[PHOTO] A rainy evening waiting for the bus at at St. George

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO comes up with a shortlist of some of the most noteworthy Giorgio Mammoliti controversies.


• Centauri Dreams has a couple of posts (1, 2) talking about how nice it would be to have space probes orbiting the ice giants of Uranus and Neptune.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an analysis suggesting that Russia is going to annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia to punish Georgia.


• Language Log tackles a myth that vocal fry is caused by stress.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the superexploitation associated with prison labour.


• Steve Munro notes the latest delays with reopening Queens Quay to streetcars.


• The Search has a fascinating interview regarding what it takes to archive electronic art, including video and programs.


• Torontoist shares photos of the Monday night storm.


• Towleroad notes the story of two Texas gay fathers who not only weren't allowed to cross-adopt the other's biological son (each father having one child, both children product of the same egg donor), but who weren't registered as the fathers of their own biological child.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that up to a quarter-million people were displaced in Brazil to make way for the World Cup.


• Window on Eurasia notes the weakness of Russian liberalism.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto cop committed to stand trial in TTC shooting"

I decided to link to Michele Mandel's Toronto Sun article announcing that the police officer has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Sammy Yatim because of the nature of the tabloid. Video of police shootings can make even right-wing tabloids skeptical of the police.

At Old City Hall comes the only decision that could satisfy this city.

Following a preliminary hearing, a judge has committed Const. James Forcillo to stand trial for second-degree murder in the troubling shooting of teen Sammy Yatim last July on an empty Dundas St. streetcar.

The flurry of bullets that struck the knife-wielding 18-year-old still echo to this day.

Bang after bang after bang after bang after bang after bang after bang after bang after bang. Nine shots fired at a skinny kid standing at the streetcar doors with a puny blade that glinted in the headlights of a cavalry of police cars that had arrived on the scene.

His death didn’t make sense. Not then, and not a year later. But our myriad of questions stand a better chance of being answered now with a trial slated to go ahead sometime in 2015.

The officer’s prelim was originally scheduled to continue until Friday, but Justice Richard LeDressay — an Oakville-area judge purposely brought in from outside Toronto to ensure there was no question of bias — had obviously heard enough and ruled Tuesday that there is enough evidence to send Forcillo to trial.

What that evidence is remains sealed under a publication ban. And yet we have seen so much of it already thanks to the horrifying citizen cellphone videos that captured the shooting in the early hours of last July 27.

"Enhanced video - Shooting of Sammy Yatim by Toronto Police Const. James Forcillo on July 27, 2013" (Watch on YouTube)

Torontoist has coverage if you'd prefer alternate sources.

The analogies to the Robert Dziekański Taser incident seven years ago in Vancouver, where a fatal tasering was only revealed thanks to a bystander's video, are obvious.

[LINK] "An Ocean On Pluto’s Moon? Hopeful Scientists Will Keep An Eye Out For Cracks"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell writes about the possibility that Charon, the smaller of the two worlds in the Pluto-Charon dwarf planet, might have a subsurface ocean.

It seems an unlikely proposition given that Pluto is so far from the Sun — about 29 times further away than the Earth is. Its surface temperature is -380 degrees Farhenheit (-229 degrees Celsius), which — to say the least — would not be a good environment for liquid water on the surface.

But it could happen with enough tidal heating. To back up, both Europa and Enceladus are small moons fighting gravity from their much larger gas giant planets, not to mention a swarm of other moons. This “tug-of-war” not only makes their orbits eccentric, but creates tides that change the interior and the surface, causing the cracks. Perhaps this might have kept subsurface oceans alive on these moons.

Since Charon once had an eccentric orbit, perhaps it also had tidal heating. Scientists think that the moon was created after a large object smacked into Pluto and created a chain of debris (similar to the leading theory for how our Moon was formed). The proportionally huge Charon — it’s one-eighth Pluto’s mass – would have been close to its parent planet, causing gravity to tug on both objects and creating friction inside their interiors.

“This friction would have also caused the tides to slightly lag behind their orbital positions,” NASA stated. “The lag would act like a brake on Pluto, causing its rotation to slow while transferring that rotational energy to Charon, making it speed up and move farther away from Pluto.”

[LINK] "Will the Visegrad Four Survive Ukraine?"

Transition Online's Martin Ehl writes about the possibility that the Visegrád Group--a post-Communist association of the four central European countries of Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary--might not survive differences over Ukraine.

On the one side, there is Poland, which has asked the United States to station thousands of troops on its soil. On the other, there is Hungary, which has signed a very suspicious deal with Russia for a loan to build two new nuclear reactors that will tie Budapest to Moscow for the next three decades. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are somewhere in between, but both strongly reject an additional NATO (read U.S.) military presence in their countries.

Polish diplomats present at recent conferences such as Globsec, where the prime ministers of the four countries openly disagreed, or at the Wroclaw Global Forum, have started to ask whether the country should invest so much energy into regional cooperation that does not reflect their basic national interests.

Milan Nic, director of the Central European Policy Institute in Bratislava, said that considering the Czech and Slovak prime ministers’ rejection of an American military presence, Poles “have to wonder about our attitudes and if Poland would be better off giving more attention to cooperation with Romania, the Baltic countries, and some Scandinavian ones, which see the threat from the east likewise.”

The Polish propensity to push their partners into a corner and entertain even the worst-case scenarios is viewed in Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest as hysteria, according to Nic. “The level of our strategic dialogue and understanding was not prepared for such a grave crisis as the Ukrainian one,” Nic said.

[. . .]

Mateusz Gniazdowski, director of the Central European department at the Polish governmental think tank, the Center for Eastern Studies has noted, “Above all, in Poland the opinion prevails quite often that countries with a common heritage and who are neighbors on a map have common interests.” While EU members obviously have varied histories, one would have thought their current priorities in regard to Russia would align more frequently than they do.