Jim Ratliff worked for 14 years in the mines of eastern Kentucky, drilling holes and blasting dynamite to expose the coal that has powered Appalachian life for more than a century.
Today, he rolls into an office at 8 a.m., settles into a small metal desk and does something that, until last year, was completely foreign to him: computer coding.
“A lot of people look at us coal miners as uneducated,” said Ratliff, a 38-year-old with a thin goatee and thick arms. “It’s backbreaking work, but there’s engineers and very sophisticated equipment. You work hard and efficiently and that translates right into coding.”
He works for Bit Source now, a Pikeville, Kentucky, startup that’s out to prove there’s life after coal for the thousands of industry veterans who’ve lost their jobs in an unprecedented rout that has already forced five major producers into bankruptcy. Bit Source has only hired 10 coders, but almost 1,000 responded to its ads as the realization spreads across Appalachia that coal’s heyday is over. What fills its void is a challenge so immense that presidential candidates including Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have cited the industry’s woes on the campaign trail.
“We’ve got a lot of high-skilled hillbillies here,” said Rusty Justice, a 57-year-old co-founder of Bit Source. “We want to prove we can run a tech business from the hills of eastern Kentucky.”
“Fishing isn’t just for making a living, it’s also enjoyable,” said Pedro Pascual, a 70-year-old fisherman who has been taking his small boat out to sea off Chile’s Pacific coast in the early hours of the morning almost every day for the past 50 years, to support his family.
Impish and ebullient, he told IPS that he doesn’t like to eat much fish anymore, although he is aware of its excellent nutritional properties, which make it a key product in terms of boosting global food security. “The thing is, eating what you fish yourself is kind of boring,” he said.
“Sometimes my wife has to go out and buy fish, because I come home without a single fish – I sell all of them, so I don’t have to eat them,” he confessed, in a mischievous tone.
Pascual was born and raised in the beach resort town of Algarrobo, 100 km west of Santiago.
“Artisanal fishers who used to have a quota, a share of extractive fishing activity, were left without rights, and many lost their work.” -- Juan Carlos Quezada
The son, grandson and great-grandson of fishermen, he stressed that fishing is everything for him and his family, as he prepared bait on counters built on the beach, which are used by some 70 local fishers.
According to U.S. group Demographia, Vancouver is the third-least affordable city in the world for a home, and construction constraints are to blame for rising home prices there and in other Canadian cities.
Wendell Cox, the principal owner at Demographia, which looked at 367 markets and nine countries for the study, says that’s a trend that can be seen in Toronto too as limits to ground-level detached housing in favour of condominium living are creating a shortage of housing as people refuse to move into high-rises.
Cox goes one step further and suggests the fertility rate will be impacted in the future in some Canadian cities. “A lot of people don’t want to raise children on the tenth floor of a condominium,” he said.
The study looked at the median cost of a home in each of the markets studied and then divided by the median income to produce a multiple. In Vancouver that $756,200 median-priced house produced a multiple of 10.8 when divided by the median household income of $69,700.
Topping the list was Hong Kong, where residents need 19 times the median income to buy the median-priced house; Syndey, Australia, was second, at 12.2 times. The second-least affordable city in Canada was Victoria, with a multiple of 6.9, followed by Toronto, at 6.7.
It might be the best, and greenest, east Gardiner Expressway that Toronto never had. City staff recently reviewed five proposals including the “Green Gardiner,” an ambitious plan to reroute the eastern end of the highway in close alignment with the rail corridor, and cover that with a long narrow park. Architect and planner Cal Brook of Brook McIlroy Inc. gives us his pitch.
What, in a nutshell, is your proposal?
The Gardiner from Cherry to Jarvis St. would be rebuilt on top of the railway. You’re really taking two barriers between downtown and the water — the Gardiner and the railway — and consolidating it in one narrow strip. On top of the Gardiner would be a 1.1-kilometre linear park, like a vast green roof. That frees up Lake Shore Blvd. to become a normal, beautiful waterfront boulevard that everyone has always aspired to. It also frees up a whole swath of city-owned land on the north side for mixed-use development. East of that, the link to the DVP is the same as the city’s “hybrid number 3” option.
So the roadway above the rail tracks becomes like an above-ground tunnel. What happens in the park on top?
It would be entirely public space — bike lanes, walkways, all the same kinds of things we see in the High Line in New York. Landscaping, mature trees — a linear park connecting the St. Lawrence, Market District and Distillery neighbourhoods, and waterfront pedestrian and cycling connections. There would be multiple access points, ramps and urban stairs, for maximum north-south permeability.
Jerry Chadwick has lived the suburban dream that Scarborough was built to feed as Toronto sprawled east in the car-centred 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
His first summer job was in the Scarborough Civic Centre, where his dad worked. Chadwick and his wife used to take their kids skating in the civic square. For 31 years, they’ve lived near McCowan and Ellesmere Rds. on the Scarborough City Centre border.
Chadwick, a retired principal who now serves as a board trustee, is ambivalent about the prospects being painted for the city centre area, roughly the size of Toronto’s downtown, by city planners and politicians. They say a single-stop subway extension will go a long way toward transforming the sleepy suburb into a vibrant urban node and revive the city centre’s commercial development prospects, which stalled around 1990.
That’s when the last office building went up in the area, bounded by Highway 401 on the north and Ellesmere on the south, stretching from about Brimley Rd. on the west and zig-zagging down Bellamy Rd. and Progress Ave. on the east.
For 40 years, Scarborough City Centre has been dominated by the mall known as Scarborough Town Centre. Its vast tracts of parking are chained off to repel commuters trying to board transit.
The terrorist attack on Dec. 2 left San Bernardino, California, with 36 shooting victims, 14 dead and 22 injured, and a spectral imprint of international terrorism. "This horrific murder underscores that we are in a time of war," said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie likewise viewed San Bernardino as a new front in a bitter clash of civilizations. "We need to come to grips with the idea that we are in the midst of the next world war," he said.
Yet less than two months after the shootings, the rituals of trauma in terrorism's aftermath, familiar from attacks in other locales, are routinely disregarded in San Bernardino, a struggling city of 210,000. In long interviews with city leaders or short conversations with residents, none felt compelled to mention where he or she had been at the fateful hour. Some presidential candidates seem to view the attack in San Bernardino as evidence of an existential threat to the nation, and invoke it every chance they get. In San Bernardino, it hasn't registered as an existential danger even to San Bernardino. It's rarely mentioned.
The threats to the city are nonetheless real. Some are even global in nature and surely devastating in effect. They have nothing to do with jihad.
San Bernardino has long been at war, and losing. The steady erosion of the American working class, with a commensurate rise in local poverty, has been killing the city for decades. It is now emblematic of some of the nation's most intractable problems -- violent crime, drug addiction, joblessness, urban blight, political dysfunction, low-skill immigration, white flight and widespread civic apathy. Like Detroit, the heaping culmination of those troubles ended in a municipal bankruptcy.
With Jian Ghomeshi about to face a packed courtroom and a daily gauntlet of jostling reporters, the stage is set for a media spectacle. Columnists will take sides. Legal pundits will pontificate. Many will be caught up in the did-he-or-didn’t-he debate and rhetoric.
But, when all is said and done — after the former CBC broadcaster is acquitted or convicted — will the public better understand our justice system? Will the country feel buoyed or soured by its close-up glimpse of how we determine guilt or innocence in emotionally charged trials?
Already, there are worrying signs that the public is being given the wrong impression of the carefully calibrated process by which we try sexual crimes in Canada. There have been calls for a presumption that complainants are telling the truth and for lowering the standard of proof that should apply in these cases.
Such calls for a justice system in which it is “easier” to secure convictions in cases of sexual assault are dangerously antithetical to basic tenets of our justice system. They threaten the fairness of criminal trials and fail to recognize that it is the person accused of a sexual offence who faces the prospect of a heavy prison sentence, inclusion on sex offender registries for years (or even life) and the associated stigma.
Just as there are myths that permeate societal thinking about sexual assault, there are also myths about the defence of sexual assault cases, which threaten to corrode public confidence in our criminal justice system.
Barnes & Noble Inc. shares plunged following speculation that Amazon.com Inc. will open hundreds of physical bookstores, potentially thrusting the companies’ longtime rivalry into America’s shopping malls.
The stock fell 9.4 percent to $7.33 in New York on Wednesday, following a 5.4 percent decline the previous day. The rout followed remarks from a mall executive, who said Amazon was planning to open 300 to 400 stores. He later said that his comments weren’t mean to represent Amazon’s actual intentions.
For years, Amazon’s e-commerce empire has put pressure on Barnes & Noble with low prices and convenient shipping. But Barnes & Noble always had one edge: its chain of brick-and-mortar stores. If Amazon does push into shopping centers, the battle will have to be fought on two fronts. And Barnes & Noble is already reeling from sluggish sales and slow adoption of its Nook e-reader.
What is the underlying business plan? To make these iconic locations like Apple stores? To treat all future business, in all sectors, as depending on the focality of the company behind it? To start with books, move on to other items, and eventually steal middle-class and upper-middle class consumers away from Walmart? Somehow use these stores to lock people in Amazon Prime? [. . .] Is this overconfident folly, or is it the “for good” return of brick and mortar bookstores to our lives?
A lot has changed since [2011] -- from marriage equality sweeping the nation and parts of the world to Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time magazine to Miley Cyrus coming out as pansexual -- and we believe that this is an especially critical time for queer people and the queer movement to regroup and redefine its mission in the wake of these incredible, once unimaginable changes to the political and cultural landscape. We hope that HuffPost Queer Voices can be a place where discussions about where we're headed, what matters to us and how we can become the best possible, most authentic versions of ourselves as queer people -- and as a community -- can take place on a daily basis.
We, like many others before us, have chosen to reclaim "queer" and to rename the section HuffPost Queer Voices because we believe that word is the most inclusive and empowering one available to us to speak to and about the community -- and because we are inspired by all of the profound possibilities it holds for self-discovery, self-realization and self-affirmation. We also revere its emphasis on intersectionality, which aids in creating, building and sustaining community while striving to bring about the liberation of all marginalized people, queer or not.
"Queer" functions as an umbrella term that includes not only the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people of "LGBT," but also those whose identities fall in between, outside of or stretch beyond those categories, including genderqueer people, intersex people, asexual people, pansexual people, polyamorous people and those questioning their sexuality or gender, to name just a few.
An anti-abortion group on P.E.I. is responding to posters that have gone up in Charlottetown and on social media calling on the province to make abortion available on the Island.
The posters show an image of a red-headed, pig-tailed woman or girl wearing a bandana, and use the hashtags #AccessNow, #SupportIslandWomen, and #HeyWade — as a direct appeal to premier Wade MacLauchlan.
[. . .]
Ann Wheatley, co-chair of Abortion Access Now PEI, said she doesn't know who's behind the posters and they aren't affiliated with her group.
Wheatley does like the posters, saying they're a clever and creative way to bring attention to the issue.
"I think the posters are quite brilliant," she said. "They catch your eye … and it sends a very straightforward message that is we need our political leaders to pay attention to Island women and do the right thing."
On Jan. 5, Abortion Access Now PEI served the provincial government notice that they would be filing a lawsuit suing for abortion access on the Island. Under the Crown Proceedings Act, any group filing a lawsuit against the province is required to provide notice of 90 days.
CBC reached out to the person or group behind the iamkarats social media accounts on Wednesday. They declined to reveal their identities but did release a written statement Thursday afternoon via an email address under the name Shirley Karats. Shirley is Anne's last name, and she was infamously called "carrots" by Gilbert Blythe in the L.M. Montgomery book.
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