A Bit More Detail

• Marginal Revolution considers if the CFA franc system is dying out, here.


• Marginal Revolution shares a link to a paper quantifying the effects of the old boys club, here.


• Marginal Revolution contrasts and compares the old NAFTA and the new USMCA, here.


• Marginal Revolution notes how Germany has access to nuclear weapons, here.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the high rate of consainguineous marriage in Saudi Arabia, here.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares a video of the expansion of supernova remnant Cas A.


• James Bow shares an alternate history Toronto transit map from his new novel The Night Girl.


• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes the Boris Johnson coup.


• The Crux notes a flawed study claiming that some plants had a recognizable intelligence.


• D-Brief notes the mysterious absorbers in the clouds of Venus. Are they life?


• Dangerous Minds shares, apropos of nothing, the Jah Wabbles song "A Very British Coup."


• Cody Delistraty looks at bullfighting.


• Dead Things notes the discovery of stone tools sixteen thousand years old in Idaho which are evidence of the first humans in the Americas.


• io9 features an interview with authors Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz on worldbuilding.


• Joe. My. God. notes that a bill in Thailand to establish civil unions is nearing approval.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how using plastic in road construction can reduce pollution in oceans.


• Language Log looks to see if some police in Hong Kong are speaking Cantonese or Putonghua.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the perplexing ramblings and--generously--inaccuracy of Joe Biden.


• The LRB Blog asks why the United Kingdom is involved in the Yemen war, with Saudi Arabia.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the different efforts aiming to map the fires of Amazonia.


• Marginal Revolution reports on how some southern US communities, perhaps because they lack other sources of income, depend heavily on fines.


• The NYR Daily looks at the complex literary career of Louisa May Alcott, writing for all sorts of markets.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the apparently sincere belief of Stalin, based on new documents, that in 1934 he faced a threat from the Soviet army.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at fixings, or fixins, as the case may be.

• Centauri Dreams takes a look at how new technology makes access to deep-sky astronomical images easier than ever, allowing for the recovery of more data.


• The Crux considers the factors that make humans so inclined to believe in the existence of god and the supernatural, including our pattern-recognition skills.


• D-Brief sharesa the latest research into the origins of the atmospheric haze of Titan.


• Todd Schoepflin at the Everyday Sociology Blog has an intriguing post performing ethnography on the fans of the Buffalo Bills.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alexander Harrowell notes one thing to take from the elections in Bavaria is the remarkable strength of the Greens, nearing the CDU/CSU nationally.


• io9 shares the delightful Alien-themed maternity photos of a British Columbia couple.


• JSTOR Daily looks at contesting visions of motherhood among American feminists in the 1960s and 1970s.


• Language Hat reports on "The Midnight Court", a poem written in the 19th century in a now-extinct dialect of Irish.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes one astounding possible defense of Saudi Arabia faced with Jamal Khashoggi, that his death was accidental.


• Christine Gordon Manley shares with her readers her words and her photos of Newfoundland's dramatic Signal Hill.


• The NYR Daily shares the witness of Käthe Kollwitz to the end of the First World War and the German Empire in 1918-1919.


• Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society Blog criticizes First Man for not showing the excitement of Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on one woman's search for the Korean cornbread remembered by her mother as a Korean War refugee.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares images of some of the most distant objects in the universe images by us so far.


• Strange Company expands upon the interesting life of early modern English travel writer Thomas Coryat, who indeed does deserve more attention.


• Window on Eurasia wonders where protests in Ingushetia regarding border changes with Chechnya are going.


• Arnold Zwicky explores the fable of the forest that identified too closely with the wooden handle of an ax.

• The albatross of France's sub-Antarctic Kerguelen Islands are facing pressure, alas. CNRS reports.


• The New Yorker takes a look at Koks, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Faroes that takes rare advantage of local food.


• The Chinese island-province of Hainan might be trying to position itself as an international tourism destination, but restrictions on the Internet continue. Quartz reports.


• Is a bare majority of the Kuril Islands' population is of Ukrainian background? Window on Eurasia suggests it may be so.


• The intensity of the desire of Saudi Arabia's government to literally make Qatar an island through canal construction worries me, frankly. VOX reports.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the real possibility that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua may have been ejected from the system of a dying star.


• Centauri Dreams notes new efforts to determine brown dwarf demographics.


• Crooked Timber shares some research on the rise and fall of Keynesianism after the financial crisis.


• Hornet Stories shares a decidedly NSFW article about gay sex in Berlin.


• JSTOR Daily notes the surprisingly high frequency of interspecies sex in the wild.


• Language Hat notes new efforts to promote the status of the Luxembourgish language in the grand duchy.


• The LRB Blog notes how a chess tournament hosted in Saudi Arabia has failed badly from the PR perspective.


• What role does the novelist have in a world where the television serial is moving in on the territory of literature? The NYR Daily considers.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on John Lyons' book Balcony over Jerusalem, the controversy over the book, and the Middle East generally.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the ominous import of the decent drone attack in Syria against Russian forces.


• Drew Rowsome praises the 2016 play Mustard, currently playing again at the Tarragon, as a modern-day classic.


• Spacing features a review of a fantastic-sounding book about the architecture of Las Vegas.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the impact of the very rapid rotation of pulsars about their very shape.

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross bets that barring catastrophe, the US under Trump will dispatch crewed circumlunar flights.


• D-Brief takes a look at the evolution of birds, through speculation on how the beak formed.


• Language Log looks at the ways Trump is represented, and mocked, in the languages of East Asia.


• Noting the death toll in a Mexico City sweatshop, Lawyers, Guns and Money reiterates that sweatshops are dangerous places to work.


• The NYR Daily notes the many structural issues likely to prevent foreign-imposed fixes in Afghanistan.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports from a seemingly unlikely date festival held in the depths of the Saudi desert.


• Rocky Planet reports that Mount Agung, a volcano in Indonesia, is at risk of imminent eruption.


• Drew Rowsome notes a new stage adaptation in Toronto of the Hitchcock classic, North by Northwest.


• Strange Company reports on how the Lonergans disappeared in 1998 in a dive off the Great Barrier Reef. What happened to them?


• Towleroad notes how Chelsea Manning was just banned from entering Canada.


• Window on Eurasia claims that the Russian language is disappearing from Armenia.


• Arnold Zwicky maps the usage of "faggot" as an obscenity in the United States.

The United States is a leading destination for students from all over the world, with international student enrollment at public and private U.S. institutions totaling more than 1 million young people in 2015-16, according to the Institute of International Education, with roughly one-third of them coming from China and Iranians well outside the top 10 places of origin.

Hengameh, a mother of two in Tehran, told RFE/RL via Telegram she was offended by the U.S. decision. "I don't have plans to travel to America, but I know many who have relatives there. This will make things harder for them," she said, adding that obtaining a U.S. visa is already difficult for Iranians.

[. . .]

"The adoption of this [executive order] and similar laws will hurt only the Iranian people, and it won't have any impact on the travels of government [officials] to America," a comment on Radio Farda's Facebook page said.

"It's clear that [Trump] doesn't have a proper understanding of terrorists. Most of them are from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other countries," another comment said.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who used passenger jets to carry out coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, were from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network blamed for the attack, was a Saudi citizen.

“Tiran and Sanafir islands are still Egyptian, and the Egyptian flag still flies above them.” This surprising statement was made by the Egyptian government’s lawyer during an Oct. 18 court session in which Cairo was appealing the April 21 verdict of Egypt’s administrative court that annulled the maritime borders agreement signed between Cairo and Riyadh earlier this year. The latter agreement, which led to widespread public outrage, effectively transferred ownership of the two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

The statement of the government’s lawyer, whereby he recognized that the islands are Egyptian territories, has sparked widespread criticism within Egypt’s political and judicial circles in the past few days. This coincided with the ongoing disagreements between Cairo and Riyadh about the intervention in the Syrian war and the decision of Saudi Aramco to stop oil supplies to Egypt in October, which threatens harmony and coordination in relations between the two countries.

An official in the Council of Ministers told Al-Monitor, “The government represented by the prime minister signed the maritime borders agreement, whereby the islands of Tiran and Sanafir would be transferred to Saudi Arabia. The government’s decision was based on the deliberations of a specialized committee that studied the issue at the political, topographical, engineering and historical levels.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, went on, “The government, however, is bound to commit to the judiciary’s decision should the appeal against the ownership of the two islands be overruled. Parliament has to consider another matter and has yet to vote on the agreement. All these procedures would delay the transfer of the islands, and therefore they remain thus far under Egypt’s sovereignty.”

• Bloomberg looks at what Gawker's bankruptcy means.


• Bloomberg View notes that Saudi Arabia's reform plans are too timid.

The Inter Press Service looks at misogynistic dress codes in Somaliland.

• Open Democracy compares the Greek and British referenda on Europe.


• Transitions Online looks at impending Russian parliamentary elections.


• Universe Today reports on confirmation that the Antikythera Mechanism was an astronomical computer.


• Wired looks at one police force that welcomes body cams.

• Bloomberg observes Iran's boycott of the hajj and Iranian hopes for relatively strong economic growth this year, looks at the impact of Middle Eastern economic decline on Thai hospitals, and notes the absence of IKEA from Ukraine.


• CBC notes retesting has revealed eight Russian athletes who used banned substances at the London Olympics.


• Foreign Policy looks at the human-caused Sidoarjo mud volcano in Indonesia.


• MacLean's notes a push in Montréal for a memorial to Irish immigrants killed by typhus.


• The National Post notes that Sun Life will stop treating pot users as smokers and start treating them as users of medicine.


• Open Democracy is critical of Iran's open-ended military objectives in Syria, given their human toll.


• Spiegel investigates Russia's support of the Euroskeptic AfD party.