Leaked BlackBerry 10 slides show video calling and screen sharing for BBM

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Study links milk-producing protein to aggressive breast cancer

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HONG KONG (Reuters) – The discovery that a protein which triggers milk production in women may also be responsible for making breast cancers aggressive could open up new opportunities for treatment of the most common and deadliest form of cancer among women.


Found in all breast cells, the protein ELF5 tries to activate milk production even in breast cancer cells, which does not work and then makes the cancer more aggressive, according to scientists in Australia and Britain.






“The discovery opens up new avenues for therapy and for designing new markers that can predict response to therapy,” said lead author Professor Chris Ormandy from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.


In 2008, Ormandy‘s work linked ELF5 to milk production.


The latest research by Ormandy and his team, published in the journal PLOS Biology on Friday, went a step further to find the link between ELF5 and breast cancer.


“Cancer cells can’t respond properly (to ELF5), so they … acquire some characteristics … that make the disease more aggressive and more refractory (resistant) to treatment with existing therapies,” Ormandy said by telephone.


Ormandy and his team grew human breast cancer tissues, genetically manipulated to contain high amounts of ELF5, in petri dishes and saw how the protein proliferated aggressively.


FINDINGS MAY HELP TARGETED THERAPY


Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the top cause of cancer death among women, accounting for 23 percent of total cancer cases and 14 percent of cancer deaths in women.


To decide on treatment, doctors normally need to find out if the cancer has receptors for the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which, in the case of breast cancer patients, promote growth in their tumors.


Two-thirds of breast cancers are usually positive for estrogen receptors, which then require anti-hormonal therapies that lower estrogen levels in the patient or block estrogen from supporting the growth of the cancer.


For the remaining one-third of patients, their cancers do not have receptors, which means they won’t benefit from hormonal therapies. Such patients are usually given other treatments, such as chemotherapy.


Ormandy’s team found that cancers with these receptors had low levels of ELF5, while those without receptors had significantly higher levels of the protein.


“What we have shown in this paper is high ELF5 tumors are dependent on ELF5 for their proliferation and if we block ELF5 in high ELF5 tumors, we will block proliferation and that will treat the tumor,” Ormandy said.


“If we can develop a drug that targets ELF5, it will be very useful for that group of women,” he said.


(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Paul Tait)


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SPOILER ALERT: Twist awaits US fans of ‘Downton’

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NEW YORK (AP) — British fans of “Downton Abbey” are feeling blue after Tuesday’s conclusion of Season 3, even as the U.S. audience eagerly anticipates this third cycle on PBS’ “Masterpiece” beginning Jan. 6.


(ANY “ABBEY” DEVOTEES WHO PREFER NOT TO LEARN WHAT AWAITS THEM ARE URGED TO STOP READING RIGHT NOW.)






___


One of the stars of this wildly popular British costume drama is leaving the series after its third season. Dan Stevens had opted not to continue beyond his initial commitment, the British network ITV confirmed Wednesday.


His character, Matthew Crawley, has been written out with what ITV called an “untimely and tragic death” in the season finale. That episode will air in the U.S. in February.


Michelle Dockery will be returning in Season 4 as Matthew’s soon-to-be widow, Lady Mary.


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Powerful winter storm pounds Northeast

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A powerful winter storm system that pounded the nation's midsection, wrecking holiday travel plans and dumping a record snowfall in Arkansas, began lashing the Northeast on Wednesday with high winds, snow and sleet.


The storm, which knocked out power to thousands of utility customersm mainly in Arkansas, was blamed in at least six deaths.


Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed, scores of motorists got stuck on icy roads or slid into drifts and blizzard warnings were issued amid snowy gusts of 30 mph that blanketed roads and windshields, at times causing whiteout conditions.


"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.


The system, which spawned Gulf Coast region tornadoes on Christmas Day, pushed through the Upper Ohio Valley and headed into the Northeast Wednesday night. High winds, snow and sleet slickened roads in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, causing dozens of minor accidents and spinouts. Forecasts called for 12 to 18 inches of snow inland from western New York to Maine into Thursday.


The National Weather Service said early Thursday that snow was falling heavily in Pennsylvania, upstate New York and some New England states. Among the highest snow totals were 2 to five inches in southeastern Massachusetts, 3 to 6 inches in Connecticut, up to a foot in some Pennsylvania counties and 10 to 11 inches in some parts of western New York.


The system was expected to taper off into a mix of rain and snow closer to the coast, where little or no accumulation was expected in such cities as Philadelphia, Boston and New York.


The storm left freezing temperatures in its aftermath, and forecasters also said parts of the Southeast from Virginia to Florida would see severe thunderstorms.


Schools on break and workers taking holiday vacations meant that many people could avoid messy commutes, but those who had to travel were implored to avoid it. Snow was blamed for scores of vehicle accidents as far east as Maryland, and about two dozen counties in Indiana and Ohio issued snow emergency travel alerts, urging people to go out on the roads only if necessary.


About 40 vehicles got bogged down trying to make it up a slick hill in central Indiana, and four state snowplows slid off roads as snow fell at the rate of 3 inches an hour in some places.


Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened Arkansas highway were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision, and two people, including a 76-year-old Milwaukee woman, were killed Tuesday on Oklahoma highways. Deaths from wind-toppled trees were reported in Texas and Louisiana.


The day after Christmas wasn't expected to be particularly busy for AAA, but its Cincinnati-area branch had its busiest Wednesday of the year. By mid-afternoon, nearly 400 members had been helped with tows, jump starts and other aid, with calls still coming in, spokesman Mike Mills said.


Jennifer Miller was taking a bus Wednesday from Cincinnati to visit family in Columbus.


"I wish this had come yesterday and was gone today," she said, struggling with a rolling suitcase and three smaller bags on a slushy sidewalk near the station. "I'm glad I don't have to drive in this."


Traffic crawled at 25 mph on Interstate 81 in Maryland, where authorities reported scores of accidents.


"We're going to try to go down south and get below" the storm, said Richard Power, traveling from home in Levittown, N.Y., to Kentucky with his wife, two children and their beagle, Lucky.


He said they were well on their way until they hit snow in Pennsylvania, then 15-mph traffic on I-81 at Hagerstown, Md.


"We're going to go as far as we can go. ... If it doesn't get better, we're going to just get a hotel," he said.


More than 1,600 flights were canceled, according to the aviation tracking website FlightAware.com, and some airlines said they would waive change fees. Lengthy delays were reported Wednesday at the three major New York City-area airports, the Federal Aviation Administration said.


In Arkansas, some of the nearly 200,000 people who lost power could be without it for as long as a week because of snapped poles and wires after ice and 10 inches of snow coated power lines, said the state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas.


Gov. Mike Beebe, who declared a statewide emergency, sent out National Guard teams, and Humvees transported medical workers and patients. Snow hadn't fallen in Little Rock on Christmas since 1926, but the capital ended Tuesday with 10.3 inches of it.


Other states also had scattered outages. Duke Energy said it had nearly 300 outages in Indiana, with few left in Ohio by early afternoon after scores were reported in the morning.


As the storm moved east, New England state highway departments were treating roads and getting ready to mobilize with snowfall forecasts of a foot or more.


"People are picking up salt and a lot of shovels today," said Andy Greenwood, an assistant manager at Aubuchon Hardware in Keene, N.H.


As usual, winter-sports enthusiasts welcomed the snow. At Smiling Hill Farm in Maine, Warren Knight was hoping for enough snow to allow the opening of trails.


"We watch the weather more carefully for cross-country skiing than we do for farming. And we're pretty diligent about farming. We're glued to the weather radio," said Knight, who described the weather at the 500-acre farm in Westbrook as being akin to the prizes in "Cracker Jacks — we don't know what we're going to get."


Behind the storm, Mississippi's governor declared states of emergency in eight counties with more than 25 people reported injured and 70 homes left damaged.


Cindy Williams stood near a home in McNeill, Miss., where its front had collapsed into a pile of wood and brick, a balcony and the porch ripped apart. Large oak trees were uprooted and winds sheared off treetops in a nearby grove. But she focused instead on the fact that all her family members had escaped harm.


"We are so thankful," she said. "God took care of us."


___


Associated Press writers Rick Callahan and Charles Wilson in Indianapolis, Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Ark.; Jim Van Anglen in Mobile, Ala.; Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss.; Julie Carr Smyth and Mitch Stacy in Columbus, Ohio; Amanda Lee Myers in Cincinnati; David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md.; Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H.; and David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.


___


Contact Dan Sewell at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell


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Afghan bomber attacks near major US base

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded at the gate of a major U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing the attacker and three Afghans, Afghan police said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.


Police Gen. Abdul Qayum Baqizai said a local guard who questioned the vehicle driver at the gate of Camp Chapman was killed along with two civilians and the assailant. The camp is located adjacent to the airport of the capital of Khost province, which borders Pakistan. Chapman and nearby Camp Salerno had been frequently targeted by militants in the past, but violent incidents have decreased considerably in recent months.






Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in an email that the bomber targeted Afghan police manning the gate and Afghans working for the Americans entering the base. He claimed high casualties were inflicted.


NATO operates with more than 100,000 troops in the country, including some 66,000 American forces. It is handing most combat operations over to the Afghans in preparation for a pullout from Afghanistan in 2014. Militant groups, including the Taliban, rarely face NATO troops head-on and rely mainly on roadside bombs and suicide attacks.


NATO forces and foreign civilians have also been increasingly attacked by rogue Afghan military and police, eroding trust between the allies.


On Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said a policewoman who killed an American contractor in Kabul a day earlier was a native Iranian who came to Afghanistan and displayed “unstable behavior” but had no known links to militants.


The policewoman, identified as Sgt. Nargas, shot 49-year-old Joseph Griffin, of Mansfield, Georgia, on Monday, in the first such shooting by a woman in the spate of insider attacks. Nargas walked into a heavily-guarded compound in the heart of Kabul, confronted Griffin and shot him once with her pistol.


The U.S-based security firm DynCorp International said on its website that Griffin was a U.S. military veteran who earlier worked with law enforcement agencies in the United States. In Kabul, he was under contract to the NATO military command to advise the Afghan police force.


The ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, told a news conference that Nargas, who uses one name like many in the country, was born in Tehran, where she married an Afghan. She moved to the country 10 years ago, after her husband obtained fake documents enabling her to live and work there.


A mother of four in her early 30s, she joined the police five years ago, held various positions and had a clean record, he said. Sediqi produced an Iranian passport that he said was found at her home.


No militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing.


The chief investigator of the case, Police Gen. Mohammad Zahir, said that during interrogation, the policewoman said she had plans to kill either the Kabul governor, city police chief or Zahir himself, but when she realized that penetrating the last security cordons to reach them would be too difficult, she saw “a foreigner” and turned her weapon on him.


There have been 60 insider attacks this year against foreign military and civilian personnel, compared to 21 in 2011. This surge presents another looming security issue as NATO prepares to pull out almost all of its forces by 2014, putting the war against the Taliban and other militant groups largely in the hands of the Afghans.


More than 50 Afghan members of the government’s security forces also have died this year in attacks by their own colleagues. The Taliban claims such incidents reflect a growing popular opposition to the foreign military presence and the Kabul government.


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10 Things to Do on Dec. 26

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Christmas has ended and New Year’s Eve is still a few days away. What’s a person to do during this holiday lull?


1. Complain About Your Christmas Gifts






[More from Mashable: ‘We Are Young’ Performed on Vintage Computer Parts]




2. Use Your New Label Maker


Image courtesy of Imgur


3. Find Weird Crap Around Your Parents’ House





4. Attempt to Learn How a Kindle Works





5. Recreate Old Family Photos


Image courtesy of Reddit, 31Max


Image courtesy of Imgur, ConnorUllmann


6. Try to Figure Out What Boxing Day Is






Educate yourself.


7. Put Away the Christmas Throw-Up


Image courtesy of Reddit, xbaahx


8. Return the Stuff You Don’t Want


Image courtesy of Imgur


9. Reuse the Christmas Tree Tinsel and Other Holiday Decorations


Image via Borntobenervous.com


Image courtesy of Flickr, stuartpilbrow


10. Take a Nap


1. Sluggish Pug


Image courtesy of Flickr, chriswaits


Click here to view this gallery.


Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, formatc1


This story originally published on Mashable here.


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Former President George H.W. Bush in intensive care: spokesman

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AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Former President George H.W. Bush is in the intensive care unit of a Houston hospital and is in “guarded condition,” family spokesman Jim McGrath said Wednesday.


“The President is alert and conversing with medical staff, and is surrounded by family,” McGrath said in a statement.






Bush was admitted to the intensive care unit on Sunday, McGrath said.


(Reporting By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Paul Thomasch)


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Britain’s royal family attends Christmas services

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LONDON (AP) — Britain‘s royal family is attending Christmas Day church services — with a few notable absences.


Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, Queen Elizabeth II arrived at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She was accompanied in a Bentley by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie.






Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.


Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.


Later Tuesday, the queen will deliver her traditional, pre-recorded Christmas message, which for the first time will be broadcast in 3D.


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Christmas Day storms blamed for 3 deaths

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MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- Twisters hopscotched across the Deep South, and, along with brutal, straight-line winds, knocked down countless trees, blew the roofs off homes and left many Christmas celebrations in the dark. Holiday travelers in the nation's much colder midsection battled treacherous driving conditions from freezing rain and blizzard conditions from the same fast-moving storms.


As predicted, conditions were volatile throughout the day and into the night with tornado warnings still out for some parts of Alabama, Florida and Georgia. The storms were blamed for three deaths, several injuries, and left homes from Louisiana to Alabama damaged.


In Mobile, Ala., a tornado or high winds damaged homes, a high school and church, and knocked down power lines and large tree limbs in an area just west of downtown around nightfall. WALA-TV's tower camera captured the image of a large funnel cloud headed toward downtown.


Rick Cauley, his wife, Ashley, and two children were hosting members of both of their families. When the sirens went off, the family headed down the block to take shelter at the athletic field house at Mobile's Murphy High School.


"As luck would have it, that's where the tornado hit," Cauley said. "The pressure dropped and the ears started popping and it got crazy for a second." They were all fine, though the school was damaged. Hours after the storm hit, officials reported no serious injuries in the southwestern Alabama city.


The storm system with heavy rains moved into Georgia early Wednesday and expected to hit the Carolinas with severe weather as well.


Meanwhile, blizzard conditions hit the nation's midsection.


Earlier in the day, winds toppled a tree onto a pickup truck in the Houston area, killing the driver, and a 53-year-old north Louisiana man was killed when a tree fell on his house. Icy roads already were blamed for a 21-vehicle pileup in Oklahoma, and the Highway Patrol there says a 28-year-old woman was killed in a crash on a snowy U.S. Highway near Fairview.


The snowstorm that caused numerous accidents pushed out of Oklahoma late Tuesday, carrying with it blizzard warnings for parts of northeast Arkansas, where 10 inches of snow was forecast. Freezing rain clung to trees and utility lines in Arkansas and winds gusts up to 30 mph whipped them around, causing about 71,000 customers to lose electricity for a time.


Blizzard conditions were possible for parts of Illinois, Indiana and western Kentucky with predictions of 4 to 7 inches of snow.


A tornado struck a mobile home park near the municipal airport at Troy, Ala., trapping a man in the wreckage of a trailer, said Thomas Johnston of the Pike County Emergency Management Agency. Rescue workers freed the person, who wasn't hurt badly, and no other serious injuries were reported, he said.


An apparent tornado also caused damage in Grove Hill, about 80 miles north of Mobile.


Mary Cartright said she was working at the Fast Track convenience store in the town on Christmas evening when the wind started howling and the lights flickered, knocking out the store's computerized cash registers.


"Our cash registers are down so our doors are closed," said Cartright in a phone interview.


Trees fell on a few houses in central Louisiana's Rapides Parish, but there were no injuries reported, said sheriff's Lt. Tommy Carnline. Near McNeill, Miss., a likely tornado damaged a dozen homes and sent eight people to the hospital, none with life-threatening injuries, said Pearl River County emergency management agency director Danny Manley.


Gov. Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency in the state, saying eight counties have reported damages and some injuries.


Fog blanketed highways, including arteries in the Atlanta area, which was expected to be dealing with the same storm system on Wednesday. In New Mexico, drivers across the eastern plains had to fight through snow, ice and low visibility.


At least three tornadoes were reported in Texas, though only one building was damaged, according to the National Weather Service.


More than 500 flights nationwide were canceled by the evening, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com. More than half were canceled into and out of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport that got a few inches of snow.


Christmas lights also were knocked out with more than 100,000 customers without power for at least a time in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.


In Louisiana, quarter-sized hail was reported early Tuesday in the western part of the state and a WDSU viewer sent a photo to the TV station of what appeared to be a waterspout around the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in New Orleans. There were no reports of crashes or damage.


Some mountainous areas of Arkansas' Ozark Mountains could get up to 10 inches of snow, which would make travel "very hazardous or impossible" in the northern tier of the state from near whiteout conditions, the weather service said.


The holiday may conjure visions of snow and ice, but twisters this time of year are not unheard of. Ten storm systems in the last 50 years have spawned at least one Christmastime tornado with winds of 113 mph or more in the South, said Chris Vaccaro, a National Weather Service spokesman in Washington, via email.


The most lethal were the storms of Dec. 24-26, 1982, when 29 tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi killed three people and injured 32.


In Mobile, a large section of the roof on the Trinity Episcopal Church is missing and the front wall of the parish wall is gone, said Scott Rye, a senior warden at the church in the Midtown section of the city.


On Christmas Eve, the church with about 500 members was crowded for services.


"Thank God this didn't happen last night," Rye said.


The church finished a $1 million-plus renovation campaign in June 2011, which required the closure of the historic sanctuary for more than a year.


___


Associated Press writers Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Ala., Jeff Amy in Atlanta, Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston, Chuck Bartels in Little Rock, Ark., and AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner in Washington, contributed to this report.


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Toronto reaches skyward, but how dark the clouds?

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TORONTO (Reuters) – Barry Fenton walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in his 30th-floor uptown Toronto penthouse suite and declared, “This is the best view of the city.”


To the south, a mass of steel-and-glass skyscrapers glinted in the bright autumn sun. Several cranes were in motion on unfinished buildings, a common sight in a city in the midst of a residential building boom.






“If you look around the core, every building you look at has a different look to it, a different ambience,” said the energetic co-founder of Lanterra Developments, one of the city’s most active builders. “That’s important.”


Fenton, 56, says he is confident the city’s condominium market will remain strong — despite warnings that it is all moving too far, too fast — and has an ambitious lineup for future development. And he is not alone in his optimism.


Toronto‘s seams are bursting with new condo and hotel towers designed by star architects like Frank Gehry and built by famed developers like Donald Trump.


But Fenton and others who see Toronto emerging from its “pokey” past — as a columnist in the Globe and Mail recently described it — face some formidable obstacles: an infrastructure buckling under soaring density rates, the laws of supply and demand and preservationists who say too many new towers are destroying the city’s character.


Canada’s central bank drew a bead on the city of 2.6 million this month in its weighty “Financial System Review,” warning of “potential future supply imbalances” in the condo market.


The Bank of Canada noted that the number of unsold condominiums in pre-construction has doubled, to 14,000, over the past year.


Greater Toronto home sales have slowed after years of steady increases. Sales fell 16 percent in November from the same month a year ago, according to the Toronto Real East Board. So far, however, prices are flattening, not falling, as some analysts have predicted.


In defiance of warnings by the central bank and economists, two mega-projects were unveiled within days of each other in October — a three-tower condo complex to be designed by Gehry and a multi-tower office project that includes a massive casino.


RACE TO THE TOP


More skyscrapers — 147 of them — are being built in Toronto than anywhere in North America, according to Emporis, the German data provider. That is twice as many as in New York, a city with about three times the population.


Toronto is getting taller fast. Fifteen buildings that will be more than 150 meters (492 feet) high are under construction, more than anywhere in the western hemisphere.


The recently completed Trump International Hotel topped out at 277 meters, just shy of Toronto’s tallest skyscraper, the 72-story First Canadian Place, which is 298 meters. That height could be exceeded by a couple of major projects on the drawing boards, including the Mirvish project.


(The city’s tallest freestanding structure, however, is the CN Tower, which soars over Toronto at 553 meters.)


“Toronto is creating a very sustainable future by building condos downtown,” said Daniel Libeskind, the American architect, who was in Toronto in October for a ceremony for one of his latest projects, the 57-story L Tower, with its sweeping, curvaceous, design that rises above the city’s modernist Sony Center for Performing Arts.


“It fights urban sprawl and brings people into the heart of the city.”


While building in big American cities and in Western Europe cratered following the financial crisis four years ago, Toronto never stopped booming. Demand for residential space has been strong, and while the office market has also been healthy, most of the new developments have been for condo projects.


Lanterra’s Fenton said his company has built some 9,000 condominium units in Toronto over the past 10 years and now has “in the hopper” up to 6 million square feet of property in downtown Toronto that is being rezoned for new projects.


Lanterra gained prominence over the past five years for the development of Maple Leaf Square, which included two condo towers, a hotel and office space, near the city’s hockey shrine, Air Canada Center, on land that had sat vacant for years.


Now it is “one of the hottest places to be,” said Fenton.


“ONE TOWER LEADS TO ANOTHER”


Some worry that Toronto can’t handle much more development.


“We have accumulated a serious infrastructure deficit,” wrote Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect, in the Globe and Mail in October. “We have failed to make the investments in public transit that are urgently needed. Our narrow sidewalks and poorly designed streets are already jammed.”


He criticized the city officials and developers for a lack of coordinated planning. “One tower leads to another,” he said.


Despite decades of debate about transportation policy, Toronto has just two subway lines, a fleet of charming but lumbering streetcar lines and crumbling roadways.


Commuters in Toronto spend at least 80 minutes in traffic a day, on average — worse than what commuters face in London or Los Angeles — according to the Toronto Board of Trade.


Toronto’s City Planning Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.


There is also concern about soaring neighborhood density rates. The city’s waterfront area has seen the most growth. Its population has soared 134 percent in a decade and is up 66 percent in the past five years, to 43,295, according to city data.


Toronto’s aging energy grid is strained. In July, downtown Toronto endured an eight-hour blackout after a transformer blew due to high demand. There was a similar outage last January.


THE MEGA-PROJECTS


Now two of the most ambitious projects the city has ever seen are being floated.


First out of the gate was theater impresario David Mirvish, who with his father, the late Ed Mirvish, helped create Toronto’s vibrant arts and theater scene.


In early October, Mirvish unveiled a plan for three condominium towers, with up to 85 floors each, that would be the city’s tallest buildings.


A podium at the buildings’ base would house two museums, including one for the Mirvish family’s contemporary art collection.


The Mirvish buildings would be designed by Gehry, the celebrated Canadian-born architect whose 76-story 8 Spruce Street residential tower was just completed in New York.


“These towers can become a symbol of what Toronto can be,” the 83-year-old Gehry said at project’s unveiling. “I am not building condominiums, I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”


Two weeks later, Oxford Properties Group, a Canadian developer with a $ 20 billion global real estate portfolio, announced a $ 3 billion makeover of the downtown convention center, just south of the Mirvish and Gehry project. It envisions a casino, two hotel towers and two office towers that would be among the tallest in the city.


Adam Vaughan, a city councilor whose district would encompass both projects, said a lot more planning is needed. He had kinder words for the Mirvish proposal — “it’s a transformative and astonishing proposal” — than for Oxford’s project, which he called “all out of proportion.”


“It’s time to have a really smart conversation about how we are building this neighborhood because there is a hell of lot of density arriving not just with this project but with all the projects that have been approved,” he said in an interview.


AT THE KIT KAT


Al Carbone, owner for the past three decades of the Kit Kat restaurant, doesn’t think people like Vaughan are listening to him, as the councilor and other politicians are not heeding the growing concerns about the rapid pace of development.


He said buildings are springing up too close to lot lines, creating jammed sidewalks and alleyways. And the sun does not shine on the streets like it once did.


He supports the Mirvish project, which would preserve his street, known as Restaurant Row. But he is battling a separate 47-story building that would go up steps away from his restaurant.


The plan, which still must be approved, would retain the historic facades of buildings on the street, which Carbone believes will destroy the character of the row.


“It’s a tough battle,” said Carbone, who launched the website SaveRestaurantrow.com to drum up support in opposition to the project. “You can’t have a condo on every corner.”


WHERE IS TORONTO HEADED?


Some believe Toronto is at a crossroads as developers, politicians and citizens debate the rapid changes the city’s urban landscape.


The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee dismissed the idea that the development was somehow bad for the city in a column in October, saying the condo boom “has transformed our once-pokey downtown into a vibrant, around-the-clock urban community.”


David Lieberman, an architect who also teaches at the University of Toronto’s architectural school, agrees the new developments have been good for the city, but he is not sure the city’s citizens are ready for it.


“We have such an excellent opportunity to get things right, but there is the Canadian conservatism,” Lieberman said, sipping coffee in his studio in an old downtown Toronto house. “Canadians in their city building are not risk takers.”


(Reporting By Russ Blinch. Editing by Janet Guttsman and Douglas Royalty)


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