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The plaster casts of the victims of the eruption of Pompeii were at the end of the Royal Ontario Museum's exhibit Pompeii: In the Shadow of the Volcano.
Jan. 25th, 2016
The plaster casts of the victims of the eruption of Pompeii were at the end of the Royal Ontario Museum's exhibit Pompeii: In the Shadow of the Volcano.
The Buffalo News' Nancy Fischer notes that the American side of the Niagara Falls may end up temporarily diverted, to allow for construction and repair work. I hope I will be able to see it.
New York State plans to shut off the thundering waters of Niagara Falls – again. At least, the American side of the falls. This “once in a lifetime” event actually may take place twice in some folks’ lifetimes. The New York State parks system wants to turn off the falls on the American side sometime in the next two to three years to replace two 115-year-old stone arch bridges that allow pedestrians, park vehicles and utilities access to Goat Island.
The proposal to “dewater” the falls will be presented at a public hearing Wednesday at the Niagara Falls Conference Center. Two of three plans propose a temporary shutdown of the American Falls.
The American Falls was slowed to a trickle in 1969 to study the effects of erosion and buildup of rock at the base of the falls. When that happened, people came from all over the world to see the falls turned off, said Michelle Kratts, who served as Niagara Falls city historian until this past December.
“It’s the nature of curiosity. You want to see what’s underneath, to see its skeleton,” Kratts said.
Bloomberg's Golnar Motevalli notes the apparent interest in both China and Iran in greatly expanding their trade and investment flows, including in non-oil sectors.
China and Iran mapped out a wide-ranging 25-year plan to broaden relations and expand trade during the first visit by a Chinese leader to the Islamic republic in 14 years.
President Xi Jinping met with his counterpart Hassan Rouhani on Saturday, a week after the lifting of international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The Chinese leader is the first head of state of the six-country bloc that negotiated the historic deal to visit Iran.
Rouhani said the meeting marked "the beginning of an important era" in Iran-China relations, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The visit was the first by a Chinese president in 14 years, official Iranian media reported.
"Today we discussed the strategic relationship between both countries, setting up a comprehensive 25-year plan and also promoting bilateral relations of up to $600 billion over the next 10 years," Rouhani said.
The two countries signed 17 documents and letters of intent, IRNA reported, including treaties on judicial, commercial and civil matters. Long-term contracts in the energy and mining sectors were also discussed, Rouhani said. Iran is seeking to attract $50 billion annually in foreign investment for the country’s ailing $400 billion economy.
The Toronto Star shares Terry Pedwell's Canadian Press article noting the collapse of local television stations across Canada.
Nearly half of the country’s local TV stations could be off the air by 2020 without a boost in revenues to pay for local programming, the national broadcast regulator has been told as it prepares to open public hearings into the viability of local TV.
The warning comes in a study submitted to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in advance of hearings that begin Monday.
Conventional, private TV stations have seen revenues decline by about 25 per cent since 2010, said the report, jointly prepared by the consulting firm Nordicity and communications lawyer Peter Miller.
But many stations that are holding their own for now could close over the next four years, potentially costing nearly 1,000 jobs, said the report submitted by the advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
“In our view, the most likely scenario over the short-to-mid-term is a material, but not fatal, erosion of traditional television,” said the report.
Looking at the small New Brusnwick village of McAdam, Spacing's Hassan Arif noted this August past how difficult economic adaptation is for these small towns.
Many small towns, communities, and rural areas face challenges with the decline of traditional industries such as forestry. Often, economic development arguments are less about “growth” than about stemming the decline. For many towns and communities a fundamental self-reinvention is in order.
These were the themes of a consultant’s report done pro bono for the town of Millinocket in Maine which had been hit by decline and mill closure. This report – actually a 9-page open letter – gained much attention in local media in Maine with the Portland Press Herald proclaiming that “All Maine is Millonocket.”
Among the recommendations in the report was a call for a greater emphasis on placemaking, beautification, and promotion of the historic town centre while also promoting its proximity to natural environments (including Baxter State Park and Mount Khatadin). Such a strategy would be aimed to attract tourism and potential new residents.
With the decline of extraction sectors such as mining and forestry “cheap land and disregard for consequences” was no longer an adequate strategy.
The Inter Press Service's Andrea Pettrachin took a look at the hostile Relationship of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, surrounded by Morocco, towards migrants from Africa.
A few kilometres before the border between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and Morocco, a sign informs passers-by that this outpost of Spain on African soil stands in a privileged position for those who wish to observe the annual migration of birds across the Strait of Gibraltar, their shortest route from Africa to Europe.
At the border itself, huge fences have been erected to block the daily attempts of human migrants seeking to escape hunger, despair and often conflict, a phenomenon that the people of Ceuta are less proud to advertise and about which they prefer silence.
That silence was dramatically broken at the beginning of May when a border control X-ray machine detected Abou, an eight-year-old boy from Cote d’Ivoire, inside a suitcase being carried into the Spanish enclave.
That was only the most recent of a number of (more or less ingenious) strategies used by migrants amassed in the Moroccan woods next to the Spanish border to try to enter the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’.
“What strikes the visitor most about Ceuta is its incredible contradictions. The city, with its population of just over 80,000 people living in 18.6 square kilometres and proudly Spanish since 1668, gives the idea of wanting to live as if the migrants and their attempts to reach the enclave do not exist”
Ceuta is one of the main (and few) ‘doors’ leading from northern Africa to the territory of the European Union, and is a ’door’ that has been closed since the end of the 1990s, when the Spanish authorities started to build two six-metre fences topped with barbed wire – complete with watch posts and a road running between them to accommodate police patrols in case of need – that surrounds the whole enclave (as in the other Spanish enclave in Africa of Melilla).
Even if they do not catch the attention of the media as in the case of Abou, every day Ceuta is the scene of young African migrants, almost all aged between 15 and 30, trying to reach Spanish territory in ways that are as, if not more, dangerous than the one chosen by Abou’s father.
The BBC News' Hugh Schofield notes the belated decline of France's AZERTY keyboard.
France's 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard - the equivalent of the English-language QWERTY - is to be reconfigured after the government ruled that it encourages bad writing.
The AZERTY set-up has infuriated generations of writers, because of labour-creating peculiarities like the need for two strokes to make full-stops and numerals.
But official ire is directed less at such inconveniences, and more at certain quirks and oversights which, it says, make it hard to construct proper French.
"Today it is practically impossible to write French correctly using a keyboard that has been bought in France," the ministry intones.
"More surprisingly, certain European countries like Germany and Spain respect French writing better than the French are able to - because their keyboards permit it!"
The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.
The aim is to produce a new standard keyboard that will gradually replace the many varieties of AZERTY currently on the market.
CBC notes a social media campaign intended to revive an indigenous language of Canada, Gwich'in.
More, including an interview, at the site.
A Gwich'in woman is using social media to get people speaking one of the most endangered languages in Canada.
Although nearly 10,000 Gwich'in people live in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska, a United Nations study estimates just a few hundred fluent speakers of the Gwich'in language are left.
"We don't have time to wait for another generation or so to really work on bringing the Gwich'in language back to being spoken more," said 23-year-old Jacey Firth-Hagen.
Just over a year ago, she sparked a social media campaign called #SpeakGwichinToMe.
More, including an interview, at the site.
Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn looks at how urban activist John Sewell got ousted from his position as head of Toronto's public housing, and the scandal it caused.
The headline was tucked in the bottom right corner of the 1988 Labour Day weekend edition of the Saturday Star: “Get rid of Sewell Hosek asks Premier.” Queen’s Park columnist Rosemary Speirs reported that following a blow-up in Ontario Housing Minister Chaviva Hosek’s office, the rookie politician recommended to Premier David Peterson that fiery former Toronto mayor John Sewell’s contract as chairman of the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) not be renewed when it expired that November. “John Sewell may be a chairman who bruises bureaucrats and angers housing ministers in his drive for more, better-run public housing,” Speirs observed. “But isn’t dynamic leadership during a time of housing crisis worth the price?”
Hosek didn’t realize the forces she was about to unleash. What followed was one of the noisiest of the scandals during the two decade existence of the MTHA before it helped form the Toronto Community Housing Corporation in 2002. Beyond outrage from the media, opposition, and tenants, the messy end of Sewell’s tenure included figures who tied into the scandal which helped sink Peterson and the Liberals at the polls in 1990.
Sewell had been involved in housing issues from the time he was first elected to City Council in 1969. During his mayoralty (1978-80), he had to deal with concerns raised about Cityhome, the city-owned non-profit housing corporation which specialized in mixed-income projects, like the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Throughout 1979 and 1980, Cityhome was turned into a political issue by aldermen Art Eggleton and June Rowlands, who felt its homes should only be offered to low-income tenants—Rowlands was especially incensed that families with incomes up to $44,000/year (adjusted for inflation, approximately $135,000) were allowed to live in subsidized spaces at a time when there was a crunch for low-income housing. Representatives of the real estate industry consistently criticized the agency for receiving advantages unavailable to private developers. Cityhome proponents like Sewell pointed out the subsidies helped achieve the desire income mix. Everyone tossed around every statistic they could find supporting their argument.
During the 1980 municipal election campaign, mayoral candidate Eggleton seized on the optics of privileged people getting into Cityhome, even though he had sat on its board for years. “He rode with the herd,” Sewell reflected recently in his book How We Changed Toronto, “supporting Cityhome when it looked good and now attacking it when it looked bad. He saw the opportunity of making political mileage with his attack.” Housing commissioner Barry Rose was fired, partly serving as the scapegoat for bad management which preceded his term. Eggleton and Rowlands made a series of proposals, including adding citizen representatives to the Cityhome board, instituting stronger approval checks, limiting spaces solely to low-income tenants, and placing a moratorium on further development. Few of what were viewed as strictly political moves were enacted after Eggleton won the mayoralty and Rowlands was returned to council. Sewell feared that, following his defeat, Cityhome would be scrapped, but the agency went on, its housing across the city eventually winding up under the watch of TCHC.
Amid the political tussles over Cityhome, the province formed a new agency to watch over the Ontario Housing Corporation’s (OHC) Metro Toronto properties. Launched in August 1980, the new MTHA was one of a series of agencies created to oversee OHC sites in individual cities. The initial hope was to change the gloomy image of public housing. Sewell occasionally noted MTHA issues during his mid-1980s stint as a municipal columnist for the Globe and Mail.
The CBC's Emily Chung and Rachelle Solomon note how the apparent dearth of life in an area of Antarctica known for approximating Martian conditions bodes ill for the potential of finding life on that cooler and dryer world.
Here's some bad news for anyone still hoping life exists on Mars: Antarctic permafrost similar to permafrost on Mars seems to be too cold and dry to support microbes.
Canadian and U.S. researchers were unable to find any micro-organisms that were living or breeding in the permafrost of a dry, high-elevation valley in the Antarctic, they reported this week in the ISME Journal.
"It doesn't mean there's no life on Mars, but what it does mean is it's going to be harder to find," said Jacqueline Goordial, the McGill University researcher who led the study, in an interview with Rachelle Solomon on CBC's Breakaway.
Her doctoral research supervisor, Prof. Lyle White, had an even more pessimistic analysis of the situation.
"If conditions are too cold and dry to support active microbial life on an analogous climate on Earth, then the colder dryer conditions in the near surface permafrost on Mars are unlikely to contain life," he said in a statement. "Additionally, if we cannot detect activity on Earth, in an environment which is teeming with micro-organisms, it will be extremely unlikely and difficult to detect such activity on Mars."
[BLOG] Some Monday links
Jan. 25th, 2016 05:08 pm- blogTO notes that I may soon end up living in the middle of a Brewery District.
- The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about lessons we learned from our first bosses.
- Joe. My. God. notes that Michael Bloomberg is likely to make a bid for the American presidency as an independent.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at racism in California during the mid-19th century gold rush.
- The Map Room Blog examines snow removal in New York City post-storm.
- Marginal Revolution notes Google Votes, and wonders if it might provide a model for élections.
- Registan notes pipeline politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
- Understanding Society graphs the most popular books used in Anglophone university curricula.
- Window on Eurasia notes how some Russians now defend Litvinenko's assassination as justified by his betrayal of Russia, and notes the negative effect of Russian education policies on minority languages.
Earlier this month, Paul Goble at Window on Eurasia linked/a> to "Экономические последствия распада РФ. Только факты, без эмоций", translated by Google as "The economic consequences of the collapse of the Russian Federation. Just the facts, without emotion". This article imagined a scenario where the Russian Federation would come apart at the seams, on ethnic and economic lines, as indicated by the map below.
This scenario strikes me as unlikely, requiring a thorough collapse of the Russian Federation. What would it take for areas with Russian majorities of population to want to separate from a Russian state? There are reasons why Québec and Catalonia have stronger separatist movements than, say, Manitoba and Essex. Why would regions with non-Russian majorities necessarily want to reject links with Russia for an uncertain independence? The most likely candidates for secession from Russia are to be found in the North Caucasus, home to mostly non-Russian populations with some measure of cultural distance from Russia, but separatism is dim even in autonomist Tatarstan.
In most cases, the independence of the subjects of the current Russian Federation will allow for economic growth and an increase in the standard of living of the population because they will not have to send so much of their income to Moscow whose “’elites’” care only about how to remain in power and how much wealth they can take from the population.
There are three reasons, the Ukrainian analysts say, why the regions and republics may separate from the USSR: “a desire to independently control their own natural resources, nationality concerns, and close economic ties with other countries. In many cases, these are mixed, but the analysts consider each group in turn.
The regions and republics which might separate from Russia in order to control their natural resources include Bashkortostan, the Astrakhan Republic, Buryatia, Komi, a unified Don-Kuban, Sakha, the Siberian Republic, Tatarstan, the Urals Republic, Yugra, and the Orenburg Republic, all of which would see their incomes rise with independence.
The regions and republics which might separate from Russia in order to promote the needs of their titular nationality include a united Altay, Adygeya, Kalmykia, Mari-El, Mordvinia, Tyva, Chuvashia, Daghestan, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Osetia-Alania, Karachayevo-Cherkesia, and Ingushetia.
And those who might separate because of close ties with foreign countries are the Far Eastern Republic, the Kaliningrad Republic, Karelia, and the Kurile Islands.
This scenario strikes me as unlikely, requiring a thorough collapse of the Russian Federation. What would it take for areas with Russian majorities of population to want to separate from a Russian state? There are reasons why Québec and Catalonia have stronger separatist movements than, say, Manitoba and Essex. Why would regions with non-Russian majorities necessarily want to reject links with Russia for an uncertain independence? The most likely candidates for secession from Russia are to be found in the North Caucasus, home to mostly non-Russian populations with some measure of cultural distance from Russia, but separatism is dim even in autonomist Tatarstan.
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Going through IWPR's recent archives, I was very surprised to see the article "LiveJournal Returns in Kazakstan, But Now Facebook is King", by one Botagoz Seidakhmetova, which noted that the ban on Livejournal had been lifted in Kazakhstan in November after four years. That it had been banned at all is something I had been unaware of--Global Voices had noticed this back in September 2011, but I had not seen it.
In that Livejournal, no longer a global contender, seems to be now substantially limited to the Russophone world, that it has been so thoroughly kneecapped in one of the largest Russophone countries about is not a good sign. The damage inflicted just can't be reversed, not without some further and wholly unexpected shift.
The authorities in Kazakstan have unblocked the LiveJournal blogging website, four years after shutting down access to it.
A government statement on November 11 said the decision was taken after unlawful material – religious and extremist propaganda and information about weapons – were deleted.
[. . .]
Commentators suspect that LiveJournal incurred anger because opposition leaders based abroad used it as a platform for attacking the government. One was Rahat Aliev, former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who went into exile after being prosecuted, and proceeded to publish allegations of wrongdoing by Kazakstan’s leaders.
Aliev is no longer a threat to the government – he committed suicide in a Vienna prison in February 2015.
In all likelihood, LiveJournal is no longer relevant since most of its users have shifted to Facebook.
Pavel Bannikov, a Russian-language poet who used to use LiveJournal, recalls how influential it used to be – literary journals would find new content on the site and approach writers to seek permission to print their poetry.
“It’s good that LiveJournal has reopened. But in Kazakstan, LiveJournal won’t become what it was in 2007, when everyone used it as a news source,” Bannikov added. "I’ve noticed that in the last three years, virtually all the active, engaging users – the ones you’d like to read and hear their views – have gone over to Facebook.”
In that Livejournal, no longer a global contender, seems to be now substantially limited to the Russophone world, that it has been so thoroughly kneecapped in one of the largest Russophone countries about is not a good sign. The damage inflicted just can't be reversed, not without some further and wholly unexpected shift.
At Demography Matters, I note about the effect of Alberta's economic crash on the strained labour market of Canada generally.