Two Canadian teenagers in Toronto made big headlines this week.

That’s because they successfully launched a man into space.

A man made of Lego blocks, that is.

This Lego man was attached to a homemade contraption, equipped with video camera, and tethered to a weather balloon.

After the two teenagers launched it, the balloon rose some 80,000 ft.

That’s within the layer of Earth’s atmosphere we want you to name.

It’s not as high as the thermosphere where the International Space Station orbits.

Nor is it as low as troposphere.

If you were standing on the summit of Mount Everest, for example, you’d be breathing the thin air of the troposphere.

The answer is the stratosphere. Lisa Mullins talks with Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammed about their science project.

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Stephen Harper made the comment after media reports regarding a divorce case in Toronto.

The case involves two women, one from Florida, the other from Britain, who got married in Canada which legalized same-sex marriages in 2005.

A lawyer, representing Canada’s federal government in the case, is arguing that the women’s marriage in Canada is not valid because same-sex marriage isn’t legal in either Florida or Britain.

Martha McCarthy is the Toronto lawyer who represents the two women.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Canada’s prime minister today denied his government is changing its position on same sex marriage. Stephen Harper made the comment after media reported a divorce case in Toronto. The case involved two women, one from Florida, the other from Britain, who got married in Canada, which legalized same sex marriages in 2005. A lawyer representing Canada’s federal government in the case is arguing that the women’s marriage in Canada is not valid because same sex marriage isn’t legal in either Florida or Britain. Attorney Martha McCarthy represents the two women. She was also involved in the push to make same sex marriage legal in Canada. McCarthy says that the divorce case in Ontario could affect thousands of Americans.

Martha McCarthy: If the government succeeds with this argument it puts into doubt the validity of the marriages of any same sex nonresident who came to Canada to be married from a jurisdiction that did not recognize the validity of same sex marriage.

Werman: So in other words, if these women who were from the state of Massachusetts where same sex marriage is legal there wouldn’t be a problem with this.

McCarthy: Right, if they came with Massachusetts after Mass. passed equal legislation then you’re right, according to their argument, that would be a valid marriage. The whole thing is like a law school exam because what if one is from Mass. and one is from Texas, and one is from Ontario and one is from New York? I’ve been inundated by emails today from individuals who have questions. And one person emailed me and said we’re from New York; at the time that we got married New York didn’t recognize the validity of equal marriage…

Werman: And now they do.

McCarthy: We came to Ontario, we got married, we’ve now moved to Ontario, do you think our marriage is valid?

Werman: Yeah, lots of questions.

McCarthy: It’s just ridiculous.

Werman: Let me ask you this, Ms. McCarthy, is a marriage certificate in Canada, for gay and lesbian couples, is it the exact same document as it is for heterosexual couples?

McCarthy: Yes, it is.

Werman: So how is Canada’s federal lawyer able to slide in the proviso after same sex marriage was enshrined into law in 2005?

McCarthy: Well, there’s some old case about the validity of marriages for purposes of annulment, 30 year old case that talks about the validity of marriage being dependent in part on the law of the domicile.

Werman: So what you’re saying is Canada’s marriage laws do not have a residency requirement, but that federal divorce laws do.

McCarthy: That’s exactly right. There is a one-year residency requirement for divorce, but no residency requirement for marriage.

Werman: So that makes this case especially complicated.

McCarthy: It’s why, the current estimates are that perhaps 15,000 same sex marriages have been solemnized since June of 2003, when equal marriage began in Canada. And as many as one third of those have been Americans.

Werman: I have to ask you this, if you know that your Canadian marriage license will not be recognized where you live, in this case in Florida and in Britain, then why even go through with marriage in the first place?

McCarthy: Because I mean that’s thousands of people who wanted a marriage despite what the view was in their home jurisdictions, who came because we were marrying same sex couples. That was you know, a flood in the first six months.

Werman: So Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that this case is not going to reopen the whole issue of same sex marriage. Do you think it actually will reopen it?

McCarthy: It’s possible, if we are not successful on this particular legal issue about whether or not the marriages are valid, the implications are enormous and embarrassing on the international stage to Canada, which has held itself out. I mean I’ve been certainly a big player in holding ourselves out as being leaders internationally on the issue of gay marriage. It’s unbelievable that the federal government would be taking this position nine years in.

Werman: Attorney Martha McCarthy speaking to us from Toronto. Thank you very much for your time.

McCarthy: No problem.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

In the United States, the attention of the ‘Occupy’ movement has shifted lately to Oakland, California.

There was violence there on Wednesday as demonstrators smashed windows and clashed with police.

Nothing like that in Toronto, Canada.

There are some tensions with authorities there, too but so far no violence.

One thing the protesters in Toronto are worried about is the cold. They’ve been camping out in a city park since mid-October.

The park is named after the Anglican Cathedral right next to it.

Can you name that park?

The answer is St. James Park. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Toronto Star reporter Josh Tapper about the Central Asian style tent homes called gers or yurts that have popped up in St. James Park.

Read tweets about the ‘Occupy’ movement

As this resident can tell you, rush hour can be a nightmare there.

“As you can imagine traffic is chaotic, lots of congestion on the roads, it takes sometimes hours to traverse the city and get to destinations, and this is the reason why the government has decided to upgrade the transportation infrastructure to ease the congestion and chaos on the streets.”

That’s where that new railway comes in. To save money, engineers are buying hundreds of used subway cars from Toronto, Canada and refitting them to run above ground in Nigeria.

So which Nigerian city is getting its train cars from Ontario?

The answer is Lagos, Nigeria.

Danladi Verheijen director of the Nigerian company Eko Rail tell anchor Marco Werman about the international transportation project.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford isn’t pulling any punches as he speaks to Toronto city councilors at their monthly public meeting. He’s trying to persuade them to privatize garbage collection, a move that would undercut the city’s powerful labor unions. In Ford’s view, the councilors are either with him or against him.

“You’re going to have one side of council that is going to support high taxes, big spending, out of control union contracts,” Ford said, as some in the audience booed, “or we’re going to have the other side of people that are going to have respect for taxpayers’ money, that want to bring accountability to City Hall, that are sick and tired of the tax and spend socialists down in this city.”

Ford’s argument might seem familiar to an American audience. The millionaire businessman is often touted as a leader of a sort of ‘Tea Party North’. Since his election last November, Ford has relentlessly pursued a populist right-wing agenda, in a city that’s often seen as socially conscious, environmentally aware and easy-going.

On his first day on the job, he repealed a hated $60 per car environment tax. He canceled plans to add more light-rail to the city’s underdeveloped public transit system, saying it would have interfered with cars. And he’s frozen property taxes.

Now the city may have to cut services to make up for an $800 million shortfall. Toronto has rarely seen such a conservative leader, said Royson James, a columnist for The Toronto Star newspaper.

“Ford came in and immediately he’s saying we’re going to privatize everything. That’s the American ethos. It’s not Toronto,” James said. “The way he does politics is quite different from what we’re used to.”

One of Ford’s most vocal opponents, City Councilor Adam Vaughan, said Ford could undo decades of progress in Toronto, a city that was recently ranked as the second best place in the world to live.

“If you want to participate in a race to the bottom, cutting government and cutting taxes, you end up with a city that doesn’t provide services for itself, where the poor get poorer and the rich move out,” Vaughan said. “Then you’re left with what you have in many American cities, which is a dead downtown core. That’s the trajectory that this kind of ideology puts us on.”

But Ford is extremely popular here. Recent polls suggest 70 % of Torontonians support him. He’s especially well-liked in the city’s suburban areas like Scarborough, where he recently inaugurated a new bus stop in front of a treatment center for handicapped children. The center tried unsuccessfully for 30 years to get the stop. After he was elected, Ford made it happen. A woman at the new bus stop said that’s one of the reasons she voted for him.

“He stood up strong for what he believed in and he was real,” she said. “He just said what he said and you either liked it or you didn’t like it — period.”

Ford rarely meets with journalists, but when he does, he presents a simple vision for the city.

“It’s going to be a very clean, very safe prosperous city,” Ford said. “Taxes will be lower than what they are now. People will have more money in their pockets so they can spend more and create jobs and stimulate the economy.”

Ford said one way he’s already stimulated the economy is by ending what he calls the war on cars and repealing the $60 vehicle tax.

“How many cities introduce a $60 car tax?” Ford asked, and how many cities reduce lanes of traffic in order to make bike paths and bike lanes.

When he’s reminded that London has a car tax and New York is creating hundreds of miles of bike lanes, he seems surprised.

“They must not like cars,” he said.

Ford plans to spread his brand of taxpayers’ rights beyond Toronto. His former campaign manager is organizing an advocacy group to promote conservative values across the province of Ontario. Ford has said that someday, he’d like to be Canada’s prime minister.

There’s a religious debate taking place in Canada. Some Muslims there say they want the country to set some limits on freedom of religion.The Muslim Canadian Congress is lobbying to ban burkas or any other kind of Islamic face covering. Anita Elash reports from Toronto.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Another type of religious debate is taking place in Canada. Some Muslims there say they want the country to set some limits on freedom of religion. The Muslim Canadian Congress is lobbying to ban burkas or any other kind of Islamic face covering. Anita Elash reports from Toronto.

[PRAYER]

ANITA ELASH: Friday afternoon at the Umar Bin Khatap Mosque in downtown Toronto. About 100 people have gathered in the basement of a grey brick building on a street that’s filled with shops selling halal pizza and East African sweets. The men are kneeling at the front of the hall. The women are at the back hidden behind black office partitions. Most are wearing multi-colored shawls, floor-length skirts, and headscarves that cover their hair. But some are fully covered revealing only their eyes. Salehah al Shehri came here from Saudi Arabia two months ago. Outside the mosque I tell her that some people in Canada want to ban what she’s wearing – the niqab – which covers her face and reveals only her eyes. She says she doesn’t speak English very well so her husband translates.

SALEHAH AL SHEHRI: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

HUSBAND TRANSLATING: She said I’m so sorry to hear this because what we hear that this is a country of freedom. If she’s not doing something bad to the people around her, so why she’s not right to have her freedom.

ELASH: The niqab and the very similar burka are still rarely seen in Canada. But the Muslim population is growing fast and so is the number of women covering their face. And some Muslims are arguing that those women are hurting Canadian society and themselves.

TAREK FATAH: They cannot use religion to hide their identity. This is an insult to my faith, to my community … .

ELASH: Tarek Fatah is the founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress. His group has long opposed face coverings for Muslim women. So when the influential Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi said the burka should be banned in Egypt the CMC called on the Canadian parliament to ban it in public places here. Fatah says the practice is a threat to public safety. Several banks have been robbed by men wearing burkas. And he says it’s a threat to women’s rights in a democracy.

FATAH: Anyone who propagates this has one objective – to make sure that the women in their family become unemployable and therefore dependent on them and therefore pose no economic, social, or political threat to their power structure within the family or the community.

ELASH: Fatah says he’s concerned the growing number of women who do cover their face is a sign that Canadian Muslims are becoming more radical. The Muslim population here is diverse and well educated. But some experts say that many Muslims feel disenfranchised by discrimination and high unemployment and may be easy targets for radical leaders looking for new recruits. Even so constitutional law expert David Schneiderman says Canada has strong human rights laws and an official policy of multiculturalism. So there’s little chance it would ever ban the burka.

DAVID SCHEIDERMAN: I think the guiding principle here is that governments are expected to accommodate rather than ban forms of religious expression. And governments are expected to abide by those human rights commitments and probably no government wants to be seen to be trampling on charter rights and freedoms.

[PRAYER]

ELASH: Back at the Umar Bin Khatap mosque one young woman says that calls to ban the burka might actually encourage the radicalization opponents are worried about. Samiya Muselem is 18 and wears only a black hijab that frames her olive-skinned face. But she supports the right of other to veil.

SAMIYA MUSELEM: It really angers me and it makes me like question the society like how far are you going to go? And when you do that kind of stuff to people they think that you’re breaking them down but little do you know you’re making them more stronger because they’re going to hold onto it more better instead of like vice versa – taking it off.

ELASH: She adds that many of her young friends have recently donned the burka to let people know they’re Muslim and proud of it. For The World I’m Anita Elash in Toronto.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

But Kobo Town gets its name — and musical inspiration — from a neighborhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, known as the birthplace of calypso.

This musical genre was once known for lyrics full of double entendres and hidden political messages — as band leader Drew Gonsalves explains.

GONSALVES: “I love the calypso of the early era where they had to use ingenious lyrical devices to suggest their political ideas in a time of heavy censorship. And I also love the exuberant melodies that were always common to calypso. I would like to take those and present them in a way that is both musically and lyrically relevant to the time we grew up in.”

Kobo Town leader Drew Gonsalves is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. So is the man known as Lord Relator. He’s another popular calypso singer. Back in 1980, he won a national competition with a song complaining about skyrocketing food prices.

Now, Lord Relator has a new version of the song. He plays it with steel pan musician Andy Narell on the new CD “University of Calypso.”

Dermot Sweeny

Sweeny: “Buildings in northern climates, surprisingly, are air conditioned every day.”

Margolis: That’s architect Dermot Sweeny. I met him a on a recent freezing day amid Toronto’s downtown skyscrapers. Sweeny says most buildings in North American cities were designed for a different era.

Sweeny: “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of people in a building. So we’re producing more heat with our bodies…”

Margolis: Sweeny takes me inside the guts of a new 30-story office tower.

Sweeny: “We’ve added CPU’s, computers, they’re all huge generators of heat… We’ve increased the heat load, typically five fold since the 60’s…”

Margolis: To compensate, Sweeny says, older buildings blast in cool air, year round. But Sweeny says it doesn’t have to be like this. In this new building he’s turning architectural design upside down, literally.

Sweeny: “Everything that normally goes on in a ceiling now goes on in a floor.”

Wiring and ventilation are installed below

Margolis: Sweeny has taken the wiring and ventilation that’s normally above our heads and moved it beneath our feet. He’s given every person individual control of the temperature in their work space.
He points to small, circular ventilation ducts spaced every few feet along the ground.

Sweeny: “That’s an air diffuser getting air out of the floor. And that’s adjustable.
Margolis: “So someone would have their desk…”
Sweeny: “So someone working here can lean down and open or close the air, control their own temperature and flow.”

Air diffuser

Margolis: This has two benefits. First, office workers can adjust the temperature just the way they like it. Gone are the days of sitting right beneath an air vent, bundled up in a sweater, during summertime. Second, it saves lots of energy. You don’t need to cool an entire building, just the areas where people are too warm.

With this change, and other innovations, Sweeny says his buildings can use 35 to 50 percent less energy than a typical Toronto office building. And Sweeny is happy to share his ideas with colleagues…. Which is why he’s joined the Architecture 2030 challenge. It was started by New Mexico architect Edward Mazria.

Mazria: “The more brainpower we can bring to it the better, and so the more people we have working on it, the better.”

Margolis: Mazria is building on more than four decades in the business to get architects to share resources and commit to building smarter. He says new buildings can already cut energy use by 60 %. His goal is buildings that use no fossil fuels at all by 2030. He’s says that’s not implausible, if architects combine new technologies with old-fashioned ideas.

Mazria: “What materials you would use both inside and outside the building. Where you would locate the openings for windows, whether you would shade the openings or even shade the entire building in the summertime. It’s only with the advent of inexpensive fossil fuels that we’ve gotten away from those kinds of design principles. So in essence we’re going back in time.”

Margolis: So far, architects from 39 nations have signed on with Mazria’s Architecture 2030 challenge… They all share information. But what works in cold Canada, isn’t always what an architect in a place like Mexico would do.

Avenida de los Insurgentes

Margolis: Insurgentes Avenue in Mexico City is said to be the longest avenue in the world: 29 miles. The buildings are an unimaginative mix of concrete and brick boxes, in various states of disrepair. Every so often though, a few buildings curve and swoop. They’re completely covered in glass. The glass allows Mexico’s ample sunshine to heat and light the building. The buildings also have open interiors with gaps in the ceiling. This allows hot air to funnel up and out of the buildings, like a chimney.

Mexico City's Fiesta Inn

Picciotto: “I’m going to make just a turn here…”

Margolis: These structures were designed by architect José Picciotto, one of two Mexican architects who signed onto the 2030 Challenge. Picciotto took me on a driving tour of some his work. All of his buildings have a similar look, but one size does not fit all. He points to a hotel he designed.

José Picciotto

Picciotto: “This building is responding to a specific situation, on a specific street, on a specific orientation.”

Margolis: The front of this building faces straight at the noonday sun. So, he’s covered the windows with small blue polka dots. The dots help block out some of the Mexican summer heat, while still allowing in plenty of light. Horizontal shades also extend several feet off the windows to provide additional cooling. This isn’t high tech stuff. But Picciotto says his buildings use up to two thirds less energy than comparable buildings in Mexico City. Still, it’s been hard to sell his ideas. He tells me about a conversation he had with a another local resident, when Picciotto mentioned he was an architect.

Picciotto: “And he told me, have you seen that building in the corner of blah, blah, blah, the blue one with those things? Don’t you think it’s horrendous? He didn’t know it was mine.”

Margolis: In Toronto, architect Dermot Sweeny has had similar difficulties.

Sweeny: “I approached a lot of developers, and they were quite honest, and they said, well nobody is doing this. Why would I do this?”

Polka dot windows

Margolis: The answer, Sweeny says, is that architecture has to change if we’re to have any chance of stopping global climate change. But the economics to build green don’t always work. Tenants benefit from lower energy costs. But developers have to pay for the capital improvements up front, and don’t necessarily recoup the long-term savings. That’s why Edward Mazria, the founder of Architecture 2030, says architects can’t solve the green building problem alone. He says it’s critical that governments play a role to make energy efficient buildings the rule, and not just an aspiration.

For the World, I’m Jason Margolis.