars, seeping through windows.
Murgatroyd smelled her three-year old’s hair, as moms do. It smelled of smoke. Now back in Vancouver she describes the atmosphere as an “uneasy calm,” an otherworldly stillness — like that fleeting moment before the clouds split open and a thunderstorm strikes. But the moment in Vancouver is not fleeting. It just goes on, and on. The skies aren’t splitting open. They are drowning in smoke. People are waiting, but for what?
“It is spooky,” Murgatroyd says. “Because no one is used to this, and no one can remember something like this happening before. We have a fire season in B.C., obviously, but it happens in other places, not at your doorstep.
“It is like the zombie apocalypse. The sun looks like another planet. It makes you think about the end of time.”
The idea of a planetary system around Kapteyn’s Star, real or not, is an interesting tale of exoplanet science. The original discovery was made using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary research (HARP) instrument at the European Southern Observatory, with supporting observations from the Las Campanas and Keck Observatory. You’d think that would make the discoveries pretty air-tight. The planets discovered orbiting Kapteyn’s Star were discerned using the radial velocity method, looking at the spectra of the star for the characteristic tugging of an unseen companion.
Recent research led by Paul Robertson of Pennsylvania State University suggests that the signal for the discovery of Kapteyn B may in fact be the result of stellar activity. Starspots—think sunspots on our own host star—can mimic the spectral signal of an unseen planet. Analyzing the HARPS data, we know that Kapteyn’s Star rotates once every 143 days. Kapteyn-b’s orbit of 48 days is very close to an integer fraction (143/48= 2.979) making it extremely suspicious.
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