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Sep. 29th, 2015
[BLOG] Some Tuesday links
Sep. 29th, 2015 01:52 pm- blogTO notes that Toronto's old City Hall may yet become a shopping mall once the courts move out.
- The Dragon's Gaze notes that worlds without plate tectonics are doomed to stop being habitable, and looks at different kinds of cosmic ray environments.
- The Dragon's Tales notes the Iranian buildup in Syria.
- A Fistful of Euros has a reading list for Jeremy Corbyn.
- Otto Pohl talks about the historic role of German minorities in Africa and Asia.
- The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of the Middle East's Kurdish populations.
- Spacing Toronto looks at campus safety in the age of threatening tweets.
- Towleroad notes Michael Sam stating he could have had a better NFL career had he not come out.
- Transit Toronto notes the TTC has taken its tenth new streetcar into service.
- The Volokh Conspiracy looks at intersections between assisted suicide and religious liberty.
- Window on Eurasia notes controversy in Belarus over a Russian military base and looks at Circassians in Syria.
Jennifer Oldham's Bloomberg article, looking at a real estate bust in a North Dakota that had been enjoying a boom in net migration, evokes Alberta for me.
Chain saws and staple guns echo across a $40 million residential complex under construction in Williston, North Dakota, a few miles from almost-empty camps once filled with oil workers.
After struggling to house thousands of migrant roughnecks during the boom, the state faces a new real-estate crisis: The frenzied drilling that made it No. 1 in personal-income growth and job creation for five consecutive years hasn’t lasted long enough to support the oil-fueled building explosion.
Civic leaders and developers say many new units were already in the pipeline, and they anticipate another influx of workers when oil prices rise again. But for now, hundreds of dwellings approved during the heady days are rising, skeletons of wood and cement surrounded by rolling grasslands, with too few residents who can afford them.
“We are overbuilt,” said Dan Kalil, a commissioner in Williams County in the heart of the Bakken, a 360-million-year-old shale bed, during a break from cutting flax on his farm. “I am concerned about having hundreds of $200-a-month apartments in the future.”
Al Jazeera America's David Martin and Sheila MacVicar report ("Hoping to reach US, Cuban doctors and nurses sit in limbo in Colombia") on Cuban medical workers who, after leaving Venezuela with the goal of getting to the United States, find themselves caught in Colombia as they wait to enter.
In a working-class section of the Colombian capital, a Cuban doctor, nurses and others spend their days languishing in a cramped apartment, checking their phones for word from the U.S. Embassy.
They’re hoping to hear they’ve been approved for U.S. visas under a program that was designed to undermine the Castro regime.
“It’s very hard,” said Dr. Yosmany Velasquez Silva, who has been waiting for a visa for more than four months after leaving his job in rural Venezuela.
Velasquez has applied for a visa under the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which grants entry into the U.S. for Cuban medical professionals sent overseas by their government.
The United States enacted the program in 2006 because Cubans sent on these medical missions are considered “conscripted” labor. But now that Cuba and the United States are normalizing relations after 50 years of Cold War tensions, the Cuban health care workers in Bogota worry the visas are drying up.
Velasquez and the others were working in Venezuela when they decided to leave their jobs and cross the border into neighboring Colombia. In all, more than 700 Cuban medical professionals left their jobs in Venezuela and have been living in Bogota.
“I’m in limbo here. A migratory limbo,” said nurse Adriana Lopez Lara, who received an email denying her U.S. visa application with no explanation.
This Al Jazeera report bodes ill, I'd say.
The perpetrators of last month's deadly Bangkok bombing were a network that trafficked Uighur Muslims and launched the attack in anger at Thailand's crackdown on the trade, police said on Tuesday.
No group has claimed responsibility for the Aug. 17 bombing at the Erawan Shrine that killed 20 people, an attack police chief Somyot Pumpanmuang ruled out as revenge for Thailand's forced repatriation in July of 109 Uighurs to China.
“It's about a human trafficking network that has been destroyed,” Somyot told reporters. “Deporting those 109 people, the Thai government did in accordance with international law. We also sent them to Turkey, not just China.”
Police have dampened speculation the bombers were members of international armed groups and have until now denied links to the Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim and say they flee China's western Xinjiang region due to persecution.
The Uighur issue is sensitive for the Thai government and any link between the bombing and their deportation at China's behest could expose it to criticism that its foreign policy may have resulted in the blast.
This Canadian Press article, hosted at MacLean's, is important.
Long-term expats determined to cast a ballot for the Oct. 19 election have found a way to do so — against the wishes of the Conservative government and despite a court ruling upholding their disenfranchisement.
However, the method costs money, travel, and time, prompting some to argue the rules have effectively made their right to vote subject to financial ability.
“Voting should not be something you must purchase,” said Natalie Chabot Roy, 38, who was raised in northern Ontario but lives in Bonney Lake, Wash.
Earlier this year, the government successfully appealed a court ruling that would have allowed Canadians abroad for more than five years to keep on voting by way of a mailed “”special ballot.”
Nevertheless, at least one enterprising expat has already cast his ballot for the Oct. 19 election under another section of the Canada Elections Act that amounts to a barely accessible backdoor around the ban, and others are considering following suit.
That section allows expats who show up in the riding in which they lived before leaving Canada to vote _ if they show proof of the former residency along with accepted identification.
Kevin Davie's 2011 article in the Mail & Guardian describing the survival of a Bushman group in eastern South Africa is fascinating.
We have many languages in South Africa, but what about /Xegwi? The word looks so alien, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that /Xegwi was a language in use in South Africa as recently as 100 years ago.
/Xegwi is an ancient language, one of the country’s originals. If you Google it, you’ll quickly find that it is extinct, as dead as the people who once spoke it. But maybe not.
I came across this story on a bicycle trip through Mpumalanga with two friends. The laminated pamphlet on the front desk of our lodge in Chrissiesmeer, near Ermelo, offered activities such as visiting a derelict town, checking the apparent impression of a giant foot in a rock face or viewing Bushman paintings. The guides for the rock-art tour were two Bushmen.
Chrissiesmeer is something of a South African secret. There are more than 270 lakes in a 20km by 20km area. One, Lake Chrissie, is one of the largest fresh-water lakes in South Africa. The water attracts an abundance of bird, frog and animal life.
The fact that the rock-art guides are themselves Bushmen is extraordinary as they are widely believed to be extinct in most of South Africa.
Postmedia News' Nick Eagland writes about two towns in British Columbia, abandoned for decades, that businesspeople would like to revive for their contemporary ends.
Two neighbouring ghost towns, both failed by the 20th-century mining industry in northwest B.C., could be on the brink of new life thanks to monster power projects helmed by a pair of dreamers.
The town of Kitsault, about 115 kilometres northwest of Terrace, was a molybdenum mining community for three years until the market crashed in 1982 and its 1,200 residents abandoned it almost overnight.
Some 28 nautical kilometres down Observation Inlet is Anyox, the site of a once-booming copper mine powered by its own hydroelectric dam until both operations were shuttered in 1935, leaving the town’s 3,000 residents with little reason to stay.
One has plans for a floating liquefied natural gas terminal in Kitsault, while the other is rehabilitating two hydroelectric dams meant to power LNG projects.
While natural gas prices slump and Asian demand for LNG is in question, both men are banking on long-term returns.
Postmedia News' Nick Eagland writes about two towns in British Columbia, abandoned for decades, that businesspeople would like to revive for their contemporary ends.
Two neighbouring ghost towns, both failed by the 20th-century mining industry in northwest B.C., could be on the brink of new life thanks to monster power projects helmed by a pair of dreamers.
The town of Kitsault, about 115 kilometres northwest of Terrace, was a molybdenum mining community for three years until the market crashed in 1982 and its 1,200 residents abandoned it almost overnight.
Some 28 nautical kilometres down Observation Inlet is Anyox, the site of a once-booming copper mine powered by its own hydroelectric dam until both operations were shuttered in 1935, leaving the town’s 3,000 residents with little reason to stay.
One has plans for a floating liquefied natural gas terminal in Kitsault, while the other is rehabilitating two hydroelectric dams meant to power LNG projects.
While natural gas prices slump and Asian demand for LNG is in question, both men are banking on long-term returns.
New York's Nick Tabor describes the various factors responsible for the fact that Manhattan's Chinatown, possibly uniquely of the older ethnic neighbourhoods on that island, remains vibrant. Apparently local ownership and a commitment to change are key.
Every summer, Wellington Chen, the director of Chinatown’s Business Improvement District, dispatches interns to document all the businesses that have recently opened and closed in his neighborhood. He has noticed an overwhelming number of empty storefronts being filled by independent pharmacies. At the same time, senior and adult day-care centers have been proliferating — starting with a 19,000-square-foot building the city has installed on Centre Street. Chen says it’s a subtle indication of a trend: As so many immigrants’ children have left for college and never returned, and as other families have sought real estate in the outer boroughs (particularly in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Flushing, Queens), most of the people left in Chinatown’s historic core are the elderly dwellers of rent-regulated apartments.
How can this possibly be the state of one of the most desirable tracts of real estate in all of Manhattan? After all, Chinatown is hedged in by three of the borough’s priciest neighborhoods: Soho to the north, the Financial District to the south, and, to the west, Tribeca, where the monthly cost of a one-bedroom averages $5,100. Developers would eagerly replace Chinatown’s tenement buildings with market-rate housing for young professionals or gut the existing buildings, leaving only the tea parlors and dumpling shacks. A similar fate has already befallen the Chinatowns of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., which have been reduced to ethnic theme parks where longtime residents have been priced out and new immigrants no longer come. And Manhattan’s Chinatown is built on the graveyards of enclaves past: the Irish Five Points, the Jewish Lower East Side, and Little Italy.
But Chen is right: So far, Manhattan’s Chinatown has largely resisted the laws of the real-estate market. Often defined by the rough borders of Delancey and Chambers on the north and south, and East Broadway and Broadway to the east and west, the neighborhood is still populated primarily by low-income Chinese, its storefronts are still dominated by Chinese mom-and-pop operations, and it remains a cultural and commercial hub even for expats in the outer boroughs. It has found ways to keep its internal economy humming even after its garment factories folded in the 1990s and early aughts. While the neighborhood is not immune to pressures — some restaurants are shuttering because of rent escalations, new hotels and luxury apartments are appearing on the periphery, and wealthier tenants are slowly filling vacancies in some of the old buildings — it is, broadly speaking, an exceptionally tight-knit and self-sustaining city unto itself.
Mike Dash's account of a remarkable Roman complex at the seaside resort of Baiae is superb. What was going on?
Two thousand years ago, Baiæ was a flourishing spa, noted both for its mineral cures and for the scandalous immorality that flourished there. Today, it is little more than a collection of picturesque ruins–but it was there, in the 1950s, that the entrance to a hitherto unknown antrum was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri. It had been concealed for years beneath a vineyard; Maiuri’s workers had to clear a 15-foot-thick accumulation of earth and vines.
The narrow entrance to the tunnel complex at Baiae is easy to miss amid the ruins of a Greek temple and a large Roman bath complex.
The antrum at Baiæ proved difficult to explore. A sliver of tunnel, obviously ancient and manmade, disappeared into a hillside close to the ruins of a temple. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into its cramped entrance discovered a pitch-black passageway that was uncomfortably hot and wreathed in fumes; they penetrated only a few feet into the interior before beating a hasty retreat. There the mystery rested, and it was not revived until the site came to the attention of Robert Paget in the early 1960s.
Paget was not a professional archaeologist. He was a Briton who worked at a nearby NATO airbase, lived in Baiæ, and excavated mostly as a hobby. As such, his theories need to be viewed with caution, and it is worth noting that when the academic Papers of the British School at Rome agreed to publish the results of the decade or more that he and an American colleague named Keith Jones spent digging in the tunnel, a firm distinction was drawn between the School’s endorsement of a straightforward description of the findings and its refusal to pass comment on the theories Paget had come up with to explain his perplexing discoveries. These theories eventually made their appearance in book form but attracted little attention–surprisingly, because the pair claimed to have stumbled across nothing less than a real-life “entrance to the underworld.”
Paget was one of the handful of men who still hoped to locate the “cave of the sibyl” described by Virgil, and it was this obsession that made him willing to risk the inhospitable interior. He and Jones pressed their way though the narrow opening and found themselves inside a high but narrow tunnel, eight feet tall but just 21 inches wide. The temperature inside was uncomfortable but bearable, and although the airless interior was still tinged with volcanic fumes, the two men pressed on into a passage that, they claimed, had probably not been entered for 2,000 years.