[LINK] Some Friday links

• BlogTO's Nav writes from the scene of one of the Tamil protests outside of Sri Lanka's Toronto consulate, and wonders who Israeli and Palestinian supporters can't be as civilized in their protests.


• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias finds herself in partial agreement with conservative columnist Barbara Kay on abortion, in that it's not comparable to genocide or slavery or ...


• Centauri Dreams reports on the news that astronomers have found a small rocky planet similar to the Earth, a body with 11 Earth masses that rotates in a torch orbit around its sun.


• Far Outliers considers the question of whether the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge can trace their origins to primal forces within Khmer culture or were directed from above on the typical totalitarian pattern, and comes out in favour of the latter, and also describes the humiliation inflicted on the Chinese military by Vietnam's in their brief border war of 1979.


• Inkless Wells reports that Defense Minister Peter Mackay might be an acceptable compromise candidate for the post of NATO secretary-general. Might.


• Joe. My. God and Towleroad report on the sad news that Oscar Wilde's, New York City's oldest GLBT bookstore, is closing down.


• Noel Maurer comes out in favour of a NAFTA-bloc protectionism aimed against China on the condition that Canadian and Mexican stimulus packages work as well as we'd all hope.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye blogs about the Tunit people, an Arctic culture that predated the Inuit.


• Slap Upside the Head covers the news of the Manitoba doctor who allegedly refused to take on two patients because they were lesbian.


• Torontoist's Stephen Michalowicz reports from the scene of one of Toronto's great snow depots, almost industrialized in their vastness.


• Windows on Eurasia blogs about the dubious efforts behind the efforts to create a "hard core" of closely integrated post-Soviet states around Russia and the ongoing emigration of Russians (Russophones?) from Central Asia.

[PHOTO] Not underneath my umbrella

Broken umbrella
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is a photo I took one summer night at an ungodly hour of an umbrella lying on Dupont Street east of Dufferin. The sight struck me as pathetic, hence the photo.

[LINK] "In Bolivia, Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism"

The New York Times's Simon Rivero has produced an interesting article about Bolivia's role in the upcoming generation of electric cars and the nationalism that may complicate the introduction of its lithium into international markets.

In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: almost half of the world’s lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found here in Bolivia — a country that may not be willing to surrender it so easily.

Japanese and European companies are busily trying to strike deals to tap the resource, but a nationalist sentiment about the lithium is building quickly in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who has already nationalized Bolivia’s oil and natural gas industries.

For now, the government talks of closely controlling the lithium and keeping foreigners at bay. Adding to the pressure, indigenous groups here in the remote salt desert where the mineral lies are pushing for a share in the eventual bounty.

“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”

The new Constitution that Mr. Morales managed to get handily passed by voters last month bolstered such claims. One provision could give Indians control over the natural resources in their territory, strengthening their ability to win concessions from the authorities and private companies, or even block mining projects.

None of this is dampening efforts by foreigners, including the Japanese conglomerates Mitsubishi and Sumitomo and a group led by a French industrialist, Vincent Bolloré. In recent months all three have sent representatives to La Paz, the capital, to meet with Mr. Morales’s government about gaining access to the lithium, a critical component for the batteries that power cars and other electronics.

“There are salt lakes in Chile and Argentina, and a promising lithium deposit in Tibet, but the prize is clearly in Bolivia,” Oji Baba, an executive in Mitsubishi’s Base Metals Unit, said in La Paz. “If we want to be a force in the next wave of automobiles and the batteries that power them, then we must be here.”

[LINK] "1 Million Nicaraguans Have Emigrated to Costa Rica"

Movements from poor countries to richer ones are quotidian, but the Latin American Herald Tribune points to one of the lesser-known migrations in the Western Hemisphere.

About 1 million Nicaraguans have emigrated to neighboring Costa Rica seeking a better life due to the dire poverty and lack of jobs in their own country, according to the International Organization for Migration.

With a population of 5.6 million inhabitants - more than half of them under 18 - with an annual growth of 2.7 percent, Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas, "is facing a tremendous challenge to overcome its poverty," IOM spokesman Jean-Philippe Chauzy said Friday in Geneva.

That challenge, he said, particularly affects women, since a quarter of Nicaraguan households are headed by women.

[. . . ]

In the last 30 years, Nicaraguan emigration has been spurred by natural disasters, political conflicts and economic hardship.

Costa Rica, meanwhile, has become a magnet for people without professional qualifications thanks to the abundant job market in sectors less attractive to the native population - above all in agriculture, construction and domestic service.

Though there are no exact figures, it is estimated that 250,000 Nicaraguans reside permanently in Costa Rica, while a similar number stay in the country only as long as their temporary jobs last.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] A tour of the Russosphere, 18 years later

Nearly eighteen years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of its legacies remain: economic, military, political. The cultural legacies are particularly interesting, especially the linguistic ones. Although Soviet legislation provided for the free use of languages across Soviet territory, as in the 1977 Soviet Constitution's Article 159 guaranteeing the right of the accused to trials in the local language, and the earlier 1936 constitution contained numerous provisions, in practice Russian was the language that was mostly widely used. Russians formed a majority of the Soviet population, and the Russian language was the vernacular common to the entire Soviet Union. Local languages were often pushed out of the public sphere by governmental and educational processes which More, most Soviet migrants were Russians, settled in the industrial areas of eastern Ukraine or in the cities and plains of central Asia or the prosperous industrial cities of the Baltic states installed large numbers of Russophones outside of Russia, their concentration in urban areas and in the administration accelerating the process of Russification. On the fringes of the Soviet Union, in the Baltic States, the South Caucasus, and southern central Asia, Russophone populations tended to not be very large and/or to be isolated from the native populations, diminishing Russification significantly--more than 30% of Estonia's population is Russophone, nearly 40% on independence, but a proletariat concentrated in the Tallinn suburbs and in the northeast never exerted that much cultural influence on ethnic Estonians. What's going on in the second-, third- and fourth-largest Soviet successor states, though??

The Ukrainian language is after Russian the most widely spoken language in the former Soviet Union. As many as 42 million people speak Ukrainian, at least according to Wikipedia, but only 31 million of these live in a Ukraine that's home to a bit over 46 million people. Ukrainian census data suggest that 31.9 million ethnic Ukrainians out of 37.5 million speak Ukrainian, with a bit over two-thirds of the Ukrainian population speaking Ukraine. The linguistic situation is more complicated than that, with many ethnic Ukrainians who mostly do not use Ukrainian in day-to-day life identifying Ukrainian as their mother tongue based on ethnic identity. The Ukrainian population may well be divided equally between speakers of Ukrainian and Russian, with Ukrainian predominating in western and central Ukraine and Russian predominated in southern and especially eastern Ukraine. There are signs of a shift towards Ukrainian, with Ukrainian becoming a trendy language a mostly Russophone Kyiv and education and government services being delivered in the Ukrainian language, but it's clear that Russian is in Ukraine to stay.

The same is doubly true of Kazakhstan, as Joanna Lillis at Eurasianet describes. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russians and Russophones actually constituted the majority population of Kazakhstan. Though this majority has been whittled away thanks to massive Russophone (and German) emigration and a substantially higher Kazakh birthrate, the linguistic legacies of this Russian domination remain.

The problem is exacerbated by the contentious language issue in Kazakhstan: a recent poll showed that only about a third of inhabitants speak fluent Kazakh, while 16.3 percent do not speak the titular language at all. The poll was conducted by the Alternativa Center for Topical Research with the Open Society regional research institute (the organization is not connected to the New York-based Open Society Institute, under whose auspices EurasiaNet operates). Out of the poll’s 1,200 respondents, 36 percent characterized their Kazakh-language skills as fluent, while an additional 20 percent claimed a sufficient knowledge of the language. In stark contrast, 90.4 percent of respondents qualified their Russian language skills as either fluent or sufficient, fuelling arguments by ethnic Kazakh nationalists that not enough is being done to promote the spread of the titular language. The polling data was released in November.

This has proved problematic in the wake of the Soviet-era policy of Russification which took strong root in Kazakhstan, where ethnic Kazakhs were in a minority at independence in 1991. "[Russification] had a catastrophic effect on the influence of Kazakh language and culture," Nazarbayev told the APK, which conducts most of its business in Russian. His call for it to be at the center of efforts to promote Kazakh language learning struck some commentators as illogical. "Without having a scientific and linguistic basis, without even speaking Kazakh, how is the Assembly going to develop the state language [Kazakh]?" the Taszhargan weekly asked rhetorically.

Finally, the Belarusian language, like Ukrainian an East Slavic language, may be on the verge of language death. Belarusian "is declared as a "language spoken at home" by about 3,686,000 people (36.7% of the population) as of 1999. By less strict criteria, about 6,984,000 (85.6%) of Belarusians declare it their "mother tongue"." The Russian language is by all accounts firmly implanted in Belarus, as it is the predominant language of Belarusian cities, Russians form the country's largest ethnic minority, and the government under Lukashenko has done very little to promote the use of Belarusian and has instead allowed it to be exposed directly to a much stronger Russian language. Belarus is likely to survive as a nation-state, but it's also likely to be a society like (say) Ireland where the native language has been firmly minoritized.