A Bit More Detail

• Architectuul looks at the divided cities of the divided island of Cyprus.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares an image of a galaxy that actually has a tail.


• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber talks about her pain as an immigrant in the United Kingdom in the era of Brexit, her pain being but one of many different types created by this move.


• The Crux talks about the rejected American proposal to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, and the several times the United States did arrange for lesser noteworthy events there (collisions, for the record).


• D-Brief notes how the innovative use of Curiosity instruments has explained more about the watery past of Gale Crater.


• Bruce Dorminey notes one astronomer's theory that Venus tipped early into a greenhouse effect because of a surfeit of carbon relative to Earth.


• Far Outliers looks at missionaries in China, and their Yangtze explorations, in the late 19th century.


• Gizmodo notes evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans cohabited in a cave for millennia.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox writes about his exploration of the solo music of Paul McCartney.


• io9 looks at what is happening with Namor in the Marvel universe, with interesting echoes of recent Aquaman storylines.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the Beothuk of Newfoundland and their sad fate.


• Language Hat explores Patagonian Afrikaans.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on how mindboggling it is to want to be a billionaire. What would you do with that wealth?


• The Map Room Blog shares a visualization of the polar vortex.


• Marginal Revolution reports on the career of a writer who writes stories intended to help people fall asleep.


• The New APPS Blog reports on the power of biometric data and the threat of its misuse.


• Neuroskeptic takes a look at neurogenesis in human beings.


• Out There notes the import, in understanding our solar system, of the New Horizons photos of Ultima Thule.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes that OSIRIS-REx is in orbit of Bennu and preparing to take samples.


• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of 21 things that visitors to Kolkata should know.


• Mark Simpson takes a critical look at the idea of toxic masculinity. Who benefits?


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why global warming is responsible for the descent of the polar vortex.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the pro-Russian Gagauz of Moldova are moving towards a break if the country at large becomes pro-Western.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the art of Finnish painter Hugo Simberg.

There were 84 skeletons, all in one place.

It wasn't the first, or the last, mass grave Ceren Ceraloglu would search, but the feeling of standing over that particular pit, with its staggering number of victims, has stayed with her.

A field archaeologist with the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) in Cyprus, Ceraloglu has been sifting through the most painful parts of her island's past.

It's not the kind of work this mother of triplets imagined she'd be doing when she was studying archaeology in university. But it's become a calling.

Not just because the excavations aim to return the remains of those killed in the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots to their families, but because scientists from both communities work side by side, every day.

There is no room for conflict here.

Cathi Delaney chooses a shady spot on the terrace to sip a refreshing cup of iced coffee. It's October, but with temperatures well above 30°C (86°F), the nearly 60-year-old British woman is perfectly comfortable wearing just a floral dress. This, after all, is what brought her to Cyprus: the sun, the sea, the sweet life.

But in recent months, back in her country of origin, a majority of voters opted for Brexit, that will force the UK to leave the European Union — adding a major element of anxiety to her otherwise trouble-free existence. "Brexit raises a lot of uncertainties," she says, noting the various legal and bureaucratic issues. "Will I get my state pension in six years? Will my husband benefit from the General Hospital Scheme that gives affordable access to health care?"

Delaney is one of an estimated 80,000 subjects of Her Majesty the Queen currently residing in Cyprus, an EU member for the past 12 years. Together they represent about 10% of the small republic's population. Around half of these ex-pats are retired. The rest work in finance, tourism or in the military. Cyprus has two British bases.

A former insurance agent, she retired early with her husband, at 45, to move here to this house they had built in the village of Tala, where half of the population is foreign. That was 14 years ago. "We'd fallen in love with this quiet, cool place in the hills, 10 minutes from the Coral Bay beach," she says.

The couple has lived on their savings. But like many Brits, they now fear they might need private insurance to cover their health care costs. Delaney, who serves as a town councilor (as allowed under EU rules), also worries about the impact Brexit may have on local commerce.

• blogTO identify five neighbourhoods in downtownish Toronto with cheap rent.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes one paper suggesting Earth-like worlds may need both ocean and rocky surfaces to be habitable.


• The Dragon's Tales reports that Pluto's Sputnik Planum is apparently less than ten million years old.


• Geocurrents begins an interesting regional schema of California.


• Language Log notes a Hong Kong ad that blends Chinese and Japanese remarkably.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that societies with low inequality report higher levels of happiness than others.


• The Map Room points to the lovely Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands.


• Marginal Revolution wonders why Amazon book reviews are so dominated by American reviewers.


• Savage Minds considers, after Björk, the ecopoetics of physical geology data.


• Window on Eurasia commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Vilnius massacre.


• The Financial Times' The World blog looks at Leo, the dog of the Cypriot president.

• Centauri Dreams argues that humans have a deep-seated instinct to explore.


• Crooked Timber looks at how Greek debt is a political problem.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes an unsuccessful search for gas giant exoplanets around a white dwarf and looks at a new system for classifying exoplanets by mass.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at a report that a Patriot missile battery in Turkey got hacked.


• Geocurrents notes how the eastern Yemeni region of Al Mahrah is seeking autonomy.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the failure of the United States' Cuban embargo.


• Marginal Revolution speculates as to the peculiar dynamics of political leadership in China.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on Greece.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes that Pluto can now be explored via Google Earth.


• Registan looks at the decline of Tajikistan's Islamic Renaissance Party.


• Strange Maps shares a map that charts out the City of London and its threats.


• Towleroad notes an upcoming vote over a civil partnership bill in Cyprus.


• Window on Eurasia reports that most books published in Russia have small print runs.

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster comments upon Brian Stableford's argument that modern science fiction traces its origins to 19th century France.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a new study suggesting that 0.5% of G dwarf stars and 0.8% of K dwarf stars have very close-orbiting planets.


• At Eastern Approaches, Joe's Biden's reassurance to Poland that NATO would defend Polish frontiers in the case of conflict is noted.


• Far Outliers observes that, at the beginning of the Second World War in the Pacific, Australian defenses in Melanesia were quite weak, additionally commenting on the first Japanese naval deployment south of the equator.


• The Financial Times' World blog notes that, while the Cypriot economy is doing less badly than predicting, the ongoing dependence on Russia is a problem.


• Language Log's Victor Mair is critical of a new system for learning Chinese script.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen observes, after the New York Times, that the economy of South Ossetia five years after the Georgian war isn't doing very well.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio, reacting to the Crimean crisis, doesn't think much of futurological methods which keep making errors.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes Ukraine's exceptional economic dependence on Russia.


• Visiting Toronto, Peter Rukavina quite likes the inexpensive integration of the TTC into Pearson International Airport.


• Towleroad notes that Susanna Atanus, a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois who said autism was God's punishment for same-sex marriage, won the party primary.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Kontrovich observes the difficult situation of France, which has contracted to sell helicopter carriers to Russia.


• John Scalzi at Whatever commemorates twenty years of his online presence.


• Window on Eurasia notes that the Russian annexation of Crimea is accelerating the disintegration of the post-Soviet space and warns of a crackdown on Russian civil society.

In an article on Rosbalt.ru, Tatyana Khrulyeva surveys the rise and what she sees as the potential fall of this community. According to the 2011 Cyprus census, there were only 8164 Russian citizens living on the island, but in reality, there are far more Russians there and they play a variety of roles (rosbalt.ru/main/2014/02/15/1233278.html).

“Not all Russians allowed themselves to be counted,” she says, given that many of them are involved in activities they do not want to call attention to. Moreover, not all of the members of Russian Cyprus are ethnic Russians or citizens of the Russian Federation. Many have other backgrounds and it is thus more appropriate to speak of the Russian-speaking community.”

Using that measure, unofficial calculations suggest that there are some 50,000 Russian speakers on Cyprus, approximately six percent of the island’s total population. Most are in the major cities, and there are so many in Limassol that some there jokingly refer to it as “Limassolograd.”

[. . .]

According to Khrulyeva, there are four basic sub-groups of the Russian-language community of Cyprus. First, there are the Pontic Greeks who in Soviet times lived on the shore of the Black Sea. Most of this community left Russia in the early 1990s, many went to Greece proper, but 10,000 settled in Cyprus, mostly around Pafos.

[. . .]

Second are the group Khrulyeva calls “the Russian wives.” According to Cyprus media, “almost 50 percent of the marriages” on the island involve Russian women. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cypriots often went to the USSR for higher educations and returned “not just with diplomas but also with spouses.” Many of these women, despite their degrees, now work as domestics.

The third group consists of “Russians who are able to live in Cyprus for an extended time during the course of the year.” Most of these people have good incomes and are from Russia or Ukraine. They came to Cyprus not only because of the good weather and good schools but because until the island joined the EU, it was just about the best place in the world for Russian companies to register and operate as offshores.

And the fourth, Khrulyeva continues, are those who came to find work. Getting a visa to Cyprus is easy but getting work permits is much less so. Consequently, those who came in pursuit of jobs have often found that while they like the weather and the schools, they are forced to work in service jobs far beneath those they were trained to do.

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.


• The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination--this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they can't find at home.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to a proposal by biologists that life initially evolved in highly saline environments.


• Democracy is still fragile in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Eastern Approaches notes.


• Odd placenames in Minnesota are analyzed at Far Outliers.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the translation problems surrounding the Nazi term volkisch, liking one recent translator's suggestion that "racist" works best.


• Razib Khan at GNXP introduces readers to the historical background behind the recent ethnic conflict in Burma.


• Itching for Eestimaa's Guistino takes a look at same-sex marriage in Estonia.


• Savage Minds reviews Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands, which took a look at offshore banking centres like Cyprus.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes the background behind Elvis' 1957 performances in Toronto.


• The negative effects of mass migration to Russia from Central Asia on sending countries, especially the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are introduced at Window on Eurasia.

During the crisis and the reform period after 2009, banking’s share of the Latvian economy declined and monitoring increased. Unlike in Cyprus, banking supervision has toughened as a result of frequent suspicions of money laundering. Still, some Russian clients of Cypriot banks, in interviews with the media, have said bankers from Latvia have already reached out to them, offering their services.

It should be noted that private Russian money is managed especially by smaller banks with a small number of wealthy clients, which constitute 20 percent of the Latvian banking business. These are banks that aren’t afraid of taking big risks. Large Scandinavian banks dominate the rest of the industry.

According to unofficial information from Latvian bankers, several transactions from Cyprus were already rejected in the past few months because of rules against money laundering.

[. . .]

“There are no grounds to expect large inflows of unknown-origin funds entering the Latvian financial sector in the nearest days, as requirements for non-resident customer assessment in Latvia are among the highest ones, …” Kristaps Zakulis, head of the country’s banking regulator, told me in a statement.

“Also, the statements that Latvia could become Cyprus No. 2 are not true, because the sizes of the financial sectors in both countries and their significance to the economy are rather different,” Zakulis said. He noted that the finance industry, including banking, makes up 40 percent of Cyprus’ GDP, compared with 3 to 3.5 percent in Latvia.

• Bag News Notes examines the use of a stock photo of some Dutch immigrant youths to illustrate a variety of different alarming articles.


• Crasstalk's Maxichamp introduces readers to the Port Chicago disaster during the Second World War, which incidentally led to a notable civil rights case.


• Daniel Drezner didn't find many surprises with the terms of the Cypriot bailout and notes that Russian disinterest in bailing Cyprus out underlines the extent to which it's a status quo, non-revisionist power.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh speculates that the current trend of emigration from Spain may put the Spanish health and pension systems at risk, especially inasmuch as Spain needs skilled labour to boost its productivity.


• A Geocurrents comparison of Bolivia with Ecuador, two Andean republics with large indigenous populations and radical governments, underlines the differences (Ecuador's government draws its support from the coastal Hispanophone majority and is somewhat hostile to the indigenous minority of the interior).


• Language Hat links to a site describing the small languages of Russia.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen seems much more worried about the outcomes of the Cypriot bailout than Drezner.


• Whatever's John Scalzi notes the unsustainability of Ohio's current constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, legally and in terms of popular opinion, and suggests it indicates current patterns of change.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that the Moldovan enclave of Gagauzia, an autonomous Turkic-populated district, wants a voice in Moldovan foreign policy.


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham notes the proportion of edits to geotagged English-language Wikipedia articles coming from users in the relevant countries. There are significant variations, with African articles being largely maintained by non-national users.