[LINKS] Some Friday links

• Richard at 1948 reflects on the Turkish military's rather unhelpful and confrontational stance towards Turkey's media.


• Phil Hunt at Cabalamat has some rather harsh towards towards anti-poor and pro-torture Republicans.


• Ibn Kafka at 'Aqoul wonders if the American intelligence community hung Bush out to dry with their recent announcement on the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program.


• Centauri Dreams considers the likely effect of travel times in space on human polities. If Rome could exert authority over territories at most one year's travel time from its empire's core, what will this mean for interstellar societies even if relativistic speeds are possible?


• Crooked Timber delves into the question of whether or not the Israeli lobby in the Untied States is more exuberantly and ultranationalistically Israeli than the Israelis themselves.


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass observes how recent fluctuations in the value of the United States dollar in the United Arab Emirates have badly hurt South Asian migrant workers there.


• Will Baird notes that, in a recent experiment, very low levels of hydrogen sulfide added to the air breathed by worms extended their lifespans by 7%. Might this lead eventually to human applications?


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros constructs a very worrying model of the Russian economy's evolution. Briefly put, Russia's labour force that's doomed to shrink significantly and is badly distributed relative to economic resources besides. Oil exports are financing strong economic growth, and this growth is reflected in wages, but labour shortages and the Dutch disease are contributing to slow growth in non-oil sectors of the Russian economy. The net result of this is that Russia's oil income is eventually going to finance the expanding consumption of goods by Russia's population via imports, with serious consequences for Russia's long-term growth.


• feorag at the Pagan Prattle blogs about how a Conservative MP in the United Kingdom is trying to get "Christianophobia" recognized as a prejudice.


• Strange Maps exposes to the Anglophone world and debunks a strange E-mail chain letter suggesting that the Untied States was planning to annex Brazil's Amazonian rain forest.

[LINK] "Immigration helping keep P.E.I. population stable"

The Guardian of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island recently featured Ron Ryder's article "Immigration helping keep P.E.I. population stable", the most significant portions of which are excerpted below.

Growth in immigration and a net gain of migrating Canadians are keeping P.E.I. from losing population according to numbers from Statistics Canada Tuesday.

The federal numbers agency reported P.E.I. had a total population of 135,851 in 2006, compared to 135,294 Islanders in 2001. The gain represents an increase of less than half a percentage point.

The city of Charlottetown saw its population slip slightly over the same period, from 32,245 to 32,174.

What growth there was could be attributed to newcomers. Statscan found that there were 505 Islanders who had lived in a different country the previous year and 2,745 who had been living in a different province or territory.

America was the greatest source of international immigrants to P.E.I. Ontario was the province that sent the most internal migrants — 2,680 — to the Island from 2001 to 2005. Some 2,125 Islanders went to Ontario over the same period.

Marc Melanson, regional advisor for Statistics Canada, said P.E.I. was one of very few provinces to attract more people from other provinces than it lost.

"All of the other Atlantic Provinces have a net loss to other provinces, Quebec has a net loss, Ontario has a net loss. Where Ontario and Quebec make up ground is in the fact that they are major destinations for immigrants," he said.

[. . .]

Development Minister Richard Brown said P.E.I. wants to get serious about bringing in a greater number of immigrants. He said the Island needs new blood to revitalize with an aging population--as it stands the province will have more people leaving the workforce than entering it by 2010 or 2011. The situation becomes more acute in about 20 years, when Statistics Canada predicts the Island will have more people dying every year than are born.

"This is something we are dealing with now. We have had some of our people going around to different Canadian embassies. We had people in China, Korea and Hong Kong. We want to make sure that when someone comes in to the embassy to talk about immigrating to Canada that P.E.I. gets mentioned.

"It’s a critical issue for P.E.I., something we want to deal with . . . We have to have the people here to fill jobs if we want companies here. We need the companies to pay taxes, to build the economy."

Brown said the province is working with the Association for Newcomers to put plans in place that will ease the arrival of new Islanders. He said established immigrant communities such as those from the Philippines, the Netherlands or Lebanon are a great resource in attracting and assisting newcomers. He said the predominantly white and Christian province is showing no hesitation about bringing in people from different backgrounds.

As one might expect, yahoos in the comments wonder why Prince Edward Island is diluting its unique culture with immigrants from non-white nations, some wondering why Island women don't reproduce more and others calling for a return to the family farm. On the whole, though, the commenters seem relatively and refreshingly realistic about the Island's population challenges.

[LINK] Tomorrow is "Pretend to be a time traveller day!"

Thanks to thebitterguy for alerting us to this vital announcement.

(Being a refugee from a dystopian future appeals most to me. You?)