[LINK] “Brazil judicial decision paves way for gay marriage”

I first came across this via Joe. My. God., and now the BBC has caught up to that august blog.

The authorities in Brazil have ruled that marriage licenses should not be denied to same-sex couples.

The council that oversees the country’s judiciary said it was wrong for some offices just to issue civil union documents when the couple wanted full marriage certificates.

Correspondents say the decision in effect authorises gay marriage.

However full legalisation depends on approval of a bill being examined by the Congress.

Tuesday’s resolution by Brazil’s National Council of Justice was based on a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that recognised same-sex civil unions.

However, notaries public were not legally bound to converting such union into marriage when asked by gay couples.

This led to some being denied marriage certificates at certain places, but being granted the document at others. That would be illegal, according to the new resolution.

“If a notary public officer rejects a gay marriage, he could eventually face disciplinary sanctions”, NCJ judge Guilherme Calmon told BBC Brasil.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams’ recounts the story of the discovery of Proxima Centauri, the dim red dwarf star C of Alpha Centauri that happens to be the closest star beyond our solar system.
• Charlie Stross comes out in favour of the United Kingdom’s unilateral nuclear disarmament, on the grounds that there is literally no need for them in an era of smart munitions.
• The Dragon’s Tales links to new findings on the origins of Mayan civilization.
• Eastern Approaches reports on the unfortunate Boston-related confusion between the Czech Republic and Chechnya.
• Geocurrents describes the terrible history of Chechnya.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis finds rhetoric that makes the health and safety of workers anywhere a secondary concern, or grants them unrealistic degrees of autonomy versus employers, ridiculous.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer describes how a new Brazilian law giving local governments the right to tax nuclear energy may, at least judging by Japan’s experience with a similar tax, encourage nuclear reactor construction.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Stewart Baker wonders why the elder Tsarnaev brothers wasn’t searched on his return from Russia.
• Window on Eurasia describes one writer’s arguments in favour of a civic, explicitly non-ethnic, state nationalism in Russia.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Behind the Numbers’ Carl Haub notes that most of the recent fall in American fertility is a consequence of falling Mexican-American fertility, with fertility in other groups remaining stable.
• Daniel Drezner is upset that, according to its star Brad Pitt, the film version of World War Z will minimize the international politics of the anti-zombie war inasmuch as those politics made the book.
• Eastern Approaches notes ongoing tensions in Slovakia over that nation’s history of collaboration with the Nazis in the Second World War.
• At Language Log, Steven Bird links to his account of how he’s using Android tablets to record the languages of indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen thinks that Cyprus would have done better to leave the Eurozone altogether and adopt a new currency rather than stay in the Eurozone.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer is surprised that Cypriots are willing to tolerate the Euro even with the terrible costs it imposes on their economy.
• Visual Science’s Perrin Ireland documents the biosphere discovered to exist in some oceanic crustal areas.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes that, as a result of emigration, the once-large Russophone community of Tajikistan has almost entirely disappeared.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Burgh Diaspora notes that the Chinese system of internal passports, like more informal (and sometimes unauthorized) Indian sanctions against migrants, discourages the free migration necessary for economic growth.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster observes that it might be possible to discover Earth-like planets orbiting post-main sequence white dwarfs, on account of the small size of their orbits and their stars.
• Eastern Approaches notes that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych seems right in thinking that he can get away with stringing the European Union on.
• A Fistful of Euros’ Brent Whelan expects a second round of elections in Italy soon and notes that the quarter of voters choosing Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment political group have to be taken into account.
• Patrick Cain has an infographic showing how many of the countries of the world with the largest Roman Catholic populations are badly underrepresented in the College of Cardinals. (Italy has 21 cardinals and 50 million Catholics, while Brazil’s 133 million Catholics have only five.)
• Torontoist and Steve Munro both note that the TTC is testing new art and display methods for its maps and bus poles.
• Torontoist commemorates the renaming of an east-end lane street Jack Layton Way after the late NDP leader.
• Window on Eurasia reports on anxiety among the Chuvash, a Turkic people of the middle Volga region of Russia, that their ethnic identity and their autonomous republic are both being eroded by slow assimilation.

[LINK] “Pastoral Uruguay Yields a Crop of Digital Yetis and Adventures”

Noel, do you have any insights on the situation described in this New York Times article?

For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

[. . .]

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• In a recent essay, Paul Belshaw writes about the often overlooked diversity of the different groups which contributed to the founding of modern Australia, whether Aborigines, the peoples of the British Isles, or Germans.
• The Burgh Diaspora notes that, attracted by a prosperous economy back home, many Brazilian immigrants in New England are returning.
• Eastern Approaches notes a controversial event in Kosovo: the publication of a book memorializing the dead of that disputed country.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh argues that despite export success, domestic demand in Spain has collapsed sufficiently to make economic recovery impossible.
• Geocurrents maps the strong regional identities of South Korea as expressed in the vote in last year’s presidential election.
• Sociology, the Global Sociology Blog suggests, is the science of “slow violence”, of bad things happening so quietly over such a long stretch of time as to obscure their existence (or the responsibility for said).
• Language Hat links approvingly to an essayist writing about the role of women in introducing language change, like “vocal fry”.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis writes more about the desperation of New England cod fishers. It looks so familiar.
• Peter Rukavina found the first use of the word “Internet” in Prince Edward Island’s legislative assembly (April 1996, in a speech by Premier Catherine Callbeck about the province’s new website).
• Concerns about the intrusion of the Latin alphabet into Cyrillic-using areas of the former Soviet Union are present at Window on Eurasia, whether we’re talking of the spread of Latin script and local norms generally in Belarus or concerns by Kazakh writers that switching that language’s script from Cyrillic to Latin could cut off Kazakh users from their language’s extensive past.

[LINK] “Fishing With Dolphins”

Joe Roman’s Slate article details an astonishing instance of bispecies cooperation, as the humans and dolphins living around the southeastern Brazilian city of Laguna help each other fish.

Early on the morning I showed up, men were arriving on bicycles, red or green milk crates holding their nylon nets. They were deeply tanned, some in shorts, some in waders. Ivan Ferraz de Bem, in a wetsuit stretched over an ample beer belly, took a cast net out of his red dune buggy. A skull-and-crossbones flag tied to his bumper snapped in the stiff wind. Recently retired from a government job in Brasilia, he seemed to enjoy the hours by the shore––and those in the nearby bar to which he retreated when things slowed down even more.

As we watched the turbid green waters flow into the lagoon, a tall dorsal fin broke the surface, followed by a smaller one. A mother dolphin and calf swam in, the youngster staying close to its parent’s side, then headed out for rougher waters. Perhaps they found no fish or were just assessing the situation. These are wild dolphins—untrained, undomesticated—and it was clear that they run the show. When the dolphins aren’t around, one fisherman told me, it’s not worth fishing. Some gave it a try anyway, with an underhand toss into the blue. A few small fish were landed.

Another dorsal fin rose a hundred meters from the shore. “Escubi,” one man called out, recognizing the white scuff marks on the leading edge of the fin. The men broke off their chatter, dashed into the water. Thigh deep, almost motionless, they stood at the ready, a line of six, as if awaiting Escubi’s orders.

Most of the helpful dolphins have names: “Escubi” is a variant of Scooby Doo. “Filipe” is a Brazilian adaptation of Flipper. Dolphins have something like names among themselves, too—each has a signature whistle, and they recognize one another by their unique calls when they meet at sea.

Another blow broke the surface. Escubi lifted his dorsal fin, reversed course. One man splashed his net in the water, to convey where he was standing. Escubi signaled with a slap of his gray tail, then charged straight for the shore.

Dolphins can swim faster and accelerate more quickly than torpedoes, so the nearest fisherman, in an olive green rain jacket and black cap, cast his net quickly as Escubi approached. It spread like a spider web, landed on the surface, and closed below as Escubi veered to the left. As the fisherman retrieved the hand line, a large tainha, the local mullet, thrashed in the mesh.

Escubi headed out to sea. The men cleaned their fish. One tossed an anchovy to a razor-thin heron, feathers lifting like white caps in the wind.

Apparently the earliest recorded mention of this cooperation dates to the late 19th century, while dolphins migrating further south along the Brazilian coast have spread this tradition to a second community. I’d really love to know how the two species involved managed to create and sustain this unique cultural tradition.

[LINK] “Bolivia Takes the Leap into the Big Pond of Mercosur”

Inter Press Service’s Mario Osava writes about Bolivia’s interest in joining Mercosur, the South American trade bloc co-founded by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and the recently-suspended Paraguay and recently expanded to include Argentina. Politically, Mercosur seems suited for Bolivia; economically, Bolivia has a large trading deficit with its potential trading partners if natural gas is excluded. Moreover, the future of the bloc as a meaningful entity seems open to question, between Paraguay’s suspension and perennial disunity in trade talks with the European Union.

“Before Bolivia has even entered Mercosur, the bloc has already entered Bolivia, and it is doing so to a growing extent,” through bilateral trade agreements, observed Gary Rodríguez, general manager of the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE).

When natural gas, which represents 96 percent of Bolivia’s exports to Mercosur, is added to the equation, the balance is reversed, leaving Bolivia with a 1.692-billion-dollar trade surplus.

But gas exports are based on operations and agreements between national governments and do not involve the private sector, stressed Rodríguez in an interview with IPS at the IBCE headquarters in Santa Cruz, where he shares the same concerns and the same office tower with powerful business owners in the eastern Bolivian department (province) of the same name.

His greatest concern is for the future of Bolivian private companies. Last year, for example, 30 million dollars worth of shoes were imported from Brazil. In conditions like these, “we won’t be able to continue manufacturing ourselves,” said Rodríguez, who fears that the Bolivian market will be flooded with these and other goods in the event of a devaluation of the Argentine peso and Brazilian real against the dollar.

But Mercosur membership, the path chosen by the government of leftist President Evo Morales, could open up new prospects for Bolivian business owners “especially those involved in big agribusiness in eastern Bolivia,” Tullo Vigévani, a professor at Paulista State University in Brazil, told IPS.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster writes about Titan, first noting an apparent river valley flowing into the north-polar Ligeia Mare, the second reflecting on the possible subsurface oceans of that Saturnian moon.
• At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell reflects on the ignoble record of the Economist in relation to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird notes research suggesting that trees in the Amazonian rain forest have survived temperature peaks akin to those likely to be produced by global warming.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan links to a 1930 article projecting a total American population of 180 million by 1980, noting that long-range demographic projections are problematic.
• Language Log’s Victor Mair notes the problems with maintaining character fluency in Sinitic cultures like China and Japan.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer observes that Ghana has been forced by a UN tribunal to return to Argentina a naval ship held at the request of Argentian’s debtors.
• A Registan guest poster, Anvar Malikov, observes that the questions of Afghanistan will dominate policy-making in Uzbekistan.
• Via Peter Rukavina, I’ve learned that peak electricity usage on Prince Edward Island amounts to 230 megawatts.
• Understanding Society’s Paul Little notes the imprecision of the social sciences relative to the physical sciences. Is this really an enduring difference, though, or will the social sciences catch up?
• Window on Eurasia takes note of growing regionalism in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell notes how Brazil is using the Afro-Brazilian majority legacy of the transatlantic slave trade to justify the construction of new transatlantic links with Africa.
• Crooked Timber comments upon the Irish anti-abortion laws that just cost a woman her life and the homophobia of the Reagan administration that made HIV/AIDS a laughing matter.
• Daniel Drezner wonders if the ongoing expanding Petraeus scandal will end up diminishing the American public’s regard for the military.
• Eastern Approaches notes that no one in the Balkans seems to be commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the First Balkan War.
• Far Outlier’s Joel quotes from Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest to describe how Christopher Columbus was really riding on the coat-tails of Portugal’s successful long-range maritime exploration.
• Geocurrents observes efforts by some Arab Christians in the Levant to revive Aramaic.
• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Laurent Dubois’ Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, highlighting the extent to which Haiti’s catastrophes are the products of foreign meddling.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis maps Detroit. The extent to which the borders of the City of Detroit overlap with African-American majority populations, and to which the sprawl of Metro Detroit is constructed so as to detach the suburbs from any responsibility for the city at their region’s center, is noteworthy.
• The Planetary Science Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla reports on Carl Sagan’s feminism.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer summarizes what’s going on with Uruguay’s decriminalization of marijuana for personal use.