A Bit More Detail

American actress Meghan Markle has lived for years on a sleepy residential street of a middle-class Toronto neighbourhood without anyone really noticing.

She has walked her dogs in a nearby park. She has dined at her favourite restaurants and hung out in popular Trinity Bellwoods Park. But when reports broke that her rumoured boyfriend, Prince Harry, was visiting the TV star this week, her quiet neighbourhood in west Toronto suddenly became grounds for a media stakeout.

On Wednesday it emerged that the prince was in Toronto, after initial reports speculated the trip had been cancelled because his plans were leaked to the press.

The London Daily Telegraph reported that Harry actually had been in the city since last Friday and was staying with Markle in her home in Seaton Village — a name with important historical links that are probably well known by the prince.

Seaton Village is named after John Colborne, 1st Baron Seaton who distinguished himself at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The prince served with the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry whose battle honours also include Waterloo.

Residents of the Bathurst Street and Dupont Avenue area knew something was up when two dark SUVs were seen parked in front of the house over the weekend.

• The Big Picture shares photos of Iran 25 years after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.


• Crooked Timber continues its seminar on the ethics of open borders.
D-Brief notes the discovery of two new classes of planets not found in our solar system, Earth-mass gas dwarfs and rocky super-Earths.

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that red dwarfs' solar wind would significantly heat exoplanets in their circumstellar habitable zones and links to another paper concluded that Kepler-10c is a giant rocky world.


• The Dragon's Tales notes drama in Canada regarding the possibility or not of a F-35 purchase.


• The Financial Times' The World blog wonders about the future of the monarchy in a securely democratic Spain.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis concludes that poverty isn't clearly the cause of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, notwithstanding the relative poverty of the Muslim north.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is rightly upset that Confederate general and defender of slavery Robert E. Lee is positioned in a new book as an American patriot.


• The New APPS Blog considers the issues associated with democracy in the European Union after the recent elections.


• Savage Minds' P. Kerim Friedman considers the shooting ratio of ethnography. How much raw material do anthropologists need to collect to come up with something compelling?


• Window on Eurasia traces the genealogy of Eurasianism in the Soviet era.

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton photographs a small-town Ontario vestige of the now-defunct Zellers retail chain.


• Crooked Timber's Ingrid Robeyns writes about the new kings of the Netherlands and Belgium.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales has a few links to interesting papers up: one describes circumstellar habitable zones for subsurface biospheres like those images on Mars; one argues that Earth-like planets orbiting small, dim red dwarfs might see their water slowly migrate to the night side; another suggests that on these same red dwarf-orbiting Earth-like worlds, the redder frequency of light will mean that ice will absorb rather than reflect radiation and so prevent runaway glaciation.


• Eastern Approaches reflected on the Second World War-era massacres of Poles by Ukrainians in the Volyn region.


• Geocurrents examined the boom in export agriculture in coastal Peru and the growing popularity of the xenophobic right in modern Europe for a variety of reasons.


• GNXP argues that language is useful as a market of identity and that the term "Caucasian" as used to refer to human populations is meaningless.


• Itching in Eestimaa's Palun argues that, given Soviet-era relocations of population into the Baltic States, much emigration might just be a matter of the population falling to levels that local economies can support.


• Language Log has a series of posts examining loan words to and from East Asian languages: Chinese loans in English (too few?), English loans in Japanese (too many?), Japanese loans in English (quite a lot).


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that not only is the United States not trying to prolong the Syrian civil war, but that the United States should not arm them for the States' own good. (Agreed.)


• Registan's Matthew Kupfer approves of the selection of Dzhohar Tsarnaev's photo on the front page of Rolling Stone as being useful in deconstructing myths that he, and terrorism, are foreign.


• Savage Minds considers how classic Star Trek seems out of date for its faith in an attractive and liveable high modernity.


• Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs examines the concept of the eruv, the fictive boundary used by Orthodox Jews to justify activity on the sabbath.


• Window on Eurasia quotes writers who wonder if Central Asian states might continue to break up and suggest that Tatarstan might have been set for statehood in 1991 and should continue to prepare for future events.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell argues that human bias as expressed in opinion polls is, depressingly, not just a matter of easily-remedied ignorance.

Her Majesty’s visit itself was on the shorter side: after 30 minutes, she left the Cabinet room, where the meeting went on for another hour. Upon leaving, she was presented with 60 lacquered table mats - one for every year of her reign - emblazoned with traditional scenes from Buckingham Palace. This could be construed as a bit tacky, but apparently the gift, paid for by a whip-round among Cabinet ministers, was suggested by the Queen’s aides. And, as Pickles (again) defended: “One can never have too many table mats”.

After her Downing Street visit, the Queen crossed Whitehall on foot with William Hague - her 22nd Foreign Secretary - to his Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Not to be outdone by his Cabinet colleagues, Hague then presented his sovereign with a gift the size of about 6.6 billion table mats.

He said: “As a mark of this country’s gratitude to the Queen for her service, we are naming a part of the British Antarctic Territory in her honour as ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’ […] The British Antarctic Territory is a unique and important member of the network of fourteen UK Overseas Territories [12]. To be able to recognise the UK’s commitment to Antarctica with a permanent association with Her Majesty is a great honour”.

The Queen was presented with a stone prised from the frozen wastes that constitute her newest territory, roughly equal to the southern third of the British Antarctic Territory (BAT).

The BAT is situated south of 60˚S latitude and between 20˚W and 80˚W longitude, with those two meridians converging on the South Pole to give the territory its pizza-slice shape. It includes a handful of islands and the Antarctic Peninsula as well as the deep-frozen interior. Measuring 1.7 million km2 (660,000 sq. mi), the BAT is the largest of Britain’s overseas territories, but arguably also its least substantial. As may be gleaned from its main sources of income: a tax on the research scientists in the territory, and the sale of postage stamps.

[. . .]

This year wasn’t just the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, it was also the 30th anniversary of the short, sharp war between both countries over a group of islands north of the BAT, and east of Patagonia, Argentina’s Deep South. To the British, and those countries that recognise their claim to the islands these are the Falklands, while the Argentines, and those that support their claim know them as the Malvinas.

The naming of Queen Elizabeth Land prompted Argentina’s Foreign Ministry to lodge a formal complaint with British ambassador John Freeman in Buenos Aires, expressing their country’s "firmest rejection of the recently announced pretension of the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of naming an area of the Argentine Antarctic sector". As far as the Argentines are concerned, the naming is a reflection of "anachronistic [British] imperialist ambitions that hark back to ancient practices", an infringement of the spirit of the Antarctic treaty - and clearly linked to the fight over the Falklands/Malvinas. The previous slight to Buenos Aires regional ambitions was the posting, last March, of Prince William to the Falklands in his role as RAF search-and-rescue pilot.

The relationship of these sovereign states has created the scenario wherein the Crown has both a separate and a shared character[dubious – discuss], being an institution that operates separately within the jurisdiction of each Commonwealth realm, with the Queen in right of each country being a distinct legal person, acting on the advice only of the government of that state. The Crown is thus unitary through its shared character, but divided in its jurisdictional operation, meaning that in different contexts, Crown may mean the Crown as shared or the Crown in each realm considered separately.

The monarchy is therefore no longer an exclusively British institution, although it may often be called British for historical reasons, for convenience, or for political (usually republican) purposes. One Canadian constitutional scholar, Dr. Richard Toporoski, stated on this: "I am perfectly prepared to concede, even happily affirm, that the British Crown no longer exists in Canada, but that is because legal reality indicates to me that in one sense, the British Crown no longer exists in Britain: the Crown transcends Britain just as much as it does Canada. One can therefore speak of 'the British Crown' or 'the Canadian Crown' or indeed the 'Barbadian' or 'Tuvaluan' Crown, but what one will mean by the term is the Crown acting or expressing itself within the context of that particular jurisdiction". Expressing this concept, through the proclamation of Elizabeth II's new titles in 1952, in each realm the Queen is known by the title appropriate for that realm; for example, in Barbados she is known as "Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Barbados," or, simply, the Queen of Barbados.

As a consequence of this relationship, as per the preamble to the Statute of Westminster, any alterations to the line of succession to the throne must be approved by the parliaments of all the realms in order to guarantee continuity of a single monarch.[14] For example, there have been suggestions of removing the religious requirements from the Act of Settlement, which currently defines the succession.[15] In practice, since each realm is a sovereign state, this requires the voluntary cooperation of all 16 of the countries. Alternatively, a realm could choose to end its participation in the shared monarchy.

[. . .]

Though the Queen's constitutional position is virtually identical in each realm, she lives in the United Kingdom. Consequently, the constitutional duties she personally exercises as Queen of the UK are in other realms generally performed by a Governor-General, who serves as her representative. The extent to which these duties are explicitly assigned to the Governor-General, rather than the Queen, varies from realm to realm, but the Queen does act personally in right of any of her other realms when required, for example when issuing Letters Patent, or on occasions of significant political importance. Similarly, the monarch usually performs ceremonial duties in the Commonwealth realms to mark historically significant events during visits at least once every five or six years, meaning she is present in a number of her realms outside the UK every other year, or on behalf of those realms abroad. She is also represented at various ceremonial events throughout all the realms by other members of the Royal Family, such as the Queen's children, grandchildren or cousin, who also reside in the United Kingdom, but act on behalf of the government of the particular realm they're in; meaning the Royal Family also has both a unitary and divided nature. The other realms may receive two to three such visits each year.