[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams observes that astronomers have noticed shortfalls of hydrogen cyanide, a checmial that's a critical precursor to DNA, around red dwarf stars, with obvious implication for life on those stars' worlds.


• Far Outliers takes a look at language reivval movements among the Tokelauans of Hawai'i.


• A Fistful of Euros observes that the IMF would think it best for the new EU member-states in the east to immediately adopt the Euro.


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the self-declared country of Northern Cyprus.


• Edward Lucas argues that the tax-shelter microstates of western Europe aren't so different from the unrecognized republics of the former Soviet Union, in that both classes exist to provide loopholes and exceptions for elites.


• Mark MacKinnon argues that the Orange and Rose Revolutions didn't break from the political pasts of Georgia and Ukraine, but that it merely restarted these countries' political cycles.


• Otto Pohl reports on the Germans of Turkmenistan, a population spared the Stalinist wartime deportations of Germans to central Asia because they were already in Central Asia.


• Towleroad notes that a Polish conservative politician is outraged that the Poznan Zoo bought a young elephant male widely suspected of being gay.


• Window on Eurasia observes that Central Asia's Aral Sea is now becoming the world's youngest desert, the Aralkum, with calamitous environmental and ultimately political effects. Also, the blog wonders if Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov might be quietly maneuvering to create an independent Chechnya.