rfmcdonald | [NEWS] Some Thursday links (Reply)

I haven't posted enough links to articles from Inter Press Service, have I?

Kalinga Seneviratne in "Population Decline - Enter the Matchmaker" takes a look at how, instead of doing anything to alleviate conditions of gender inequality and economic hardship that help discourage family formation, the Singaporean government is trying to promote matchmakers as a useful new tool for boosting the birth rate.

Zoltán Dujisin's "How the Hawks Won" makes a direct connection between Saakaashvili's recently increasing authoritarianism at home and his recent appalling poor performance in the recent war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If those two territories-soon-to-be-countries distrusted Georgina promises before ...

Mario Osava in "The Complications of Coming into Sudden (Oil) Wealth" examines how Brazilians and their government are thinking about regulating the revenues set to be produced by Brazil's massive new offshore oil. Demagoguery is a well-justified fear.

Zoltán Dujisin in "Russian Language Toned Down: takes a look at recent trend in language policy and use in Ukraine, where education and other government facilities has been steadily Ukrainianized even as most of the mass media and business remain Russophone, and knowledge and use of the Ukrainian language are growing particularly among the young and in southern Ukraien. (After the fall of the Soviet Union Russophones and Ukrainopphones were roughly equally as numerous.)

Vesna Peric Zimonjic writes ("Uneasy Over the Kosovo Parallel With Georgia") about how public opinion in Serbia, while broadly supportive of Russia, are concerned about the certain associations that the precedent of recognizing the independence of a territory liberated by foreign intervention from ethnic cleansing and a threatened genocide have with their own recent history. Kosovars, for their part, deny the relevance of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to their situation.

Lowana Veal's "Filling Up on Hydrogen" takes a look at how, thanks in no small measure to cheap and abundant geothermal energy, hydrogen-fuelled cars and boats are starting to appeal in some number.