A Bit More Detail

• The different proposals for the future of McGill College Avenue in Montréal sound very interesting. Global News reports.


• Ozy reports on how Tromsø, largest city in Arctic Norway, has found new energy thanks to tourism.


• Roads and Kingdoms has some tips for visitors to the French Mediterranean city of Marseilles.


• Sean Marshall examines the question of why property taxes in the Ontario city of Brampton are so high. Can anything be done about them?


• Guardian Cities notes how the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, like much of China's old rest belt, is facing stagnant economic growth.

• In Toronto, the new Port Lands plan imagines a new island, Villiers, at the mouth of the Don.


• Brexit means, among other thing, that the EU is no longer supporting the UK on the Chagos. The Economist reports.


• VICE notes that people on Mauritius fear extensive fish farming will also boost the shark population offshore.


• The Independent notes that tides and currents have created a new sand bar-cum-island more than 1 km long off of North Carolina, Shelly Island.


• The National Post notes that sub-Arctic Vardo Island, in Norway, has moved on from its fisheries to become a NATO outpost set to watch Russia.


• Carmela Fonbuena reports for The Guardian from Thitu Island, a Filipino-occupied island uncomfortably near a Chinese base in the contested South China Sea.

• blogTO notes the 1970s, when Yonge around Queen was under reconstruction.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her writing life in New York City.


• The Crux considers: Neandertal or Neanderthal?


• Dangerous Minds notes the new Laibach app.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at evaporating hot Jupiter HD 209458b.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russia's planned reduction of its crew on the International Space Station.


• Joe. My. God. notes the reactions of the Trump camp to Hillary's alt-right speech.


• Language Hat links to a paper examining the transition from classical to modern Arabic.


• Marginal Revolution considers the economics of durable art.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at post-Soviet patterns of migration and examines the ethnic composition of Georgia circa 1926.


• Une heure de peine reports on a new French series on sociology in comic book format.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the legal question of a head transplant.


• Window on Eurasia notes the violent rivalries of the two Donbas republics and looks at a refugee-prompted restricted movement zone on Russia's frontier with Norway.

• Bloomberg looks at Argentina's push for renewable energy, reports on Rosatom's interest in developing South Africa as an entry into the African nuclear market, writes about China's opposition to anything remotely like separatism in Hong Kong, and looks at Poland's demand for an apology for Bill Clinton critical of the new government.


• Bloomberg View notes the importance of honest statistics in Brazil, and calls for American arms sales to a friendly Vietnam.


• CBC notes new Conservative support for a transgender rights bill and reports on how Ontario's climate policy will hit Alberta's natural gas exports.


• Gizmodo notes Portugal has just managed to power itself entirely on renewable energy for four days.


• The Inter Press Service describes the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.


• The National Post looks at a proposed New York State ban on declawing cats.


• Open Democracy reports on Norway's EU status via a left-leaning Norwegian, looks at the life of Daniel Berrigan, and notes the emergent Saudi-Indian alliance.


• Universe Today describes the circumstellar habitable zones of red giants.

Troms County is a sprawling region of broken coastline, labyrinthine fiords, and rugged alpine forests, situated some 700 miles (1,150 km) north of Oslo. This is the heart of Sami country, where Lapp nomads once moved their herds across vast distances to the rhythm of the seasons, oblivious to national borders. Those days are long gone. Of the estimated 100,000 Sami spread out across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, only about 10,000 still herd reindeer for a living. Reindeer meat is an important part of a herder’s diet, as well as the sole source of income for some families. For part-time herders, the animals’ meat and hides augment their earnings from other sources.

Today, reindeer herders find themselves increasingly boxed in by powerful interests competing for their traditional grazing lands. Dams, roads, live-fire military drills, high-voltage power lines, even green energy projects such as wind farms all have nibbled away at grazing territory. Of particular concern to the Sami leadership are a proposed copper mine in Finnmark County to the north and a windmill park just to the south.

So far, no single project has posed an existential threat to the herding culture of the Sami, Western Europe’s only indigenous people who inhabit the Arctic. But the cumulative impacts–a road here, a pipeline there–have reduced Norway’s undisturbed reindeer habitat by 70 percent in the past century and reshaped the way reindeer herding is done.

Technology is a double-edged sword for the Sami. On the one hand, it provides herders with the comforts of modern life–warm houses, GPS collars and smartphone apps to track their animals, snowmobiles and ATVs to round them up. On the other, the steady encroachment of industrial infrastructure has reduced their range and freedom of movement, requiring them to move herds by truck and boat between summer and winter pastures. It’s an expensive undertaking, and herders receive just a one-time payout to compensate losses when courts override their objections and approve large-scale projects.

As Norway, one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, pushes forward with plans to extract more resources and build more industry in the Arctic, Sami leaders fear their languages and culture, largely sustained by herding families, will be sacrificed to produce wealth for the larger society.

As Europe grapples with record-breaking numbers of migrants, a trickle of asylum seekers from Syria and the Mediterranean region have found an unlikely route: Through Russia to a remote Arctic border post in Norway, partly on bicycles.

Police Chief Inspector Goeran Stenseth said Monday that 151 people have crossed the border this year near the northeastern Norwegian town of Kirkenes, 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) northeast of Oslo.

He said that most of the migrants are from Syria, with some from Turkey and Ukraine, and that they mainly cross in motor vehicles although some have resorted to arriving on bicycles because the Storskog border post is not open to pedestrians, in line with a Norwegian-Russian border agreement.

"There have been about 100 during the past two months, at least 50 in July and looks like August will be much the same," he told The Associated Press. "But the conditions will be bad soon. It's getting colder by the day ... Soon no one will be able to bike, that's for sure."

The real trouble started when they stopped causing trouble. Torleif Sanchez Hammer and his friends — all residents of the same small cluster of clapboard houses in southern Norway — had been having run-ins with the police for years but then suddenly halted their marijuana-fueled gatherings in the basement apartment of Mr. Hammer’s widowed mother.

Police officers in this placid Norwegian town had busted their marijuana parties so regularly that “we knew them all on a first-name basis,” recalled Ragnar Foss, head of a local police unit responsible for youth crime. But, two years ago, they cleaned up their act. “We wondered what had happened but were glad when they dropped off our radar,” Mr. Foss said.

One by one over the following months, Mr. Hammer and at least seven other young men who lived on or around just one street, Lislebyveien, made their way to Syria to wage jihad alongside the Islamic State and other militant groups.

As Europe tries to fathom such journeys by its young Muslims, politicians and scholars have variously blamed the influence of the Internet and radical mosques, or sources of despair like discrimination and unemployment.
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But the subterranean currents that pushed so many young men to Syria from Lisleby, a Fredrikstad district of just 6,000, stand out as an example of a phenomenon none of those theories can explain: Why it is that certain towns, and even small areas within them, generate a disproportionate number of jihadists?

Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion Cdn pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas. The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

By contrast, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Fund, established in 1976 by premier Peter Lougheed, sits at only $17 billion Cdn and has been raided by governments and starved of contributions for years.

“For the last 10 years, when nothing went into the Alberta fund, and we put a lot of money aside, the profit went out of Canada," says Rolf Wiborg, a petroleum engineer who recently retired from Norway’s public service.

Wiborg, who studied at the University of Alberta and worked for a Norwegian oil company before joining Norway’s Petroleum Directorate, says the key to success has been Norway's ethos of sharing and a commitment to never waver from that goal.

“We don’t change our policies in Norway, with changes in the oil price – you can’t do that," he says. “Lougheed’s government in Alberta knew that, they made policies and then they left them behind."

Oil and gas make up 25 per cent of Norway’s GDP, so the recent plunge in oil prices should have set off alarm bells in Oslo. Thousands of workers have indeed been laid off, but parliament is not painting a dire forecast for 2015.

Japan’s government mistakenly forecast that fertility would bounce back…until 1997. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the government wised up, and realized that the fertility rate was not about to bounce back. If you look at the graph -- as many of the pundits heaping scorn on Japan’s government apparently did not -- you will see that the forecasts have been too pessimistic for more than a decade now. Fertility rates bottomed out at 1.26 children per woman in 2005, and have been rising since -- despite the sharp recession and natural disasters that happened in the meantime. The modest rise has been sustained, and the fertility rate has bounced back to 1.43 in 2013 -- a 13.5 percent rise from its low.

Now, a 13.5 percent rise isn't going to save Japan from a baby bust -- the rate would have to rise by an additional 47 percent in order to reach replacement level, the level that generates long-term population stability. Population decline has already set in, causing economic and social difficulties.

But the slight rise is encouraging, and hints that falling fertility might not be an inescapable death sentence for developed countries. Japan’s experience is part of a trend that has been appearing all across the rich world in the last few years -- fertility is rising a bit. The first study to discover this intriguing phenomenon was published in 2009 in Nature by demographers Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler and Francesco Billari. They write:

Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development–fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries.

Japan was one of the only exceptions they found. Now, it too has joined the trend. In some countries, such as France, Sweden and Norway, fertility has almost climbed back to replacement levels, after dipping far below it for decades. In the U.S., fertility briefly surged above the replacement rate for a few years before drifting back to just underneath it. And in New Zealand, fertility is now at the replacement level.