[PHOTO] Green and grey on blue, Yonge and St. Clair

[OBSCURA] Toronto Pride

Toronto mayor John Tory's Twitter account shared the below photograph last night, of the Toronto sign at City Hall in the colours of the Pride rainbow.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes five interesting abandoned places to explore around Toronto.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers how to map minute areas of the protoplanetary disks of young stars.


• Joe. My. God. notes ISIS' claim of responsibility for the Orlando massacre.


• Language Log looks at the oddly misprinted signs in non-Latin scripts at an Austrian botanical garden.


• Speed River Journal's Van Waffle turns to a nature walk yesterday.


• Towleroad notes the line-ups to donate blood at Orlando.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that knee-jerk reactions to tragedy are rarely good ones.


• Whatever's John Scalzi expresses his grief and rage at mass shootings generally.


• The Financial Times' The World notes English and Russian hooliganism at Euro 2016.


• Window on Eurasia notes how experts in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan reject the idea that theirs are failed states, and looks at modern-day Russians' awkwardness towards a holiday marking Russia's declaration of sovereignty within the Soviet Union.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Bloomberg notes UEFA's opening of a disciplinary case against Russia for fans' violence, and looks how an anti-corruption drive has not been hurting China's Hainan.


• Bloomberg View notes the flaws in Gawker's shock approach.


• CBC looks at tributes to the dead of Orlando, and reports on Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn.


• The Calgary Herald describes the story of Alberta's Stephan family, pushed by the tragedy of psychiatric illness into alternative medicine and eventual neglect of a meningitis-infected toddler.


• MacLean's shares an Orlando victim's texts to his mother.


• National Geographic imagines what happened sixty-five million years ago after the Chixculub impact.


• The National Post notes that the father of the Orlando mass killer supported the Taliban on his television show.


• Open Democracy notes the astonishingly weak British constitution.


• The Toronto Star looks at the first gay pride rally in Kyiv.


• Wired looks at Apple's contributions to smartphone technology and examines how the Islamic State outsources terror.

[URBAN NOTE] "Fugitive capybara captured in Toronto park 19 days after zoo escape"

The Guardian reports.

For 19 days, the renegades roamed through a forested Toronto park, munching on grass and frolicking in ponds while social media celebrated them as folk heroes.

But the brief taste of freedom has come to an abrupt end for one of the capybaras that escaped last month from a Toronto zoo. The dog-sized rodent – native to South America and resembling a large, tailless beaver with stumpy legs – was lured into a metal cage on Sunday evening in one corner of a 400-acre park in the city.

Two capybaras, one male and one female, bolted from a small zoo in the park on 24 May. It was their first day at the High Park zoo, after being brought in from a breeder in Texas to join Chewie, the zoo’s lone capybara.

[. . .]

After initial attempts to attract the rodents by playing capybara calls over a speaker yielded no results, search teams turned to traps baited with corn and fruit to lure the animals.

Only one of them was caught on Sunday, the other capybara remains at large.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto holds candlelight vigil for victims of Orlando nightclub massacre"

The Toronto Star's Jackie Hong reports on the local reaction to Orlando.

Hundreds of members of Toronto’s gay community and their supporters honoured the victims of the shooting spree in Orlando with a candlelight vigil Sunday evening at Barbara Hall Park, on Church St.

The vigil, organized by a “queer nun” collective dubbed the Toronto Sisters, invited people to “bring a candle, say a prayer, seek or give comfort (and) stand in solidarity with our queer Orlando brothers and sisters. Love conquers all.”

Supported by The 519, a LGBTQ community centre, the vigil was just one of many ways Torontonians expressed their horror over the massacre of 50 people when a lone gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub early Sunday.

A group of equity officials in Ontario schools encouraged schools province-wide to discuss the incident in classrooms on Monday. The Equity Summit Group also urged schools to fly their flags at half-mast, create announcements explaining the reason June has been designated Pride month, build support groups for LGBTQ staff, challenge schools that don’t have active Gay Student Alliance groups, and simply speak out for people who feel silenced.

Durham Region schools will fly their flags at half-mast. Barry Bedford, principal of equity at the Durham District School Board and co-chair of the equity group, wrote: “It's time to step up. This event has not only robbed countless people of their loved ones, partners. Husbands and wives, it has also stolen any sense of safety within our LGBTQ community. Step up. Words alone mean nothing!”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto to dedicate Pride Parade to victims of Orlando shooting"

CityNews reports.

Toronto will dedicate its upcoming Pride Parade to the victims of the Orlando shooting, the executive director of Pride Toronto said on Monday morning.

They will also be increasing their own security measures, a decision the board made hours after the fatal shooting.

[. . .]

“The board decided to dedicate the parade to the victims, we’ll have a minute of silence, we’ll read all their names … even if I never met them, they are my family,” Mathieu Chantelois told CityNews.

“We have a meeting with the RCMP, obviously we’re going to talk about security,” Chantelois added.

“At the same time, we already have a very robust security plan in place … we need to make it as safe a space as possible. ”

[URBAN NOTE] "At eight months old, Toronto Zoo panda cubs starting to like bamboo"

CityNews reports on the Toronto Zoo's pandas, complete with many photos. I really must go see them!

Those adorable giant panda cubs at the Toronto Zoo are just so cute that we need to mark their milestones as often as we can.

On Monday, the cubs – Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue – turned eight months old. It seems like only yesterday they were born.

They were born to mom Er Shun on Oct. 13, 2015, and at the time, weighed only 187 grams and 115 grams. Now, Jia Panpan (the male panda), weighs 14.4 kilograms, while the female Jia Yueyue weighs 11.15 kilograms.

And as all pandas do, they are getting a taste for bamboo, their food of choice.

“Although they aren’t eating very much quite yet, they have now developed a keen interest in bamboo,” the Zoo said in a statement.

[URBAN NOTE] "Metrolinx wrestles with what fare is fair"

The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr reports on discussions about the future flat fare of Metrolinx's systems. I do have to again voice my opposite to getting rid of the TTC flat rate: I depend on it.

It’s a small task that millions of people perform every day, by dropping coins in a fare box, flashing a transfer to a bus operator, or tapping a Presto card at the subway turnstile.

But with plans afoot to change how, and how much, transit riders in the Toronto region pay for public transit, the fate of that simple gesture is looking very complicated.

For more than a year and a half, Metrolinx, the Ontario government’s regional transit agency, has been working on a plan to merge the fare systems of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s nine municipal transit operators, as well as GO Transit.

It’s a project that could transform the daily routines of millions of transit riders from Hamilton to Oshawa, and the Ministry of Transportation says it’s key to the success its plans to increase mobility in the GTHA.

[. . .]

The goal of integration is to enable transit users to go to their nearest transit stop, pay their fare using the new Presto fare card, and never notice if they transfer onto another municipality’s system.

Integration is necessary, Metrolinx says, because more than 22 per cent of the GTHA’s nearly 2 million daily transit riders cross a municipal boundary, and thousands of them pay a penalty for it.

[ISL] "Tug-of-war draws rival Estonian islands closer"

The Gulf Times carried this charming AFP article from Estonia.

Residents on Estonia’s two biggest islands took their age old rivalry to a whole new level over the weekend by staging their first tug-of-war using a 10km long rope across the part of the Baltic sea which separates them.

For centuries, the islanders of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa, off Estonia’s west coast, have revelled in poking fun at each other.

But on Saturday night, they decided to finally let bygones be bygones and pull the islands closer together - at least symbolically.

Over 500 people grabbed the rope at Hiiumaa’s Soru marina, while over 600 competitors pulled its other end at the Soela marina on Saaremaa, an AFP photographer saw.

It took just 10 minutes for the rope to break, forcing referees from the “neutral” smaller island of Vormsi to declare a tie.

[LINK] Five links on the Microsoft purchase of LinkedIn

I have a profile on LinkedIn, but I'll be damned if I've actually used the service for anything. I don't quite know what it is for--most of the people I've talked to seem to be a like mind. That is perhaps why I was surprised to learn, from the CBC among others, that Microsoft was buying LinkedIn for $US 26 billion.

In a release Monday, Microsoft announced it would pay $196 US for every share in LinkedIn, a professional networking website at which users post their resumes online and can contact other companies and professionals. It has 430 million members, according to its most recent regulatory filings.

The price represents a 49 per cent premium from Friday's closing price of LinkedIn shares.

"The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centred on connecting the world's professionals," Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in the release. "Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft."

[. . .]

If the deal is approved by regulators, LinkedIn will stay on as an independent unit within Microsoft, and chief executive Jeff Weiner will stay on at the company.

In LinkedIn, Microsoft gets access to more than 400 million customers and the opportunity to sell them more business tools, cloud services and other products.

Bloomberg's Robert Lafranco was responsible for an infographic noting that the sale benefited LinkedIn's founder personally to the tune of one billion US dollars.

Joshua Brustein's article "How Microsoft Thinks Office Can Help LinkedIn and Vice Versa" notes what Microsoft thinks LinkedIn ownership can do for the company. The goal of integrating a social network with hundreds of millions of users with its office software is appealing.

As it stands now, LinkedIn is generally a place where people go when they’re looking for work, and Microsoft Office is a tool they use to actually do work. Keeping those two activities separate limits their appeal: Many people just don't see a reason to check in on their LinkedIn accounts very often. Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn—one of the biggest deals ever in the tech industry—is based on the theory that people will start using both LinkedIn and Microsoft Office more if they're combined.

In a presentation to investors on Monday, the companies stressed how much the two services could reinforce one another. LinkedIn has information that can help Microsoft Outlook users do last-minute prep for meetings. The same goes for a Skype call, or maybe even a document being shared through Office365. At a time when there's a layer of social networking laid on top of just about everything, running a suite of productivity software that's largely isolated can be a big disadvantage.

By buying LinkedIn, Microsoft is giving Office a social network of its own. In theory, it’s the perfect fit, because both are focused tightly on the working world. The collaboration could get people to use Microsoft software more often, making it less likely that they’ll cancel their subscriptions at the end of the year. Having access to LinkedIn’s data will also help make Microsoft’s personal assistant, Cortana, a bit smarter. Microsoft gives the example of the virtual assistant telling someone that the person she’s meeting with went to the same college she did, and giving her a quick update on how the school’s sport's team did, presumably to give her some easy fodder for chitchat.

Chris Sorenson of MacLean's is not optimistic about this.

So what, exactly, would LinkedIn, with some 105 million active monthly users, add to Microsoft’s menu? Some say LinkedIn will help broaden and deepen the appeal of Microsoft’s products among business customers. Others believe Redmond, WA-based firm is hoping LinkedIn’s reams of data about people and their employers can be tapped by its Cortana digital assistant to prep Windows 10 users for sales and other meetings. “It sounds smarmy, but a good salesperson will tell you that an emotional connection helps seal the deal,” wrote Mark Hachman, a senior editor at PCWorld.

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the tie-up mostly offers it a reprieve from competition and angry investors. Earlier this year, LinkedIn’s stock plummeted 43 per cent in a single day after executives released a sales forecast that came in well below expectations. Though LinkedIn was once touted as superior to Facebook when it came to having a lucrative business model—it makes money by selling “premium” subscriptions to users as well as access to recruiters and marketers—the company has struggled to keep users engaged in recent years, sparking fears on Wall Street about overall growth potential. Now, LinkedIn can leverage Microsoft’s vast enterprise portfolio to build its user base. “Imagine a world where we’re no longer looking up at Tech Titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, and wondering what it would be like to operate at their extraordinary scale—because [now] we’re one of them,” wrote LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a memo to employees about this week’s deal.

Yet, despite the potential advantages for both sides, there’s no guarantees the merger will work. Indeed, Microsoft has a long history of making poor acquisitions or, at least, failing to properly capitalize on them. Back in 2013, Microsoft purchased Finnish device maker Nokia for US$7.9 billion in a deal that was supposed to make both firms more relevant in a mobile market increasingly dominated by Apple and Google. Instead, the merger, which critics likened to two drunks leaning on each other, ultimately resulted in a US$7.2 billion write down for Microsoft last year. Microsoft’s 2007 purchase of online ad firm aQuantive for US$6.3 billion followed a similar script, with the software giant writing down nearly the entire cost of the deal five years later. And while Microsoft’s decision to scoop up Skype for US$8.5 billion in 2011 has hardly been a disaster, it’s not as if the communications platform—which, incidentally, was previously owned by a group of investors that included the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board—has transformed Microsoft’s business in a meaningful way.

Bloomberg View's Conor Sen sees this in the context of economic bubbles.

For a better sense of where the bubble might be, consider how Microsoft is raising the cash to fund the deal. The money will come entirely from new bond issues, adding about $25 billion to a debt load that has already increased by about $15 billion over the past year:

Corporate debt issuance has surged since the 2008 financial crisis for a variety of reasons, including central banks’ easy-money policies, low or negative interest rates in much of the developed world, and foreign central banks’ more recent moves to purchase corporate bonds directly. In the U.S., corporate bonds outstanding amounted to 27 percent of gross domestic product as of March 2016, up from 20 percent at the end of 2007:

To be sure, some of the debt issuance is a form of tax arbitrage: Instead of incurring tax liabilities by bringing in cash from abroad to pay for stock buybacks, U.S. tech and pharmaceutical companies are instead borrowing the money at home. That said, when a source of funding is too cheap it will be abused, and excess issuance is generally a big danger sign, whether it involves tech IPOs in the late 1990s, mortgage debt in the middle 2000s, energy debt in the early 2010s, or corporate debt today.

Justin Fox, also of Bloomberg View, sees this in the context of a closed-in digital frontier. Where else is there room for innovation?

“Even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether,” Recode’s Peter Kafka wrote last week. “Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.”

This could just be the result of a temporary bottleneck. Lots of people, myself included, currently own smartphones with only 16 gigabytes of storage. That’s often not enough space even to upgrade all the apps we’ve already downloaded -- I’ve been having to delete apps on a regular basis for the past six months. Someday I’ll get a better phone and this will change, right?

Still, it seems like it’s more than just a storage-capacity issue. A handful of dominant mobile apps are crowding out the rest in terms of mindshare. And, at least in the developed world, there aren’t many untapped customers left to go after.

This situation may represent the new normal for the mobile internet and the internet in general. There could well be lots of revenue growth left -- in the annual Internet Trends slideshow she released earlier this month, Mary Meeker of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers pointed to rising advertising spending on mobile and the great potential of voice interfaces. Apple and Google, meanwhile, are hoping that app subscriptions will increase mobile spending. What there doesn’t seem to be, though, is a lot of truly virgin digital territory.

In the early days of the commercial internet, digital homesteaders could stake big claims. Now a small group of companies -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, mainly -- already controls most of the territory. Facebook is only 12 years old, and five-year-old Snapchat now seems like it may be breaking into the mainstream. It's not impossible for newcomers to find a niche. But as I’ve written before, the advantages to size seem to be growing. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, announced today, is just one more indication of that.