A Bit More Detail

• The school boards of London, it turns out, will now fund a play that features a gay student's struggle to bring his date to a prom. CBC reports.


• A woman from Cameroon claims--credibly, I think--that she will face persecution on the grounds of her sexual orientation if she is deported back to her homeland from British Columbia. Global News reports.


• VICE reports on how one man is now finding acceptance and even welcome for people of colour in the leather scene, looking at his experiences in the recent Mid-Atlantic Leather weekend.


• Katya Myachina reports on one documentary photographer's efforts to document LGBTQ life in the Russian-dominated exclave of Transnistria, and the effect these photos and their display have had, over at Open Democracy.


• The Jakarta Post notes that, while Indonesians are willing to accept their LGBTQ fellow citizens as citizens, they are strongly opposed to their exercise of civil and human rights.

Transnistria certainly needs a shoulder to lean on. A clampdown on the transit of excisable goods, launched last March by Ukraine and enthusiastically taken up by Saakashvili, is severely restricting a trade on which its economy has long relied.

Moreover, the authorities cut pensions by 30 percent in February, promising to return what’s owed once the economic crisis abates. That has led to a daily crowd of mostly elderly people gathering outside the city’s Russian consulate, hoping to access higher pensions under a newly expedited procedure for Russian citizenship.

In the line are also some working-age people looking to leave. Among them is Andrian Braga, who at 23 decided to move to Moscow with his wife and two-year-old daughter. “Things are bad, but they always have been. The fact that everyone’s leaving is nothing new,” he said, standing outside the consulate clutching his daughter’s new Russian passport.

The region has always struggled. Since separating from Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, it’s also been dependent on Moscow’s aid. Heavily subsidized Russian gas has provided a lifeline, saddling Transnistria with a $5 billion debt that would fall on Chisinau if the territory were reabsorbed. Trolleybuses course through central Tiraspol, decorated with pictures of beaming pensioners and the words “Into the future together with Russia!” Like dozens of big-ticket items dotted throughout the region — from modern hospitals to construction cranes — the vehicles bear the logo of their sponsor: Moscow-based non-profit “Eurasian Integration,” founded in 2012 by Russian MP and leader of nationalist party Rodina, Alexey Zhuravlev.

Locals praise Moscow’s projects for providing much-needed jobs, while many young men see conscription into the Russian Army’s regional force as the only chance for a secure job at home. Uniformed soldiers are a common sight in Tiraspol, congregating outside army bases or along the vast perimeter of the former Soviet aerodrome that now lies decaying on its outskirts.

• The Dragon's Gaze notes that while red dwarfs host giant planets less frequently than more massive stars, they don't do so that much more frequently.


• Eastern Approaches notes concerns with the Czech Republic's legislation on banning extremist ads, which may have targeted a Euroskeptic party.


• The Financial Times's World blog notes North Korea's self-defeating propaganda, regularly invoking stereotypes or racisms that are problematic in the outside world.


• Joe. My. God. takes a look at out NFL football player Michael Sam's boyfriend, former swimmer Vito Cammisano.


• Marginal Revolution notes the internal Chinese cultural distinctions between northern wheat-eaters and southern rice-eaters.


• Strange Maps looks at a redrawing of the borders of the world based on the mathemetical theories of Georgy Voronoy.


• Window on Eurasia notes the fragile nature of the Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire, and warns that if Moldova joins the European Union Transnistria will join with Russia.

• Eastern Approaches follows the story of Crimean Tatars who are now refugees in western Ukraine.


• At the Financial Times' The World blog, John Reed examines the unlikely media star who is Crimean attorney-general Natalia Poklonskaya.


• A Fistful of Euros' David Weman notes the United Nations vote against the annexation of Crimea by Russia.


• Geocurrents has a series of posts on Ukraine and its area: one on the Moldovan region of Transnistria, a possible western anchor for Russia; one on Transcarpathia, a Ruthene-populated enclave in western Ukraine not quite Ukrainian; one on Ukraine's energy reserves.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley notes the Russian takeover of the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet ships based in Crimea.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh points out the many, many ways in which Kosovo does not compare to Crimea.


• Window on Eurasia has a veritable brace of posts. Crimeans aren't taking up Russian passports with much enthusiasm, it seems, while the financial costs of annexation will be significant indeed. A Russian war in southeastern Ukraine would be a difficult war to fight, while post-Soviet space has already been destabilized (1, 2). Will South Ossetia be next to be annexed? (Northern California is not so likely.) Meanwhile, Turkish support for Turkic peoples can be destabilizing.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little takes a social science approach to the Russian annexation. What does it mean for the international system's future? Will there be more annexations?

Links between business, politics and crime in the former USSR began to surface in the second half of the 1980s, at the same time as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev liberalised the economy. Crime exploded in three regions of Ukraine – Crimea, Donetsk and Odesa – where there were huge profits to be made from trade, tourism, property and the export of raw materials. During this legal vacuum, and at a time of the disintegration of one state (USSR) and a yet-to-be-built Ukraine, individuals such as Yanukovych, Aksyonov and their Donetsk and Crimean allies literally fought their way to the top. Those who survived the bloodshed, by the late 1990s were already attempting to transform themselves into biznesmeni.


Serhiy Taruta was appointed Donetsk governor by Kyiv’s then revolutionary leaders because although co-director of the Industrial Union of Donbas, he had never joined the Party of Regions, and supported the pro-Western opposition. In 2010, Yulia Tymosenko’s election headquarters were located in Kyiv’s Hyatt Hotel that he owns.

A cable from the US Embassy in Kyiv reported that Taruta had dismissed the whole Donetsk-Regions group, saying 'they are all looters’, which, as clearly seen in the massive asset and budget stripping that occurred under Yanukovych. Former National Security and Defence Council Secretary Volodymyr Horbulin told US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst that the Party of Regions was 'notable for its inclusion of criminal and anti-democracy figures.' Another cable described the Party of Regions as, 'long a haven for DONETSK-based mobsters and oligarchs,' led by 'DONETSK CLAN godfather Rinat Akhmetov.' 
Akhmetov, who has close business ties to Yanukovych going back to the 1990s, backed him to the ignominious end, and has issued timid statements during the Maidan protests and Crimean invasion.

The Party of Regions elected organised crime leaders to the Ukrainian and Crimean parliaments and local government. In the March 2006 elections to the Crimean parliament and local councils, hundreds of candidates who had 'problems with the law,' according to then Interior Minister Lutsenko, ran in the election blocs ‘For Union!’ and ‘For Yanukovych!’

Many of these candidates were, like Aksyonov, members of the Seilem organised crime gang, such as its leader Aleksandr Melnyk who was elected in the ‘For Yanukovych!’ bloc. Yanukovych reportedly told a Party of Regions deputy who criticized this alliance with organised crime that, 'I take responsibility for him (Melnyk);' 

and Prime Minister Yanukovych asked Police Chief Lutsenko to not touch 'my Sasha' (Melnyk).

The corrupt Prosecutor-General’s office assisted in protecting these ties between politics, business and crime. Former Deputy Prosecutor-General Renat Kuzmin ensured Melnyk evaded justice, after the Party of Regions lobbied the prosecutor’s office not to press charges. Lutsenko said, 'Having all the evidence connecting the (Seilem) gang to murders' Kuzmin 'releases the man who Yanukovych shelters, the head of an organised crime gang.' Lutsenko told the US Embassy in Kyiv that the Seilem organised crime gang had been responsible in the 1990s for 52 contract murders, including one journalist, two police officers, 30 businessmen and 15 organised crime competitors.

• 'Aqoul's Shaheen touches on the famous case of a Muslim woman in France who was divorced because she wasn't a virgin and points out that the divorce was gramted on the well-established grounds of marrying under false pretenses. Worry might instead be profitably directed towards the misogyny inherent in the assumption that women must be virgins to be moral.


• blogTo has easily convinced me of my need to go to Mars at the Ontario Science Centre. Now,.


• Castrovalva argues that it makes more sense to see the Communism of Brecht as not akin to (say) the Naziism of Riefenstahl but rather as the relatively incidental fascism of France's Céline?


• Centauri Dreams lets us know that the Milky Way Galaxy might have only two arms instead of the expected four, and that quark stars might be exploding throughout.


• Far Outliers' Joel critiques Anne Applebaum's general assault upon blogs and Wikipedia, by asking whether the mainstream media--like, say, The New Republic that published Applebaum's article--is really that much more accurate and unbiased, or more accurate and unbiased at all.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros blogs about a possible solution to the Moldova-Transnistria standoff, while Will at The Dragon's Tales touches upon the tricky situation of Abkhazia and Russia and Georgia.


• Gideon Rachmann worries that Obama might not win.


• Via Joe.My.God comes the video "Dads, I'm Straight".


• Language Hat considers obscenities in the multilingual Soviet army, with special emphasis on Chechens faced with the Russian language.
  
• Spacing.ca argues that the TTC shouldn't be concerned with drunk or drugged drivers, but rather with racist and otherwise impolite booth attendants.


• Strange Maps has an abundance of goodness, including a map of United Germanic States covering most of Europe in alliance wit Britain and the United States, a map of the lost rivers of London, and a lunatic plan by a long-forgotten American on what the world should look like after the Second World War.


• John Reilly at The Long View has a fascinating post about the relationships of empire to culture and of both to the longue durée and the future of human civilization. I still have to think on it.