A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer reports on Kepler-90, now known to have eight planets.


• Centauri Dreams notes a model suggesting low-mass worlds like Mars do not stay very habitable for long at all around red dwarf stars.


• Citizen Science Salon notes how Puerto Ricans are monitoring water quality on their own after Hurricane Maria.


• The Crux notes how climate change played a role in the fall of Rome. We know more about our environment than the Romans did, but we are not much less vulnerable.


• D-Brief notes a feature film that has just been made about Ötzi, the man who body was famously found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps five thousand years ago.


• Daily JSTOR notes how a postage stamp featuring an erupting volcano may have kept Nicaragua from hosting an inter-oceanic canal of its own.


• Hornet Stories reports on some exciting queer musicians.


• Language Hat links to an online dictionary of French slang from the 19th century.


• Language Hat has a post dealing with some controversy created on its author's perspective on "they" as a singular pronoun. (Language changes, that's all I have to say on that.)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a pretty wrong-headed take from a right-wing news source on sexuality and dating and flirting. Gack.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how the recent Kepler-90 press release shows how Kepler has reached the limit of the exoplanet science it can do. We need to put better technology at work.


• At Whatever, John Scalzi has some interesting non-spoiler thoughts about the direction of The Last Jedi. I must see this, soon.


• Window on Eurasia features a blithe dismissal by Putin of the idea that there is language or ethnic conflict at work. Tatars just need to learn Russian, apparently, though they can also keep Tatar as an extra.

• Bloomberg notes Petrobras' dismissal of rumours it is threatened by the impeachment, observes that many Europeans expect a chain reaction of departures if the United Kingdom leaves, notes that a return to high economic growth in Israel will require including the Palestinian minority, and
  looks at Panamanian efforts to convince the world that the country is not a tax haven.


• The Globe and Mail remembers Mi'kMaq teacher Elsie Basque, and looks at how Mongolia is trying to adapt to the new economy.


• Bloomberg View states the obvious, noting that an expected event is not a wild swan.


• CBC notes Rachel Notley's tour of Fort McMurray.


• The Inter Press Service notes the denial of everything about the Rohingya.


• MacLean's looks at further confusion in Brazil.


• Open Democracy notes a push for land reform in Paraguay and looks at the devastation of Scotland's Labour Party.


• Wired notes the dependence of intelligence agencies on Twitter, proved by Twitter shutting an intermediary down.

When the new locks of the expanded Panama Canal begin operations, they will do so amidst numerous challenges, because of the storm clouds hanging over the global economy, especially China. But local authorities and experts are not worried about the possible impact on the expanded canal.

The slowdown in the Chinese economy, the second largest client of the Panama Canal, transporting 48.42 million tons in 2015, is one of the factors causing concern regarding this motor of the Panamanian economy, which last grew six percent, the highest rate in Latin America.

But the start of operations of the expanded canal, due in May or June, does not worry Luis Ferreira, spokesman for the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an autonomous government agency.

“When there were economic problems in the past, we would lose basically two to three percent of the cargo; the same thing might happen this time, but we don’t expect a substantial decrease, unless there is an all-out recession in China,” he said in an interview with IPS.

[. . .]

The expansion of the 80-km canal, which turned 100 years old in 2014 and which handles approximately five percent of global trade, involved an investment of 5.25 billion dollars. Work began on Sep. 3, 2007.

With this megaproject, carried out by Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC), the consortium led by Spanish construction firm Sacyr, Panama hopes to increase daily ship traffic from 35- 40 to 48-51.

Last year was one most of Latin America would rather forget. The region trailed the world in economic growth, led on inflation, and posted the highest fiscal deficit after the Middle East and North Africa, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

So two cheers for Panama. The fastest-growing economy in the Americas expanded by almost 6 percent in 2015, compared with a nearly 1 percent drop for Latin America as a whole, and it will likely repeat that performance this year, according to the World Bank.

Cue the applause for the expanded Panama Canal, which -- by the time the overhaul is finished, expected to be later this year -- will double shipping capacity and allow for much larger container ships to traverse the waterway, consolidating the country's historical role as an entrepot for the global economy. The anticipated knock-on effects already have studded this slender country of 4 million people with skyscrapers and grand public-works projects.

The breakneck pace of the project, which began in 2007, has come at a price. Bribery, graft and dirty politics are all too common in Latin America, but a noxious combination of the three has dogged the Central American dynamo in what ought to be its finest hour. And unless Panama can shake the curse, its glory may prove fleeting.

Nicholas Suchecki Guillén is blind. His dream was to visit the Panama Canal expansion works, touch the cement structures, and feel part of this new period of history in his country.

The 11-year-old stood on the third set of locks in Cocolí, near the Pacific Ocean. He had the privilege of forming part of the last group allowed to visit the complex before the flooding started – a long process that on this side began on Jun. 22.

Like Nicholas, many Panamanians visited the new locks free of charge on tours promoted by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), the agency that has run the canal since it was handed back to this country by the United States in 1999.

“I feel proud to see what we have done,” engineer Luis Ferreira, spokesman for the ACP, told IPS. “When the first locks were built, 222 Panamanians participated. On this occasion, 36,276 Panamanians took part.”

The expansion also represents a promise of economic growth. “The canal’s contributions to the state coffers amounted to more than nine billion dollars between 2000 and 2014. With the new locks, they could climb to three billion dollars a year,” Ferreira said.

[The Panama-Colombia border is] one of the only international frontiers without a pliable road across it. The 225km boundary, stretching from the Caribbean coast through dense mountainous jungle and swamps to the Pacific Ocean, has no formal crossings for people or cargo.

Foreigners require prior permission from Senafront - Panama's border police - to access the neighbouring province of Darién, and any visitor must navigate numerous security checkpoints heading in and out.

People still traverse the frontier: smugglers, paramilitaries, undocumented migrants, as well as indigenous people who call the region home. Its remote nature and chronic insecurity suits many of their needs.

Increasing numbers of undocumented migrants, from as far away as South Asia and Africa, are traversing through the region. They arrive in South American countries and risk their lives on this perilous path, invariably headed to the United States.

The movement of drugs, rebels, and North America-bound migrants is stretching the resources of Darién - and residents' patience.

"The people are trying to build a wall against these pressures," said Ivan Lay, 64, the provincial director in Panama's interior ministry, through a translator. "But the avalanche is powerful."

Leonardo Zambranok left Venezuela in 2011 to take a marketing job with Procter & Gamble (PG) in Panama. Watching the latest wave of violent protests back home, Zambranok thinks he made the right choice. “Everyone said I was making a big mistake,” says Zambranok, 27. “Now it’s more insecure than ever, and you’re starting to see young people want to move away like crazy.”

An exodus that began under Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez has continued under President Nicolás Maduro, who vowed to extend his predecessor’s socialist policies after winning election a year ago. Panama has emerged as a primary destination: Last year, 233,921 Venezuelans entered the country, up from about 147,000 in 2010. They’re mostly young, middle-class job seekers driven by their country’s shortage of basic goods, quickening inflation, and antigovernment demonstrations that have claimed at least 41 lives since February.

With close cultural ties, more open immigration laws, and plentiful jobs, Panama City, the capital, has dozens of Venezuelan-run restaurants, yoga studios, and bakeries. Cable TV packages include Globovisión, historically an antigovernment Venezuelan channel.

At pickup soccer games in the capital, Zambranok says the talk is about hardships at home and opportunities in Panama. “Our culture is about relationships, where you know a guy who knows a guy who can help you,” Zambranok says. He shows a photo of a friend, taken amid recent food shortages, standing in front of mayonnaise jars at a Caracas supermarket. “This is big news when you can get mayonnaise. It’s absurd.”

[. . .]

Wedged between Colombia and Costa Rica, Panama has lured workers with economic growth that has averaged about 9 percent per year since 2008. Unemployment is 4.1 percent, a record low. A $5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal, scheduled for completion in late 2015, will create more jobs and has prompted investments in banks, mining, and real estate, including a new Hard Rock hotel. “We’ve had to open up our immigration policy to attract more skilled labor,” says Panama Finance Minister Frank De Lima.

Panama’s immigration agency recently announced it had legalized about 50,000 foreign workers since 2010 in a series of open registrations. Of the 5,072 foreign workers approved in April, 603 were Venezuelan, the fourth-highest after immigrants from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.

• io9 links to a map showing the Milky Way Galaxy's location in nearer intergalactic space.


• The Big Picture has pictures from the Sochi Paralympics.


• blogTO shares an array of pictures from Toronto in the 1980s.


• D-Brief notes the recent finding that star HR 5171A is one of the largest stars discovered, a massive yellow hypergiant visible to the naked eye despite being twenty thousand light-years away.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes recent studies suggesting that M-class red dwarfs are almost guaranteed to have planets.


• Eastern Approaches argues that the lawsuits of Serbia and Croatia posed against each other on charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice will do little but cause harm.


• Far Outliers explores how Australian colonists in the late 19th century feared German ambitions in New Guinea.


• The Financial Times World blog suggests that, in its mendacity, Russia is behaving in Crimea much as the Soviet Union did in Lithuania in 1990.


• Geocurrents notes that the Belarusian language seems to be nearing extinction, displaced by Russian in Belarus (and Polish to some extent, too).


• Joe. My. God. notes the protests of tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in New York City against mandatory conscription laws in Israel that would see their co-sectarians do service.


• Marginal Revolution notes that, in pre-Israeli Palestine, local Arabs wanted to be part of a greater Syria.Otto Pohl notes the connections of Crimean Tatars to a wider Turkic world and their fear that a Russian Crimea might see their persecution.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that Venezuela has attacked Panama in retaliation for a vote against it by confiscating the assets of its companies there. In turn, Panama has promised to reveal the banking accounts of Venezuelan officials in Panama.


• John Scalzi of Whatever is unimpressed with the cultic adoration of Robert Heinlein's novels by some science fiction fans.

• Discover Magazine blog The Crux argues that rising rates of autism are an artifact of better diagnostics, not of an actual rising prevalence.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell notes how Friedrich von Hayek's prized capitalism above freedom, famously approving of Chile's Pinochet.


• Geocurrents describes plans for new canals crossing the Central American isthmus, on the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border, to supplement the Panama Canal.


• The Global Sociology Blog examines the work of sociologist David Harvey on monopoly rent, noting how capitalism's imperatives to establish a unified economy are at least troubled by the need to maintain local distinctiveness--brands, neighbourhoods, cities--which offers opponents a chance to challenge the established order.


• Language Hat links (and discusses) the work of linguist William Labov, who managed to define to a remarkable degree the mechanics of language change--who, what, when, where, maybe even why--in a community.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín criticizes the assumptions of Nicholas Kristof in his rescue of sex workers. (Are they really underage? Could this be the best alternative for them? Et cetera.) Diffcult, engagement-worthy stuff.


• Slap Upside the Head notes that a half-baked challenge to New York's same-sex marriage law based on the mechanics of meetings and whether or not they should be open was rejected. Good.