Portugal is welcoming non-military Chinese engagement in the Azores to help develop the logistical and research potential of the mid-Atlantic island chain.
The growing Chinese influence on the archipelago is worrying Washington as the U.S. reduces its military presence at the Lajes Field air base on the island of Terceira. A series of senior Chinese officials -- including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang -- have used the island as a stop-over on trips to Latin America, as China seeks to expand its footprint overseas and safeguard economic interests.
In a Bloomberg Television interview in Macau on Tuesday, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said that while his nation -- a NATO member -- would continue to honor its defense pact with the U.S., he also wants to see better use of the Azores. The islands are “very important both logistically in the Atlantic Ocean but also in terms of technology and research, in the field of climate change and deep water research,” he said.
“The military use of the American base at this moment is not on the table, what is on the table is for EU institutes, American institutes and Chinese institutes to reuse infrastructure for scientific research purposes,” said Costa, 55. “It’d be a huge waste not to use that infrastructure. We need to reuse that infrastructure, and if you are not going to use it for the military purpose, why not scientific research?”
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Lajes Field -- located 2,290 miles (3,690 kilometers) east of New York and about 1,000 miles west of Lisbon -- had served as a key link between the U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Middle East. During the Cold War, the base played a crucial role in tracking Soviet guided missiles and ballistic missile submarines in the region. It also supported U.S. airlift missions to Israel in the 1970s.
When Danny Zimmerman, who used to run Zimmerman's Discounts with his father, walks down Augusta, in the heart of Kensington Market, it's as if he's amongst friends. He waves hello to passersby as we make our way down the street from 4 Life Natural Foods (in the old Zimmerman's Discounts space) to grab a coffee at the Via Mercanti Food Shop.
"This is the new King of Kensington, right here," says a man, referring to Danny, as he grabs an espresso to go. Danny started working in the market back in 1973 when he was 13 years old. His father moved to the area after surviving the Holocaust.
But even before that, the neighbourhood was a Jewish enclave. In the early 1900s, Jews started moving west out of The Ward into the area now known as Kensington Market.
"By the end of the First World World War," writes Stephen Speisman in The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937, "an outdoor market had begun to develop on the western streets - Kensington, Augusta, Baldwin, Nassau - and a shtetl atmosphere... had been created."
While Kensington Market may not resemble a shtetl (a small Jewish village) anymore, the area still maintains vestiges of Jewish life through various restaurants, synagogues and community groups.
As major delays continue to plague the TTC’s order of 204 new streetcars from Bombardier, other cities like Detroit and Los Angeles are celebrating the arrival of their fresh transit vehicles, built by other manufacturers, on — and in the case of Detroit, ahead of — schedule.
For car-friendly Los Angeles, its most recent transit endeavour has seen far more efficient — and timely — results than Toronto’s streetcar overhaul.
In August 2012, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority chose Japanese firm Kinkisharyo International to produce its new fleet of light rail vehicles, in part due to the company’s reputation of delivering on time. Kinkisharyo had previously built 62 light rail cars for Seattle’s Central Link from 2006-2010.
The initial contract tasked Kinkisharyo with producing a base order of 78 light rail vehicles. Satisfied with the partnership, L.A.’s transportation authority later increased its order to 235 vehicles, at a cost of more than $900 million.
[. . .]
The news in Detroit is also positive. While the order is not to scale of either Toronto’s streetcars or L.A.’s light rail vehicles, the first of Detroit’s six streetcars rolled in last month, and the new QLINE streetcar system should be operational by spring.
It took about 14 months from the time M-1 Rail, the organization leading the development of the 3.3-mile-system, signed on with Brookville Equipment Corporation to the delivery of its first car.
“We have worked at a faster pace, I think, than a lot of entities,” said Dan Lijana, spokesperson for M-1 Rail. “We basically set a target to try to get all these cars here on a more advanced schedule and they worked with us every step of the way to make that happen.”
First, they started building a four-bedroom house without a permit.
But what two brothers ended up building wasn’t the single-family home they’d promised — it was a 21-room student residence, also without a permit.
Now the building sits empty because the City of Toronto refuses to let anyone occupy it. And last week a court ruled against the brothers, who wanted a permit for the now-completed building.
For five years, Steve and Luke Williamson have been embroiled in a dispute with the city over the construction on Victoria Park Ave. near Finch Ave.
“It’s a witch hunt,” said Steve Williamson, who admits he made a mistake but doesn’t feel the city is helping reach a resolution.
“They built without a permit,” said Tim Carre, a lawyer for the city. “Then once they got a permit they did not build within accordance of that permit. They’ve had people in the building occupying it in a manner that was contrary to the building code, contrary to the fire code.
“They’ve had every opportunity to bring it into compliance and they’ve chosen thus far not to.”
Last summer, Elyse Bouvier got into her beat-up Volvo station wagon and drove across Alberta in search of something very personal but very foreign.
It was not any kind of spiritual epiphany or Kerouacian pursuit of freedom. Instead, she ate and took dozens of photos of ginger beef at tiny Chinese restaurants across rural Alberta. Through the lens of her camera, she was trying to capture a cuisine that is ubiquitous and mysterious in Canada, and the trip culminated in an exhibition called Royal Cafe: Chinese-Western in Alberta.
But the journey of reconnecting with Canadian Chinese food is not unique to Bouvier. It’s the same one embarked on by chef Evelyn Wu and professor Lily Cho, each of whom have used their professional lens to better understand the food brought to Canada by Chinese immigrants over a century ago—food that remains a staple of the Canadian diet.
[. . .]
Ginger beef is an iconic Canadian Chinese dish made of battered and deep-fried beef and coated in a thick, dark, sweet, vinegary sauce. It’s the perfect springboard off of which to jump into the murky waters of Canadian Chinese food and its origins.
Ginger beef is indigenous to Alberta but can be found, it’s safe to say, on pretty much any Chinese takeout menu in Canada. But like its American cousin General Tso’s chicken, you’ll have a hard time finding anything resembling ginger beef in China—it doesn’t exist. It is neither Chinese nor Canadian, and yet it is both.
So how can one food occupy such a strange, culturally ambiguous place in Canada? Part of the reason is that Canada was, by all accounts, a very strange and culturally ambiguous place when Chinese immigrants arrived here during the second half of the 19th century. And like a lot dishes, from General Tso’s chicken to poutine, a lot of restaurants claim the inventor’s throne, but there is no definitive evidence to support these claims.
When Aaron Hewitt walked into Striker Sports Bar as a first-time customer, the first thing he noticed was that the washrooms were gender-neutral. The second was that he had just stumbled upon a place to watch sports without dealing with the hostility that he’s experienced in straight sports bars.
Hewitt played sports as a child, but he says his experiences were negative, a common issue for some LGBT people. “There was a lot of bullying from staff and from other students. It’s awful and it makes you sort of avoid sports altogether,” he says.
As he got older, he realized that he missed both playing and watching sports, and decided he would not let hatred stop him from enjoying what he loved. The next logical step would be finding people with similar interests, so when he heard about Striker, he was excited to visit a new space where he could enjoy watching sports.
Striker’s owners dub it as the first LGBT-specific sports bar in Toronto. It opened on Sept 2, 2016, after a sleek renovation. “We designed it and hand picked every single thing in that place from tiles to floors to the seats,” says co-owner Vince Silva. “We poured our heart and soul into this.”
Expenses don’t appear to have been spared. Striker has 15 TV screens, impressive lighting and a frost-rail — a chilled strip along the bartop meant to keep drinks cold. It also serves pub-style food.
“In the sight of the people of Toronto the dream of one thousand years came true last night,” wrote the Toronto Telegram on July 14, 1910. “Rising from the crowd like a creature of life and being, a monoplane circled above over the heads of the crowd, then departed southward and westward, sailing away like some fabled bird born on the wings of the wind.” The event prompting such rhetoric was the successful flight over downtown Toronto executed by Jacques de Lesseps, a French aviator participating in the Toronto aviation meet. “Toronto [has] seen the first great flight,” continued the Telegram, “the beginning of many others that shall annihilate our mighty distance and make the man of our city a neighbour with his brother on the wave-washed shores of the Pacific.”
The meet took place in July 1910, seven year years after Wilbur and Orville Wright had managed their first successful (if brief) aeroplane flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In the latter years of the 1900s, daring aviation pioneers made headlines across the world, experimenting with new aircraft, and making many more flights, some more successful than others. Torontonians’ first real opportunity to see the novelty of powered flight came in 1909, when Charles F. Willard provided demonstrations at Scarboro Beach Park. By some standards, Willard’s flights had been of limited success; although he managed to get his Curtiss “Golden Flyer” into the air on three occasions, each of his flights ended with uneasy landings in Lake Ontario.
In the summer of 1910, Canada’s first aviation meet took place near Montreal, organized by the Automobile and Aero Club of Canada. Though not financially profitable, the event attracted considerable public interest, with demonstrations and competitions featuring experienced pilots, most already famous for their flying exploits in other parts of the world.
One week after the end of the Montreal meet, a second week-long event was held in Toronto, organized in part by the Ontario Motor League, featuring many of the same pilots and aeroplanes. The site chosen for the Toronto meet was owned by the Trethewey family, and was a functioning farm near Weston, just southeast of Jane and Lawrence. The Globe reported that finding a suitable Toronto venue had proven a challenge for the organizers, as the site needed to be large and open, but also conveniently located along transportation lines, so that the planes and spectators could easily access the airfield. The Globe noted that “the Trethewey farm was thought of after [the thought of using] practically all open places in the city had been abandoned for some reason or other.”
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