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Même s'ils se disent prêts à collaborer contre la fraude fiscale, la Suisse, le Luxembourg et l'Autriche appréhendent les pires conséquences si les pressions internationales entraînent la fin du secret bancaire. Pour en lire plus...

Ce n'est pas un secret : SNC-Lavalin veut depuis un moment évincer ce locataire qui fait grimper leur prime d'assurance. Voici un projet par Lemay pour le déménagement du consulat. Au coin de Longueuil et Saint-Paul dans le Vieux-Montréal. Merci à MTLskyline sur SSP. Option 1 Option 2 http://www.lemayonline.com/fr/lab/u-s-consulate J'ignore cependant si ce projet est toujours actif ou si c'est abandonné ... ?

Je propose un fil sur le thème des immeubles montréalais coup de coeur que chacun pourrait proposer en photos. Pas besoin qu'ils soient connus ou imposants, anciens ou modernes, ce peut être un simple duplex digne de mention notamment, ou tout autre type de construction. L'important serait qu'ils se distinguent par leur facture particulière et qu'ils soient pour vous un bel exemple de réussite, un secret bien gardé ou un exemple inspirant à suivre. Ce pourrait même être une découverte dans votre quartier ou ville ou région montréalaise, que vous souhaitez partager sur le forum.

(Courtesy of The Globe and Mail) I have a feeling many women will be happy with this news.

Les petits secrets de la réussite de Lassonde: l'innovation et la distinction. Pour en lire plus...

Source copenhagenize.com I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Or maybe a big one. In the race for reestablishing the bicycle as a feasible, accepted and respected form of transport, many cities are keen to bang their drums to show off their bicycle goodness. All of the noise is good noise - every bike lane, bike rack, lowered speed limit, et al are great news and important for the symbolism of cementing the bicycle on the urban landscape. The secret is this. There is a city in North America that is steadily working towards planting bicycle seeds. I often see internet lists about the most bicycle friendly cities in North America and just as often this city isn't on them. Which is wrong. The reason is a cultural one. English North America looks in the mirror when measuring itself. Europe is another planet and measuring yourself up against the bicycle boom in cities like Paris, Seville and Barcelona won't let you top any bicycle traffic lists. Fair enough. Compare yourself with other cities in your region and measure your progress. Nothing wrong with that. This secret city, despite being firmly placed on the North American continent, still gets ignored and overlooked. (No, it's not Portland) It's in a region that doesn't speak an English dialect. (No, it's not Wisconsin) A region that has its own unique cultural heritage and identity. (No, it's not Alberta) This city, and region, don't figure in the daily consciousness of most North Americans because they're just too damned "foreign". Ish. But I was there very recently and I was amazed with what I saw. And I've seen stuff. I saw the most impressive bicycle rush hour one afternoon. More impressive and with greater numbers than anywhere else in North America. By far. I saw more separated bicycle infrastructure in this city than anywhere else in North America. One of the cycle tracks dates from 1986! Beat that. You can't. Sure, many of the cycle tracks are on-street bi-directional ones, which we threw out of our Best Practice in Denmark a couple of decades ago, but they area there and they are used and they are a good start. I rode on a cycle track that features 9000 daily cyclists. And this is nothing new for them. I stayed in a borough in the city - one of the highest-density areas in North America - that has one of the lowest car-ownership rates in North America and that can boast a modal split for bicycles of over 9%. City-wide it's at about 2.3%, just so you know. This borough showed me that bicycle culture is alive and well and that focusing solely on bicycle commuting doesn't get you anywhere. The bicycle can get you to work and back, sure, but it about making the bicycle a part of your daily life. There are, after all, schools to drop off at, shops to shop at, cafés to sip at, cinemas to be entertained at, and so on. This city is a role model for a continent. It can teach lessons worth learning if there were people from other cities willing to learn. It has the country's largest cyclist organisation who have been representing Citizen Cyclists for 40 years. I ate at their café, too! How cool is that. I had lunch with the Mayor of the aforementioned borough and saw in his eyes the kind of visionary politician that every city should have. A man who dares to believe that his vision of his city's future can be achieved and who isn't afraid to suddenly change a busy street to one-way for cars and put in bicycle lanes in both directions on either side of said street. I felt his passion and was charged by it. This is a city that can put on two bike rides / events in three days, organised by the aforementioned cyclists organisation. The first one drew 17,000 people on bicycles for an evening ride. The next one drew 25,000 for a 50 km tour of the city. Read those numbers again. 17,000 on a Friday evening. Then 25,000 on the Sunday. This is a city that fascinates me. Not only for what it is doing for bicycle traffic and culture but for it's stunning liveable-ness. I live in what is regarded as one of the world's most liveable cities. I can go to other like-minded cities and feel at home. Then I land in this city and wonder how the hell they do it. How the hell it many neighbourhoods are lightyears ahead of Copenhagen, Amsterdam and anywhere else in the way the streets are used by people. For all the talk of Liveable Streets, this city lives the dream. Walking the walk and talking the talk. I am simply obsessed by this. I simply need to find out, in detail, how it can be. I want the recipe. I'm willing to bust my ass to find it, write it down, absorb it. I want to be taught. I'm still working on my love affair with their french fries served with gravy and cheese curds, but I have seen North America's promised land. I've been to the mountaintop (and rode up and down their mountain and hills on a three-speed upright bike... easy) and I've seen down the other side. Every waking moment... okay, that's an exaggeration... I'm thinking about returning. To experience, to learn, to soak up their the city's vibe.

How Switzerland camouflaged its ready-to-explode architecture during the Cold War I finally had a chance to read John McPhee's book La Place de la Concorde Suisse, his somewhat off-puttingly titled 1984 look at the Swiss military and its elaborately engineered landscape defenses. To make a long story short, McPhee describes two things: how Switzerland requires military service from every able-bodied male Swiss citizen — a model later emulated and expanded by Israel — and how the Swiss military has, in effect, wired the entire country to blow in the event of foreign invasion. To keep enemy armies out, bridges will be dynamited and, whenever possible, deliberately collapsed onto other roads and bridges below; hills have been weaponized to be activated as valley-sweeping artificial landslides; mountain tunnels will be sealed from within to act as nuclear-proof air raid shelters; and much more. First, a quick look at the system of self-demolition that is literally built into the Swiss national infrastructure: To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage. Further: Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide. The impending self-demolition of the country is "routinely practiced," McPhee writes. "Often, in such assignments, the civilian engineer who created the bridge will, in his capacity as a military officer, be given the task of planning its destruction." But this is where a weirdly fascinating, George Dante-esque artifice begins. After all, McPhee writes, why would Switzerland want anyone to know where the dynamite is wired, where the cannons are hidden, which bridges will blow, or where to find the Army's top secret mountain hideaways and resupply shelters? But if you look closely, you start to see things. Through locked gates you see corridors in the sides of mountains-going on and on into the rock, with alight in the ceiling every five meters and far too many to count... Riding around Switzerland with these matters in mind-seeing little driveways that blank out in mountain walls, cavern entrances like dark spots under mountainside railroads and winding corniches, portals in various forms of lithic disguise-you can find it difficult not to imagine that almost anything is a military deception, masking a hidden installation. Full size Indeed, at one point McPhee jokes that his local guide in Switzerland "tends to treat the army itself as if it were a military secret." McPhee points to small moments of "fake stonework, concealing the artillery behind it," that dot Switzerland's Alpine geology, little doors that will pop open to reveal internal cannons and blast the country's roads to smithereens. Later, passing under a mountain bridge, McPhee notices "small steel doors in one pier" hinting that the bridge "was ready to blow. It had been superceded, however, by an even higher bridge, which leaped through the sky above-a part of the new road to Simplon. In an extreme emergency, the midspan of the new bridge would no doubt drop on the old one." It's a strange kind of national infrastructure, one that is at its most rigorously functional — one that truly fulfills its promises-when in a state of cascading self-imposed collapse. I could easily over-quote my way to the end of my internet service here, but it's a story worth reading. There are, for instance, hidden bomb shelters everywhere in an extraordinary application of dual-use construction. "All over Switzerland," according to McPhee, "in relatively spacious and quiet towns, are sophisticated underground parking garages with automatic machines that offer tickets like tongues and imply a level of commerce that is somewhere else. In a nuclear emergency, huge doors would slide closed with the town's population inside." Full size Describing titanic underground fortresses — "networks of tunnels, caverns, bunkers, and surface installations, each spread through many tens of square miles" — McPhee briefly relates the story of a military reconnaissance mission on which he was able to tag along, involving a hydroelectric power station built inside a mountain, accessible by ladders and stairs; the battalion tasked with climbing down into it thus learns "that if a company of soldiers had to do it they could climb the mountain on the inside." In any case, the book's vision of the Alps as a massively constructed — or, at least, geotechnically augmented and militarily amplified — terrain is quite heady, including the very idea that, in seeking to protect itself from outside invaders, Switzerland is prepared to dynamite, shell, bulldoze, and seal itself into a kind of self-protective oblivion, hiding out in artificially expanded rocky passes and concrete super-basements as all roads and bridges into and out of the country are instantly transformed into landslides and dust. http://gizmodo.com/5919581/how-switzerland-camouflaged-its-ready+to+explode-architecture-during-the-cold-war?tag=design

Le dévoilement progressif des principaux éléments du budget fédéral auquel les Canadiens ont assisté au cours des derniers jours est une première dans un pays où la tradition du secret budgétaire a toujours été scrupuleusement respectée, par Ottawa et par les provinces. Pour en lire plus...

Qui l’eût cru ? De toutes les villes américaines, c’est New York, et sa grande région de 20 millions d’habitants, qui a le plus faible taux d’émission de gaz à effet de serre (GES) par habitant. Son secret ? Un large système de transport collectif, constamment repensé par l’équipe de Projjal Dutta, l’homme derrière la « stratégie verte » de l’autorité new-yorkaise des transports. http://www.ledevoir.com/environnement/actualites-sur-l-environnement/435194/sur-la-route-ges-les-secrets-de-la-grosse-pomme

Morgan Stanley débarque en ville 1 mai 2008 - 06h07 La Presse Denis Lessard Un géant américain dans le secteur des valeurs mobilières et du placement, Morgan Stanley (MS), s'établira à Montréal, a appris La Presse. En cette période tourmentée pour le secteur financier, le geste de la multinationale a un effet rassurant pour la métropole qui vient de voir sa Bourse achetée par celle de Toronto. Un leader mondial Morgan Stanley est toujours un des leaders chez les firmes américaines de placement. Elle gère des actifs totalisant 749 milliards et compte 600 bureaux dans 33 pays. Ses revenus de 8 milliards proviennent pour les trois quarts de placements institutionnels. Le premier ministre Charest, qui vient de reporter une mission officielle au Nouveau-Brunswick à cause des inondations dans cette province, pourra être présent à l'annonce aujourd'hui (jeudi) où se trouveront aussi la titulaire des Finances Monique Jérôme-Forget, son collègue au Développement économique, Raymond Bachand, ainsi que le président d'Investissement Québec, Jacques Daoust. Dans le secret Le plus grand secret devait entourer cette annonce. Le maire de Montréal Gérald Tremblay et plusieurs leaders de la communauté d'affaires québécoise ont été invités sans qu'on leur fasse part de l'identité de la firme qui a décidé d'avoir pignon sur rue à Montréal. Un signal positif L'arrivée de telles firmes est surtout un signal sur l'importance stratégique de Montréal. Mais les emplois générés par ces activités sont toujours très lucratifs. Morgan Stanley a été comme plusieurs de ses concurrentes américaines frappées par la tempête des papiers commerciaux adossés à des actifs.

Barack Obama faces 30 death threats a day, stretching US Secret Service US President Barack Obama is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched and under-resourced Secret Service, according to a new book. By Toby Harnden in Washington Published: 8:34PM BST 03 Aug 2009 Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service. Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history. Most however, are kept under wraps because the Secret Service fears that revealing details of them would only increase the number of copycat attempts. Although most threats are not credible, each one has to be investigated meticulously. According to the book, intelligence officials received information that people associated with the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab might try to disrupt Mr Obama's inauguration in January, when the Secret Service co-ordinated at least 40,000 agents and officers from some 94 police, military and security agencies. More than a dozen counter-sniper teams were stationed along the inauguration parade route and the criminal records of employees and hotel guests in nearby buildings were scrutinised. Despite all this, there were glaring loopholes in the security. Kessler describes how more than 100 VIPs and major campaign donors were screened by metal detectors but then walked along a public pavement before boarding "secure" buses and were not checked again. It could have been relatively simple for an assassin to have mingled with them in order to get close enough to shoot the new president. After Mr Obama was elected president, his two children Malia, 11, codenamed Radiance, and Sasha, eight, codenamed Rosebud, began receiving Secret Service protection. Mr Obama's wife Michelle is codenamed Renaissance. The Secret Service also started to protect Vice-President Joe Biden's children, grandchildren, and mother. Instead of bringing in more agents - instantly identifiable because of their bulky suits, worn over bullet-proof jackets, and earpieces - the Secret Service directed agents to work longer hours to cover the extra load and to miss firearms training, physical fitness sessions and tests. "We have half the number of agents we need, but requests for more agents have fallen on deaf ears at headquarters," a Secret Service agent told Kessler. "Headquarters' mentality has always been, 'You can complete the mission with what you have. You're a U.S.S.S. agent'." Mr Biden's constant travel, including back to his home state of Delaware-the burden has meant that all agents on his team have ceased training. According to Kessler, however, they fill in forms stating they have "taken and passed all tests, when they have not, creating a dishonest culture". The Secret Service has increasingly cut corners after it was absorbed by the new Homeland Security Department under Mr Bush. Kessler said that when Mr Biden threw the first pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the 2009 season, the Secret Service did not screen any of the more than 40,000 fans, stunning his agents and the local Secret Service field office.