[PHOTO] Coffee before the rain

I stopped in the Same James Coffee Bar's pocket shop on Bloor West by Christie Monday, just as the rain began to pour down from the sky. My drink was fortifying.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomy shares a new photo of the area of the Vela supernova.


• blogTO notes Toronto has only one more month in which it can lodge its 2024 Olympics bid.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the apparent discovery of an exoplanet orbiting Canopus.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is against Heinz.
  
• Discover's Seriously Science notes Internet search engine rankings can swing elections.


• Towleroad continues reporting over the Stonewall controversy.


• Window on Eurasia speculates as to reasons for Putin's escalation of fighting in Ukraine.

[LINK] "United Church votes to sell off its fossil fuel assets"

CBC reports on the decision of the United Church of Canada.

The United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant denomination, has voted to sell its fossil fuel assets and commit financially to funding an economy based on renewable energy.

The United Church General Council, which is meeting in Corner Brook, N.L., voted 67 per cent in favour of the move on Tuesday.

"Given the lack of political and industrial leadership to address climate concerns in a way that matches the scale of the problem, we wanted to signal that we are so serious about averting climate crisis that we are willing to put our money where our mouth is," said Christine Boyle, general council commissioner and a longtime climate advocate.

The move will mean selling off about $5.9 million in holdings, or 4.7 per cent of the United Church of Canada treasury.

[LINK] Bloomberg on the Venezuela-Guyana border dispute

Bloomberg's Andrew Rosati describes how Venezuela's claim to most of Guyana has been energized by the discovery of offshore oil, and perhaps also by Venezuela's economic issues.

For generations, Venezuela has formally laid claim to most of its tiny neighbor, Guyana. Many dismissed the case, given Venezuela’s oil wealth and Guyana’s penury. Hugo Chavez, longstanding president of Venezuela, even let it slide, referring to the Guyanese as his brothers.

Then in May, Exxon Mobil Corp. revealed that under contract from Guyana it had found massive offshore oil and gas deposits. Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, demanded that the drilling stop because the area was Venezuela’s. He dismissed Guyana’s president as a tool of Big Oil, declared his statements “nauseating” and Guyana’s actions likely to “bring war to our border.” He withdrew his ambassador, and Guyana announced the end to a long-time rice-for-oil deal.

For Guyana -- which produces no oil and whose 800,000 inhabitants live with unpaved flooded roads and power outages -- the estimated offshore find of 700 million barrels promises a revolution, a shift from negligible food exporter to global energy dealer. The combined oil and natural-gas deposits appear to be worth $40 billion, at least 10 times the country’s gross domestic product.

“We’ve gone through suffering for many decades and our time is due,” Raphael Trotman, minister of governance, said in an interview in his office on an unassuming road in the capital, Georgetown. The discovery is “transformational,” he said. “For us, there is no going back.”

[LINK] "For Burundians, Tanzania's refugee camps offer a better life"

Al Jazeera America's Tom A. Peter reports on the movement of Burundian refugees into Tanzania, a movement that might be more durable than many might wish.

When Niyonzima Peruz fled mounting violence in her home country of Burundi in 1996, she guessed it might be decades before she could return.

“There was no peace in Burundi,” she says. “We left everything.”

Nineteen years later, her prediction isn’t so far off. Although she returned to Burundi in 2004, she spent most of her time there wishing she could go back to the refugee camp in neighboring Tanzania, where she had regular work and made a home. This past April unrest reared up once more and by May, Peruz found herself again in a Tanzanian refugee camp. Now she has no intention of ever returning to Burundi, even if that means spending the rest of her life in a refugee camp.

By the time Peruz first arrived in Tanzania, Burundi had seen consistent turmoil since gaining independence in 1962. In 1993, deep-rooted tensions between Burundi’s Hutu and Tutsi tribes boiled over and eventually pushed her out of the country. With no foreseeable end to her nation’s troubles, Peruz, like most other refugees, put down roots in Tanzania’s Mtabila refugee camp. In the years that followed, she married and had two children. Throughout the camp, tents were gradually replaced with mud-brick homes with thatched roofs.

[LINK] "Dying California forests offer a glimpse into climate change"

CBC News' Kim Brunhuber reports from California's forest, beset by a drought that might well make its way up north.

Normally, only about two per cent of the trees in their study areas [in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks] die. But this year, that number has grown to 13 per cent.

"That's a really severe uptick," says U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Nate Stephenson. "We've never seen anything like it before."

Stevenson bends the branch of an incense cedar. Most branches are covered with dry, dead orange needles. The rest are bare.

"I used to call them 'the immortals,' because they just never seemed to die," he says. "In the fourth year of drought, they've started dying by the bucket-loads. So they're no longer the immortals."

Stevenson has surveyed some of the oldest, richest forests in the U.S. and British Columbia. Compared to just a few decades ago, he found that the trees' death rate has doubled from one to two percent. It may not sound like a lot, he says, but he says imagine if you were talking about your hometown.

[LINK] "Mulcair seen as skilled as Harper on the economy, poll shows"

The Toronto Star's Donovan Vincent reports on the increasing credibility of the NDP among voters.

Voters believe NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is as skilled at managing the economy as Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, and the NDP continues to hold a healthy lead in public support, a new poll by Forum Research finds.

The public opinion survey conducted after last week’s leaders debate found Harper and Mulcair in a statistical tie (30 per cent to 29 per cent respectively) when respondents were asked “which of the three main party leaders would handle the economy best?”

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was in third place with 26 per cent of voters saying he’d best handle the economy.

The results are significant because the general perception among the public has typically been that Harper and the Conservatives have a leg up when it comes to overseeing Canada’s economy, says Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff.

“That’s supposed to be the cornerstone of the Tory campaign, the economy, with a lot of their attention focused on balancing the budget. But there’s been an undercurrent of contrary news lately that the economy is not doing fabulously,’’ Bozinoff said in an interview Wednesday.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rouge National Urban Park Stalled"

Torontoist's Kat Eschner writes about the jurisdictional issues hindering an enlargement of Rouge National Urban Park, on the eastern frontier of Toronto.

Kathleen Wynne isn’t the only Ontario politician critical of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s environmental record. Liberal cabinet minister Brad Duguid says the Conservatives are failing Torontonians on an issue close to home, and it could jeopardize what was supposed to be a crown jewel in northeastern Toronto.

On his last visit, the prime minister told Toronto the government was expanding plans for the country’s first urban national park, located in northeast Scarborough. But Duguid, MPP for Scarborough Centre, told Torontoist that the provincial government isn’t currently willing to move forward with the planned park.

Harper announced that the Government of Canada will contribute an additional 21 square kilometres of land to Rouge National Urban Park, which increases the size of the park by approximately one third. But that’s only if the provincial and federal governments can sort a dispute over environmental protections, and the park ever gets built.

Although the federal government is donating new land, the province said this spring that it isn’t willing to hand over any parkland until an agreement on environmental protections is reached.

[LINK] Two links on the Nigel Wright testimony at the Mike Duffy trial

I've been sitting back and watching the testimony given by Nigel Wright. I'm still not in a position to come to any conclusions, but I would point to the summaries of the CBC and the Toronto Star as starting points.

What do you think will come of this?

[REVIEW] Ed Wright, A Left-Handed History of the World

I have been waiting for International Lefthanders Day just for the chance to review this one book.

I belong to a minority group, one that has long been unfairly subjected to prejudice on the basis of our shared innate difference and that has only recently been freed from this prejudice. I speak, of course, of left-handers, amounting to between 7 and 10% of the human population. There's nothing sinister about being left-handed, I've joked, yet for millennia there has been much prejudice, much hindrance. Were I born a generation earlier, I might have gotten off lightly by being forced to write with my right hand. Researches on handedness don't reveal any outstanding reason for this prejudice: Perhaps left-handers in the aggregate exhibit greater aptitudes for language or math or spatial relations, certainly left-handers are more likely than right-handers to be non-heterosexual, but nothing outstanding appears to justify this prejudice. Only a patchwork of biographies to testifies to the past.

Australian writer Ed Wright's 2007 A Left-Handed History of the World (Pier 9) deals successfully enough with this gap, assembling short biographies of prominent left-handers through history from Ramses the Great to the current crop of American presidents. (Barack Obama, I was pleased to learn, is one of my kind.) The left-handed content of I>A Left-Handed History of the World comes with the sidebars to the individual biographies, exploring the extent to which traits associated with left-handed people manifested in the lives of individuals profiles. We are, apparently, great conquerors, and experimenters, and good at seeing the world in new ways.

This was a fun book, all said. Recommended.

(See also this note from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.)