• At Antipope, Charlie Stross wonders--among other things--what the Trump Administration is getting done behind its public scandals.
• blogTO notes a protest in Toronto aiming to get the HBC to drop Ivanka Trump's line of fashion.
• Dangerous Minds reflects on a Talking Heads video compilation from the 1980s.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on a murderous ( Read more... )

I only saw Montréal's Olympic Stadium from a distance, from the street north of Pie-IX station. What I saw did look stunning, the vast cost of the edifice aside.


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The Globe and Mail carries Andrew Dampf's Associated Press article noting that Rome is withdrawing from the running for the 2024 Olympic Games.

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi rejected the city’s bid for the 2024 Olympics on Wednesday, effectively dooming the capital’s candidacy for the second time in four years ( Read more... )

• News of Proxima Centauri b spread across the blogosphere yesterday, to Discover's D-Brief and Crux, to Joe. My. God., to the Planetary Society Blog, and to Centauri Dreams and The Dragon's Gaze.
• blogTO notes the impending opening of Toronto's first Uniqlo and suggests TTC buses may soon have a new colour scheme.
• The Dragon's Gaze discusses detecting ( Read more... )

• Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni ( Read more... )

The Toronto Star's Verity Stevenson reports on how the Beach will celebrate the return of Olympic medallist Penny Oleksiak to her home.

It’s hard to tell whether Penny Oleksiak’s neighbours in the Beach cheered harder during her races than they will for her return ( Read more... )

CBC News' David Common reports why Calgary, with its extensive investments in the 1988 Olympics still good, might make a good host for 2026's games.

[T]he Olympic money problem [. . .] presents an opportunity, particularly for cities that have hosted in the past and might like to do so again, and whose existing infrastructure could help control ( Read more... )

• From last month, Charlie Stross imagined how the Laundry of his ongoing fiction series would have reacted to Boris Johnson as their superior.
• The Big Picture shares photos of winning Olympians.
• blogTO celebrates the Leslie Street Spit and south Etobicoke.
• Centauri Dreams notes a study of some of the smallest and most planet-like brown dwarfs.
• The ( Read more... )

• blogTO writes about the impending installation of snooze stations across Toronto.
• Centauri Dreams considers the astrobiological implications of stromatolites.
• D-Brief notes that Titan has methane-flooded canyons.
• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the Kepler-444 system and notes studies of HR 8799.
• The Dragon's Tales notes an assassination attempt against a ( Read more... )

Prscilla Hwang's CBC News article says worrisome things about Toronto.

The water conditions in Rio de Janeiro don't appear as bad as what's being reported, and the Toronto harbour is sometimes "almost worse," according to a Canadian Olympic sailor who is in the Brazilian city for his first Games ( Read more... )