[LINK] Some Thursday news links

[rfmcdonald]

• Reuters reports on the latest round of Cypriot reunification talks. The decision of the leaders of both sides to initiate the talks is hoepful, but is this likely to end in something, I ask my readers with more knowledge in this drawn-out affair?


• Hugo Chavez and King Juan Carlos of Spain appear to have made up, some months after last November's spat when, Chavez, after Chavez accused former Spansih prime minister Aznar of being a fascist, the King told Chavez to shut up.


• The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon writes about the irony that the bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes and wreck their livelihoods are now being used against Israelis.


• More and more frequently of late news comes out of massive job cuts and layoffs in the Canadian (actually, Ontarian) auto industry. This will do wonders for the cities surrounding Toronto--Oshawa comes particularly to mind.


• Turkey's ruling and quite popular AKP party has been saved from being banned, which is quite good for Turkish democracy and still allows some faint hope of Turkey getting into the European Union along with Latveria. The Wall Street Journal has a quite interesting article on the ongoing political tensions in Turkey, making a convincing argument that Turkish secularists' devotion to Ataturk is almost as much of a religion as Islam.


• The blog IBEX Salad suggests that the economic health of a nation can be guaged by the cost of being smuggled into that coutnry. (The price of illegal migrants to Spain has dropped by half.)


• Finally, the extensive tract of forested land in British Columbia bought by German noble His Royal Highness Duke Carl Herzog von Wurttemberg after the Soviet invasino of Czechoslovakia, has been bought up by an environmental group that wants to operate it as a nature reserve.