[PHOTO] Red hibiscus, Allan Gardens

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Dragon's Gase shares a paper examining the ultraviolet output of the two Sun-like stars at Alpha Centauri.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that shale formations might be good places to store nuclear waste.


• Far Outliers looks at the scale of North Korea's economic collapse in the 1990s.


• The Frailest Thing considers the ethics of technological artifacts.


• Language Hat considers the etymology and the pronunciation of "Odradek", used as a last name in a Franz Kafka story.


• Languages of the World debunks an argument that the Basque language is related to the West African language of Dogon.


• Language Log celebrates the appearance of a split infinitive in the pages of the Economist.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the 150th anniversary, on Saturday the 29th, of the massacre of Native Americans in Colorado at Sand Creek.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that two years of sanctions could lead to a fiscal crisis in Russia.


• Steve Munro is unimpressed by the integration of the Presto regional transit card on the Spadina streetcar.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell notes an interesting book by two Jesuits about space science and extraterrestrial life.


• The Russian Demographics Blog tracks trends in life expectancy in Russia and other countries.


• Registan considers what has happened in the past year in Ukraine.


• Torontoist notes the Art Shoppe, a high-end furniture retailer that recently moved from Yonge and Eglinton.


• Towleroad notes an attack on a Russian lawyer defending a gay rights activist and observes an early same-sex marriage attempt in early 1970s Texas.


• Transit Toronto notes the steady expansion of WiFi in the Toronto subway system.


• The Volokh Conspiracy suggests, based on eyewitness testimony, that the Michael Brown shooting might have been defensible.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia could lose Belarus and looks at the etymology of the ethnonym "Tatar".

[ISL] "Sable Island horses should be removed, says biologist"

CBC reported these weekend just past on a proposal that the herd of horses on Sable Island, almost literally a giant sand bank several hundred kilometres southeast of Nova Scotia, be removed to the mainland. Biologist Ian Jones makes a convincing two-pronged argument, that the non-native horses not only are damaging a fragile environment but that they themselves are suffering in an environment that cannot support them in health.

According to a scientific report ordered by Parks Canada, excessive inbreeding, a tiny population and extreme weather linked to global warming all pose risks of extinction to the fabled horses. Parks Canada is the newly appointed custodian of the historic sand crescent that lies about 175 kilometres off the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia.

The herd, first introduced to the island in the 1760s and left to fend for itself since 1960, now numbers more than 500 animals but the population could drop precipitously after just one harsh winter, with food hard to access under heavy snow or ice, according to the study. The ponies also may suffer from low genetic diversity, making them less resilient to disease and prone to reproductive failure.

But Jones argues the horses "hurt" the island and "cause destruction."

"Remote island ecosystems are the most endangered ecosystems," he said. "Sable Island is such a place and the horses are modifying the island. They need to be removed."

Jones adds that the island's environment is hurting the horses.

"I love horses ... and I certainly wish the very best for those horses," he said. "Every bite they take, they get a mouthful of sand and grass. Their teeth are wearing away. They endure a lot of suffering because of the climate.

"If you or anyone kept horses in these conditions on your farm, you would be charged and convicted with cruelty to animals."

[LINK] "Francophonie secretary-general [Michaëlle Jean] wins wide applause"

The Ottawa Citizen's Robert Sibley notes the selection of former Canadian governor-general Michaëlle Jean as new head of la Francophonie, hinting at the Canadian domestic politics behind this.

In a well-timed dovetailing of political promotion, personal ambition, and international aid, former governor-general Michaëlle Jean has been named the new head of la Francophonie.

The appointment was announced Sunday at the conclusion of the 15th Francophonie Summit in Dakar, Senegal, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper present to praise the decision even as he promoted his African out-reach agenda of maternal and child health. Jean, who actively campaigned for the post of secretary general — with the backing of the Canadian government — fended off challenges from four other candidates. The 57-year-old replaces Abdou Diouf, who held the post for 10 years.

[. . .]

Jean, a former Radio-Canada reporter whose family emigrated to Canada from Haiti in the 1960s, was appointed governor-general in 2005 by then-prime minister Paul Martin, serving until 2010. Since then she’s been appointed to the chancellorship of the University of Ottawa and served as a UNESCO special envoy in Haiti.

During her tenure as governor general, Jean’s relationship with the Conservative government was sometimes controversial. In 2008, when the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois threatened to bring the down Conservatives’ minority government six weeks after an election and seek to form their own government, Jean met with Harper and, after nearly three hours of deliberation, accepted his advice to prorogue parliament until late January 2009.

Her decision blocked the opposition’s non-confidence vote and, as well, allowed her to avoid her making a politically difficult choice between asking the opposition coalition to form a government or call another federal election so soon after the previous one.

Five years later, Jean had Harper’s active support in her campaign for the Francophonie post. Late last week, the prime minister’s office acknowledged the government was covering about $55,000 in Jean’s travel costs as she campaigned with visits to several countries.

[LINK] Bloomberg on the import of $40 dollar a barrel oil

The Bloomberg article "Oil Shock Streaks Across Globe From Moscow to Tehran to Caracas. Ready for $40?", by Gregory Viscusi, Tara Patel and Simon Kennedy, examines the geopolitical import of falling oil prices. From their account, a financially overstretched Venezuela seems particularly vulnerable, although Russia and Iran will have their own issues.

Oil’s decline is proving to be the worst since the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and threatening to have the same global impact of falling prices three decades ago that led to the Mexican debt crisis and the end of the Soviet Union.

Russia, the world’s largest producer, can no longer rely on the same oil revenues to rescue an economy suffering from European and U.S. sanctions. Iran, also reeling from similar sanctions, will need to reduce subsidies that have partly insulated its growing population. Nigeria, fighting an Islamic insurgency, and Venezuela, crippled by failing political and economic policies, also rank among the biggest losers from the decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries last week to let the force of the market determine what some experts say will be the first free-fall in decades.

“This is a big shock in Caracas, it’s a shock in Tehran, it’s a shock in Abuja,” Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of Englewood, Colorado-based consultant IHS Inc. and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, told Bloomberg Radio. “There’s a change in psychology. There’s going to be a higher degree of uncertainty.”

A world already unsettled by Russian-inspired insurrection in Ukraine to the onslaught of Islamic State in the Middle East is about be roiled further as crude prices plunge. Global energy markets have been upended by an unprecedented North American oil boom brought on by hydraulic fracturing, the process of blasting shale rocks to release oil and gas.

Few expected the extent or speed of the U.S. oil resurgence. As wildcatters unlocked new energy supplies, some oil exporters abroad failed to invest in diversifying their economies. Coddled by years of $100 crude, governments instead spent that windfall subsidizing everything from 5 cents-per-gallon gasoline to cheap housing that kept a growing population of underemployed citizens content.

[URBAN NOTE] "Historicist: An Authentic Viking Hoax"

Torontoist's Kevin Plummer looks at the strange history of the Beardmore Relics, an alleged cache of Viking artifacts found in the middle of Ontario. That the cache seems to have been a hoax seems established. The interesting question is how it came about.

Tucked in the European galleries on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum, there is a display of Viking weapons containing the head of a battle axe, and a sword, broken in two. There’s nothing particularly attention-grabbing about the items compared to some of the grander specimens nearby. And the accompanying captions offer only the barest of facts—their age, 900–1025 and 775–900 respectively, and their Norwegian origin. They look like any number of similar Norse antiquities you’d see in any other museum around the world.

But this particular axe head and sword—as well as a third artifact, a rattle—once occupied a place of pride in the ROM. Unearthed in northern Ontario, near Beardmore, the relics represented perhaps the province’s greatest historical discovery, offering tantalizing proof that at least one Viking, perhaps many more, had travelled into the heart of the continent 400 years before Columbus.

For nearly 20 years, the Beardmore Relics, were displayed prominently, in a glass case in a main gallery, where no visitor could miss them. Then, in late 1956, under a cloud of controversy, suddenly they were gone, removed to storage and rarely spoken of for decades. Were the ROM’s greatest treasures a deliberate hoax?

Everyone could agree the relics were authentic Norse artifacts. But had they really been discovered in Ontario? Or had they been planted? Could Dr. Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM’s founding curator and a man of sterling scholarly reputation, have been duped? Or had he, with a wink and a nod, embraced the dubious relics as a sure-fire way to gin attendance figures?

[URBAN NOTE] "A brief history of queer music in Toronto"

blogTO's Benjamin Boles has a brief overview of the history of GLBT-themed popular music and musicians in Toronto. Rough Trade, it turns out, might have been early, but it was not the first.

Toronto's longstanding reputation as an uptight puritan town often overshadows our vibrant underground queer history. After all, how else would our massive Pride celebrations easily dwarf San Francisco's, if there weren't such a strong local queer community? Not surprisingly, evidence of that defiantly homo undercurrent has long run through Toronto's music scene, even if it wasn't always immediately recognized.

Toronto's earliest well known out musician was Jackie Shane, a talented R&B singer who'd relocated from Nashville to become one of the biggest names on the raucous 1960s Yonge Street strip. Shane attracted a lot of attention for his androgynous style, often wearing full makeup, sequins, and gloriously big hair. While this kind of flamboyance wasn't generally accepted, being an exceptionally charismatic entertainer seemed to allow Shane to get away with it.

He even had a local radio hit in 1963, when his version of "Any Other Way" reached number two on the CHUM chart. While most radio listeners likely didn't catch the way he twisted the meaning of the line "tell that I'm happy, tell her that I'm gay," anyone who caught him playing live would have quickly picked up on the subtext. Shane disappeared before his career could really take off, but in more recent years his recordings have been rediscovered by a new generation of soul music fans.

It wasn't long after Jackie Shane first pushed up against Toronto's homophobia that Carole Pope and Kevan Staples began testing the sexual boundaries even more. Performing under various names starting in 1968, in 1975 they finally settled on their most well known moniker: Rough Trade. If their name wasn't enough of a hint, Pope's habit of performing in bondage gear made their queerness more explicit, not to mention the lascivious lyrical content.

[LINK] "TV Stars From Italy Flock to Low-Cost Albania Amid Recession"

Bloomberg's Marco Bertacche and Daniele Lepido report on an Albania-based Italian-language television channel, Agon Channel Italia, that is taking advantage of lower costs and a certain degree of cultural familiarity.

More than 20 years after Albanian refugees began arriving on rickety boats in southern Italy, fading Italian television stars are starting a counter-trend, flocking to Albania as the advertising market at home dries up.

[. . .]

Agon, which will beam programming into Italy, is owned by entrepreneur Francesco Becchetti, who said he invested 40 million euros ($50 million) in studios in Tirana, Albania’s capital, where he employs about 500 people.

“If you want to do TV nowadays, the project needs to be viable,” Becchetti said at a press conference in Milan last week. “Even if you pay your Albanian labor force twice the average salary, that still allows you to attract important stars and secure an Italian TV audience.”

Italian broadcasters are cutting costs as the country’s ad market has failed to recover from a 15-year low and its recession enters a fourth year. Mediaset SpA (MS), Italy’s largest private broadcaster, is slashing 450 million euros in costs, while state broadcaster RAI SpA faces budget cuts as part of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s drive to rein in spending and tame Italy’s 2.13 trillion-euro debt.

Agon is one of 400 Italian companies operating in Albania, where more than half of the 3 million population speak at least some Italian due to the countries’ proximity and the ease of picking up Italian TV signals, according to the Italian embassy. Cement maker Italcementi SpA (IT), one of the first foreign investors in Albania after the old regime fell, has a local unit that’s a top 10 company. Intesa Sanpaolo SpA’s Bank Albania, formed through acquisitions, is the country’s third-largest lender.

Almost 500,000 Albanians live in Italy, the second-biggest foreign community, including about 50,000 who fled chaos and a crumbling economy after the country’s communist regime collapsed in 1991. About 20,000 arrived by ship in the port city of Bari on Aug. 8, 1991 alone. The average Albanian salary today is one sixth of the Italian level, according to the country’s statistics institute.

[LINK] Two links on HIV/AIDS treatment, present and future, in Canada

The Globe and Mail's Stephanie Nolen notes that Brazil is planning on implementing British Columbia's pioneering program to control HIV/AIDS by making sure every HIV-positive person is on treatment, extending lifespan and reducing transmissibility of the virus. Scaling up from a Canadian province--even a large one--will have challenges, as will the ethical issues related, but this is still quite positive.

[Brazil] had national free public AIDS treatment before anywhere else, and it had huge success enlisting gay men, sex workers and drug users in the fight to stop the virus. But with a new plan launched late last year, Brazil is poised to go one step further. It wants to stop the spread of HIV by putting every single person who has the virus on treatment, whether they are sick or not.

The concept – known as “treatment as prevention” – has Canadian roots. It was pioneered by, among others, Julio Montaner, a leading AIDS physician in British Columbia and former president of the International AIDS Society who credits it with the fact that Vancouver closed its AIDS ward earlier this year. It’s policy now in B.C. – and while Canada as a whole hasn’t adopted it, China, Australia, France and the U.S. all want to use the model.

But Brazil has gone furthest, and with 720,000 people living with HIV, this country has taken the concept to a whole new scale, once again blazing an ambitious path in the response to AIDS.

Thirty years ago, Brazil’s dedicated push on HIV helped rein in the epidemic, cutting new infections sharply. But those numbers started to creep up again because Brazil got complacent, its own officials agree, and for two other key reasons. First, the virus has spread into every nook and cranny of the country, including the vast swaths of the Amazon forest where the health system struggles to provide even basic care. And second, in Brazil like everywhere else, there is a generation of young people who don’t recall the decimation AIDS wrought in the 1980s, who think of it as a treatable illness, and for whom safer-sex messages fall on deaf ears.

“Our strategies have been failing, and it’s clear we need a new one,” said Inacio Queiroz, president of the chapter of Pela Vidda (For Life) in this city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.

That’s where the new plan comes in. Putting people on anti-retroviral therapy (ARVs) stops the spread of HIV because people on treatment have so little presence of the virus in their bodily fluids that it’s called “undetectable”; they are 90 per cent less likely to infect partners with whom they have unprotected sex or share needles. (The virus is still present in genomic material in their cells and eventually starts to circulate again, when it grows resistant to the medication.)

Daily Xtra's Frank Prendergast, meanwhile, notes that Truvada has still not been approved in camera for pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Manufactured by Gilead, Truvada is a drug commonly given to people who are HIV-positive as part of their treatment regimens. Two years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it for a second use: to help prevent HIV infection. The FDA decision followed the groundbreaking iPrEx study, headed by principal researcher Robert Grant, which proved its effectiveness as an HIV prevention drug if taken daily.

In an email to Daily Xtra, a Gilead representative says the company has submitted filings seeking approval for Truvada to be used as a prevention drug (in addition to its primary use as a treatment for HIV) in Brazil, South Africa, Thailand and France. But Canada seems to be in limbo.

“After initial discussions with the European Medicines Agency and Health Canada, Gilead has not received any recent communications regarding a PrEP filing from either agency,” the Gilead representative writes. The representative has not yet responded to Daily Xtra’s requests for clarification regarding what was said in these “initial discussions.”

Health Canada says it won’t provide information on what approvals drug companies may or may not be seeking at any given time, stating that this is “proprietary information.”

We contacted Eric Morrissette, senior media relations advisor at Health Canada, to ask why there may have been no “recent communications” with Gilead after “initial discussions” but were told that this, too, is confidential information. However, Morrissette tells Daily Xtra that there is “no backlog” at Health Canada that would slow down communications.

[LINK] On the possible evolution of HIV towards decreased virulence

Livejournal's robby pointed me to the New Scientist article suggesting that HIV is becoming less virulent over time in many populations.

To track how HIV has been evolving, Philip Goulder of the University of Oxford and his colleagues compared HIV samples taken from 842 pregnant women in Botswana and South Africa. In Botswana, the epidemic took off in the mid-1980s, compared with the mid-90s in South Africa – so HIV in Botswana has had about a decade longer to evolve.

When tested on cells grown in a lab, the HIV from Botswana reproduced more slowly than that from South Africa, which should mean it takes longer to destroy people's immune systems and result in AIDS.

"To show it's adapting so rapidly is very significant," says José Borghans of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.

One reason for the change could be the growing use of HIV drugs, says Goulder. People with the most virulent form of the virus get sick sooner and start drug treatment. This reduces the level of the virus in their blood and sexual fluids almost to zero, so they are unlikely to pass it on. This means that a more aggressive virus is less likely to be transmitted.

"It's a benefit of therapy that nobody thought of," says Goulder. "That's another reason to provide it."

The study in question, "Impact of HLA-driven HIV adaptation on virulence in populations of high HIV seroprevalence", is available here from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.