A Bit More Detail

• Curbed takes a look at the innovative ways in which the city government of Hamilton has helped boost the city's strengths.


• Commonwealth Magazine shares a revived plan from the 1980s to protect Boston from sea level rise by building a great crescent-shaped dike in Boston Harbor.


• CityLab takes a look at New York City's seemingly-inexplicable decision to back down on a years-long closure of the L Train subway line for repair work.


• Guardian Cities notes the controversy in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, about the construction of a Turkish-funded mosque there. Is this but an element of a new Turkish sphere of influence in the western Balkans?


• This fascinating CNN report takes a look at the sheer scale of Chinese influence in Addis Ababa, the booming capital of Ethiopia, on its own terms and as an example of Chinese influence in Africa at large. (The locals, incidentally, find its models quite relevant and wanted.)

• Reese Fallon, one of the two people killed in the Danforth shooting, was a student hoping to go to the fall to McMaster University to study for a career in nursing. The Toronto Star reports.


• People in some Toronto neighbourhoods with high levels of gun violence welcome an expanded police presence, despite other issues. CBC reports.


• Urban Toronto notes an exciting plan to, among other things, build a Sugar Beach North on the waterfront.


• blogTO talks about Little Ethiopia, on Danforth by Greenwood. Speaking as someone familiar with his Little Ethiopia near Ossington, this area sounds fascinating.


• The Pia Bouman School in Parkdale, a leading dance academy for four decades, is hoping to avoid displacement by new construction. CBC reports.

• There are, happily, new breeds of coffee plants being bred to cope with climate change. The Toronto Star reports.


• High labour and infrastructure costs means that Ethiopia is the only African power likely to challenge China in manufactures. Quartz reports.


• Wired's Kevin Kelly is perhaps on a limb in suggesting the lifestyle of Mongolian nomads is a viable world model.


• The flowing waters of icy Mars were icy, as Universe Today reports.

How does someone teach a language when we have no idea what it might actually sound like?

That's one of the questions for U of T's Robert Holmsted, who's teaching the university's course on the liturgical Ethiopian language Ge'ez.

In its first semester at U of T, his class has five undergraduates and five graduate students enrolled, and several more students auditing the class. They all realize that deciphering ancient languages can help us learn about a country's ancient past.

Manuscripts in the language, which hasn't been spoken in 1,000 years, date from as far back as the sixth century BCE. In fact, contemporary scholars of such ancient languages may not be able to ascertain the true sound of the language at all.

Holmstedt agrees that no one can truly know how centuries-old languages were pronounced, but we can get some clues from other Semitic tongues.

"Without recordings, we have to do our best to reconstruct the sound from Semitic languages," he says. "We make an approximation and can never know for sure."

Ethiopia’s government suspects Egyptian elements may be backing Oromo protesters as rivalry over control of the Nile River intensifies, Communications Minister Getachew Reda said.

Authorities in Cairo may be supporting the banned Oromo Liberation Front, or OLF, that organized a spate of attacks last week across Ethiopia’s most populous region, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency on Sunday, he told reporters Monday in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“We have ample evidence that trainings have happened, financing has happened in Egypt, the jury is still out whether the Egyptian government is going to claim responsibility for that,” Getachew said. “Nor are we saying it is directly linked with the Egyptian government, but we know for a fact the terrorist group OLF has been receiving all kind of support from Egypt.”

Egypt’s government has claimed Ethiopia’s construction of a hydropower dam on the main tributary of the Nile contravenes colonial-era treaties that grant it the right to the bulk of the river’s water. Ethiopian officials reject the accords as obsolete and unjust.

Grammy-winning artist The Weeknd has donated $50,000 to the University of Toronto to help start an Ethiopian Studies program.

The artist, who was born under the name Abel Tesfaye, is a Scarborough native whose parents emigrated from Ethiopia. The Bikila Awards organization, which works to “foster academic, professional and business excellence and promote volunteerism among persons of Ethiopian origin,” reached out to Tesfaye for funding and he immediately responded. Previously, in 2014, the Bikila Awards organization had awarded Tesfaye with its Professional Excellence Award.

On Saturday, the Weeknd tweeted “sharing our brilliant and ancient history of Ethiopia. proud to support the studies in our homie town through @UofT and @bikilaaward”

The money will go toward a larger fundraising campaign which started last year when University of Toronto history and cultural studies professor Michael Gervers pledged a donation of $50,000 of his own money if the amount was matched by the school and the Ethiopian community. The campaign has raised $170,000 thus far.

Proceeds will go towards a course, to be offered later this year, in the ancient Ethiopic language Ge’ez. The school and Bikila hope to follow this with a full program in the future.

• Business Insider looks at the sad state of a project to build a Chinese bullet train in Venezuela.


• Bloomberg notes the profound unconstitutionality of Donald Trump's suggestion that the US national debt might be renounced, looks at the needs of the Brazilian economy, and suggests Poland's economic nationalism is viable.


• CBC reports that Sinéad O'Connor is safe in Chicago.


• National Geographic shares hidden pictures of the Cultural Revolution.


• The National Post notes the discovery of what might be the ruins of an old fort at Lunenburg.


• Open Democracy suggests that Brexit, by separating the City of London from the European Union, could trigger the end of globalization, also taking a look at the popularity of populism.


• Reuters notes the softening of the terms of a Chinese-Venezuelan loan arrangement.


• The Washington Post notes the migration of some Ethiopian-Americans to a booming Ethiopia.


• Wired looks at how natural gas will be used to move beyond the Haber-Bosch process which has created fertilizer for a century.

• Asahi notes the problems of Uniqlo.


• Atlas Obscura looks at the effort to restore the Old Spanish Trail, an early American interstate highway.


• Bloomberg notes the travails of the coal industry in the Czech Republic.


• Bloomberg View notes South Africa's serious economic problems and looks at how the Panama Papers make centrism more difficult.


• CBC notes how a terrifyingly high suicide rate in Attawapiskat has triggered a state of emergency.


• Fusion looks at how default settings for online mapping services have left some people targets.


• The Boston Globe reports on how Boston cops can now be freely gay.


• The Inter Press Service notes the increasing alienation of Ethiopia's Oromo in the face of the corporatization of agriculture.


• MacLean's considers the future of the NDP, post-Mulcair.


• Space Daily looks at new research examining how neutron stars could, through mass accretion, become black holes.


• The Toronto Star looks at what happened to Mulcair at the NDP convention.


• The Weather Network notes the spread of goldfish into the lakes of Alberta.

Negotiations between Cairo, Addis Ababa and Khartoum have entered a decisive stage in which the parties must express their final stance concerning the controversy and disagreement caused by Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, which threatens Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters. Meetings involving the parties’ foreign affairs and water ministers have intensified, as Ethiopia and Egypt are preparing by finding alternatives that speed up the implementation of the studies should the feud deepen and the negotiations fall through.

On Dec. 11, the foreign affairs and water ministers met in six-party talks in Khartoum, after the failure of technical initiatives to break the deadlock over a mechanism to reduce the dam’s repercussions on Egypt and Sudan. These talks represent a new attempt at direct political negotiations to reach an agreement or a mechanism guaranteeing no harmful effects for Egypt and Sudan will come from the dam. However, construction is underway regardless of the results of the negotiations or studies, which are supposed to modify the construction standards if needed to mitigate the damage.

The parties exhibited anxiety and tension, especially the Egyptian and Ethiopian delegations, throughout the closed meetings on Dec. 11-12. The talks concluded with a brief statement read by Sudanese Foreign Affairs Minister Ibrahim al-Ghandur, who declared, “The parties did not reach any agreement, and meetings will be resumed on Dec. 27 and 28, at the same level of political and technical representation.”

The main problem between the Egyptian and Ethiopian delegations during the meeting concerned the clauses under discussion. While the Egyptian delegation demanded to speed up the technical studies of the dam’s effects that began more than 18 months ago with the formation of a tripartite technical committee, the Ethiopians stressed the importance of the technical studies, as per the Declaration of Principles.

The Egyptian foreign affairs minister demanded that the meeting focus on discussing a new mechanism to agree on the dam’s administration and operation policies and fill the reservoir directly, without wasting any more time to reach a written agreement.

Tekle Negash’s days of riding a battered minibus to work in Ethiopia’s capital are over. Boarding Addis Ababa’s $475-million, Chinese-built and funded Light Rail, he can slash his one-hour commute by two-thirds and still save money.

The 50-year-old trader was one of thousands who queued Sunday for the opening of the first phase of the state-owned urban railway, which comprises 34 kilometers (21.1 miles) of lines across the city. In a ceremony that featured a Chinese delegate’s impromptu singing and an Ethiopian dance troupe, Transport Minister Workneh Gebeyu described the project, one of the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, as a milestone in the nation’s journey out of poverty.

The Light Rail is the first in a raft of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects that Ethiopia’s government says will come online in the next few months and help maintain annual economic growth of more than 10 percent. Another railway along the main trade route to neighboring Djibouti may begin early in 2016, while the Gibe III hydropower dam’s reservoir has started filling, with its 1,870 megawatts capable of almost doubling Ethiopia’s generating capacity.

The operational track, which includes elevated sections and tunnels, runs from Addis Ababa’s main industrial area on its southern fringe, through the trading district of Merkato to the historic center of Piazza. An east-west line skirts the African Union’s headquarters, soars past the main government district and out to modern housing developments.

The Ethiopian Railways Corp. service, which will be run and maintained by Shenzhen Metro Group and China Railway Engineering Corp. for five years, may eventually carry 60,000 passengers an hour, according to project manager Behailu Sintayehu. The second line will start running when China Electric Power Equipment Technology Co., another state-owned company, finishes connecting it to a dedicated electricity supply, he said in a text message on Monday.