[OBSCURA] Aurelian Marechal's photos of rising apartment tower complexes in China

The above photo, showing a residential high-rise development outside of the interior Chinese city of Yinchuan, is one of a few stunning photos of similar developments taken across China by photographer Aurelian Marechal. Marechal's work was the subject of a brief Wired article by Charley Locke.

Venture to the outskirts of China’s biggest cities and you’ll find soaring towers and a barren landscape. One day, these futuristic high-rises will house the 250 million or so people the government hopes to move from villages into cities. For now, though, they remain all but empty. “They look like ghost towns,” says photographer Aurelien Marechal. “They’re suburbs in the middle of nowhere.”

China’s relocation plan is designed to give those in poor, rural areas access to healthcare, schools, and jobs. To entice people into the cities, the government is paying people for their land and subsidizing their housing in gargantuan towers that stand 40 stories or more.

Marechal, who has lived in Shanghai since 2012, noticed the developments during a train ride to Nanjing. He found their size and location intriguing and spent two years documenting their construction in 15 cities throughout the country. The images in Block look like an abandoned civilization, a dystopian vision of a city immediately and completely emptied. Exactly the opposite is happening, of course, as China’s plan to relocate people fills the standing suburbs waiting to house them.

[PHOTO] Eighteen photos from Allan Gardens, Toronto

The first snowfall of winter inspired me to dash off yesterday to the Allan Gardens Conservatory, where I spent a half-hour before it closed at 5 o'clock. It was nice to spend time in the greenhouse complex, among the green and living things prepared for Christmas. The relatively late hour was a new time for me, casting shadows and complicating shots.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Big Picture shares photos from ruined Aleppo.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the new explanation for the ASASSN-15h, of a Sun-mass star torn apart by a fast-rotating black hole.


• The Crux looks at the condition of hyperemesis gravidarum.


• Dangerous Minds shares the dark and Satanic art of an Argentine artist.


• Joe. My. God. reports on one man's displeasure that Malta has banned ex-gay "therapy".


• Language Log looks at where British law confronts linguistics.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines an alternate history where Jill Stein leaves the presidential race and gives Hillary Clinton a needed victory.


• Peter Rukavina recalls the simple yet effective early version of Hansard for the Island legislative assembly.


• Mark Simpson notes the objectification of men on the new Baywatch.


• Window on Eurasia fears the violence of an open Russian imperialism and looks at the confusion over how to recognize the 1917 revolution.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why an NDP veteran cut his party ties over tolls"

The Toronto Star's Martin Regg Cohn writes about why one Toronto NDP MPP left his party over its opposition to road tolls.

Politicians are like pretzels — easily twisted out of shape.

Until they snap.

Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are twisting themselves into cloverleafs over road tolls. But they’re not the only politicians clutching fig leafs.

The New Democratic Party is also twisting and turning in ideological circles over road tolls. And this time, the road kill is one of their own.

Paul Ferreira, a lifelong New Democrat, one-time MPP, and former chief of staff to two of Ontario’s NDP leaders, has quit the party.

Many New Democrats responded by telling him they’d “already taken a similar decision,” Ferreira told me, for the same reason: The party is being “fundamentally dishonest.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Why doesn’t Ontario’s NDP get road pricing?"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc is fed up with the NDP's failure to get Toronto voters, most recently on the road toll issue.

How long do progressives and urban dwellers more generally have to wait before Ontario’s NDP stops compensating (atoning?) for former premier Bob Rae’s decision, circa the early 1990s, to slap tolls on Highway 407?

The question arose again late last week when Andrea Horwath’s populists stood shoulder to ideological shoulder with Patrick Brown’s Progressive Conservatives to support a symbolic motion calling on Kathleen Wynne’s government to reject the City of Toronto’s forthcoming request to put tolls on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway.

I understand that opposition parties need to be, well, oppositional. But as happened in the last provincial election in 2014, Horwath revealed she’s got a tin ear when it comes to not just funding urban infrastructure but deploying green policies meant to change driver behaviour, reduce emissions, and spur transit use.

Instead of tabling a motion calling on the provincial government to, say, properly fund the operating costs of transit, toll all the 400-series highways or urge the Wynne Liberals to give the City of Toronto other revenue tools, such as sales tax, Team Horwath threw in their lot with a rurally-based party that has little interest in transit and scant purchase with urban voters.

Why? Shouldn’t progressive voters in big cities like Toronto be able to back an electoral option to the Liberals? Of course. Yet last week’s stunt — which, let’s face it, is what that motion amounted to — stands as a fairly crisp signal that the NDP isn’t interested in Toronto. I understand why the Tories don’t much care about the city, but the NDP’s indifference is much more difficult to grasp.

[URBAN NOTE] On the survival of the HMV flagship store at Yonge and Dundas

blogTO's Phil Villeneuve shares the good news that HMV is committed to the survival of its Yonge and Dundas space for music, in the broadest sense.

The music industry in Toronto is ever-changing, but 2016 was a particularly difficult year for HMV.

The Eaton Centre location announced its imminent closure when its lease came up for renewal, which was the same story at the Bloor Street store. A company that was once ubiquitous in Toronto is now down to a handful of stores.

It leaves many wondering about the future of 333 Yonge St., the 4,000 square foot flagship store near Yonge and Dundas. It's been around for 30 years and can't help but feel like a bit of a vessel for movie merch and bargain bin pop cultural items.

Nick Williams, the president and CEO of of HMV Canada has a status update about the store and the main message is that it's not going anywhere.

"Every time we have to close a store or move a store we get lots of letters and emails from our core consumers who don’t like that change," he says. "The reality is the problem in some of our downtown markets, the rental markets are so prohibitive for retail in the malls.

"The big landlords and Cadillacs of this world command such high rent that we just get to the point where we can’t afford to pay them anymore. Our business model doesn’t allow us to."

[URBAN NOTE] "Music City: Toronto's creative brain drain"

NOW Toronto's Ian Gormley argues that rising real estate prices threaten to push the Torontonians who drive the music industry out of the city.

A recent study by the Martin Prosperity Institute illustrates the financial quandary local musicians face. Using data from SOCAN and the Toronto Music Advisory Council, we mapped out the epicentre of the local music economy – the 24 neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of working songwriters and composers per capita, and of music industry infrastructure like venues, rehearsal spaces, studios and record labels – and then compared it to average home prices across the GTA, as per Market Watch stats. (See Taylor Blake's interactive map above.)

In Toronto, Canada’s second-most expensive real estate market, the average home goes for over $700,000, a figure that’s more than doubled in the past 20 years. A one-bedroom apartment will set you back about $1,400 a month, according to a recent PadMapper report. Meanwhile, an estimated 80 per cent of Canada’s music industry is based here, making Toronto a magnet for bands looking to further their art and career.

Though the primary sites for music creation and performance in the city have shifted westward and eastward in recent years, our data show that musicians still cluster along a stretch running through the downtown core. Almost a third of them – about 9 per cent of Toronto’s total population – live in west-end neighbourhoods like Dovercourt, Rua Açores, Parkdale and High Park. A further 20 per cent cluster in pockets of East York, along the Danforth and in the Beach.

The cost of a home in these neighbourhoods falls into the middle-range bracket, but those areas are surrounded by higher-end real estate zones. Previously, when rents spiked, musicians were able move to cheaper neighbourhoods. Today, creators are becoming boxed in as prices in surrounding areas also soar. And while there are relatively cheaper pockets farther into the suburbs, musicians aren’t opting to relocate there. Many would rather either tough it out downtown or move to, say, Hamilton.

[LINK] "Why Trump and the Tech Industry Are on a Collision Course"

The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein looks at the huge gap, in social and economic terms both, between California's Silicon Valley and incoming President Donald Trump.

The political gulf between Donald Trump and the high-tech community he has summoned to a meeting in New York City on Wednesday might be comparable to the technological distance between the latest cutting-edge smartphone and a Commodore 64 personal computer.

While Hillary Clinton, by most accounts, did not stir up as much enthusiasm as President Obama did among this group, the resistance to Trump across the technology industry was widespread and powerful—whether measured by votes, campaign contributions, or endorsements. The list of tech-world notables who endorsed Trump essentially began and ended with Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and libertarian investor who also bankrolled the lawsuit from wrestler Hulk Hogan that bankrupted Gawker Media.

The barriers between Trump and the technology world span both values—the industry emphatically leans left on social issues—and interests. Trump’s hostility to immigration, opposition to free trade, and resistance to replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources to combat climate change all clash directly with the constellation of technology industries that rely on importing talent from around the world, sell their products across the globe, and have invested heavily in developing clean-energy alternatives to oil, gas, and coal. Tech leaders are also bracing for Trump to attempt to unravel the net-neutrality rules that Obama’s Federal Communications Commission adopted, and to push against the privacy standards many industry leaders have sought to maintain.

During the campaign, Trump in turn lashed Apple for manufacturing too many of its products overseas. Stephen Bannon, the former chief executive of Breitbart—who has emerged as the ideological synthesizer of Trump’s worldview—has touted Democrats’ courtship of the technology industry as evidence the party had abandoned heartland workers for coastal elites. As Bannon recently told The Hollywood Reporter, “They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Across this DMZ of mutual suspicion, financial support for Trump from the technology industry barely registered as trace amounts.

[LINK] "Why China Can't Lure Tech Talent"

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter argues that China's erratic and often repressive official policies leave it poorly positioned to copy, or import, Silicon Valley.

At first glance, China does seem like a logical destination for talented tech workers. For years, its government has offered them lucrative incentives to come to Chinese universities and companies. Its online population is the world's largest, and the local e-commerce market is booming. Private and public research budgets are increasing quickly. Recently, there's been steady growth in Chinese returning home after earning degrees overseas.

So what's not to like?

The biggest problem is government control of the internet. For a software developer, the inconvenience goes well beyond not being able to access YouTube during coffee breaks. It means that key software libraries and tools are often inaccessible. In 2013, China blocked Github, a globally important open-source depository and collaboration tool, thereby forcing developers to seek workarounds. Using a virtual private network to "tunnel" through the blockades is one popular option. But VPNs slow uploads, downloads and collaboration. That slowness, in turn, can pose security risks: In 2015, hundreds of developers opted to use infected iOS software tools rather than spend days downloading legit versions from Apple Inc.

And it isn't just developers who suffer. Among the restricted sites in China is Google Scholar, a tool that indexes online peer-reviewed studies, conference proceedings, books and other research material into an easily accessible format. It's become a crucial database for academics around the world, and Chinese researchers -- even those with VPNs -- struggle to use it. The situation grew so dire this summer that several state-run news outlets published complaints from Chinese scientists, with one practically begging the nationalist Global Times newspaper: "We hope the government can relax supervision for academic purposes."

The cumulative impact of these restrictions is significant. Scientists unable to keep up with what researchers in other countries are publishing are destined to be left behind, which is one reason China is having difficulty luring foreign scholars to its universities. Programmers who can't take advantage of the sites and tools that make development a global effort are destined to write software customized solely for the Chinese market.

[LINK] 'Russia’s American coup"

Scott Gilmore in MacLean's describes how Americans are starting to respond to confirmation of Russian interference in the recent presidential elections.

Some of the most important moments in history happen fast, like a flash of lightning. A tank crosses a border or a prince is assassinated and everyone knows the world has changed, even before the sound of thunder rolls over them.

Other epochal shifts are more subtle and incremental. In 18th-century England, very few people would have known what a Spinning Jenny was, and fewer still would recognize what the automation of weaving meant for the world.

For the last two years we have been living through one of those less obvious historic transformations. It didn’t happen all at once, it’s still not over, and even now we can’t say how deep or far it will go. But it happened, moment by moment, until we woke up in a cold day in December and realized that Moscow had effectively installed the next president of the United States.

That sounds hyperbolic, doesn’t it? Even writing it I have to pause and stare at that sentence. But these are the facts: The CIA and over a dozen other U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Russia hacked into both the Republican and Democratic party computers. Senior Russian officials have admitted that they leaked the Democratic data to WikiLeaks. Those emails were then strategically published over the course of the presidential campaign. Why? A member of the House Intelligence Committee states there is “overwhelming evidence” Russia’s goal was to elect Donald Trump.

The result of Putin’s intervention in the American election cannot be downplayed. If Hillary Clinton had garnered just 107,000 more votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, this would have given her the Electoral College and the White House. According to pollster Nate Silver, the Russian intervention contributed to eroding up to three per cent of the swing-state vote from Clinton. That small margin was all it took to decide the election.

[LINK] "Putin Will Find Germany's Elections Hard to Subvert"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky argues that, owing to the greater resilience of German politics and a more honest media environment among other things, any Russian involvement in Germany's elections would have more limited results. Here's hoping.

Merkel's Achilles heel in this election is the refugee crisis of 2015. I doubt, however, that much unpublished kompromat exists on that: Merkel's mistakes in handling the crisis were extensively covered by the German press. And unlike Americans, whose trust in the media is at a historic low, Germans still trust traditional media.

There's a notable difference between the ways relatively conservative Germans and tech-crazy Americans get their news. Only 20 percent of Americans find it in newspapers; 57 percent of Germans still read a newspaper or a magazine every day. That means the effectiveness of fake news campaigns and social network echo chambers won't be as high in Germany as it was in the U.S.

Besides, Germans are far more amenable to speech restrictions than Americans. Germany has hate speech laws that would be impossible under the First Amendment. Calls to outlaw fake news or prosecute those who spread it are coming from many quarters, especially from Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the other centrist political force -- its coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party. Unlike in the U.S., the government in Germany has the ability to go after those who knowingly publish disinformation. A Russian TV journalist who reported on the fake rape earlier this year was briefly under investigation, though he wasn't convicted.

On Tuesday, the leader of the Social Democrats, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, posted a photo of a handwritten message on Twitter: "A fair fight! That's how we must fight the 2017 election -- not like in the U.S.! No fake news, no bashing, no insults." Gabriel wrote "fake news" and "bashing" in English. Germany doesn't even have the kind of echo chambers of anti-establishment opinion that amplified the anti-Clinton line in the U.S., where a propaganda effort could just use the existing channel that gorged on the additional content. In Germany, the channel itself would need to be built.

[LINK] CBC on the Haitians stranded in Tijuana

CBC News' Kim Brunhuber tells a heartbreaking story of Haitian migrants stranded on the US-Mexican frontier.

Every day, more Haitians arrive, famished. They've been on the road for three months to get here.

"We crossed Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala to come here," says 26-year-old Joubert Alizaire.

He's among the close to 50,000 Haitians who migrated to Brazil after the 2010 earthquake devastated parts of their country. Most of them went to work on Olympic construction. When the Olympics ended, so did the work. But the U.S. offered them a lifeline of sorts, announcing that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would stop deporting Haitians who were in the country illegally.

That's what prompted many Haitians like Jean-Ludger Sainnoval to begin a tortuous cross-continental journey. He says he walked much of the way, over mountains, through rivers and jungle.

"You never forget a journey like that," Sainnoval says. "We had nothing to eat, no water, nothing to drink. We have friends that left Brazil but didn't make it here. Some because it was too hard. Some because they died."

Close to 5,000 Haitians managed to make it all the way to Tijuana, at the Mexico-U.S. border. But then in September the U.S. reversed the policy and said it would resume "removing" Haitian nationals, claiming that conditions in Haiti had improved. Those who feared persecution back home could apply for asylum.

[LINK] "Frustration abounds for sponsorship groups waiting for families to arrive"

The Toronto Star's Nicholas Keung tells the story of how refugee sponsors in Canada have found themselves left waiting for the actual arrival of refugees, leaving them with significant costs indeed.

It didn’t take long for Nancy Wilding and her sponsorship group in Huntsville to raise well over the $60,000 they needed to sponsor a Syrian family of seven.

With an application submitted in October 2015, they were matched quickly with a refugee family and scrambled to get things ready.

By December they had secured a four-bedroom house for the family. Some 60 volunteers installed a new kitchen, with cabinetry donated by Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, with natural maple cupboards, new countertops and a donated fridge and stove.

Handmade curtains were hung, a country-style couch and love seat were brought in to grace the living room and a harvest table big enough for dining for the entire family was given pride of place.

The group even filled the house with food, clothing and daily necessities.

The only thing missing was the family.

“We had been ready to go by Christmas, then we waited, waited and waited. It’s been a rollercoaster ride for us. There’s been so much frustration that our hope was dashed,” Wilding said of Syrian Refugee Sponsorship Huntsville.