A Bit More Detail

• NOW Toronto profiles some eye-catching exhibits part of the Contact Photography Festival.


• Toronto Life profiles some recently recovered photos by Christopher Porter dating from the 1990s.


• The NYR Daily took a look at the war-themed photographs of Don McCullin, here.


• The NYR Daily examines the work of Antanas Sutkus, who began his work in Soviet Lithuania.


• These images of the legacies of the Vietnam War in Laos, decades later, are stunning. VICE has them.

• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps takes a look at the regularity, and otherwise, of different cities' street grids.


• CityLab notes how the city of Baltimore is suing Big Oil over the effects of climate change, including flooding.


• The Lake Huron resort community of Wasaga Beach turns out to have strong connections with the Lithuanian-Canadian community.


• CityLab takes a look at the love food critic Jonathan Gold expressed for the city of Los Angeles in his writing.

The SCMP notes that the British government in the 1980s was so opposed to Hong Kongers gaining the right to live in the UK that they tried to get Portugal to strip full citizenship from eligible Macanese.

• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin considers imaginable ways to get carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down to 350 ppm by 2100.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog considers the tenuous nature of the upper-middle class in America. How is downwards mobility to be avoided, even here?


• Imageo shows the growth of a sunspot larger than the Earth.


• Language Hat shares the story of how Manchu script came to be.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the working poor need protection from arbitrary and always-changing work schedules.


• The LRB Blog notes the geopolitical scramble at the Horn of Africa, starting with bases in Djibouti.


• The NYR Daily engages with an intriguing exhibition about the relationship between Henry James and paintings, and painting.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw engages with the classic 1937 Australian film, Lovers and Luggers.


• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money notes that one benefit of the trend towards greater informality in fashion is that time has been freed up, especially for women.


• Peter Rukavina writes about his new Instagram account, hosting his various sketches.


• Unicorn Booty notes the continuing problems with Germany's adoption laws for same-sex couples.


• The Volokh Conspiracy looks at how the Polish president saved the independence of Poland's courts with his veto.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia is trying to mobilize the ethnic Russians of Lithuania, finally.

• blogTO notes that Canadian Backpackers Hostel is set to close down to make room for condos.


• Centauri Dreams looks at ways to use the Earth's transit of the Sun to find potentially watching extraterrestrial civilizations.


• Dangerous Minds notes the human zoo.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the packed planetary system of young HL Tauri.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that primates in North America were not outcompeted by rodents.


• Geocurrents maps the substantial progress in development seen in Brazil.


• Language Log notes intriguing research suggesting some songbirds have a capacity for grammar.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the environmental injustice of hog farms.


• Marginal Revolution notes it is now possible to get loans with negative interest rates in Germany.


• Rachel Kessler reflects on otherness and the need for empathy in the works of Octavia Butler.


• The Russian Demographics Blog commemorates the first mention of the name "Lithuania" in March 9, 1009.


• Torontoist debates Ontario's funding of the Catholic separate school system.


• Transit Toronto looks at the latest plans for Smartttrack in Toronto.

• Centauri Dreams reports on the non-existence of Alpha Centauri Bb.
  
• The Dragon's Tales notes the exciting new findings from Pluto, including news that it supports a subsurface ocean.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the power of student protests at the University of Missouri.


• Joe. My. God. notes the promise of anti-viral injections in treating HIV.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reacts to a historical student of slavery in the US urban south.


• Marginal Revolution notes the slow pace at which US immigration records are being digitized.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that before 1960, contrary to the current trend, African-Americans with identifiably African-American names did better than average.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the size of Poland-Lithuania in 1635.


• Towleroad notes how a photo of Justin Trudeau with the same-sex family of Scott Brison went viral.


• Transit Toronto looks at the upcoming TTC open house on the 12th.


• Window on Eurasia notes that North Caucasians have reason for protest apart from ethnicity and suggests Russian regionalism is not related to ethnicity.

• blogTO notes Uber competition could mean lower taxi rates.


• Centauri Dreams notes the New Horizons data is starting to come in.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to some papers suggesting that the solar system is not exceptional.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the linkage between Enceladus' surface features and its geysers.


• Far Outliers' Joel writes about efforts to convert Japanese in Hawai'i.


• Language Hat links to an article on endangered languages.


• Languages of the World reports on the complexities of describing the history of the Slavic laqnguages.


• Marginal Revolution reports on the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora of Haiti.


• Out of Orbit's Diane Duane announces a new Young Wizards novella.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the exceptional size of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.


• Spacing Toronto describes the complexity of education in inner-city Toronto.


• Transit Toronto notes the repairs at Dupont Station.


• Window on Eurasia notes the scale of the Russian HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Tanks and ballistic missiles lumbered past thousands of spectators gathered in Kaliningrad on Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe, an historic triumph for Russia that the Kremlin has used to whip up a new nationalist fervor.

“We need to show our enemies, who deem us guilty just because we exist, that Russia is a very peculiar woman—she can knock you down without a second thought,” said Aleksandr Sapenko, a 64-year-old history teacher, citing the U.S. and European Union as Russia’s main enemies. “Soviet soldiers saved them from the Nazi gas chambers, but they are barking at Russia like a pack of stray dogs.”

This Russian enclave was once the German province of East Prussia; the city’s Victory Square was known for centuries as Hansa Platz and briefly as Adolf Hitler Platz. On Saturday, when Russia and the former Soviet republics marked the anniversary of Hitler’s defeat in World War II, the square was awash in Russian and Soviet flags. Many people brought their children, whom soldiers encouraged to climb tanks and pose for photographs while wearing garrison caps and clutching tank-shaped balloons. Similar parades were held all over Russia, notably in Moscow, the capital, where more than 16,500 troops marched in Red Square.

In the postwar settlement, East Prussia was incorporated into the Russian republic of the USSR, its entire population deported to Germany and the province repopulated with Soviet citizens, primarily ethnic Russians. Nearly flattened by British bombers and Soviet artillery, the East Prussian capital, Koenigsberg, was rebuilt as a drab Soviet city and renamed Kaliningrad, after Mikhail Kalinin, a Stalin functionary who held the largely ceremonial post of Soviet president during the war.

[. . .]

At the rally, Nikita, a 21-year-old student sporting a red Soviet flag on his bicycle, complained about the hardware. “Why couldn’t they show the new T-90 tanks instead of the old T-72s?” he said, more satisfied with the state-of-the-art Platforma-M robot tanks. Nikita said such parades were necessary so that no one forgets Russia’s war sacrifice. “It is also important to show our military might, but it’s not to scare the neighbors,” he said. “They are not our enemies, and we should all be united.”

Amber has become post-Soviet Russia's "blood diamond" that has killed dozens of black diggers and enriched or impoverished thousands of craftsmen, smugglers and middlemen - amid an amber boom in China that sent prices up and redrew the world map of the "solar stone" trade.

Digger Alexander says his illegal job is his only chance to earn a decent living in the Montenegro-sized region of one million, where competition with European farmers made agriculture unprofitable, Soviet-era plants have been shut down, and rampant corruption stifles business.

"I have no other choice," says the former schoolteacher who refused to provide his last name citing safety reasons. During a cigarette break, he climbs a hillock that overlooks a wasteland of dead grass, other man-made pools, and upturned soil that soak in the drizzle falling from the grey October sky. "Every third guy my age around here does the same," Alexander adds.

[. . .]

After the 1991 Soviet Union collapse, amber mining - like almost any other industry in Russia - was rife with corruption and crime. Corrupt mine guards turned a blind eye to black diggers - who could get away with a fine of 500 rubles ($13) if caught, and who drove around in SUVs equipped with powerful pumps - or took part in the theft themselves. Hundreds of tonnes of amber were smuggled to Poland and Lithuania.

"There were bandits, crooks and thieves," says Galina Spivak, a guide at Combine's museum. Most of Combine's 3,000 workers were fired and "resorted to what desperate Russian men do - drinking vodka and hanging themselves", she adds bitterly.

In 2004, after a contract-style killing of a businessman who tried to wrestle control of the amber trade, a star was born. Viktor Bogdan, a former police sergeant nicknamed "Ballet", monopolised the sale of Combine's entire output to domestic and foreign buyers, and started calling himself "The Amber King".

After the Kremlin's intervention in 2012, Bogdan was charged with fraud and now awaits extradition from Poland. A new team headed by a former KGB officer was appointed to manage Combine and boost domestic production of amber.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s largest social networking website, fled the country on Tuesday, a day after he said he was forced out as the company’s CEO for refusing to share users’ personal data with Russian law enforcement agencies.

Durov, who created Vkontakte seven years ago, first announced his intention to leave the company on April 1 but withdrew his resignation letter two days later. On Monday, he announced that he had been fired and that the social network would now fall under “full control” of Kremlin-linked Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Vkontakte billionaire shareholder Alisher Usmanov.

[. . .]

Last week, Durov said in an interview with the New Times that the Federal Security Service had turned up the pressure on Vkontakte employees dramatically in recent months, demanding that Durov release personal information about Euromaidan activists. He said the Prosecutor General's Office ordered him to shut down a group on the website dedicated to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, though he refused to do so.

“I am out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” Durov said Tuesday in an interview with Techcrunch, a news website focused on technology. He said he intended to launch a mobile social network outside Russia.

“Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment,” he said, adding that Russian authorities had targeted him after he publicly refused to cooperate with them.

Vkontake founder Pavel Durov has been fired as the social network's CEO, the company said, while Durov added that the move puts the network under the "full control" of Kremlin insiders.

Durov, who said he had resisted months of increasing pressure from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, to release personal information about opposition activists who use Russia's most popular social network, said he that learned about his dismissal from media reports.

"It is interesting that shareholders did not have the courage to do it directly," he said on his Vkontakte page on Monday night.

Vkontakte said in a statement a few hours earlier that it had acted on a resignation letter that Durov submitted on March 21 and supposedly failed to properly withdraw before a one-month deadline had expired, Interfax reported.

In the wake of several political conflicts both domestically and in neighboring countries like Ukraine, VK.com has become a platform for people to rally support for positions, often in defiance of the Kremlin and Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin.

Durov has been resistant to those who have tried to restrict freedom of expression on the platform, and he believes that this is at the heart of the leadership fight, as he told us a month ago, and then re-confirmed in more statements on VK.com last week. You have to wonder how and if the odd appearance by Edward Snowden on Russian TV, on the subject of government surveillance online, sits in relation to all of this.

Even beyond all of that murkiness, the situation is messy. Shareholders have been playing up publicly the role of other issues as spurs for leadership change at VK.com.

There are questions, for example, about where VK.com sits in terms of its wider business — it’s the subject of ongoing negotiations, suits and threats of suits about copyright infringement because VK.com is also a very popular platform for streaming and exchanging media.

And there are Durov’s wider interests, specifically around his Telegram app. Telegram had a surge of interest in the last couple of months because of a perfect storm of sorts: Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp has seen some turn away from the popular messaging app and look around for alternatives; and in general the public has started to become a lot more interested in apps offering “secure” services that do a better job of keeping their data away from commercial and government data gatherers. One of VK.com’s shareholders, United Capital Partners, has criticised Durov’s focus on Telegram at the expense of his attention on VK.com.

• The Big Picture shares pictures of the ongoing confusion and human tragedy surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes preliminary results for the hunt of exoplanets around very cool stars.


• The Dragon's Tales, meanwhile, observes that the red-coloured formation on Europa's icy surface seem to be produced by internal events.


• Far Outliers notes that Japan provided naval protection to Australia during the First World War, causing the Australians no small amount of alarm at their vulnerability.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the personal and ideological connection between now-separate Crimea and Transnistria.


• At The Frailest Thing, Michael Sacasas talks about how the phenomenon of people disconnecting from the online world can evoke the Bakhtinian carnival, and how it also might not be enough.


• Geocurrents notes that, in various referenda, Switzerland's Francophone cantons are consistently more open (to immigrants, to the European Union) than others.)


• Joe. My. God. observes that for the first time since the epidemic hit, HIV/AIDS has stopped being one of the top ten causes of death in New York City.


• Ukrainian demographics blogger pollotenchegg shares the results of recent detailed polling of Crimea's population, on everything from political views or language usage.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that markets are reacting to Russia's actions, though whether it's Crimea alone or broader fears about a Ukrainian war is open to question.


• Torontoist explains to its readership what co-op apartments actually are, in the course of an explanation that Jack Layton and Olivia Chow were not living in subsidized apartments.


• Towleroad celebrates the classic TV series Golden Girls.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian relations with Lithuania are also deteriorating.