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Federal regulators have indefinitely delayed a decision on the proposed restart of the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in California, raising new questions Monday about whether the twin reactors will produce electricity again.

The seaside plant between San Diego and Los Angeles has been dark since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.

Operator Southern California Edison wants permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power in hopes of stopping vibration and friction that was blamed for damaging tubing.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission delayed several earlier target dates for a ruling. Its website on Monday listed no date for a restart decision _ only “to be determined.”

Agency spokesman Victor Dricks had no comment.

Last week, the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board sided with environmentalists who have called for lengthy hearings on the restart plan after concluding that firing up the plant would allow Edison “to operate beyond the scope of its existing license.”

A statement from SCE spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre noted that NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane indicated earlier that no decision would be made until at least mid-June on the company’s request to change its operating license to run at lower power.

“SCE continues to adhere to the established regulatory process,” the statement said payday loans with no fax. The company “cannot restart Unit 2 until the NRC says that it is safe to do so.”

Last month, SCE’s parent, Edison International, raised the possibility of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. The company also disclosed that costs tied to the long-running shutdown had hit $553 million.

Edison is facing a tangle of regulatory obstacles that include a separate state investigation into who should pay for the trouble _ customers or shareholders.

Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists and some lawmakers have said restarting the plant would lead to a disaster.

Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group challenging the restart, believes no decision can be made “until all the safety issues raised by the board are addressed,” spokesman Shaun Burnie said in an email.

Even with San Onofre sidelined, state power officials predict that there should be adequate power supplies in California this summer, but heat waves or wildfires that damage transmission lines could lead to potential shortages.

San Onofre is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside.

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European stocks fell for the first time in five days and U.S. equity-index futures dropped before a report that may show American retail sales slipped. Oil declined while the yen swung between gains and losses after sliding beyond 102 per dollar for the first time since October 2008.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index slipped 0.5 percent at 6:05 a.m. in New York. Standard & Poor

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The no-parking sign didn’t really make sense. Nader Khan parked there anyway.

All along Finfar Court in Mississauga, signs stated parking was prohibited from 12 to 3 on Fridays. It seemed odd to Khan, since a large mosque — the Islamic Society of North America — was a few metres away and offered its main prayer service at the same time.

“When I first parked there, I genuinely thought the sign said no parking every day but Fridays,” said Khan, an Islamic singer and songwriter who had driven there to pray. “I thought, wow, how accommodating.”

But when he returned an hour later, he found that his car and all the others parked on both sides of the street in the light industrial area had been ticketed. “I was furious.”

A year later, Khan returned and saw the signs were still there. Instead of parking, he started taking photos and turned to Facebook to express his frustration. “Finfar Court: A most racist, discriminatory, Islamophobic street in the GTA, located in Mississauga Ontario,” he wrote to introduce the pictures.

The Facebook post sparked intense debate between those agreeing with Khan and those who thought the issue was merely a response to years of bad parking, including blocking driveways and parking too close to hydrants.

Across the GTA, places of worship have claimed intolerance and unfairness when their facilities face resistance from residents or their expansion plans and building permits are rejected by the city.

But a look at parking bylaws across the city and the outcomes of dozens of Ontario Municipal Board decisions suggests the real culprit is much more benign and mundane. It almost always comes down to indiscretions of the vehicular kind — traffic and parking.

“The truth is, places of worship have a need for a lot of parking,” said Joe D’Abramo, director of zoning and environmental planning for the City of Toronto. “Nobody wants to provide parking, because it takes up land and costs money to put it underground. But if we don’t require it, then they park on the streets and the community around it gets very upset.”

Toronto recently completed a review of its outdated zoning bylaws, including those for parking near a place of worship, and enacted them into law last week.

There was ample resistance. The Toronto Faith Coalition protested some of the zoning changes, concerned the parking requirements would make it impossible for existing places of worship to expand and new ones to set up.

“Parking is a big issue because it determines whether or not a church, synagogue and mosque can be built,” said Charles McVety, an evangelical Christian leader, who headed the Toronto Faith Coalition. “It’s fundamental, because if you do not have enough land to meet this high level of parking required, then you can’t build your building or expand it. They won’t approve it.”

D’Abramo said the changes were necessary. Not only were the bylaws old, but they were from pre-amalgamation and rules differed across the city. They also didn’t reflect the diversity of the city. “Some faiths have seating, and some faiths have no seating, so the standards are different depending on how you worship,” he said.

Generally, municipalities require a place of worship to provide parking based on complex formulas that account for the number of pews or square footage. The parking requirement is reduced if the religious centre is near transit or major city centres.

In recent years,the neighbourhood church has been replaced by mega-churches. According to a study commissioned by the City of Toronto on parking standards for a place of worship, the average size of a new place of worship built between 2000 and 2005 was more than double the average size of one built between 1975 and 1990. This means more people now drive to church. And, since many religious centres are set up in industrial areas — where land may be cheaper — public transit is rarely a realistic alternative.

A number of municipalities, including Brampton, Mississauga and Markham, have also conducted reviews of their parking bylaws around places of worship.

And it turns out nothing riles up the neighbours like bad parking and increased traffic. Infractions or even the perception that rules could be broken have been enough to ignite tensions and divide communities.

In Markham, a Taoist temple trying to build in a residential area faced heavy resistance from neighbours primarily due to fear of increased traffic and parking concerns — even though the temple said it expected attendance of 15 to 20 people at a time. The city voted against the temple’s plans for rezoning, and the matter eventually landed at the Ontario Municipal Board, which approved the building last summer payday loans online.

Ten years ago, city officials thwarted the plans of a Hindu temple in Scarborough to redesignate a property it purchased in an industrial zone into a religious facility. There were a number of concerns, including parking and lack of transit. The temple took its case to the OMB, but the city’s concerns were upheld.

And a new mosque project in Markham has divided an otherwise peaceful community with concerns that the construction of the facility would create a traffic nightmare and lead to parking chaos in a neighbouring residential area. The matter was further complicated by what the mosque called a “typo” on its website suggesting it could hold 1,600people when it only had approval for 500 — and parking accommodations for such. The mosque has since decreased the planned size of its worship space and will provide 188 parking spaces.

On the surface,the primary concern appears to be good planning. But there are some who question whether the zoning issues are simply a mask for underlying tensions.

“It becomes an oddly intense battle when it comes to parking and mundane zoning issues around a mosque or temple,” said Jason Hackworth, a geography professor at the University of Toronto who wrote a paper on the collision of faith and economic development in the city’s industrial zones. “You have to ask yourself why this is the case, as zoning issues normally don’t invoke such a reaction.”

But he, too, is careful. “Of course, something like that is hard to prove.”

Especially when mosque officials agree that their congregants are also at fault. “The officials are very frustrated with the small minority of people who park badly,” said Khan, the Mississauga man offended by the signs. But Khan still thinks the city went too far: “Have tow trucks on call, tow the cars that are being inconsiderate and fine them again and tow them again. Punishing an entire community or the actions of a few is very problematic.”

Mosque officials say they constantly make announcements about parking etiquette to their congregants, and have even organized a shuttle from free parking lots nearby to accommodate overflow. But they were surprised when the city put up the signs without any consultation.

The bylaw was enacted in December 2011 after the city received numerous other parking complaints from businesses, said Mississauga transportation commissioner Martin Powell. The staff report on the matter only refers to the concerns of one citizen. And the city did not send out a petition to local residents and businesses, as is the normal process, the report states.

“I know it seems a bit strange because of the hours, but that’s when we have a problem,” said Powell. “If there are safety issues involved, then staff will make recommendations to council, and that is what we did here.”

But Powell is quick to point out that the mosque isn’t the only place of worship that faces odd parking restrictions. Last spring, a number of churches in Mississauga were shocked to find their congregants could no longer park on the streets nearby from 10-1 on Sundays.

“We have been at our location for 19 years, and there has never been any problem,” said Desmond Singh, a pastor with Mississauga Gospel Assembly. “But it seems like the city has been targeting our church hours.”

Some of his congregants and those from the nearby St. Joseph Syriac Catholic Church took a petition to city hall, but their protest fell on deaf ears. A member of St. Joseph’s church wrote about the restrictions on a website on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms claiming that it infringed upon the rights of parishioners to freely practise their religion.

The Toronto Faith Coalition’s McVety believes further restrictions on where a place of worship can be set up will make the problem even worse. Toronto and Ajax have recently banned places of worship from setting up in industrial zones — forcing new places of worship into expensive residential areas.

McVety says the coalition is considering taking Toronto’s new zoning bylaws to the OMB.

“We bring in hundreds of thousands of new Canadians in the GTA every year, and then we pass laws to restrict their ability to worship.”

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The Galaxy S4’s design is virtually unchanged from the Galaxy S III. And when I say virtually unchanged, I mean that you have to be pretty obsessive to notice the differences. Aside from a slightly more rectangular body and a more substantial, metal-esque band wrapping around the sides, there’s little to separate Samsung’s successor from its predecessor.

The most notable improvements to the phone’s hardware guts come in its processor, display and camera. None are revolutionary, but they all match or one-up the Android status quo.

The 5-inch, Super AMOLED display is one of the best Samsung has ever put on a phone, with a 1080p display and a pixel density of 441 per inch — more than enough to eliminate any trace of pixelation. The screen could stand to be a bit brighter, but that’s a minor quibble.

Even with a bigger screen and a beefier battery, the Galaxy S4 managed to get ever-so-slightly thinner, slimmer, and lighter than the Galaxy S III. It also got a power boost.

Smartphone makers have spent the past few years flinging extra cores at everything, so yet another quad-core processor — this time in the form of , Fortune 500) Snapdragon 600 — doesn’t sound all that exciting, especially compared to the “octo-core” Samsung Exynos 5 Octa that international markets are getting. (Geek caveat: Those extra four cores in the Exynos 5 are meant for low-power scenarios, so they don’t provide the massive boost over Snapdragon that you might expect.)

Still, the fact that the Galaxy S4 is more than three times faster than the Galaxy S III when run through the same benchmarking tests is nothing to scoff at.

In using the phone regularly for a week, I rarely came across a moment when it suffered from significant stuttering, lag or overheating. The one noticeable exception was when I played “Real Racing 3,” a graphically intense game that got choppy when too many cars were onscreen. That’s not really Samsung’s fault — Android is notorious for its game lag.

The Galaxy S4’s camera is also improved, though we’re at the point of diminishing returns. On paper, the leap from 8 megapixels to 13 megapixels sounds substantial, but we learned years ago that the megapixel arms race is only part of the story when it comes to camera quality. The Galaxy S4’s best new photo trick is a camera sensor that’s back-illuminated, which means it can capture more light and produce brighter, more-detailed images without the use of a flash.

The camera works well in most normal situations. Its new user interface, pulled from Samsung’s point-and-shoot Galaxy Camera, is nicely laid out and easy to use. The image processing time between hitting the shutter button and having a saved photo isn’t blazing, but also isn’t a nuisance one hour payday loan. A few of the software advances, like being able to erase unwanted objects from an image’s background or create time-lapse action shots, are neat and well-implemented.

Of course, these improvements — especially to the camera and screen — require more power, and Samsung obliged by packing in a bigger battery. With the screen’s brightness ranging between 50% and 75%, 4G turned on, and a few apps and services running in the background (Facebook, Gmail, Google Talk, etc. — the usual suspects), I was still able to get through a full day with moderate use. With heavier usage, I found myself having to recharge after 6 to 8 hours. On the whole, I didn’t notice any huge leap in battery life over the S3, but it certainly wasn’t worse, either.

The features Samsung wants buyers to focus on, though, aren’t the Galaxy S4’s internal guts, which are more or less identical to other top smartphones right now. It’s the software upgrades baked into Samsung’s custom “TouchWiz” interface. The phone’s flashier tricks include pausing video when you look away from the screen, letting you answer the phone by waving in front of it, and activating tilt-based scrolling when eye contact is detected. Samsung also pinched a few features from its Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, like allowing two apps to simultaneously run side-by-side, and the Airview feature, which detects when your finger is hovering over — but not quite touching — the screen. The gesture can activate a secondary action or menu.

Those are neat tricks, but they’re more like a sword-juggling circus act than the revolutionary breakthrough Samsung would like them to be. They’re interesting, novel and sometimes impressive, but they’re not significant or lasting advances. None are meaningfully better than our existing methods of smartphone interaction.

So, is the Samsung Galaxy S4 one of the best Android phones available? Yes. There are few other phones, period, that are as powerful and capable. But, in line with what we’ve seen from the past few iPhone generations, the improvements here aren’t as pronounced and exciting as in past years. This isn’t a phone that’s going to convert an iPhone user, and current Galaxy S III owners aren’t going to miss out on a whole lot as far as features go.

If you’re ready for an upgrade, and are in the market for an Android phone, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be one of top two or three phones you consider. It’s not the standout, though, that Samsung needs to remain the preeminent leader of the Android field. Hear that, HTC?

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A Muslim woman has been ordered to remove her niqab when she testifies at the preliminary hearing for two men she alleges sexually assaulted her years ago.

“Permitting her to wear her niqab while testifying in court does … create a serious risk to trial fairness,” Ontario Court Justice Norris Weisman wrote in his nine-page decision. “Her credibility is very much in issue and unfortunately, no accommodation of the parties conflicting Charter rights is possible.”

It is the second time Weisman has ruled N.S. – known in court by her initials – should remove the face covering when testifying in court.

He released his written ruling Wednesday.

The woman’s lawyer, David Butt, said his client is “disappointed” and he will be asking a Superior Court judge to quash the decision obliging her to remove the face covering.

The judge should have considered expert testimony about the “substantial body of evidence” that says facial expressions are not helpful in judging whether a person is telling the truth, Butt said. Butt said he will promptly file the papers seeking the review, which will put next week’s preliminary hearing on hold again.

In 2008, Weisman ruled she should be required to testify with her face bare after finding her “religious belief is not that strong.”

That decision was appealed to two higher courts before landing in the Supreme Court, which sent the case back to him last December payday loans for bad credit.

His latest decision says he is satisifed her wish to wear her niqab is based “on a religious belief that is both sincere and strong.” However, Weisman said he is concerned that her “overwhelming negative emotions in having her face exposed to public …will adversely affect her ability to tell the truth as she sees it, resulting in a wrongful acquittal of the accused and consequent loss of public confidence in the administration of justice.

“I am even more concerned, however, that her niqab will impair accurate assessment of her demeanour and credibility, resulting in wrongful convictions, loss of freedom for the accused, and loss of public respect for the justice system.”

The complainant, now 37, alleges she was sexually abused as a child by an uncle and another man over a five year period from 1982 to 1987.

Last week, lawyers revisited the veil issue. The Supreme Court said a judge’s decision on whether to allow the face-covering must be made on a case-by-case basis.

The court said judges should consider four questions before making a decision, including whether permitting a witness to wear a niqab would create a serious risk to trial fairness.

More from thestar.com:

Toronto judge in niqab case ‘fair in his treatment of everybody’

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The Internal Revenue Service will close all of its public operations on five days from now through August because of employee furloughs, acting commissioner Steve Miller told employees in a memo today.

The tax agency will be closed and almost all employees will be furloughed on May 24, June 14, July 5, July 22 and Aug. 30, Miller wrote. The closing will affect operations such as the IRS toll-free lines and taxpayer assistance centers.

As many as two more furlough days may be needed in August and September, Miller wrote.

The euro fell versus all but two of its 16 major peers amid concern that the region

A man is charged with second-degree murder after a woman was found dead early Saturday morning in a Toronto Community Housing apartment in Regent Park.

The woman, Natasha Perez, 28, was found in the kitchen of a 24th-floor unit having suffered “sharp-force injury,” said homicide Det. Sgt Gary Giroux, noting a household knife was found on the scene.

Police were called to 220 Oak St., near Gerrard St. and the Don Valley Parkway shortly before 6 a.m. after a man called 911 from the apartment, said Giroux. The man was taken into custody at the scene.

Brian Harte, 42, of Toronto, is scheduled to appear in court at Old City Hall on Sunday.

Giroux said it is not clear what the relationship was between the accused and the victim.

The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

The incident arose from a “dispute,” according to Staff Sgt. Kevin Guest.

Abena Oduro, who lives in the highrise, said she did not know the victim personally, but added she would often see a man in the building who other residents said was the victim’s boyfriend. She described him as “white with a goatee and tattoos.”

“He wouldn’t say a word whenever I was in the elevator with him.”

Oduro said dangerous activity is not uncommon in her building.

“Believe me, a lot of things are going on here,” she said. “A lot of the people in this building, 99 per cent of them do drugs or deal them.”

On Feb. 6, another resident of the building was shot in the chest when he opened the door of his second-floor apartment. He survived.

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On Twitter, negative views of vaccination are more contagious than positive sentiments — and too many pro messages may backfire.

That’s according to Penn State University researchers who tracked about 350,000 tweets from more than 100,000 people during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Their study was published Thursday in the journal EPJ Data Science.

The findings have implications that extend beyond the issue of vaccinations.

“People are getting information about how to deal with their health from a variety of sources and increasingly from social media,” said the study’s lead author Marcel Salath

The dawn of the age of aerial civilian drones is rich with possibilities for people far from the war zones where they made their devastating mark as a weapon of choice against terrorists.

The unmanned, generally small aircraft can steer water and pesticides to crops with precision, saving farmers money while reducing environmental risk. They can inspect distant bridges, pipelines and power lines and find hurricane victims stranded on rooftops.

Drones _ some as tiny as a hummingbird _ promise everyday benefits as broad as the sky is wide. But the drone industry and those eager to tap its potential are running headlong into fears the peeping-eye, go-anywhere technology will be misused.

Since January, drone-related legislation has been introduced in more than 30 states, largely in response to privacy concerns. Many of the bills would prevent police from using drones for broad public surveillance or to watch individuals without sufficient grounds to believe they were involved in crimes.

Stephen Ingley, executive director of the Airborne Law Enforcement Association, says resistance to the technology is frustrating. Drones “clearly have so much potential for saving lives, and it’s a darn shame we’re having to go through this right now,” he said.

But privacy advocates say now is the time to debate the proper use of civilian drones and set rules, before they become ubiquitous. Sentiment for curbing domestic drone use has brought the left and right together perhaps more than any other recent issue.

“The thought of government drones buzzing overhead and constantly monitoring the activities of law-abiding citizens runs contrary to the notion of what it means to live in a free society,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said at a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

With military budgets shrinking, drone makers have been counting on the civilian market to spur the industry’s growth. Some companies that make drones or supply support equipment and services say the uncertainty has caused them to put U.S. expansion plans on hold, and they are looking overseas for new markets.

“Our lack of success in educating the public about unmanned aircraft is coming back to bite us,” said Robert Fitzgerald, CEO of the BOSH Group of Newport News, Va., which provides support services to drone users.

“The U.S. has been at the lead of this technology a long time,” he said. “If our government holds back this technology, there’s the freedom to move elsewhere … and all of a sudden these things will be flying everywhere else and competing with us.”

Law enforcement is expected to be one of the bigger initial markets for civilian drones. Last month, the FBI used drones to maintain continuous surveillance of a bunker in Alabama where a 5-year-old boy was being held hostage.

In Virginia, the state General Assembly passed a bill that would place a two-year moratorium on the use of drones by state and local law enforcement. The measure is supported by groups as varied as the American Civil Liberties Union on the left and the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation on the right.

Gov. Bob McDonnell is proposing amendments that would retain the broad ban on spy drones but allow specific exemptions when lives are in danger, such as for search-and rescue operations. The legislature reconvenes on April 3 to consider the matter.

Seattle abandoned its drone program after community protests in February. The city’s police department had purchased two drones through a federal grant without consulting the city council.

In Congress, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-chairman of the House’s privacy caucus, has introduced a bill that prohibits the Federal Aviation Administration from issuing drone licenses unless the applicant provides a statement explaining who will operate the drone, where it will be flown, what kind of data will be collected, how the data will be used, whether the information will be sold to third parties and the period for which the information will be retained.

Privacy advocates acknowledge the many benign uses of drones. In Mesa County, Colo., for example, an annual landfill survey using manned aircraft cost about $10,000. The county recently performed the same survey using a drone for about $200.

Drones can help police departments find missing people, reconstruct traffic accidents and act as lookouts for SWAT teams. Real estate agents can have them film videos of properties and surrounding neighborhoods, offering clients a better-than-bird’s-eye view though one that neighbors may not wish to have shared.

“Any legislation that restricts the use of this kind of capability to serve the public is putting the public at risk,” said Steve Gitlin, vice president of AeroVironment, a leading maker of smaller drones.

Yet the virtues of drones can also make them dangerous, privacy advocates say. The low cost and ease of use may encourage police and others to conduct the kind of continuous or intrusive surveillance that might otherwise be impractical.

Drones can be equipped with high-powered cameras and listening devices, and infrared cameras that can see people in the dark.

“High-rise buildings, security fences or even the walls of a building are not barriers to increasingly common drone technology,” Amie Stepanovich, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Council’s surveillance project, told the Senate panel.

Civilian drone use is limited to government agencies and public universities that have received a few hundred permits from the FAA. A law passed by Congress last year requires the FAA to open U.S. skies to widespread drone flights by 2015, but the agency is behind schedule and it’s doubtful it will meet that deadline. Lawmakers and industry officials have complained for years about the FAA’s slow progress.

The FAA estimates that within five years of gaining broader access about 7,500 civilian drones will be in use.

Although the Supreme Court has not dealt directly with drones, it has OK’d aerial surveillance without warrants in drug cases in which officers in a plane or helicopter spotted marijuana plants growing on a suspect’s property.

But in a case involving the use of ground-based equipment, the court said police generally need a warrant before using a thermal imaging device to detect hot spots in a home that might indicate that marijuana plants are being grown there.

In some states economic concerns have trumped public unease. In Oklahoma, an anti-drone bill was shelved at the request of Republican Gov. Mary Fallin, who was concerned it might hinder growth of the state’s drone industry. The North Dakota state Senate killed a drone bill in part because it might impede the state’s chances of being selected by the Federal Aviation Administration as one of six national drone test sites, which could generate local jobs.

A bill that would have limited the ability of state and local governments to use drones died in the Washington legislature. The measure was opposed by the Boeing Co., which employs more than 80,000 workers in the state and which has a subsidiary, Insitu, that’s a leading military drone manufacturer.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., recently drew attention to the domestic use of drones when he staged a Senate filibuster, demanding to know whether the president has authority to use weaponized drones to kill Americans on American soil. The White House said no, if the person isn’t engaged in combat. Industry officials worry that the episode could temporarily set back civilian drone use.

“The opposition has become very loud,” said Gitlin of AeroVironment, “but we are confident that over time the benefits of these solutions are going to far outweigh the concerns, and they’ll become part of normal life in the future.”

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Associated Press writer Michael Felberbaum in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

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