Toronto Police Const. David Hopkinson has arrested his fair share of rooftoppers, a nickname for the daredevil photographers who climb atop skyscrapers to snap vertigo-inducing pictures of the world below.
He expects it’s just a matter of time before one of them in Canada dies.
“We can’t bat 1,000 on this,” he says. “I believe that eventually somebody is going to make a mistake, and it will be a critical one.”
Last year, at least two deaths were linked to rooftopping.
A 17-year-old man fell off a building in Russia and a 24-year-old New Yorker slipped off the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. In 2012, a photographer died after he fell into a Chicago building’s smokestack.
But despite the obvious dangers, there’s no shortage of photographers willing to take a big risk for a great photo from the top of a bank building, condo tower or the edge of a construction crane.
It was just a few years ago that rooftopping lingered on the fringes of the mainstream in North America, appealing to urban explorers who were already venturing into abandoned buildings, city sewers and subway systems.
Romania’s finance chief sees an opening for her nation to become eastern Europe’s go-to investment destination as nerves jangle over government policies in Poland, until recently the region’s top performer.
The second-poorest European Union member has been underestimated by investors and eclipsed by its neighbors for too long, said Finance Minister Anca Dragu, citing a calmer political backdrop and an economic expansion that’s set to surge more than 4 percent this year. Standard & Poor’s cut Poland’s credit rating on Jan. 15 on concern the new government is undermining the independence of institutions such as courts and media.
“There are certain developments in the region that have investors worried,” Dragu said Friday in an interview in Bucharest. “Compared with that, Romania’s economic growth is balanced and sustainable, we have an educated population and relative political stability that we need to appreciate more because we don’t have extremist parties that cause problems in other countries.”
Romania is no stranger to political drama itself: Dragu is part of a technocrat cabinet led by former European Commissioner Dacian Ciolos, who took over in November after anti-corruption protests in the European Union and NATO member prompted his predecessor to quit. It also faces competition to lure cash fleeing Poland from other local peers, such as the Czech Republic, a regional haven whose 10-year borrowing costs are lower than every country in the world except for Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Activism can take many forms. In the case of Women’s Words, it takes the form of a little red dictionary. The tiny book is the work of Karmen Hui, Tan Sueh Li, and Tan Zi Hao of Malaysian design collective TypoKaki. On its pages you’ll find made-up words and phrases—Chinese characters that, through their unusual arrangement and alteration, subvert the sexism ingrained in Mandarin.
Unlike the phoneticism of English, written Mandarin relies on pictorial representations of words. These characters are made up of graphic symbols called radicals, which often are combined with phonetic or semantic components to form compound characters. Women’s Words centers on the female radical pronounced “nu” (女)—a symbol which has been a source of contention among feminists because of its visual etymology (the original female radical depicted a woman bowing before a man).
Tan Zi Hao explains that by adding, removing, or changing the position of the female radical (女) in these compound characters, he and his fellow designers devised a new vernacular of 30 feminist-leaning words and phrases. Many of the words in the dictionary are like pictorial portmanteaus, blending two separate words to make a single word with a new meaning. Take one entry, which combines the female radical with “mao” (毛), the character for the word “hair.” The designers added an extra stroke to 毛, and inserted a female radical on the left. “It indicates that a woman can be hairy, which is a word that doesn’t exist in the Chinese vocabulary,” Tan says.
Who would have guessed that, at the time of his most critical decision, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan would be doing a military sample of the 1976 Genesis prog-rock song, Ripples?
“If we want to understand the ripples we are creating, we have to understand the environment we are creating them in,” Sajjan said last week. He was being asked—as he is on an almost daily basis—when he will reveal details about the long promised Liberal plan to pull out CF-18 jets from the mission in Iraq and Syria. Apparently this “ripple effect” theory is the “genesis” of the long delay. “We may not be able to control all the ripples that are out there, but we can control the ripples that we create,” Sajjan said, adding something or other about “negative ripples.”
As there is no formal military theory about “ripple effects,” it’s hard to tell exactly what the minister is talking about. But we get the gist: The decisions he makes now will have an impact on the future. The problem is, the future is already here. The Conservative mandate for the mission is up by the end of March. If the Liberals were not ready with an alternative plan—and clearly they weren’t—why didn’t they just say they would complete the original mandate and then end it? Pulling out now, after more than 100 days of post-election bombing, looks disorganized at best—at worst, it smacks of cheap politics.
But as politically charged as the bombing mission is, it is really nothing compared to the deeper funding crisis facing the military. “There is simply not enough money to buy the military hardware that we need,” says Dave Perry, senior analyst at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Perry is to military procurement what Nate Silver is to polling, so when he crunches the numbers on the military budget you tend to listen. “There’s three times more demand for procurement dollars than there is budgeted fiscally, which means the Canada First Defence Strategy—the plan to maintain Canada’s military capabilities to protect our interests—is now, essentially dead.”
That’s a big problem. It would cost the government another $2 billion a year for 20 years, on top of what we’re already spending, just to maintain the Air Force, the Army, the Navy—and upgrade our technology for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (the NORAD commander comes to Canada later in February to demand those upgrades). Meanwhile, NATO is asking Canada to fulfill its commitment to contribute two per cent of our GDP to military spending. That would mean another $20 billion this year alone. Not happening, NATO. Because it’s 2016. And we’re still broke.
Fulfilling the military promises Trudeau made in the campaign looks equally unlikely. “The biggest one from the campaign in terms of the budget is the idea of savings tens of billions on the acquisition of new aircraft to devote to ships,” Perry says. “The $9-billion fighter budget was set when the Canadian dollar was worth 100 cents American—and now it’s 70 cents.” We’ve lost close to 30 per cent of our purchasing power. There’s no way to save on planes and still have a viable air force.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper wanted to pull Canada out of one of Europe's leading security organization four years ago, but U.S. President Barack Obama helped convince him to stay, according to three European ambassadors.
The ambassadors described on Monday what happened in 2012, when Harper suggested Canada would withdraw from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a 57-country alliance that includes NATO and European Union countries.
The diplomats said Harper believed the organization was no longer relevant because Europe was mainly peaceful, a view that was widely shared at the time. The outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine would later change that.
Their account flies in the face of a heated denial issued by former foreign affairs minister John Baird in April, 2013 during testimony before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.
Baird was confronted by New Democrat MP Helene Laverdiere who said she was "flabbergasted" to hear that Canada wanted to withdraw from the organization.
It’s difficult to imagine the scale of the trauma, the wartime anxiety, the shock, the anger, that would have engulfed the nation 100 years ago when the seat of the federal government went down in flames.
Seven people died that bitterly cold night on Feb. 3, 1916, when the old Centre Block burned down — the building that saw figures like Macdonald, Bowell, Tupper and Laurier pass through its halls and sit in the Dominion’s first House of Commons.
“The grand old tower put up a magnificent fight for survival. Standing while the support seemed to have burned away, it sent a solid pillow of twisting, billowing gold up into the winter night,” Ottawa Citizen reporter Charles Bishop wrote.
“Finally, it came down, crashing into the concourse in front and with it, carrying the huge, old clock which had stayed illuminated and kept on striking to the last.”
On Wednesday, the House of Commons will mark the tragedy by displaying the wooden mace that was first used as a replacement after the fire. The House will also hear the names of the victims read out, including Nova Scotia MP Bowman Brown Law.
Premier Kathleen Wynne was honoured by Sikh leaders at the Golden Temple despite a media-fuelled controversy swirling around her visit to the holy shrine.
Wynne was warmly welcomed Sunday, receiving the “siropa” robe of honour at the Sikh faith’s most sacred site.
A large and aggressive throng of Indian news photographers accompanied the premier — here leading an Ontario trade delegation — as she toured the sprawling temple for two hours.
The second biggest story on the front page of Sunday’s Hindustan Times, one of India’s major newspapers, was about the “pro-gay” premier, who is travelling with her spouse, Jane Rounthwaite.
According to the Times, “the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee … would not welcome her with a ‘siropa’ … during her visit to the Golden Temple as she is a supporter of same-sex marriages.”
But Wynne was presented with the orange cotton robe in a private ceremony at the end of a tour that also saw her preparing chapati in the massive kitchen that serves 70,000 free meals to pilgrims every day.
During the past several years, I've watched country after country destroy their stockpiles of confiscated elephant ivory, preventing that ivory from somehow slipping back into the black market and symbolically demonstrating commitment to stopping the illegal trade.
But to my mind, something that’s always been missing is an apology: No country has ever formally said sorry for its complicity in the trade. Tomorrow Sri Lanka will hold a religious ceremony to do just that.
“We have to apologize,” said the Venerable Omalpe Sobitha Thero, the Buddhist priest who will lead the service. “Those elephants were victimized by the cruelty of certain people. But all of human society is responsible. We destroyed those innocent lives to take those tusks. We have to ask for pardon from them.”
Sri Lanka’s destruction of its ivory—the first by a country in South Asia—brings to 16 the total so far. (For the other countries, see the chart below.) The ivory will be crushed at an iconic oceanside park in the heart of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, then burned in a city incinerator.
The ivory—the country’s entire stockpile—came from a single shipment of 359 tusks, weighing 1.5 tons, seized by customs authorities at the Port of Colombo in May 2012. The shipment was in transit from Kenya to Dubai. DNA testing later showed that the tusks came from Tanzania.
The Toast: If has always been mostly garbage, why did you write this book now? Do you think we’re better positioned in terms of either will or technology to take more of the garbage out?
Sarah Jeong: The book positions online harassment as part of a larger category of long-extant problems, but when it comes down to it, it’s still a book about online harassment. One of the things I wanted to do with the book was to hammer in how online harassment has been around forever — but I don’t think there would have been an audience for the book until fairly recently. There’s a lot more mainstream awareness of harassment and online misogyny in particular.
Why do you think that is? More media coverage, more survivors of online harassment speaking out?
100% media coverage. Part of that has to do with journalists being aggressively harassed — the journalists then turn around and use their platforms to show the world what is happening to them.
But that’s not the whole story. The Internet now includes a much broader swath of the entire population, which means that the old trite victim-blaming along the lines of “it’s just the Internet” doesn’t work so well. We now recognize the Internet as just another arena for our day-to-day lives, a place that’s no less real than the offline world. The Internet’s ubiquity also means that large-scale incidents of harassment become very large-scale, sucking in celebrities, journalists, even entire media organizations.
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