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The newest member of Canada's piano-playing Parker family made his debut at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival yesterday, and he was a hit.
Dylan Parker, who is three months old, is the son of Gryphon Trio pianist Jamie Parker and his wife, Mim Pearse, and he's the nephew of pianist Jon Kimura Parker. Sitting in his mother's arms, Dylan smiled as patrons at the festival made a fuss over him after the Gryphon Trio's 10 a.m. concert at Dominion-Chalmers Church.
It was Dylan's first visit to the festival, and you could say he owes his life to the event.
His parents met at the festival in 1999, when Pearse, a freelance editor and classical music buff, was a festival volunteer. She found herself sitting across from Parker for some late-night drinks with festival director Julian Armour and other musicians at the Mayflower Pub on Elgin Street, and they hit it off instantly.
A year later, Parker proposed to Pearse at the festival. CBC Radio host Shelagh Rogers, who was broadcasting one of the concerts across Canada a few days later, announced the engagement on the air. A year after that, on Aug. 5, 2001, Parker and Pearse got married near Ottawa, shortly after Parker and his brother brought the festival to a close with a duo-piano recital. Armour officiated at the ceremony.
To top off their romantic festival story, Pearse says with a laugh, "we're about 100-per-cent sure that he was conceived at last year's festival. We met at the festival, we got married at the festival, and we obviously have a festive time at the festival."
Pearse, 38, and Parker, 42, live in Toronto, where he teaches at the University of Toronto in addition to his international concert touring with the trio.
While Parker, cellist Roman Borys and violinist Annalee Patipatanikoon performed Mozart piano trios for a crowd of more than 500 at Dominion-Chalmers Church yesterday morning, Pearse and Dylan waited backstage. This was one of the festival's "coffee concerts," where patrons are invited to have refreshments with the musicians after the show. So there was a line of well-wishers waiting to congratulate Pearse and Parker and coo over their baby.
Pearse says Dylan has already heard his dad's trio in concert. She took him to a performance in Toronto, when organizers invited her to bring Dylan to the show.
"I stood at back and he was really good. He seems to like music. Jamie used to put him in a sling and practise with him next to the piano. We haven't sensed if he has a preference for certain composers yet."
Tonight at Dominion-Chalmers, the Gryphon Trio will play the festival's 120th and final concert of the year, a piano-trio extravaganza that will include the Vienna Piano Trio.
The trios will perform separately in music by Beethoven and Brahms, and will share the stage for Dvorak's Slavonic Dance No. 8 and Schumann's Andante and Variations in B-flat major for Two Pianos, Two Cellos and Horn, with National Arts Centre Orchestra horn player Lawrence Vine.
Parker says he's looking forward to working with an expanded ensemble and performing music he doesn't get to perform often.
"One of the great things about a festival like this is that you get different people thrown together who wouldn't usually get a chance to work together. It's been a lot of fun to meet and work with them. They're great guys."
The concert starts at 8 p.m.
After Ottawa, Parker, Pearse and son will head to Vancouver, home of the Parker clan, to let the family meet Dylan and check out his tiny hands for piano-playing potential. He's a Parker, after all.
Ottawa Citizen, subscriptionKevin presses his feet against two columns, hugging a window, and snakes upward.
At about 15 feet off the ground, he swings sideways and reaches for the adjacent wall, lunging for the nearest handhold. His fingers catch as his feet give out.
For a few seconds, he's hanging leaf-like in the breeze, just below the second-storey windows of the University of Toronto's medical building. The only thing keeping him from falling is an inch-deep groove in the wall, enough real estate for a few fingers -- a climber's lifeline.
It's called buildering -- the scaling of structures such as buildings and statues, usually without ropes or protective gear -- and if you wander a university campus this summer, you just might come across signs of it. If you don't see the climbers themselves, you may see their telltale traces: handprints left on walls from the chalk they use to ensure a good grip.
Globe and MailWhile otherwise praising the University of Toronto, the jury that handed out the latest Toronto Architecture and Urban Design Awards went out of its way "to register its unanimous dissatisfaction" with the Alumni Gateway, a controversial new structure on College Street at King's College Road, designed in the stripped-down classical style favoured by the architects of various totalitarian regimes -- Nazi, Fascist, Communist -- during the 1930s. The jury further registered its "hope that the university will reconsider the strategy of defining its perimeter with ponderous ceremonial portals."
Yet elsewhere in the city, ponderous ceremonial portals are all the rage. A few kilometres southwest of the university, the city is beginning a lavish restoration of the gateway to old Trinity College, now Trinity Bellwoods Park. And this summer, another jury will nominate a plan for an even more ambitious makeover of the city's most imposing (and loved) ceremonial portal, the Princes' Gates at Exhibition Place.
Interestingly, both projects are being funded in large part by developers whose projects are currently transforming the western part of downtown into the city's newest and temporarily trendiest residential neighbourhood. Just as developers of the early 20th century erected ceremonial gates in open fields to signify the arrival of a new subdivision (eventually turning to functional gates and guard houses to ensure exclusivity), their modern counterparts are restoring historic gates in order to celebrate the revival of an old neighbourhood.
Although far less imposing than the monumental Princes' Gates at the bottom of Strachan Avenue, the Trinity gates at the top of the same street will receive the most thorough going-over. Restoration will include the addition of at least a metre in height to each of the two main columns flanking the park entrance, which were cut down as part of an earlier repair, and the replacement of the wrought-iron doorways that somehow turned up at Trinity College School in Port Hope decades ago.
“Since we don't understand how they got there in the first place, we're not quite sure how to get them back,” said deputy mayor Joe Pantalone, the local councillor. So a second set will be crafted for the old gates.
Nothing so drastic is planned for the Princes' Gates, which have benefited from ongoing restoration efforts over the years — most notably the replacement of Winged Victory, the badly eroded statute that adorned the top of the gates' central arch, with a plastic replica. This time, the effort will focus on the mess of asphalt that surrounds the gates.
“The Princes' Gates are a wonderful, iconic Toronto symbol,” Mr. Pantalone said. “But instead of complementing them, the area around the gates simply denigrates them.”
The brief for the design competition — which is currently in full swing — calls for a dramatic reduction in the asphalt hemming in the gates, including the elimination of traffic lanes on Strachan and the redesign of that street's intersection with Lake Shore Boulevard. The idea is to create a setting that is “perhaps piazza-like,” Mr. Pantalone said.
The fact that the competition is restricted to Italian architects from Milan should help achieve that goal. The Italian connection grows out of Toronto's “twin city” relationship with Milan, with the Princes' Gates competition conceived as a concrete example of that otherwise nebulous relationship. And as the Italian-born deputy mayor asserts, without prejudice, “Italians know their piazzas.”
The winning scheme, as selected by a jury of local experts, will be announced in late September at a gala fundraiser hosted by Lanterra Developments and H&R Developments, two of the companies most active in transforming the skyline of west downtown. They have guaranteed to raise at least $250,000 from the private sector to support the project. Final construction of the winning scheme is scheduled to be finished in June.
Let none declare that this city neglects its ponderous ceremonial portals.
Globe and Mail, subscriptionTheories about polar ice caps melting, put forward by a research student at Durham University, have captured the attention of leading scientists.
New ideas about sea-level change from Sophie Bassett, who is completing her PhD studies in the earth sciences department at Durham, has led to her work being selected for publication in the international journal Science.
Sophie, who was brought up in Newcastle, did her research in collaboration with scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Oregon State University in the US.
It provides evidence to help explain processes that brought the Earth out of the last Ice Age.
Sophie said: "I'm delighted my work has been so well received."
Evening ChronicleThe oldest embryos ever discovered reveal that some early dinosaurs crawled on all fours before learning to stand upright.
A team from the US, Canada and South Africa used the latest archaeological tools - including miniature jackhammers and fine dental drills - to crack open two of six 190 million-year-old dinosaur eggs discovered in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa, in 1978, which were too fragile to examine at the time.
Inside they found a pair of perfectly formed baby Massospondylus carinatus, a long-necked herbivore that stalked on two large hind legs during the late Triassic and early Jurassic period, 220 to 183 million years ago.
The shape and size of each embryo's head, neck and forearms suggests that baby Massospondylus crawled on four limbs after hatching, learning to walk on two legs only later on in life (Science, vol 309, p 761). The researchers suspect the hatchlings' large heads may have been too heavy for their long, horizontally oriented necks to support them comfortably.
"I can't think of any living vertebrate that does this," says Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the research, "except possibly us, and we are terribly awkward as hatchlings."
Over the past half-century, millions of people worldwide have chomped through trillions of McDonald's burgers and fries. But by the turn of the millennium, critics had made the corporation shorthand for everything that's bad in food in rich countries: over-processed, fatty, unhealthy. Faced with this image problem, and stalling and falling profits, McDonald's began fighting back. In 2003 – in what will sound to some a deeply ironic gesture – it set up the Global Advisory Council on Healthy Lifestyles. Its role was to reform McDonald's from within and make the company look like it was taking the global obesity epidemic seriously.
The council recruited some of the world's most respected scientists: biochemists, nutritionists, policy advisers and epidemiologists, keen to help the food giant transform itself. Given the council's academic credibility and good intentions, is it wrong to be cynical about McDonald's' motivation? And given the hold the company has on the hearts and minds of its many customers, is it better to try to applaud the company for its efforts?
Canadian obesity and nutrition researcher Harvey Anderson thinks so. He is one of the elite scientists working with McDonald's, so Diane Martindale asked him if we should start trusting the food giant
Morgan Spurlock's film Super Size Me showed what happened when he ate McDonald's meals for 30 days. What did you think of it?
Garbage. The movie was too extreme to be educational. What pleased me was that most people I know thought it was a bit of a joke. They enjoyed it, but it was more of a question: how could he do that to himself? McDonald's didn't force-feed him. Spurlock is an anti-obesity advocate picking on the biggest target. He didn't show the evils of eating at McDonald's, he showed the evils of over-consumption. Spurlock could have gone to any greasy spoon and done the same thing with the same result. But doing it at a small, unknown restaurant wouldn't have had much impact, would it?
So why did McDonald's do away with the "Supersize" option? It was working for them, wasn't it?
One of the first things the council told McDonald's was to back off from supersizing: it just happened to coincide with the silly movie. People don't need Supersize: if the Supersize option is there, people will go for it. Sometimes you have to help them trip over the right choice. We do have a big obesity epidemic and it's wrong to have large serving sizes.
You are a top nutritionist and obesity researcher. Why did you join a council sponsored by the world's biggest fast-food chain?
Here's an organisation serving millions of meals a day and you have a chance to have an impact on the composition of the food, the nutrition and the public's health. Why not? If I or anyone in public health services was in a position to influence the way the 35 million people in Canada eat, we'd love that opportunity. The trouble is, there's no organised way of getting at it – McDonald's is that way. So I'd rather work from within the system to change things rather than simply complaining.
How did you set about changing the company's billion-dollar-grossing menu?
First, we checked what was in the meal, and figured out what was missing. Was there enough fibre in the buns? Were there things to add to make it more nutritious – say, an apple to the "Happy Meal" and milk instead of a soft drink? We worked with Cathy Kapica, global director of nutrition at the Chicago head office. The most difficult aspect was and is not altering the taste too much, because people complain. McDonald's criteria covering how its food looks, tastes and its composition is rigorous. If you could take a frozen McDonald's hamburger, grill and eat it at home, you'd say: "This is the freshest tasting piece of meat I've ever had." It's just absolutely wonderful.
How do you know?
I've tasted it, on my first visit to McDonald's main testing kitchen in Chicago – what they call Hamburger University – when I joined the council. They grilled me a burger patty and said: "Why don't you just taste our hamburger meat, without any dressings or bun?" And it was delicious.
What do you think you've achieved health-wise?
The Happy Meal used to be a small burger, fries, fizzy drink and toy. Now you can choose: there's apple, yoghurt, milk or juice as substitutes for the fries, and pop at no extra charge. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. We told McDonald's to add fibre to their buns; now we are encouraging whole grains. Compared with 10 years ago, there is much more fruit and vegetables on the menu.
Are the sales improving?
Yes. People see they can choose to eat a salad at McDonald's and still have fun. The fact that the choice is there broadens a child's vision of what fun foods are. If they see other kids eating a salad or an apple, that's more powerful than mom and dad saying: "Eat your salad!" If people would only select the choice that's suitable for them – that's the tricky part.
Is the company image changing?
Yes, I think we are changing people's perception. People tended to close their minds and say: "I'm just not going there." But now they say: "Wow, that was a good salad."
Will there be any scientific papers available showing some independent evidence of this shift?
McDonald's is evaluating its meals. Cathy Kapica is starting to publish – and presenting data at scientific meetings is a real first for McDonald's. She presented at the Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego in April and she will present at the International Congress of Nutrition in Durban, South Africa, in September.
Quite a change. But while McDonald's is now the number one seller of salads in North America, those salads are full of sugar.
There's nothing wrong with a little sugar. It's 4 calories per gram of sugar versus 9 calories per gram of fat. People don't think about that. I eat McDonald's salads all the time. I just had one of its newer ones, the fruit and walnut – it's a wonderful little salad. But you do have to choose your salad dressing carefully. McDonald's is trying to drop the calorie content of some of the dressings because not everyone knows the difference between one made with oil versus one lower in calories.
Is working for McDonald's like going to the dark side, a sort of career suicide?
Just the opposite. Most people see it as a wonderful opportunity. Others say it's nice that you are brave enough to take it on. It's not so much my colleagues that are negative or closed-minded about it. They say to me: "Why don't you suggest to McDonald's that they do this or this?" They see it as an avenue to change. That's comforting. In truth, I did expect that there would be more negative opinions, but most people think we have to work with fast-food companies, we can't be in an ivory tower throwing darts. It's friends, acquaintances, or a vegetarian, or someone who never takes their kids to McDonald's, who say to me: "How could you work for them?" When they say that I give them an educational talk!
Do you eat at McDonald's?
I probably go there once a week. I like the Happy Meal because it's a small burger, and I have the yoghurt and juice instead of pop and fries. I like my high-fibre breakfast cereals, but sometimes I'll just grab a breakfast bagel on the way to work. It's wonderful, fresh, but I don't put the mayo on it. It's a good start to the day. I hope that we'll eventually get to whole-wheat bagels.
Harvey Anderson is a professor at the University of Toronto in the department of nutritional sciences and physiology, and the director of the university's food safety programme. His academic work concentrates on childhood obesity, diet and behaviour. He has contributed to more than 250 publications on food sciences and nutrition.
Even here in Canada, the state can hurt us. It can put us in handcuffs. It can push our cheeks to the ground and hold us down if we resist arrest. It can drag us out of our homes.
Of course, there are limits to the state's ability to use force. The police have to follow the rules.
But how do we make sure the people with the power to use force don't overstep?
This was the topic of conversation last night at the annual Couchiching Summer Conference. For 74 years, the conference in Northern Ontario has offered a weekend of intellectual stimulation to people who like nothing more than a good jaw session on tough topics.
This year, the conference looks at the use of physical force, both around the world and right here on the streets of our cities.
Imagine this. You come home after work and there's a hole in the ground where your house used to be. It wasn't a gas explosion. The government sent a bulldozer.This is what's happening in East Jerusalem, an Israeli-held territory that's home to a large population of Palestinians.
In 2003, Israeli Irus Braverman studied the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, interviewing the Israelis who order the bulldozers in, and those who lose their homes.
Braverman, who is studying law at the University of Toronto and who appeared as a speaker at the conference, said her study didn't look at cases where the Israeli government bulldozed houses as a military response. Her focus was Palestinian houses that were built in East Jerusalem illegally.
"The idea is that the building is illegal, that the person did not obtain a permit, so it must be demolished," Braverman told the Star in an interview.
She stresses that the issues here are complex - and boil down to the question of when the state can use force to hurt a person. The Palestinians who lost homes were breaking the law. But having your house bulldozed is nonetheless traumatic.
The mystery Braverman set out to solve is how Isreali government inspectors decided which houses to bulldoze.
"At first, one inspector was saying to me that there's very fixed criteria. They prefer to demolish houses in the old city or in green areas or in public spaces," Braverman said.
But this doesn't explain all the demolitions. Braverman said there are "hidden criteria" involved in the inspection process that she could never fully expose. It's a question of power.
While Braverman calls for a closer monitoring of state power in East Jerusalem, her call is echoed right here in Canada.
Conference organizers brought the issue home when they introduced Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
"Look at the evidence coming out of the Maher Arar inquiry," Borovoy said in an interview with the Star.
Arar, a Canadian citizen whom the Americans suspected of having ties to terrorist groups, was deported to Syria by American officials during a stopover in the U.S. He claims that during his year in a Syrian prison, he was tortured. Now there's an inquiry to find out what role the RCMP might have played in Arar's deportation.
Borovoy said defence minister Bill Graham, who was foreign minister at the time Arar was deported, told the inquiry the RCMP didn't give his office any information on their investigation into Arar.
Borovoy said it's true that politicians aren't supposed to know about the day to day operational matters of law enforcement agencies, and with good reason.
But if an RCMP probe might have infuenced the deportation of Arar without the government's knowledge, then that's a legitimate concern too, Borovoy said. "The price they're paying is they're losing police accountability."
The event's third speaker, Christine Silverberg, former chief of the Calgary police, said when the public or politicians take a heavy-handed approach to greater police accountability, it can only put the police force on the defensive.
"Institutional change will happen through leadership, not coercion."
Toronto StarLow self-control, psychopathic behaviour or a need to establish a ruthless reputation are some factors that could allow individuals to fire into a crowd in the hopes of hitting an intended victim, criminologists and psychiatrists suggest.
There are no easy answers to explain the motivation or mindset of a gunman who appears to feel no compunction about possibly injuring innocent bystanders, said Scot Wortley, professor at the University of Toronto's Centre of Criminology.
Toronto's most recent spate of drive-by shootings has triggered fear in many neighbourhoods. In gang-related cases, that is the motivation for these crimes: to create that climate of fear, Wortley suggests.
"If you're in the gang business, you want to establish a reputation for being ruthless and someone you don't mess with or there'll be consequences," said Wortley, who is doing a study on ex-gang members in Toronto.
And there's no better way to establish that reputation than shooting someone in front of a lot of other people, he said. It creates a culture of intimidation that makes people think twice about putting up a fight or co-operating with police.
"Others have speculated that the reason these shootings take place in public venues is because that is where your reputation for being a thug grows," Wortley said.
"If you shoot someone in the back alley, no one sees.
"A lot of gang members I have interviewed say: "I don't give a f---. They want to demonstrate they are ruthless men: 'You can't cross us. You don't disrespect us in public. You don't try to move into our territory or there will be consequences.'"
Low self-control can also be at play, he suggested.
Many criminals don't perceive the long-term consequences of their actions, he said. They're angry, they want to do harm and they don't think about who will get hurt in the heat of the moment when they are driven to act.
Others would suggest that gunmen who injure innocent and unrelated bystanders might just be lousy shots, said Wortley. The spray technique of firing a gun repeatedly in a general direction may be the only skill they have.
It all comes down to having a warped perspective on life, said Wortley.
"It's a devaluing of those they shoot and their own life," he said.
Dr. Mark Berber, a psychiatrist and lecturer at the University of Toronto's medical school, said there is a moral void, an absence of empathy and sympathy in those that would fire into a crowd of innocent people.
But it's hard to really understand what goes on in the minds of these shooters, Berber said. Kids who shoot to kill like this have a conduct disorder, he said. They have no remorse or feelings of regret about violating social rules; they exhibit aggression and routinely lie and steal.
"People who do this kind of thing ... these people would be considered to be exhibiting psychopathic behaviour and that's behaviour where normal values of society are ignored. There is a lack of sympathy and empathy for others. These people are violent towards others. They don't care as normal people do."
Berber suggested that this behaviour might be caused by a lack of bonding between the mother and child and an absent or transient father. The child in turn may have trouble attaching to adults and have a low level of tolerance for frustration, and a sense of self-importance.
Another factor Berber believes is adding to the toxic mix in the minds of many of these shooters is the explosion of violence in the media, including video games that teach children how to kill and hurt people.
Berber sees these kind of shootings as "terrorism of a different sort ... terrorism because people are going to become terrified of letting their children play outside."
Toronto Star... The longstanding threat of Irish Republican Army bombings are most often cited as the reason for Britain's extensive surveillance network, that's only part of the explanation, according to Prof. Hier. The country implemented new security measures after bombings in 1992 and 1993, but it was the abduction of James Bulger that caused Britain's surveillance boom. The two-year-old was lured away from his mother while shopping at a mall near Liverpool in 1993. His abductors, a pair of 10-year-olds, beat him and left his corpse on a railway. An image of the toddler hand-in-hand with one of his killers was captured by a mall security camera...
"The experience of the London bombings should help Canadians to embrace this technology, to change their thinking a bit, and to regard these kinds of systems as a kind of necessary precaution and part of the defensive layering protecting certain kinds of potential targets in Canada," said Wesley Wark, a professor at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.
While often cast as the tools of a secretive, authoritarian regime, Prof. Wark argued the camera images released after the subway attacks actually served to make the police investigation more transparent to. In this way, devices that often inspire paranoia instead offered reassurance. "All terrorist attacks cause extreme anxiety in the public at large about the nature of the attack and about the nature of government response," Prof. Wark said. "It seems to me the ability of the authorities to quickly post images for widespread public dissemination had some kind of calming effect. It allowed people to understand the authorities were on the trail of these individuals, were targetting their investigation on a small number of people. All of these uses of camera imagery were very beneficial."
National Post"The bomb detonated at 5: 29 a.m. I felt the heat on the back of my neck, disturbingly warm ... the ball of fire was surrounded by a huge cloud of transparent purplish air produced in part by radiations from the bomb ... no one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display."
This secret atomic test, recounted by its director, took place on July 16, 1945, in a remote desert of southern New Mexico. Code-named Trinity, it was the final proof that months of intensive research had paid off. The ultimate weapon of World War II was a reality.
Three weeks later, on Aug. 6, the Japanese city of Hiroshima would feel the catastrophic power of the first atomic attack - an event of such cosmic proportions that it would change the nature of life on earth forever.
"Until the bomb dropped, the idea of human extinction was talked about mainly by religious groups," says psychiatrist Robert Lifton, author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. "Now we had the actual means of doing it. With the two atomic bombs, just about everyone in the world developed an 'imagery of extinction.'"
Minutes after the atomic experiment spread its deadly radiation across the dawn skies, Robert Oppenheimer, a pioneer atomic scientist, quoted the Hindu scriptures: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Bainbridge, less poetically, muttered, "now we are all sons of bitches."
From the start, the image of the mushroom cloud struck both awe and terror into the hearts of nations, and the pride and revulsion felt by those who developed the bomb has echoed through the decades. Now, 60 years after the first atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the debate over the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons continues unabated.
One thing, however, is agreed: The dawn of the nuclear age caused a seismic shift in the personal and geopolitical landscape of billions of people worldwide.
"What was gunpowder? Trivial," said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. "What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in wrath."
The political effects of the bomb spread like ripples of radiation. Its explosion split the world into two sectors, East and West, facing off against each other with life-threatening weapons that would terrify the planet for half a century.
"It guaranteed a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union," says University of Toronto history professor William Walker. "It also guaranteed that the U.S. would consciously and actively play a role as a global power."
And, he says, although the immediate beneficiary of the bomb was America, its spectacularly defeated enemy, Japan, would now be thrust into a key strategic role by its conqueror, setting the scene for a new order in Asia as well as the West.
"As Japan got past the war, and wrote a new constitution, it would be an advance agent of U.S. interests. It would become a major economic power at a time when many in the West feared a recurrence of the Depression. One way to hedge against that was to create a new economic order that included Japan as a reliable ally."
Immediately after World War II, says Cold War expert Bill Geerhart, America enjoyed a "moment of euphoria" as a newborn, unchallenged superpower.
"The effect was to make us believe we were invincible. It was reflected in everything from music to merchandising, and all aspects of pop culture. Lots of businesses even changed their names to include the word 'atomic,'" said Geerhart, a Los Angeles culture writer who co-founded the Internet site conelrad.com, devoted to popular culture of the Cold War era.
But with the explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, America's atomic party was over and a desperate race for nuclear supremacy was on.
By 1950, the U.S. had manufactured 300 atomic bombs and designed delivery systems to attack Moscow by land, sea or air. The Soviet Union, late through the starting gate, put extra pressure on its scientists to match America's destructive power, using scarce economic resources for the burgeoning weapons program.
The perilous superpower contest quickly sobered the American public. "You could turn to two radio frequencies and find out what to do in case of an atomic attack," says Geerhart. "Fear and dread found their way into the popular culture, in films and songs."
The change in mood is audible in Conelrad's recently released music album Atomic Platters: Cold War Music From the Golden Age of Homeland Security, featuring such nostalgic titles as "Commie Lies" and "Fascist Threat."
In both the Soviet Union and the U.S., frightened citizens turned to their governments for protection.
"In the Cold War atmosphere of sustained 'emergency' to which no end was foreseen, all manner of interventions into economy and society gained a hearing," says American historian Joseph Stromberg. "They could be presented as essential to winning the war."
Meanwhile, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - its members including architects of the atomic bomb - created a Doomsday Clock to monitor the danger of nuclear annihilation. In 1953 its hands were at two minutes to midnight, as the U.S. and Soviet Union exploded more powerful new thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other, lowering the odds on world survival by a thousandfold.
But the very brinksmanship that brought the Cold War enemies to the edge of extinction also created a standoff that some deemed vital for saving humanity from itself.
Many military officials and politicians firmly believed that only the threat of nuclear weapons could ensure their country's survival. Scientists like Edward Teller as well as a succession of American presidents, embraced nuclear deterrence as a central element of foreign policy, even as the growing peace movement deplored it. The imminence of "mutual assured destruction," they believed, would keep Soviet and American fingers off the nuclear triggers.
In spite of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis - which brought the world to the brink of atomic Armageddon with President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who came close to launching nuclear strikes - reliance on nuclear weapons continued. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, countries continue to support and develop nuclear programs.
"The need for deterrence in today's world is still critical," says former U.S. assistant defence secretary Edward Warner. "Our nuclear posture contributes substantially to our ability to deter any future hostile political leadership with access to nuclear weapons ... from aggression against the United States, its forces abroad, and its allies and friends."
But while the U.S. and Soviet Union maintained their perilous nuclear peace, the Cold War was not without victims.
"We may not have had strategic confrontation between the superpowers," says U of T's Walker, "but we should remember that a substantial number of people died as a result of proxy wars. In those countries, there was no peace."
Through back door wars, Washington and Moscow confronted each other, expanding their spheres of influence without risking massive nuclear attack. In Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East they armed and trained local governments and militias, causing large-scale suffering and destabilization in those regions.
But the development of nuclear weapons itself claimed victims. Environmentalists document hundreds of deaths, illnesses and genetic diseases from the fallout of bomb tests and waste from nuclear weapons plants, stretching from the American southwest to the South Pacific, Siberia, Central Asia and China.
The superpower arsenals also reinforced the divisions between the world's haves and have-nots.
"Not only strategically, but economically, there was an international division of labour," says Walker. "The nuclear age gave the major powers even more reason to believe they were entitled to the fruits of victory."
Possession of weapons meant not only defence capability, but membership in the nuclear club of the world's most powerful nations. Britain, France and China followed the example of the U.S. and Soviet Union, developing their own nuclear arsenals.
Those who succeeded gained a front row seat at the United Nations as permanent members who could veto any resolutions.
On the other side of the nuclear divide, says Victor Sidel a former president of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, small and powerless nations and their citizens developed their own muscle-power.
"Industrial countries had nuclear weapons, small nations had terrorist groups. It was their way of balancing the nuclear equation, and it has made possible a nuclear war of a different kind."
Nuclear terrorism is now one of the world's worst-case scenarios. Although the creation of a nuclear bomb by an Al Qaeda-type organization remains a distant possibility, the most likely threat is a "dirty bomb" cobbled together from conventional explosives and nuclear material.
"Loose" nuclear material has gone missing in the former Soviet Union, and there are recorded cases of smuggling. Records seized from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan show that efforts had been made to buy nuclear material. Although the U.S. recently launched an initiative to secure nuclear and radiological materials in Russia and other countries, some experts fear it may already be too late to prevent their use in a terrorist attack.
"After 9/11, the Bush administration insiders asked what could happen that would be even worse," says William Arkin, a leading nuclear analyst. "The answer was some kind of attack with weapons of mass destruction."
Some believe an equal threat is the vulnerability of Russian nuclear weapons to seizure by militant groups.
"To maintain the reliability of its far-flung weapons, Russia must constantly transport large numbers back and forth between a manufacturing facility and the dispersed military bases," says Bruce Blair of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "This creates a serious vulnerability, because transportation is the Achilles' heel of nuclear weapons security."
However, says Arkin, the threat that state-held nuclear weapons could still cause a catastrophic war should not be ruled out.
"I think the greatest danger we face five to 10 years in the future is Russia, if it continues to develop in a negative way, and believes that the U.S. is developing a first-strike capability. Deterrence only works if there's equivalence of power. But Russia's arsenal doesn't really work now, and if they perceive they are falling behind, it could raise the potential for disaster. The danger is of an inadvertent strike."
The proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel - which does not admit to developing a bomb - is now augmented by Iran's nuclear program. Saudi Arabia and Libya have also shown interest in developing nuclear weapons.
The deadly weapons may also move out to space, creating new threats. Control of space has long been a strategic objective of Russia and the U.S. But under the Bush administration, offensive as well as defensive systems may be on the agenda, experts say.
Sixty years after the first atomic bomb dropped - a time that now seems light years from our complex, unpredictable era - the question of whether nuclear weapons have made us safer is being reassessed, but the debate is no less fierce.
"When the first bomb dropped it set a whole series of events in motion," says Sidel. "I would argue that we began with the birth of an indiscriminate weapon. And now it has come back to haunt us."
Toronto StarFor some, Israel's decision to unilaterally withdraw this month from the Gaza Strip is a mindboggling development. How could the Jewish state abandon territory it has clung to so fiercely since capturing it from Egypt in the 1967 war?
The answer, according to several Mideast analysts, rests mostly with one man -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a 77-year-old military commander turned politician who, they say, exhibits a strategic brilliance that should not be underestimated.
Sharon has calculated that a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians is impossible, they say, and that dismantling Israeli settlements in the Gaza -- the barren strip of land that houses 1.5 million Palestinians and only a few thousand Israelis -- is the best route to enhancing the security of Israelis within the tough Mideast neighborhood.
"I do not believe this would be happening without Sharon," says Aaron David Miller, an adviser to six U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.
"His objective, and it's a strategic objective, is to improve Israel's demographic, political and security position to prepare for what he believes to be the ongoing and continuing, perhaps even century-long, struggle with the Arabs."
In short, some analysts argue, Sharon thinks Israel's security hinges on maintaining strategic Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a buffer against possible attack by Arab armies.
The West Bank, also captured in the 1967 war, is a 5,800-square-kilometre parcel of land on the west bank of the Jordan River which houses 2.5 million Palestinians and 187,000 Israeli settlers.
By contrast, the 365-square-kilometre Gaza Strip, which hugs a 45-kilometre stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, is not seen as a security requirement. Neither are the four isolated settlements being evacuated in the northern reaches of the West Bank as part of Sharon's unilateral withdrawal plan.
Edward Walker, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., says Sharon is clearly not flying by the seat of his pants.
"This has been well thought through," he said in an interview. "This is a popular move in Israel."
The unilateral ceding of territory also buys him time, easing international pressure on Israel to deal on the West Bank, he added.
"He has certainly come to the position now, which he has made no secret of, that we need 10 to 15 years of stability in which Israel continues to control the strategic points throughout the West Bank," Walker said.
Miller and other analysts say Sharon can pull off the unilateral withdrawal -- despite alienating hardline Jewish settlers, religious nationalists and many in his own Likud party -- because of who he is.
"He sits astride Israeli politics like a colossus," said Miller. "He embodies for most Israelis the toughness and the pragmatism that they want in a leader right now."
Or, as former Canadian diplomat Michael Bell puts it, Sharon is seen as a leader who would never jeopardize Israeli security.
The former tank commander has a well-earned reputation as a military strongman and ruthless leader committed to building a "greater Israel" from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
He has practised a take-no-hostages approach to Palestinian resistance. As Israeli defence minister, he was the architect of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that ousted Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, sending them into exile in Tunisia.
His reputation took a serious hit, however, after an Israeli commission of inquiry found in 1983 he was complicit in the September 1982 massacre of at least 800 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Christians.
Sharon resigned as defence minister, but his days in the political wilderness proved short-lived as he fought his way back to prominent cabinet posts.
He eventually won the Likud leadership in 1999.
He became prime minister in 2001 after scoring a landslide election victory on promises he would neither evacuate Israeli settlements nor cede more territory to the Palestinians than they already held under the 1993 Oslo accords.
But Bell says Sharon's pragmatism led him to conclude Israel could not continue to rule over four million Palestinians.
The result was a two-pronged strategy. He would pursue unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and push ahead with building a wall, or security fence, to separate Israelis from Palestinian population centres, which harbour Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants, in the West Bank.
Given his history as a defender of Israeli settlements, there is wide agreement he can weather the outraged betrayal of Gaza settlers and their supporters.
"He's the master architect of Israel's settlement effort," Miller said. "If anyone is going to go into the lion's den and be accused of betrayal by the settlers, and be able to politically absorb it, it's him."
The path to Israel's embrace of a unilateral Gaza pullout, something Sharon once rejected on grounds it would divide the "land of Israel," has been long and tortured.
It's littered with political assassinations, two intifadas, cycles of murderous violence, crushed dreams and collapsed peace efforts. Dead are the 1993 Oslo accords and the Camp David initiative of 2000, both of which envisioned a gradual, reciprocal process that would lead to a comprehensive peace between two independent states.
The most recent international initiative, the so-called Roadmap to Peace blessed by U.S. President George W. Bush, is on hold at best.
Israeli frustration with the violence, combined with the toll Gaza occupation was taking on the men and women of the Israeli military, proved fertile ground for Sharon to sell his plan for a unilateral pullout.
Analysts agree he would have proceeded, regardless of whether the late Yasser Arafat was alive, and regardless of whether he had the blessing of the Bush administration.
"Sharon is the driver," said Miller. "But the train on this one is also being pulled by Israeli public opinion."
Bell, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and Egypt, said the Israeli public had a real thirst for some kind of a step forward.
"Quelling the violence wasn't enough," said Bell (Michael), now a senior scholar for diplomacy at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.
Sharon responded with a unilateral plan that Bell says is motivated by the prime minister's realization that, within a very short period of time, the number of Palestinians on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River will outnumber the number of Jews.
"He came to the realization that the state of Israel could not digest the West Bank and Gaza because of demographics," Bell said.
By getting out of Gaza, there will be 1.5 million fewer Palestinians for which Israel has to assume responsibility, and the demographic pressure on the Jewish state of about six million will ease, Bell said.
Ottawa CitizenCanada's premier stock market has been on a tear. The S&P/TSX composite index is up nearly 15 per cent for the year so far, leaving the U.S. markets in the dust.
The rocket fuel for this climb has come from three areas: financials, energy and raw materials. That's because these sectors now account for about 70 per cent of the index...
Eric Kirzner, a finance professor with the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, suggests investors increase their foreign content. While each investor's risk tolerance is different, Kirzner recommends some mix of U.S., Europe, Canada and some emerging markets, with Canadian exposure at 15 or 20 per cent. That way, three sectors won't rule your portfolio.
Toronto StarA $75 million class action lawsuit was filed in a Brampton court yesterday, accusing Air France, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority and Nav Canada of negligence in the landing accident of an Airbus A340 commercial jet three days ago.
The lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court, names Suzanne Deak of Toronto as the lone plaintiff, but the list of claimants is expected to grow.
The suit was filed on behalf of all 297 passengers on board the plane that skidded off Pearson airport's runway 24L before bursting into flames on Tuesday. All passengers, as well as the 12 crew members on board, survived the crash; 43 people suffered minor injuries...
Sources said Air France has already begun offering compensation to some passengers, which doesn't surprise airline expert Joseph D'Cruz.
"That's normal procedure in these cases," said D'Cruz, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "It's insurance for the airline. If they succeed in getting people to take that compensation, it prevents them from suing later on."
Toronto StarThe federal government plans to launch a "no-fly" list next year to keep terrorists and anyone considered a security threat off airplanes in Canada, part of a security review that will examine all aspects of public transit in this country...
Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence professor with the University of Toronto, said Canada will undoubtedly face growing pains similar to those experienced by Washington with its list.
National PostSome people seem to carry a computer curse, frustrated by a plague of viruses, hard-drive failures, power surges and software conflicts that appear and disappear without rational explanation.
They blame their machines and suffer the scorn of others who accuse them of doing something wrong. But researchers at Princeton University may have an explanation: these computer users, it seems, could be sending out bad vibes...
"I think it's quite possible that individual people could have statistically noticeable effect on computers, but I don't think it's a vibe," said John DiMarco, information technology director for the University of Toronto's computer science department.
"The presence of strange anomalies in the hardware can often be attributed to the environment," he said.
National Post, Canadian PressIslamic law is coming to the University of Toronto.
Not in the form of sharia tribunals for cheaters or strict dress codes for female students, but in the form of two professors hired to teach the subject at the university's law school.
While students are excited about the opportunity to learn about another legal tradition, especially one that's often in the headlines, groups fighting to keep sharia out of Canada's legal system worry that the hirings are a setback to their efforts.
Bringing in Anver Emon, 34, and Mohammad Fadel, 38, to teach courses in Islamic law is part of a push for a more global focus that students are embracing, says acting law school dean Lorne Sossin. Having two full-time professors will give the law school a bigger concentration on Islamic law than anywhere else in Canada.
Globe and MailPebbles tossed into a great pond send ripples in all directions. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, three ripples converged over Hiroshima in a blinding flash that killed 140,000 people and altered the course of human history. Now is the time to commemorate that tragedy, by reflecting on the sequence of events which culminated on that day, and by discerning among contemporary events those which, if not constrained or redirected, could produce an equally momentous tragedy in our time.
The first pebble
On June 28, 1914, an angry young Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, hurled a pebble into the pond of international politics when he assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on the streets of Sarajevo. The ripples from that single violent act spread rapidly: Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilized to support Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia, Britain and France mobilized in support of Russia, and the Great War of 1914-18 was on. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended that war, contained the seeds of further conflict. Ripples from the rise and aggressions of Mussolini and Hitler embroiled Russia, and this time spread to Asia — Japan invading China, and attacking Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, bringing the Americans into the Second World War. The terrible climax came in August, 1945, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the Americans delivered a blow to bring about Japan's unconditional surrender.
The second pebble
On April 30, 1897, British physicist J.J. Thomson gently tossed a small pebble into the pool of international science. In an evening lecture to the Royal Institution, Thomson announced his discovery of the first “atomic particle” — soon to be called the electron. In the early 20th century, Ernest Rutherford demonstrated atom-splitting and James Chadwick discovered the neutron. As more scientists studied practical ways of releasing the energy of the atom, the ripples continued to spread.
At first, they sparkled in the sunlight of optimism as the application of atomic energy to medicine and energy production was postulated and explored. But in the dark shadows between the ripples lurked the prospect of destructive uses. In 1939, a crude drawing of an “atomic bomb” appeared on Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's blackboard at Berkeley. The Manhattan Project to build such a bomb was implemented, the apparatus tested in the Nevada desert — and by the summer of 1945, a fully operational atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” was ready for delivery.
The third pebble
On Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers named Wilbur and Orville Wright threw an odd-shaped pebble into the pool of transportation technology when Orville flew a “heavier-than-air flying machine” (later called an “airplane”) for 12 seconds over a distance of 120 feet.
Within a decade, the new invention was being harnessed for warfare. The first shot was fired from an airplane on Aug. 20, 1910, and by the First World War, France, Germany and Britain were using biplanes for aerial reconnaissance and bombing.
By the end of the First World War, the U.S. had inaugurated the U.S. Air Service. and by the Second World War, was building strategic bombers — including one very specially designed B-29 nicknamed the “Enola Gay.”
At precisely 8:16:02 a.m. local time on Aug. 6, 1945, all of these ripples — the political, the scientific, and the technological — converged over Hiroshima. At that instant, Little Boy, the atomic bomb that was created for the political purpose of ending the Second World War and dropped from the Enola Gay's bomb bay, exploded — with devastating effects that shook the entire world.
The life sciences, especially genetics, will be to the 21st century what atomic science was to the 20th: a two-edged sword with enormous potential to save and improve life, or to take it. Like the last century, the 21st will harness the most advanced organizational techniques and scientific discoveries to military and political purposes. And like the B-29 bomber, some technology will prove to be the carrier that links biologically-based instrumentalities of mass destruction with political purposes.
The first pebble
In the 1980s, a Palestinian militant named Abdullah Yusuf Azzam joined forces with a Saudi Arabian businessman named Osama bin Laden to help create a mujahedeen (holy warriors) resistance movement in Afghanistan — a small pebble hurled from a far-off place into the pool of international politics.
The ripples spread, under the shadowy banner of al-Qaeda, from attacks against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, to 1992 bomb attacks against U.S. troops in Yemen, to the 1996 Khobar Towers truck bombing in Saudi Arabia, to the issuance of a fatwa in 1998 saying that “to kill Americans and their allies, civilians, and military is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able.”
And the ripples continue to spread — from 9/11, to the Bali bombing in 2002, to the attacks on commuter trains in Madrid in 2004, to the London subway bombings in July, to the eventual harnessing by sophisticated international terrorists of new and even more deadly means of destruction: biological weapons and terrorist-induced-pandemics capable, like the blinding flash and mushroom-shaped cloud of their atomic predecessors, of killing millions of human beings.
The second pebble
In April, 1943, Halifax-born Oswald Avery, working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, discovered that the material responsible for “heredity” was deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. Avery's work led to the birth of modern genetics and molecular biology, leading in turn to the birth of the first “test-tube” baby, cloning experimentation, Dolly the sheep, the sequencing of the human and other genomes, advances in stem-cell research . . . and the ripples continue to spread.
As in the case of the development of atomic science, many of these ripples sparkle in the sunlight of optimism, offering the prospect for improved crops and animals, cures for terrible diseases of genetic origin, and even the biological improvement of the human race itself.
But again, in the dark shadows between the ripples lurks the prospect of destructive uses. The same science that can be used to develop genetically-based cures for human diseases can also be used to produce mutated smallpox bacteria or influenza viruses even more virulent than their predecessors and highly resistant to any known treatment. And if the sun of human progress should again become obscured by the storm clouds of war — war itself transformed by the increasing scope and sophistication of terrorism — how long will it be before the plan for utilizing mutated viruses and terrorist-induced pandemics as instruments of mass destruction appears on the underground blackboard of some terrorist cell capable of implementing it?
The third pebble
What exactly is the most disruptive and lethal dimension of the “dark side” of the life sciences — the genetic equivalent of the first A-bomb — and how might this destructive force be delivered to target populations to accomplish the political purposes of those desiring to unleash it?
While a terrorist attack on military or civilian populations utilizing such techniques would have immediate impacts on public health, the greater damage to human life and society will most likely be through the panic and terror that such a biological attack or pandemic will trigger throughout the general population. And this panic won't be transmitted by air, water, or utility system, but by the mass-communications network of 21st-century society, in particular the electronic media of radio, television, the Internet, cell phones, and personal computing devices. It is the electronic mass media that will most likely prove to be the B-29s of the age of genetics and bioterrorism.
The “third pebble” may well prove to have been Karl Ferdinand Braun's 1897 invention of the first cathode ray tube screening device — the invention to which contemporary television and computer screens owe their existence.
Our success in preventing a 21st-century biological Hiroshima will depend in part on our success in finding ways to combat international terrorism. It will also depend on our ability to encourage the benevolent applications of genetic science while constraining its misuse.
But even more crucial to our success will be how the owners, managers, and practitioners of the mass-media business conduct themselves in communicating the news of bioterrorist acts and induced pandemics to the public.
Whether our modern mass media become the principal carriers of fear and terror associated with those pandemics, or the timely carriers of the antibodies of fact, reason, and courage that will mitigate that fear and terror, could well be the critical factor in preventing the next Hiroshima.
Preston Manning is a former leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament and opposition critic for science and technology. He is currently a distinguished visitor at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow of the Canada West Foundation and the Fraser Institute.
Globe and Mail, subscriptionIt was during the first 15 minutes of Setsuko Nakamura's new job as a decoding assistant for the Japanese army that the world changed forever.,,
In 1955, she married Jim Thurlow, a Canadian she had met at an international Christian work camp in Japan.
They had their wedding in Washington because Virginia did not allow interracial unions, and Canada would not admit Asian immigrants unless they were the close relatives of a citizen.
The couple undertook graduate work at the University of Toronto -- she in social work, he in history -- and had two sons.
As groups invited her to speak about her experiences, she realized Canadians had little interest in Hiroshima, not knowing that Canadian uranium was used in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Globe and MailEight years ago, Samantha Campbell was studying English and Literary Studies at the University of Toronto. Today, she makes creamsicle body lotion. Her career hop came after she mixed grapefruit extract, a personal allergy to most body products and a passion for potions.
And now, Sweet Suskind, the line of natural products that she has been making in her apartment, is reaping sweet rewards on the shelves of hot shops from London to New York to Seattle.
Yes, Campbell, 31, is another instance of a Canadian having to seek success beyond our borders. Her good fortune came as a result of a few influential customers. "Shalom Harlow [the model] bought some stuff from me for Christmas presents, and she gave some stuff to Amber Valletta," says Campbell. "Amber was writing a column in Allure magazine and asked if she could mention it."
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