[PHOTO] Pictures from the Toronto Islands, Labour Day

I spent most of Labour Day doing the Toronto Islands, walking from east (Ward's) to west (Hanlan's).





The Port of Toronto stretches out to the east of Toronto Harbour.



The Ward's Island ferry dock seemed somehow cheerful.



On the beach just to the east of the ferry dock, the skyline of downtown Toronto was visible.



The Ward's Island residential community always makes for a charming, green stroll.





The Ward's Island beach was heavily populated, people onshore and boats offshore.





The marina on the north shore of Centre Island, facing Toronto across the harbour, is well-located.







The shallower waters on the northern shore of the Islands, protected from Lake Ontario, are rich with life.



The Center Island beach was busy.





The Gibraltar Point beach was beautiful.



The Gibraltar Point lighthouse is photogenic.



Approaching the Hanlan's Point dock from the south, CN Tower and the skyline of Toronto west of the downtown rise.

[LINK] "For the love of god — or safety — Muslim refugees converting to Christianity in Berlin"

The Toronto Star shared Kirsten Grieshaber's Associated Press report

Mohammed Ali Zonoobi bends his head as the priest pours holy water over his black hair. “Will you break away from Satan and his evil deeds?” pastor Gottfried Martens asks the Iranian refugee. “Will you break away from Islam?”

“Yes,” Zonoobi fervently replies. Spreading his hands in blessing, Martens then baptizes the man “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

Mohammed is now Martin — no longer Muslim, but Christian.

Zonoobi, a carpenter from the Iranian city of Shiraz, arrived in Germany with his wife and two children five months ago. He is one of hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers who have converted to Christianity at the evangelical Trinity Church in a leafy Berlin neighbourhood.

Like Zonoobi, most say true belief prompted their embrace of Christianity. But there’s no overlooking the fact that the decision will also greatly boost their chances of winning asylum by allowing them to claim they would face persecution if sent home.

[LINK] "Proposed mosque in Detroit suburb draws sharp opposition"

Al Jazeera America's Steve Friess reports on conflict between Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims in the Detroit area on the location of a mosque in a Christian neighbourhood, a conflict rooted in past conflicts.

The nation’s largest concentration of Iraqi Christians, many driven from their homeland by persecution at the hands of Muslim groups, is mounting an intensive campaign to block a proposed mosque in Sterling Heights, Michigan — sometimes by deploying public anti-Islam invective unusual in its bluntness even in this post-9/11 era.

The 20,500-square-foot mosque, to be built on four acres by the American Islamic Community Center (AICC), is to stand 60 feet tall along a major thoroughfare in a middle-class neighborhood if the Sterling Heights Planning Commission approves the plan at its meeting this Thursday. Opponents have dubbed it a “mega-mosque,” while Muslim leaders say it is of average size for houses of worship, including some nearby churches.

American leaders of the Chaldeans, an ancient Christian sect also known historically as ethnic Assyrians and originating from Iraq, have insisted in recent days that their opposition is based on concerns about traffic and property values, not religious enmity.

Yet a parade of speakers at a four-hour Sterling Heights City Council meeting on Aug. 13 offered vicious accusations that the group behind the mosque planned to use it to plot terrorist attacks and store weaponry, and attacked women who wear headscarves as scary to children. More of that sort of ire is being spewed on popular Chaldean group pages on Facebook and in signage and comments to local reporters at recent street-side protests near the proposed mosque site.

“This mosque is going to bring people like this. I do not want to be near people like this,” one resident, Saad Antoun, said at the City Council meeting as he held up a photo of women in burkas. “This is not humanity. … It is not right to live with people like this. This is not acceptable at all because these people are scaring the public. And they don’t care. … Can we prohibit this kind of public thing? We see them at the mall every day. We see them at shopping. Can we prohibit this? Can we make law against this? It’s scary and disgusting.”

[LINK] "EU law puts a dent in Scandinavian labor organizing"

Al Jazeera America's Ned Resnikoff reports on the tension between the EU institution of posted workers--workers sent from one, low-wage, country to work in a high-wage country at the wages of the native countries--and the Nordic welfare state.

“The question is under what circumstances the services offered by a Latvian, Polish or German firm should be sold in Denmark and Sweden,” Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Al Jazeera. “There’s an ongoing struggle over whether they should be able to offer those services paying Polish or Latvian wages."

The struggle concerns a particular category of workers, defined as “posted workers” under EU law. A posted worker is “sent by his employer on a temporary basis to carry out his work in another Member State” according to a fact sheet on the European Commission website.

Under the Posting of Workers Directive, approved by the European Parliament in 1996, workers who are posted to a particular member state get to enjoy that state’s labor protections. A Polish worker posted to Denmark must be paid Denmark’s minimum wage or more.

The problem is that Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage, at least not legally speaking — nor does Sweden. (Norway, the third of three Scandinavian countries also does not have a legal minimum wage but it is not a member of the European Union.)

Instead of legislating their minimum wages, the Scandinavian countries have their unions bargain for them. Sweden and Denmark may not have minimum wage laws, but they do have effective wage minimums, defined by the collective bargaining agreements their unions negotiate.

[URBAN NOTE] Politico on the anti-Greek pogroms in Istanbul of 1955

Aykan Erdemir reports.

A belated commemoration — 60 years late, in fact — was held on September 6 at Istanbul’s Panagia Greek Orthodox Church. It was in memory of the victims of the 1955 pogrom targeting the Polites, short for Konstantinoupolites, namely the Greeks of Istanbul.

This was the first divine liturgy-cum-memorial service ever to remember what’s known in Turkey as “the events of September 6 and 7.” In what some refer to as the “Kristallnacht in Constantinople,” 71 churches, 41 schools, eight newspapers, more than 4,000 stores and 2,000 residences were looted or destroyed overnight. The human toll and suffering were even more catastrophic, with more than 30 dead, 300 injured and 400 raped. As one Greek Orthodox community leader recently argued, the greatest damage of the pogrom was to the ideal of equal citizenship in Turkey, not only for the Polites but also for the country’s other non-Muslim minorities.

The 1955 pogrom was not a clash of civilizations pitting Muslims against Christians. On the contrary, amid rising Turkish-Greek tension over the future status of the then British colony of Cyprus, the riots were carefully planned by the Turkish government to cleanse Istanbul of the approximately 100,000 Polites, who were excluded from the Turkish-Greek population exchange of 1923-24. Chauvinist thugs, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, happen to be an imperfect tool for social engineering. As one assailant told a Greek Orthodox victim of the 1955 pogrom, the thugs had permission “not to kill but only to break things.” By the time martial law and curfew were declared in Istanbul the next day, however, the death toll exceeded 30. Of the stores looted by the out-of-control mobs, only 59 percent belonged to the targeted Polites, with the remaining establishments belonging to the Armenians and Jews.

[URBAN NOTE] "Athletes are gone, now it’s time to get village ready for residents"

The Canadian Press' Paola Loriggio describes in the Toronto Star the birth of a new neighbourhood.

Competitors in the summer’s Pan Am and Parapan Am Games left the athletes village weeks ago, but it will be months before residents of the new downtown Toronto neighbourhood can move in.

Pan Am crews are still tearing down temporary structures and removing 220,000 pieces of furniture and fixtures from the complex, which will then be turned over to Infrastructure Ontario and developer Dundee Kilmer at the end of the month.

A spokeswoman for the Crown corporation says the units must then be converted into the condos, affordable housing units, commercial spaces and dorm rooms that make up the mixed-use development.

Mandy Downes says only basic units were prepared for the athletes, with temporary walls serving as partitions to allow more people to stay in each unit.

She says some spaces — such as the future YMCA facility and the George Brown College residences — may need less work.

[URBAN NOTE] "Opening New City Hall"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn describes the scene on the 13th of September, 1965, as the new City Hall was opened.

When the new City Hall opened on September 13, 1965, that afternoon’s Toronto Star editorial echoed many initial thoughts about our new $31 million landmark:

Suddenly today every Torontonian is ten feet high. For the new City Hall is his. He is part of its greatness and shares its beauty. There in its mass and grace is his visible assurance that he is a citizen of no mean city. The building in Nathan Phillips Square is more than an impressive and proud architectural statement of civic status. It gives the metropolis a focus. It is the heart of Toronto’s future. It is the symbol of the new Toronto and we can rejoice in what it means.

Seven years after Viljo Revell’s design was chosen in an open competition, four years after ground had broken, the controversial structure buzzed with activity while preparing for its debut. Forty-two workmen moved furniture, including the mayor’s desk, across Bay Street via overnight dolly runs. Shelves were filled at the new library branch. Workmen scrambled to finish installing desks and rugs, catching up after an eight-week carpenters’ strike. Metro Toronto’s coat of arms for the council chamber arrived late. Officials decided that the first two floors of the podium, the council chamber, and the basement cafeteria were the only areas ready for public scrutiny.

A military band from Petawawa launched the festivities at 1:30 p.m., which drew a crowd of 15,000. The civic guard of honour escorted city councillors and suburban mayors and reeves from old City Hall to the platform in front of the new building. At 2:15, a 100-member honour guard drawn from five regiments marched into the square. Accompanied by the first of several RCAF flyovers, Governor-General Georges Vanier’s motorcade arrived on time. He was followed by the Finnish ambassador to Canada, Torstein Tikanvaara, Prime Minister Lester Pearson, and Ontario Premier John Robarts.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why the Tories’ mean-spirited refugee policy has awoken urban Canada"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc describes yet another failure of the Conservative government, just short of a month away from the elections.

Like many Canadians, I was riveted to the point of distraction by the extremely disturbing events of last week, and the way the developments in Europe’s refugee crisis reverberated in this city, and in other big cities across the country.

But beyond the emotion of that terrible image of a young boy washed up on beach, the accounts of the chaos in Budapest, and the Canadian government’s tin-ear response to the same, something else gnawed at me relentlessly, almost like a trigger. And on Saturday, as the migrants who’d been treated so wretchedly in Budapest finally reached the safety and open arms of officials in Austria and Germany, the source of the aggravation hit me:

That as the events of the past week unfolded, Canada, in a peculiar way, suddenly found itself on the same ethical plane as Hungary — a self-involved country with an odious government and a rich history of treacherous xenophobia.

True, we haven’t forced weary families off trains. But in the worst humanitarian crisis in decades, it suddenly became crystal clear that we hadn’t done much better than the Hungarians, and that grim fact sunk in powerfully last week.

We caught the image of Harper’s Canada in the mirror, and we didn’t like what we saw there.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes Uber competition could mean lower taxi rates.


• Centauri Dreams notes the New Horizons data is starting to come in.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to some papers suggesting that the solar system is not exceptional.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the linkage between Enceladus' surface features and its geysers.


• Far Outliers' Joel writes about efforts to convert Japanese in Hawai'i.


• Language Hat links to an article on endangered languages.


• Languages of the World reports on the complexities of describing the history of the Slavic laqnguages.


• Marginal Revolution reports on the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora of Haiti.


• Out of Orbit's Diane Duane announces a new Young Wizards novella.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the exceptional size of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.


• Spacing Toronto describes the complexity of education in inner-city Toronto.


• Transit Toronto notes the repairs at Dupont Station.


• Window on Eurasia notes the scale of the Russian HIV/AIDS epidemic.

[LINK] "Amid US-Russia chill, Natives struggle to connect across Maritime border"

Al Jazeera America's Ryan Schuessler notes how the Aleuts of the Bering Strait area, who in the two decades after the end of the Cold War began to restore their ties, are now facing division as Russian-American relations deteriorate.

Patricia Lekanoff-Gregory remembers when a delegation of American Unangax flew to Russia’s Komandorski Islands to meet their kin in the early 1990s.

Lekanoff-Gregory’s father made the journey to Russia as the global euphoria at the end of the Cold War reached far north, into the Bering Sea. She said her father, who is elderly and asked her to speak for him, said the Russian and American Unangax were sitting on either side of a room, staring at each other in silence, told to wait for the official interpreters to arrive. But they couldn’t wait. Soon enough, the two groups were shouting words in their native language to each other. “Seal.” “Table.” Hugs. Tears. The two communities had not met in decades.

Lekanoff-Gregory has traveled to the Komandorski Islands five times since her father’s journey. She’s hoping to go again in the coming months to help teach Russian Unangax traditional hat making.

“They’re just finding out they’re Native again,” she said of the Russian Unangax, citing the cultural damage from the oppression they faced during the Soviet era. “But money is harder to get, and it’s getting more expensive [to go there] now.”

While some other Native communities that straddle the Russia-U.S. border have protections that allow for direct visa-free travel between the countries, no such arrangement exists for the Unangax. The efforts to reconnect Unangax communities across the border in the remote North Pacific remain at the mercy of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Washington, and locals say it’s getting harder to keep the cultural exchanges going.

“Bringing a couple of people [from Russia to Alaska] is an expensive proposition,” said Jim Gamble, the executive director of the Aleut International Association. “And one that we can only do once in a while when we gather enough funding together. And it’s similar going the other way.”

[LINK] "National Geographic gives Fox control of media assets in $725 million deal"

The Washington Post is one news source of many to cover the news of National Geographic's inclusion in the Rupert Murdoch empire.

On Wednesday, the iconic ­yellow-bordered magazine, beset by financial issues, entered its own uncharted territory. In an effort to stave off further decline, the magazine was effectively sold by its nonprofit parent organization to a for-profit venture whose principal shareholder is one of Rupert Murdoch’s global media companies.

In exchange for $725 million, the National Geographic Society passed the troubled magazine and its book, map and other media assets to a partnership headed by 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch-controlled company that owns the 20th Century Fox movie studio, the Fox television network and Fox News Channel.

Under the terms announced Wednesday, Fox will control 73 percent of the operation, called National Geographic Partners, with the balance held by the National Geographic Society. The partnership, based in Washington, will include a portfolio of National Geographic-branded cable TV channels, digital properties and publishing operations, most notably the magazine that has advanced the society’s founding mission — “the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.”

The agreement provides a financial lifeline not just for the much-honored magazine, but also for the National Geographic Society itself, the organization’s chief executive acknowledged Wednesday. Like many print publications, National Geographic has been hurt by the onset of the digital era, which has put it on a slow trajectory toward extinction.

[. . .]

The society first partnered with Fox in 1997 to launch the National Geographic cable channel, and later a fleet of smaller TV channels. The TV channels have grown into the organization’s most valuable assets; the venture had operating profits surpassing $400 million last year, according to one executive, although the society’s actual dividend from the partnership has not been disclosed.

Many have worried that Murdoch might influence the media negatively. What does it mean that Murdoch is a climate-change denier who has just bought a media outlet that has been consistently supportive of climate change and climate science, for instance?