Seattle

After the drama of the past few months, Julian Assange could be forgiven for wishing that the world still communicated via passenger pigeon.

Seattle-based email provider Riseup's "canary" expiration baffled the public for months and led to emotional, nonfactual accusations that Wikileaks had been "compromised" by state actors. But what is Riseup's canary and how did an anomaly related to it cause so much concern? To explain that, it is necessary to outline the legal processes that made canaries necessary, how they work in relation to the law and what a canary is exactly.

Back in August we noted that the Vancouver housing market was doomed after the implementation of a 15% property tax on foreign buyers targeting the massive influx of Chinese money driving real estate prices to astronomical levels.  Sure enough, within a matter of weeks home prices had plunged and so had the volume of residential real estate transactions (see "As The Vancouver Housing Market Implodes, The "Smart Money" Is Rushing To Get Out Now").

France may go dark tomorrow, but for residents of downtown Seattle elevators ground to a halt and lights went out across downtown Seattle late Wednesday morning as a major power outage struck. According to Komo News, the outage struck at about 11:30 a.m. The cause of the disruption was an equipment failure at Massachusetts Street Substation and was expected to last about two hours, according to Seattle City Light.

Submitted by Jed Graham via Investors.com,

Hiring at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality sector venues slowed markedly last year in metro areas that saw big minimum-wage hikes, new Labor Department data show.

Wherever cities implemented big minimum-wage hikes to $10 an hour or more last year, the latest data through December show that job creation downshifted to the slowest pace in at least five years.

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

If you have forgotten your Gulliver’s Travels, recall that Jonathan Swift described the people of Brobdingnag as being as tall as church steeples and having a ten foot stride. Everything else was in proportion - with rats the size of mastiffs and the latter the size of four elephants, while flies were “as big as a Dunstable lark” and wasps were the size of partridges.