[PHOTO] St. Michael Archangel, 212 Delaware Avenue

This is a sign of St. Michael Archangel, a church of the Serbian Orthodox denomination located at 212 Delaware Avenue just north of Bloor Street West.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bag News Notes examines the use of a stock photo of some Dutch immigrant youths to illustrate a variety of different alarming articles.


• Crasstalk's Maxichamp introduces readers to the Port Chicago disaster during the Second World War, which incidentally led to a notable civil rights case.


• Daniel Drezner didn't find many surprises with the terms of the Cypriot bailout and notes that Russian disinterest in bailing Cyprus out underlines the extent to which it's a status quo, non-revisionist power.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh speculates that the current trend of emigration from Spain may put the Spanish health and pension systems at risk, especially inasmuch as Spain needs skilled labour to boost its productivity.


• A Geocurrents comparison of Bolivia with Ecuador, two Andean republics with large indigenous populations and radical governments, underlines the differences (Ecuador's government draws its support from the coastal Hispanophone majority and is somewhat hostile to the indigenous minority of the interior).


• Language Hat links to a site describing the small languages of Russia.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen seems much more worried about the outcomes of the Cypriot bailout than Drezner.


• Whatever's John Scalzi notes the unsustainability of Ohio's current constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, legally and in terms of popular opinion, and suggests it indicates current patterns of change.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that the Moldovan enclave of Gagauzia, an autonomous Turkic-populated district, wants a voice in Moldovan foreign policy.


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham notes the proportion of edits to geotagged English-language Wikipedia articles coming from users in the relevant countries. There are significant variations, with African articles being largely maintained by non-national users.

[LINK] "Fishing's decline looms; will fish eaters notice?"

Jay Lindsay's Associated Press article about the effect of the ongoing collapse of New England's offshore fisheries is somewhat sad. Apparently most fish-eaters won't notice, since the fish they eat is imported.

In May, New England's fishermen will again see a cut to the number of fish they can catch, this time so deeply that the historic industry's existence is threatened from Rhode Island to Maine. But as hard as the cuts are likely to hit fishing communities, local seafood eaters may not notice at all. In the region's markets, grocery stores and restaurants, imported fish dominate, and the cuts make that less likely to change.

The cuts will shrink the catch limit 77 percent for cod in the Gulf of Maine and 61 percent for cod in Georges Bank, off southeastern Massachusetts. That's the worst of a series of reductions to the catch of bottom-dwelling groundfish, such as haddock and flounder, that many fear could be fatal to the industry.

[. . .]

For fish consumers, a sharp drop in the local groundfish catch may jar a select group of diners who seek fish caught that day. But the cut's effects may not ripple further than that.

Just 9 percent of the seafood eaten in the United States is domestically caught, the federal government estimates. In New England, locally caught cod was just a slightly larger fraction of all cod eaten, 12 percent, according to fisheries economist Jenny Sun of the Portland, Maine-based Gulf of Maine Research Institute. And she estimates that could drop to 4 percent after the coming cuts.

Much of the imported cod is caught and frozen in Norway and cut in China, and there's plenty of it, Sun said. If the local cod catch dips to near nothing, fish processors "could easily fill in with imports," Sun said.

In fact, the biggest issue for one Maine seafood processing executive has been the perception that the New England industry's troubles mean he won't have fish.

[LINK] "Talking in tongues: New Caledonia promotes Kanak languages"

Nic Maclellan's Islands Business article takes an extended look at the situation facing the languages of the Kanaks of New Caledonia, the minority indigenous population of the autonomous French-ruled Melanesian polity of New Caledonia. Many of the smaller languages are threatened by shift, whether to more widely spoken Melanesian languages or to French.

The Pacific Ocean is home to almost 20 percent of the world’s languages, especially with the great diversity of indigenous languages across Melanesia. In New Caledonia, there are twenty-eight Kanak languages, eleven dialects and one creole (Tayo), with an estimated 70,000 speakers from a total population of 254,000. For the director of the Academy of Kanak Languages, Weniko Ihage, this diversity is an asset for society. “There’s a panoply of 28 Kanak languages, each of them very different from the other,” Ihage told Islands Business at his office in Noumea.

“Most Kanak languages exist only in spoken form, so the mission of the ALK is to establish rules of usage and to help promote and develop all Kanak languages and dialects.”

While there are thousands of people fluent in four or five of the major Kanak languages, other smaller languages and dialects are endangered.

Colonisation has disrupted the transmission of language between generations and today many parents value fluency in French for their children, as a pre-requisite for advancement, jobs and higher education.

“The number of speakers varies from one island to another, from one area to another,” Ihage says. “There are four main languages: Drehu spoken on Lifou; Nengone spoken on Mare; Paicî around the town of Poindimie; and Ajië, which is spoken in the Houailou region.

“These four languages have the largest number of speakers, they’re also the languages taught in school, which senior students can study at the level of the baccalaureate, just as they might study other regional languages in France like Breton or Corsican.” The usage of Kanak languages is tied to official French attitudes to cultural policy. As France joined the European Union in 1992, Article 2 of the French Constitution was changed to state for the first time that “the language of the Republic is French.”

France puts significant resources into promoting the French language through its education system, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) and institutions like the Alliance Française.

For colonised people within the French empire, however, the use of their own language is tied to broader questions of identity, culture and sovereignty.

[URBAN NOTE] "Don Bosco parents discuss if they want Ford to continue coaching football"

The report, carried by Metro Toronto and composed by the Torstar News Service, that Toronto mayor Rob Ford might be removed from his position as coach of Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School's Don Bosco Eagles football team, could be personally quite devastating to the mayor. (It's been noted in the past that he spends almost as much time as football coach as he does being mayor, see here and here.)

It's also unsurprising: both the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun have carried reports that parents and staff at Don Bosco are upset with Ford's portrayal of students at the school as being one football team away from becoming juvenile delinquents. The media spotlight put on the school, likewise, is apparently unappreciated by many.

He has a history of sometimes characterizing the school in an unflattering light and his actions often put students and staff under a harsh glare.

So parents from Don Bosco Catholic Secondary — the Etobicoke school some parents says is too-often described as “Rob Ford’s” — met Tuesday night to discuss whether the costs outweigh the benefits of having the high-profile mayor as their football coach.

[. . .]

The TCDSB launched an investigation earlier this month into statements Ford made about the school during an interview with Sun News — including that some students would have “no reason to go to school” if not for football.

“You can’t tell them to get an education. But I use the football as a carrot,” he said.

Following the broadcast, a “significant” number of teachers signed an anonymous letter sent to senior board officials — saying Ford’s comments were “disgusting” and depicted the school in a “demeaning way that was filled with untruths” — prompting the board’s investigation.

[. . .]

While [Teresa Bridport, vice-chair of the school’s parent council] acknowledged that may be cause for concern at Tuesday’s meeting, the problems with Ford stem back to the previous football season, she said.

“Just the chaos it created in our school to have the mayor as our coach, how disruptive it was, for the administration, staff, for the teachers, for the students, just because he’s such a high profile person now — it certainly puts our school under a microscope.”