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There was something terrifically fragile about this sprig of red begonia flowers lying on Dupont Street, on pavement so clean or worn it was almost blue in colour.
Sep. 25th, 2015
There was something terrifically fragile about this sprig of red begonia flowers lying on Dupont Street, on pavement so clean or worn it was almost blue in colour.
I found out earlier this week, ultimately from the CBC, that Montréal French-language daily was ceasing daily publication to focus on its tablet app and it Saturday issue.
I also found out that La Presse has announced massive layoffs.
Montreal's La Presse, one of the country's oldest and largest newspapers, has announced the end of its weekday print edition.
Starting in January, the print edition of the 130-year-old French-language publication will only be available on Saturdays, president and publisher Guy Crevier announced Wednesday.
The newspaper launched its free tablet edition La Presse+ in 2013 at a cost $40 million.
Crevier said the tablet edition has more than double to number of readers of its print edition and ad revenue from the tablet edition accounts for 70 per cent of the company's total revenue.
"Thirty months after its launch, La Presse+ is now more successful than the print version of La Presse after 131 years of existence," Crevier said in a statement.
I also found out that La Presse has announced massive layoffs.
Montreal news institution La Presse announced on Thursday 158 people would be leaving the newspaper, including 43 positions within its editorial department.
Of the 158, 102 of the positions are permanent, full-time jobs.
The newspaper said in a news release that the jobs include unionized, non-unionized and contract staff.
There will be 633 staff members left at La Presse after the laid-off staff leave.
Joe O'Connor's heartbreaking National Post article looks at a terrible Canadian social ill.
Rex Uttak liked to laugh, especially when his aunt, Mary Ann Uttak, got him going, as she loved to do, because he could get her right back by cracking a joke or doing something silly. Then they would both start laughing until their eyes watered, and they would try to choke back their giggles until the next joke flew.
That was Rex, says his aunt, an 11-year-old boy full of laughter and light. Mary Ann remembers coming home on August 10, 2013 and seeing her nephew and one of his cousin’s asleep on a living room couch. She touched his cheek and whispered goodnight. By the next morning Rex was dead. The little boy who liked to laugh had hanged himself.
Rex Uttak was one of 45 Nunavut Inuit to take their own life in 2013, a cascade of tragedies that triggered a special coroner’s inquest into the high rate of suicide in the North that convened in Iqaluit on Sept. 14 and concludes Friday.
Since 1999, 479 Inuit have killed themselves in the territory — by hanging, gun, overdose and stabbing — out of a population of about 28,000. To put the numbers in perspective: an Inuit age 15 years and older is 9.8 times more likely to commit suicide than a Canadian living in the south, while the suicide rate among Inuit children, aged 11-14, is about 50 times the national average. Of the 45 suicides in 2013, 12 were women and 33 were men, mostly between the ages of 15-25.
Rex Uttak was the youngest. The oldest was 72.
Bloomberg reports on the breakdown in Serbian-Croatian relations over border controls imposed on account of the refugee crisis.
Croatia, an EU member, on Wednesday banned Serb vehicles from entering except those with perishable goods. In retaliation, Serbia blocked imports of Croat products. Croatia also accused Serbia of having directed migrants to its territory since Hungary erected a razor-wire fence to stop the influx. The government in Belgrade rejected the allegation, saying it can’t influence the refugees’ route.
“In order to avoid a further escalation of the new situation Brussels should mediate and civil society organizations in both countries must help,” said Gordana Delic, the director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy. “I believe the situation between Croatia and Serbia has not gone that far yet, that it would be impossible to restore the good neighborly relations”.
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said his nation “can’t handle such a huge inflow” and urged Serbia to take the “completely reasonable” steps of setting up registration centers and directing some of the refugee toward Hungary.
EU policy chief Federica Mogherini and Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn are in close contact with Zagreb and Belgrade “to try and help them to find a solution together in order to restore trade flows as soon as possible,” Mina Andreeva, a spokeswoman for the 28-nation bloc’s executive, the European Commission, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Any trade restrictions must be “proportional, non-discriminatory and limited in time,” she said.
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In MacLean's, Michael Petrou explains the import of the recent disaster in Saudi Arabia.
The scale of the disaster, shocking as it is, is not unprecedented. More than 1,400 pilgrims were killed during a Hajj stampede in 1990. In fact, multiple-fatality incidents were a semi-regular occurrence until 2006, when more than 350 people died.
Since then, Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars in safety measures and upgrading infrastructure around pilgrimage sites. The measures seemed to have worked for a time, restoring some prestige that Saudi Arabia had lost by presiding over an almost predictable annual tragedy.
That’s all shattered now. The exact reasons for the deaths today are unknown. A Saudi minister reportedly blamed pilgrims he said did not “respect timetables.” Saudi Arabia has promised an investigation. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blamed Saudi “mismanagement,” adding a potential layer of sectarian and geopolitical belligerency to the deaths. Iran considers itself the champion of Shia Muslims, while Saudi Arabia sees itself as the world’s leading Sunni power.
Undoubtedly, the enormous crowds and heat played a role. Survivors of past stampedes speak of individuals collapsing and fainting, and then panic gripping a crowd as people scramble for air and space.
Maria Tadeo's Bloomberg article "Catalonia Isn't Really About to Break Away From Spain, Is It?" looks at the trajectory of Catalonian politics.
Mark Gilbert's "Scotland Proved You Can't Scare Catalonia Away From Independence" emphasizes the extent to which Spain has to make a positive case for itself.
is Catalonia really about to break away from Spain?
Probably not, no. But regional President Artur Mas will likely get enough support to begin the process of secession and push for more powers. His mainstream pro-independence alliance Junts pel Si is projected to fall just short of a majority, and a smaller separatist group, the CUP, will probably get the movement over the 68-seat threshold.
While this will most likely be enough for the separatists to push on with their fight, without a majority of votes they will struggle to present this as a clear democratic mandate. Polls show votes for independence coming in below the 50 percent threshold.
What is Junts pel Si?
An alliance of separatist groups. Mas’s party, Convergencia, agreed to join forces with its traditional separatist rival Esquerra Republicana for this election after their attempts at holding a non-binding referendum were blocked last year.
They’ve been joined by figures from across Catalan society such as Bayern Munich soccer coach Pep Guardiola. The aim is to set aside differences on economic and social issues to bring the separatist vote together under one banner and send a clear signal to officials in Madrid.
Mas and Esquerra leader Oriol Junqueras have drawn up a road map that involves setting up a tax agency, a central bank, an army and securing access to the euro before declaring independence in 18 months’ time if they can secure a majority of 68 seats in the 135 strong regional assembly.
Mark Gilbert's "Scotland Proved You Can't Scare Catalonia Away From Independence" emphasizes the extent to which Spain has to make a positive case for itself.
Rajoy said this week that the pro-independence politicians have no concrete plans as to how they'd run a government, and that "Catalans aren’t being told the real consequences of independence." Rajoy even suggested that Catalans would lose their EU citizenship. The Spanish central bank, meanwhile, insisted that cut loose from the mothership, the region would be kicked out of the European Union, barred from using the euro and would leave its banks without the support of the European Central Bank. And Miguel Cardenal, the Spanish minister for sports, has threatened to kick Catalonian soccer team Barcelona out of the national league.
Catalonia produces about 18 percent of Spain's gross domestic product, so the region wouldn't exactly be a pauper. Nevertheless, investors have reacted to the prospect of an escalating fight over independence by driving up the yield premium they demand for lending to the region by buying its bonds rather than those of the central government; they now charge Catalonia 3.25 percent for five-year money, which is about 2.3 percentage points more than the government pays. That's almost double what the surcharge was six months ago
The U.K.'s eventual change of tactics in persuading Scotland to remain part of the union should provide Spain with a better guide as to how to hang on to Catalonia. Devolution -- the transfer of tax and spending powers to the regions -- has softened (though not silenced) Scottish calls for independence, and seems to have averted a Welsh move down the secessionist path. Andreu Mas-Colell, a former Harvard University economics professor who is the Spanish region's finance chief, said a year ago that he was open to the idea. "The more attractive is the offer on the table, the more likely that the vote will end up developing as in Britain," he said in October.
Travel and Leisure has a lovely photo-heavy article by Stephen Metcalfe looking at Toronto's complexities.
Before I spent time in Toronto, I had lazily classed it in my mind with Seattle and Portland—laid-back metropolises populated by well-adjusted knowledge workers. And it’s true that Toronto is nothing if not well-adjusted. Cops here are more likely to have bikes than weapons; cars slow down for a yellow rather than gunning it; passersby say “excuse me,” often for no discernible reason.
But Toronto is also the biggest city in the country. It is not to Canada as Seattle or Portland is to the U.S. “You could drop a small nuke in Trinity Bellwoods Park, and the entire cultural class of Canada would be wiped out,” Stephen Fowler quipped. Fowler, a preternaturally young-looking 51-year-old, moved from San Francisco to Toronto with his Canadian wife a dozen years ago, then watched in despair as everything that he is—a twirlymustache- sporting, vintagestore- rummaging, vinyllistening kind of guy—became a hipster cliché. He runs the Monkey’s Paw, an antiquarian bookstore in Little Portugal that is filled with lost curios and oddments of the Englishspeaking world. Spread across the tables of his little storefront on Dundas Street West are titles like Werewolves in Western Culture and A Guide to Gravestones and Gravestone Rubbing. Fowler is one of the more acute observers of civic manners I’ve met. He sees Toronto’s dilemma this way: From the Canadian perspective, it is the striver city the rest of the country resents. But from a global perspective, it remains a provincial city where the brightest lights leave for London or Dubai. “Or worse,” he adds, “for New York. Beneath all the decency and modesty is a chip on the shoulder so huge it took me years to understand it.”
Toronto’s divided self has always found expression in its urban design. In a sense, there are two Torontos: the highly planned, highly developed city known as “downtown,” a word locals sometimes say with an air of exasperation, and the city of “the neighborhoods,” enclaves of civic spontaneity like Little Portugal, where Hoofland is located. The seminal urban theorist Jane Jacobs commented on just this aspect of the city when she moved here in 1968 from her beloved Greenwich Village. “Toronto is a very refreshing city to come to from the States,” Jacobs said on a Canadian TV program. “It’s all full of romanticism and quirks and surprises and ingenuity, particularly in the way outdoor space is used.” But Jacobs also recognized Toronto’s “civic schizophrenia,” as she put it. On the one hand, it was a bottom-up, fun, free-spirited city of creatively repurposed public spaces. On the other, it was a top-down, pompous, overplanned city that seemed perversely devoted to stamping out its more creative twin.
As of 2015, the situation has grown more curious. For most of the past decade, Toronto has been a skyline of cranes, each hoisting a fresh glass-skinned tower up from a podium slab. The boom is partly thanks to Canada’s strict lending standards, which allowed it to largely avert the global real estate bubble. And so, ironically, it was the country’s infamous prudence that helped unleash the current wave of construction and speculation. Developers completed more than 20,000 new condo units across the greater Toronto area last year, an all-time record. And yet, though international money pours in, it is not the case that pompous Toronto is swallowing indieartsy- Etsy Toronto whole. The two now encroach upon one another in novel and disorienting ways. For downtown, that means borrowing from the cachet of the arts scene, sometimes to sell real estate that is unremarkable. For the art and culture scene, it means courting international recognition and money. The key term for both is design.
The Toronto Star's Robin Levinson King wrote earlier this month about an initiative by a San Francisco group to force suburbs to allow rental housing.
An advocacy group has a novel solution to the affordable housing crisis that’s gripped many cities across North America: sue the suburbs.
The SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation is using a little-known law to force the tony garden suburb of Lafayette, Calif., located about an hour east of San Francisco, to build rental housing. On Monday night, the city council downsized a 315-unit apartment complex proposal to just 44 single-family homes.
Sonja Trauss, the champion of the Sue the Suburbs campaign, called the decision “mean spirited” and said it limits access to affordable housing.
“One of the reasons we have such high prices is we don’t have enough housing,” she told the Star.
The suit, which has yet to be filed, argues that the city council decision violates the California’s Housing Accountability Act, which says cities are not allowed to reject housing development proposals that meet existing zoning requirements.
The law, enacted in 1982, was specifically designed to keep cities and suburbs from using zoning powers to stop housing projects.
The Irish Independent featured the opinion piece "Tech overkill destroyed the loveliest, liveliest city on the West Coast" by Adrian Weckler.
Thoughts, Californians?
Now if you're the mayor of a city and want model citizens to generate revenue and commerce, this is hardly a bad problem to have. These mild-mannered, job-obsessed workers cause little hassle. They earn a lot. They rarely get drunk. They like rules.
But in terms of a city's character, its buzz, its memorable qualities, these tech clones are killing atmosphere in a way many might not have anticipated.
This is a relatively recent thing. The first time I travelled to San Francisco I was 19. It was a magical place, unlike any other US city I had been to. There was a pulsating artistic atmosphere about the place.
Today, San Francisco is still physically beguiling. But culturally, it's now a chilled out version of Manhattan without the legacy. The tech boom has pushed out local character and imported people who look, talk and act the same.
One of the practical problems is that no-one who works outside a booming tech firm or a financial services company can afford to live in the city itself.
Those who are merely financially 'comfortable' now have to move out to adjoining metropolitan areas like Oakland. Those earning less can't even afford to live there.
The result is a lot less diversity and a lot less culture. Technically, there are plenty of different nationalities and cultures present. But whether they're Indian, Israeli or Irish, they all keep their noses stuck in their Slack notifications. And the same button shirts seem to be popular regardless of where you're from.
Thoughts, Californians?
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Sep. 25th, 2015 05:28 pm- blogTO notes a proposal to make the Gardiner Expressway an equivalent of New York City's High Line park and observes the dropping of charges against Toronto rooftopping photographers.
- Crooked Timber notes that Trump is a consummate populist.
- The Dragon's Gaze maps the WASP-33 system and suggests Uranus was formed by a planetary collision.
- The Dragon's Tales notes progress has been made on synthetic telepathy.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money examines the myth of the failure of public housing in the United States and notes the perverted minds of anti-sex conservatives.
- The Russian Demographics Blog links to scenarios for Jewish population growth.
- Window on Eurasia looks at the vulnerability of Belarus and notes anti-German sentiment in Kaliningrad.
The famed monkey selfie, taken by a female Celebes macaque David Slater is now a matter of law, with potentially great import. The situation was described by Discovery News' Jennifer Viegas.
A macaque named Naruto holds the rights to a photograph that he snapped of himself in 2011, according to a lawsuit filed by PETA today in San Francisco.
The lawsuit isn’t just about the famous selfie, which went viral, but instead challenges our views on what constitutes property and ownership, PETA holds.
In a statement issued by the organization, PETA explained, “If this lawsuit succeeds, it will be the first time that a nonhuman animal is declared the owner of property (the copyright of the “monkey selfie”), rather than being declared a piece of property himself or herself. It will also be the first time that a right is extended to a nonhuman animal beyond just the mere basic necessities of food, shelter, water, and veterinary care. In our view, it is high time.”
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed at the U.S. District Court Northern District of California, is listed as “Naruto, a Crested Macaque, by and through his Next Friends,” including PETA and Antje Engelhardt.
The defendants are David John Slater and his company Wildlife Personalities Ltd, which PETA says both claim copyright ownership of the photos. Also named as a defendant is the San Francisco-based publishing company Blurb, Inc., which published a collection of Slater’s photographs, including two images said to have been taken by Naruto.
As for how Naruto came into possession of a camera, the lawsuit mentions that Slater left his camera unattended. The curious male macaque grabbed the camera and then not only took the selfies, but also photos of the forest floor and pictures of some other macaques.
In his book, Slater wrote, “The recognition that animals have personality and should be granted rights to dignity and property would be a great thing.” He then mentioned that macaques are “intelligent — artistic — complex.”
Now that the lawsuit has been filed, Slater had this to say to Time: “The facts are that I was the intellect behind the photos, I set the whole thing up. A monkey only pressed a button of a camera set up on a tripod — a tripod I positioned and held throughout the shoot.”
The potential import of this case and its legitimate issues are both observed by the Volokh Conspiracy's David Post.
I admit I didn’t see this one coming. It is easy — indeed, it is irresistible — to milk this one for laughs. To begin with: How do they know the plaintiff-in-interest’s name is “Naruto”? [There’s an old joke: Stranger to Farmer: “That’s a real nice hog you got there — what’s his name?" Farmer to Stranger: “Don’t know for sure, but we call him Bill."] Or that Naruto is 6 years old? And if Naruto owns the copyright, how do I negotiate with him to license use of the photo? And to whom does ownership pass when he dies? Etc.
But as I said before, the copyright question that the case poses — whether non-humans can be considered “authors” — is not entirely trivial, especially in a world of robots, self-driving cars, and music-generating software. It has an interesting constitutional dimension, inasmuch as the Constitution gives Congress only the power to grant “authors” rights in their “writings.” [Originalists will presumably have a field day tracking down the Framers’ view of non-human animals as “authors."]
And I also have a feeling that the ridiculous idea that non-human animals have “rights” of any kind (including ownership rights) will seem less and less ridiculous over time, and that the presentists of the future will look back and shudder at the manner in which we treated animals and wonder how we could have been so morally obtuse (somewhat in the way today we view slaveholders of days gone by).
As an amateur photographer myself, I would be very interested to see how Naruto took photos. Did it know what it was doing? How many tries did it take? Was it acquainted with photography beforehand? An animal fumbling is one thing, but a creator experimenting is another.
The involvement of PETA notwithstanding, this will be a case to watch.