[LINK] The war in Georgia is over

Bloomberg's article "Russia Ends Offensive Against 'Aggressor' Georgia" carries (mostly) happy news.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev halted five days of military action in Georgia, Russia's first foreign offensive since the Cold War, defusing a dispute that threatened to draw in the West.

"The aggressor has been punished," Medvedev said today. Russia has secured the safety of its peacekeepers and citizens in the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Medvedev said on state television.

Russia sent tanks, troops and warplanes into Georgia on Aug. 8 in what it said was a response to a Georgian offensive on South Ossetia, which won de facto independence from Georgia after a war in the early 1990s. Russian forces crossed into Georgia's heartland for the first time yesterday and took several towns and a military base, drawing criticism from President George W. Bush. More than 2,000 people were killed in the fighting, according to Russian estimates.

The military thrust threatened to draw the U.S. into confrontation with its former Cold War foe. Bush backs Georgia's bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Russia views as a security threat. The West sees Georgia as a key ally in the region, in part because it has an oil pipeline that carries Caspian Sea crude oil to Western markets and bypasses Russia.

``Russia has come out looking like a victor. If it had continued, the war wouldn't have been popular in Russia, not to speak of the negative reaction in the West,'' said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst from the Moscow Carnegie Center.

[. . .]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said just before Medvedev's announcement that Georgia must sign a legally binding non-aggression pact with South Ossetia, a self-proclaimed republic of 70,000 people, most with Russian passports. Georgia must also withdraw its forces from military bases it used to stage its attack on the disputed region, which is about half the size of Kosovo, he said.

Lavrov also said that U.S.-backed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili should step down. Russia refuses to negotiate with Saakashvili because it has "no trust" in him and because he's a "criminal,'' Lavrov said. "It will be best if he left."

[LINK] "A golden discovery of Judaism in the North"

In the history of Canada's Jews, the Yukon Territory doesn't particularly feature even though hundreds of Jews did take part in the Klondike gold rush. The most visible, or at least longest lasting, artifacts left behind by the brief Jewish heyday of Yukon are the Jewish cemeteries located in the communities of Dawson and Klondike. Work on maintaining and restoring the Klondike cemetery began at the end of the 1990s--this 1999 report on the restoration of the Klondike cemetery goes into some detail--and in The Globe and Mail this Saturday just past, Gary Mason took a look at the cemetery restoration program as it is right now.

It was a clear, hot June afternoon 10 years ago when Rick Karp and two friends crunched their way through a tangled, dense web of bushes and trees. But this is where their research indicated it was supposed to be, somewhere near what was now a horribly overgrown patch of land on the south slope of the hill that overlooked this historic Klondike town.

"And then one of us literally tripped over the old wooden arc that was once erected at its entrance," Mr. Karp recalled recently in his office in Whitehorse. "It was lying on the ground. You could barely see it. It was like this amazing archeological find."

What Mr. Karp and his friends had discovered were the remains of a long-forgotten, century-old Jewish cemetery, one that has a growing fascination among academics. Next week, a historian from Jerusalem's Hebrew University will arrive to take a first-hand look while carrying out research on the Jewish role in the gold rush.

"It's wonderful there is so much interest in this," said Mr. Karp, president of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce, and point man for the Jewish community in Yukon.

Mr. Karp had no idea the cemetery existed until alerted by a Jewish physician and amateur historian from Minnesota who had earlier vacationed in Dawson City. When Dr. Norman Kagan saw the overgrown condition of the area where the cemetery was supposed to be, he phoned Mr. Karp and suggested its cleanup and restoration would be a wonderful project to mark the 100th anniversary of the gold rush.

"How could we not?" Mr. Karp said.

[LINK] "Red-light gets the green light"

Troy McMullen's article in the Financial Times strikes me as believable, considering how gentrification of some districts risks pricing many people living in these poorer neghbourhoods out of their old turf.

The maze of narrow alleys and dingy, cobblestone streets that surrounds the red-light district in Hamburg, Germany, has been attracting revellers for years. Lined with dozens of sex shops, strip clubs and prostitutes preening behind windows, the gritty area known as the Reeperbahn is as popular as the Michelin-starred restaurants and upscale boutiques that encircle the Alster, the centuries-old lake at the centre of this affluent port city.

Despite its notorious reputation, however, the Reeperbahn is gaining some unexpected new residents. As property values have risen sharply in Hamburg during the past decade, smart residential buildings have increasingly crowded the area. The latest addition is the Bavaria, a 28,000-sq metre complex that includes dozens of luxury residences with panoramic views of the city, and a boutique hotel designed by architect David Chipperfield.

"There was a time when real estate developers would not have considered building in an area with this kind of reputation," says Nina Riedel, a managing partner at Engel & Voelkers, a Hamburg-based property firm. "Now we see more and more of them doing it and I really don't believe it will stop any time soon."

[. . .]

Gentrifying gritty urban areas is nothing new, of course. Times Square in New York City, and Las Vegas, Nevada, spent decades infested by high crime, drugs, and prostitution until ambitious redevelopment plans took hold. London's Notting Hill was a poor, troubled city district with racial tensions some 20 years ago. Today it's one of London's - and Europe's - priciest areas for real estate. And the city's King's Cross area is also shaking off its down-at-heel, seedy image as a large regeneration initiative progresses.

What is different today, property experts say, is that in spite of a push in many places for affordable housing, almost all of the new residential projects crowding these shady districts target high-end property shoppers. "In years past you had a much wider distribution of property prices when developers ventured into undesirable areas," says Michael Ball, a professor of real estate at Reading University in England, who advises the UK government. He says an unprecedented rise in land prices throughout the past decade has left developers struggling to find buildable plots in many expensive world capitals. "Property developers see financial opportunity in these areas so they invest with the idea of actually getting a better than expected return on their money."