[PHOTO] Looking west down Bloor

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about breaking habits.


• Centauri Dreams notes the detection of geological features on Pluto, shares the flyby schedule, and examines Charon.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on a brown dwarf found to have a Venus-sized world in orbit.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the atmospheric polymers of Titan, argues that worlds like Titan and Europa and Enceladus with shells of ice covering water are their own class of worlds, and wonders if Enceladus has a fluffy core.


• Geocurrents compares Oman with adjacent Yemen, and looks at the Yemeni island of Socotra.


• Languages of the World shares an atlas of the Dutch provinces in porcelain.


• Marginal Revolution notes that bankers from Iceland and China seem to have been using shares as collateral, and argues aging in China is overrated.


• The Planetary Society Blog focuses on Pluto and Charon.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that Michoacán in Mexico fails to become a criminalized Sicily because the Mexican criminals were too violent.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell looks at the new papal encyclical on the environment.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the Russian baby bust.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that contrary the internet meme the Oregon bakers were not fined for doxxing the complainants.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Russian military desertion, the mistreatment of Ukrainians in Russian prisoners, and fears for the prospect of peaceful change in Russia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes the roles of whips in the British political scene.

[URBAN NOTE] "The oldest bit of Toronto subway opened 50 years ago"

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman reported that last week was the 50th anniversary of the first subway trip across the Don Valley on the Bloor-Danforth line.

50 years ago this week, a special gasoline-powered TTC subway car trundled east along an unfinished Bloor-Danforth line towards the maintenance yard at Greenwood Ave. The east-west subway was still a year from completion, so the vehicle had to periodically halt to let workers clear scaffolding and other obstacles off the track.

When it came time to cross the Don Valley, the car emerged into daylight on what was then a 40-year-old metal platform beneath the road deck of the Bloor St. viaduct. It rumbled over top of Bayview Ave., the brown Don River, and newly-completed Don Valley Parkway before disappearing into the approach to Broadview station.

“We have nothing to report but happiness—nothing wrong happened,” a TTC engineer cheerfully announced once the trip was over.

By successfully crossing the Don Valley via the bridge, a group of senior TTC subway engineers and two Toronto Star reporters had inaugurated the city’s oldest piece of subway infrastructure—a train platform built when the city was still dreaming of “tubes” under Bay St.

[URBAN NOTE] "Queens Condos Set Record as Manhattan Buyers Priced Out"

Bloomberg's Oshrat Carmiel reports on soaring condo prices in New York City's Queens.

Condominium prices in New York’s Queens jumped to a record in the second quarter as soaring values in Manhattan sent buyers fanning out across the city’s boroughs in search of properties they could afford.

The average price of a Queens condo sold was $575,339, up 20 percent from a year earlier, according to a report Thursday from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. In Long Island City, a neighborhood just across the East River from Manhattan better known for its rental towers, the average price rose 28 percent to $1.06 million.

Demand to own homes in the outer boroughs is climbing as Manhattan apartments reach their own new highs, further shutting out cost-sensitive buyers. In Brooklyn, the average sales price climbed 0.7 percent to a record $788,529 in the second quarter, extending a surge in values amid the area’s growing appeal as a hip place to live.

“This is the search for affordability,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel and a Bloomberg View contributor. “Queens is benefiting from Brooklyn’s success, Brooklyn is benefiting from Manhattan’s success. Next is the Bronx.”

The average sales price of all homes in Queens climbed 9.1 percent from a year earlier to $452,304, while the number of transactions increased 5.6 percent to 2,539. In Brooklyn, sales fell 17 percent from a year earlier to 1,735 properties, hampered by inventory below historical averages.

[URBAN NOTE] "Salt mine keeps Goderich alive, 'youthful'"

CBC reported earlier this month on how a salt mine in the southwestern Ontario town of Goderich contributes to that city's relative economic health.

Deep under Lake Huron, five kilometres from shore, miners work in a cloud of fine particles, the beams from their headlamps piercing the darkness.

The rooms and tunnels they have dug out are huge, the ceilings 20 metres from the floor.

Trucks load and scurry about, tipping their loads of freshly mined salt into crushers connected to long, fast-moving conveyor belts.

Some 500 people work in this mine in Goderich, Ont., exploiting a massive and almost pure deposit that is the small town's ace in the hole.

"There is salt underground in this seam for 100 years of mining, " said Gerry Rogers, the Compass Minerals executive in charge of the operation. "It will last a long time."

The company says the salt mine in Goderich, a town about 100 kilometres northwest of London, is the largest in the world. And business is good.

[LINK] "Malaysia Airlines MH17: Russia rebukes push for UN tribunal"

CBC shares the Associated Press' unsurprising report. What will happen, I wonder, when further confirmation of Russia's indirect role comes out?

Malaysia has asked the United Nations Security Council to set up an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected of downing a passenger airliner last year in eastern Ukraine, but Russia dismissed the move on Thursday.

Malaysia, a member of the 15-member council, distributed a draft resolution late on Wednesday, which it hoped could be adopted later this month, diplomats said. It is a joint proposal by Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ukraine.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down in July 2014 with 298 passengers on board, two-thirds of them Dutch. It crashed in Ukrainian territory held by Russian-backed separatists.

"I don't see any future for" this resolution, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said in a statement translated from Russian. "Unfortunately, it seems that this is an attempt to organize a grandiose, political show, which only damages efforts to find the guilty parties."

Russia is a veto-wielding permanent member on the 15-member council — along with France, Britain, China and the United States — and therefore it has the option of blocking the proposal if it is put to a vote.

[LINK] Buzzfeed on the trials of Alan Gross and American democracy promotion

Buzzfeed's Joshua Hersh has an incisive article looking at the case of Alan Gross, an American contractor held in detention in Cuba for years, and notes how it is an example of how American efforts to promote democracy abroad are often flawed.

The Villa Marista prison in Havana is a complex of ornate, industrial-era buildings situated on the outskirts of the city. Before Fidel Castro came to power, in 1959, it was a Catholic boys school, but today it serves as the country’s main detention center for political prisoners. A fearsome place, its cells are cramped and dank, with beds made of iron planks hanging on chains, and a filthy hole in the corner of each room for a toilet. The prison guards are known for brutal interrogations and creative acts of petty cruelty; the lights are often kept on throughout the night, and in the evening an inmate might be served his breakfast and told it is morning.

One night in early December 2009, a genial, portly 60-year-old man from Potomac, Maryland, was pulled out of his hotel room in central Havana and dumped into one of those cells. Alan Gross had arrived in Cuba a week and a half earlier on a U.S. government–backed mission to bring uncensored internet access to Jewish communities on the island, and was scheduled to fly home the following morning. He wouldn’t make it back to the U.S. for more than five years.

Gross had come to Cuba to espouse and spread the values and benefits of democracy by helping to make internet service more accessible; he had visited synagogues and Jewish leaders across the country, introducing them to search engines and Spanish-language Wikipedia. (“I saw the world,” one of his beneficiaries later reportedly said, after being shown Google Earth for the first time.) For this, he was convicted of undertaking “a subversive project” to “destroy the Revolution” in Cuba, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. U.S. officials protested strongly, characterizing Gross as a humanitarian. Last December, on the same day the Obama administration revealed plans to restore diplomatic ties with the Cubans, after nearly six decades of impasse and isolation, it announced that Gross would be coming home, too.

Aside from a few off-the-record appearances and a single interview, Gross has not spoken publicly about his experiences, and he rejected numerous attempts to be interviewed for this article. (A book deal and network television interview are believed to be in the works, and his website lists a contact for a speech agent. A $3.2 million settlement with the U.S. government, finalized late last year, came with a strict nondisclosure agreement.) But since returning to America, he has emerged as an advocate for closer U.S.–Cuban relations, and has a lively presence on Twitter, where he shares artwork he drew while in prison and observations from his recovery and reintegration into everyday life. In early June, after Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a hard-line opponent of open relations with Cuba, threatened to block the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to the island, Gross quipped, “When will Sen Rubio recognize that significant on-the-ground changes are taking place in Cuba under his nose?” He’s even embraced the snappy tone of social media: When a critic accused him of having Stockholm syndrome, he replied swiftly, “Not a fuckin’ chance.”

Gross’ resilience is striking. Friends and others who have seen him since his return describe him as having retained his upbeat attitude and lively sense of humor. (In a phone message he left for a supporter near the end of his captivity, Gross chuckled and apologized that it “took me so long” to get in touch.) But his writings and legal documents from the five years of wrangling over his case in Cuban and American courts, and interviews with friends and colleagues, tell a story of great anguish, and occasional bewilderment. “I have never — repeat, never ever — been in any kind of trouble, legal or otherwise, anywhere in the world,” Gross noted in a handwritten statement he filed before a Cuban court in 2011. “I did nothing in Cuba that is not done on a daily basis in millions of homes and offices around the world. I have an immense fondness for the people of Cuba, and I am deeply sorry for being a trusting fool. I was duped. I was used. And my family and I have paid dearly for this.”

[LINK] "Want to Become a Russian in Crimea? Join the Queue"

The Moscow Times' Eva Hartog reports on how becoming a Russian citizen if you are one of the nearly two million people of Crimea can be difficult, even if you want to be a citizen.

At least 100,000 Crimeans were unable to obtain Russian citizenship in the year following the peninsula's annexation by Russia, federal human rights ombudswoman Ella Pamfilova estimated in a report published on her department's website in May.

[. . .]

Most of the thousands of those living without official Russian citizenship are people who were born in mainland Ukraine but, despite spending years and sometimes decades living and working in Crimea, never re-registered as residents of Crimea.

Under Ukrainian rule, authorities mostly turned a blind eye to the 'illegal' section of the Crimean population. Crimea was, after all, part of the same country.

But since Russia's annexation of the peninsula in March last year, these Crimeans have been branded foreigners on what was once their own soil until they convince the authorities otherwise.

Following Russia's formal annexation of the peninsula on March 18 last year, all Crimean residents — a mix of ethnic Russians, ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars — were automatically declared Russian citizens unless they made use of a one-month window to renounce their new status.

In practice, however, the burden of proof was on Crimeans themselves — until they acquired a Russian passport, they would de facto be considered foreigners.

[OBSCURA] "Gorgeous Pluto", courtesy NASA and New Horizons

From Instagram:

Gorgeous Pluto! The dwarf planet has sent a love note back to Earth via our New Horizons spacecraft, which has traveled more than 9 years and 3+ billion miles. This is the last and most detailed image of Pluto sent to Earth before the moment of closest approach, which was at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday - about 7,750 miles above the surface -- roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth. This stunning image of the dwarf planet was captured from New Horizons at about 4 p.m. EDT on July 13, about 16 hours before the moment of closest approach. The spacecraft was 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface. Images from closest approach are expected to be released on Wednesday, July 15. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #pluto #plutoflyby #newhorizons#solarsystem #nasabeyond #science

A photo posted by NASA (@nasa) on Jul 14, 2015 at 4:00am PDT