[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton photographs the ever-changing and increasingly condo-ized intersection of Queen Street West with Dufferin.


• James Bow points to a McDonald's in Scarborough that appears for all the world to be abandoned. (Suburbia can be a wasteland.)


• Centauri Dreams notes that astronomers have ingeniously managed to determine the characteristics of the atmosphere of exoplanet GJ3470b, a hot Neptune closely orbiting a red dwarf.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that South Asia was repopulated by migrants from Africa after the Toba volcanic explosion.


• GNXP takes a look at some interesting genetic analysis of Caribbean populations.


• Joe. My. God. notes, with others, the irony of anti-Castro Cuban-American Marco Rubio defending the same homophobic policies that Castro would have advanced.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money does not think that internships can be defended.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen and The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer both note that Honduras seems interested in charter cities. The latter doesn't think much will come of it.


• Elsewhere at The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer observes that Colombia is actually a very close ally of the United States and sees, in the relationship of Brazil with an Ecuador that has tried to harass Brazilian companies, the birth of a Brazilian hegemony in South America.


• Torontoist notes that ambitious plans for expanding St. Lawrence Market North have been sharply downgraded.


• Window on Eurasia notes an Uzbek writer who argues that the death of the Aral Sea will affect even upstream countries in Central Asia like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, whether directly through environmental catastrophe or indirectly through regional tensions.