[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: extreme weather, Jodi Emery, Little Jamaica, public art, Mnandi pie

• Matt Elliott at CBC Toronto asks what, exactly, the City of Toronto is doing to prepare for the increasingly erratic and dangerous weather hitting the city.


• NOW Toronto reports on how Jodie Emery plans to start expanding her marijuana empire, and her wider influence, after opening a new café in Kensington Market.


• This NOW Toronto article reporting on some of the restaurants of Little Jamaica, along Eglinton Avenue West, is informative.
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• I honestly have to say that I have taken note of Three Points Make Two Lines, down at Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue West. I will. Murray Whyte at the Toronto Star makes the case.


• Suresh Doss describes the Mnandi pies sold by Evis Chirowamhangu at Wychwood Barns.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Winnipeg, Buffalo, Chicago, Tallinn, Duqm

• The question of re-opening the storied intersection of Portage and Main, at the heart of Winnipeg, to pedestrian traffic is being hotly debated. The National Post reports.


• CityLab describes how the New York city of Buffalo is enjoying a huge boom in the creation of public art.


• Wired describes Chicago's Wild Mile, a new riverine habitat ingeniously created for the manmade North Branch Canal.


• The World Economic Forum reports that, on the theory that public transit is a public good, Estonia is making public transit free throughout the country, including in the capital of Tallinn.


• Guardian Cities notes the energetic effort of Oman to create, where five years ago there was just desert, the new city of Duqm.

[ISL] Five island links: Ireland, Norse Greenland, Rapa Nui/Easter Island, Nauru, Puerto Rico

• JSTOR Daily notes how severe drought in Ireland is revealing, to aerial and other observers, the outlines of ancient ruins.


• D-Brief examines how the export from Norse Greenland to Europe of walrus ivory played a key role in these lost settlements' economy.


• The people of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, have demanded a return of one of their moai statues from the British Museum, taken at their historical nadir.


• Asylum-seekers being held in detention by Australia on the island of Nauru have beseeched Canada, asking for refuge here. CBC reports.


• New York Magazine suggests that San Juan, capital of Puerto Rico, is despite recent horrors a good destination for tourists.

[NEWS] Some First Nations links: bigotries, Montréal plaques, High Arctic yarn, Abenaki

• The startling anti-native racism demonstrated in a series of tweets by retired Brock University professor Garth Stevenson may see him stripped of any continuing affiliation with that university. CBC reports.


• SBS notes how Canadians Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, visiting Sydney, set to engaging in racist slander against Australian Aborigines.


• The Bank of Montreal has just replaced plaques, on its headquarters at the Place d'Armes, commemorating the death in battle there of an Iroquois chief. I actually saw these in place on my recent visit, just days before these went. CBC reports.


• New findings suggest that, if yarn technology did diffuse in the High Arctic in the Norse period, it came from the Inuit to the Norse and not the other way around. Global News has it.


• Ici Radio-Canada reports on a new dictionary of Abenaki that might yet help save that indigenous language.