[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Fredericton, Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Riga

• The city of Fredericton hopes a new strategy to attracting international migration to the New Brunswick capital will help its grow its population by 25 thousand. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities notes the controversy in Amsterdam as users of moped find themselves being pushed from using bike lanes.
• Guardian Cities looks at how many in Athens think the city might do well to unbury the rivers covered under concrete and construction in the second half of the 20th century.
• The Sagrada Familia, after more than 130 years of construction, has finally received a permit for construction from Barcelona city authorities. Global News reports.
• Evan Gershkovich at the Moscow Times reports on how the recent ousting of the mayor of the Latvian capital of Riga for corruption is also seem through a lens of ethnic conflict.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven Toronto links: High Park, rent, Sri Lanka, vertical farm, Zizek vs Peterson

• The cherry blossoms of High Park are expected to start blooming earlier than expected, perhaps reaching peak bloom in a week’s time. blogTO reports.
• blogTO notes that someone was trying to rent out a bed in an occupied apartment for a rent of $C 600 a month.
• A Toronto Star investigation reveals the prominence of ghost hotels, enabled by Airbnb, in making the rental housing market that much more difficult.
• At NOW Toronto, Liam Barrington-Bush considers what renters in Toronto can learn from their activist counterparts in Berlin and Barcelona.
• Aparita Bhandari wrote at The Discourse about how Sri Lankans living in Scarborough responded to the recent terrible bombings.
• blogTO writes about the new vertical farm set to be built at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus.
• The VICE account of the debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson reveals much.

[NEWS] Five links on politics: 2020 US, Middle East, Spain, Turkey, Latin America

• New York Magazine is quite right to note that a 2020 reelection of Donald Trump would be a catastrophe for, among others, Democrats.
• Iran and Turkey are the obvious winners from the disarray in Iraq, among other Middle Eastern countries. Open Democracy reports.
• The Spanish situation is deteriorating, between the growth of separatism in Catalonia and far-right populism elsewhere. Open Democracy reports.
• Is Latin America a region adrift in the world? Open Democracy reports.
• Ozy notes the rapid growth of the influence of Turkey, culturally and politically, in Latin America.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New York City, Atlanta, Barcelona, Copenhagen

• Montréal may yet get a new park to commemorate victims of the Irish famine of the 1840s. CTV reports.
• CityLab reports on the new spectacular Hudson Yards development in Manhattan.
• The nightclubs of Atlanta in the 1990s played a critical role in that decade’s hip-hop. VICE reports.
• CityLab reports that, dealing with a housing crisis, city authorities in Barcelona have taken to finding the owners of empty buildings.
• Guardian Cities reports on how civic authorities in Copenhagen hope to create an offshore archipelago, a sort of floating Silicon Valley.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New York City, Atlanta, Barcelona, Verona

• Huffington Post Québec notes that the iconic Silo no 5 on the Montréal waterfront is now the subject of a redevelopment bid.
• Emily Raboteau writes in the NYR Daily about life in the metropolis of New York City as it faces the threats of climate change.
• CityLab remembers Lightning, the African-American neighbourhood of Atlanta displaced by the construction of the stadium where the Superbowl is now playing.
• CityLab looks at the reasons behind a surge of petty crime in Barcelona.
• Claudia Torrisi writes< at Open Democracy about the growing strength of the neo-traditionalist right in the northern Italian city of Verona.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Wasaga Beach, Montréal, Barcelona, Narva, Luanda

• The question of how to develop, or redevelop, the Georgian Bay resort town of Wasaga Beach is ever-pressing. Global News reports.
• Le Devoir enters the discussion over the Royalmount development, arguing that the city of Montréal needs to fight urban sprawl.
• Guardian Cities reports on the efforts of Barcelona to keep its street kiosks, home to a thriving culture, alive in the digital age.
• The New York Times reports on how the government of Estonia is trying to use pop culture to help bind the Russophone-majority city of Narva into the country.
• This Guardian Cities photo essay takes a look at how the Angolan capital of Luanda, after a long economic boom driven by oil, is rich but terribly unequal.

[NEWS] Five cultural links: astronauts learning Chinese, hitchhiking, Catalonia, Croatia, Georgia

• The BBC reports on how astronauts from Europe are starting to learn Chinese, the better to interacting with future fellow travelers.
• MacLean’s takes a look at the practical disappearance of hitchhiking as a mode of travel in Canada, from its heights in the 1970s. (No surprise, I think, on safety grounds alone.)
• PRI notes the practical disappearance of the quintessentially Spanish bullfight in Catalonia, driven by national identity and by animal-rights sentiment.
• Transitions Online notes how the strong performance of Croatia at the World Cup, making it to the finals, was welcomed by most people in the former Yugoslavia.
• Open Democracy notes how tensions between liberal and conservative views on popular culture and public life are becoming political in post-Soviet Georgia.

[NEWS] Five language links: Macedonian, Inuktitut, Afrikaans, Slavic languages, Catalan

• The Conversation takes a look at the fierce repression faced by the Macedonian language in early 20th century Greece.
• Creating an Inuktitut word for marijuana is a surprisingly controversial task. The Toronto Star reports.
• The representation of non-whites in the Afrikaans language community–the majority population of Afrikaans speakers, actually, despite racism–is a continuing issue. The Christian Science Monitor reports.
• Far Outliers considers the question of just how many different Slavic languages there actually are. Where are boundaries drawn?
• The Catalan language remains widely spoken by ten million people in Europe, but outside of Catalonia proper–especially in French Roussillon–usage is declining.

[NEWS] Five politics links: Patrick Brown and Ontario, NDP and abortion, First Nations, Franco, EU

• Arshy Mann at Daily Xtra notes that the fall of moderate Patrick Brown might embolden social conservatives in the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
• CBC notes the belated clarification of the NDP that its opposition to federal government requirements for NGOs offering summer jobs does not mean it is reneging on support for abortion rights.
• The Nisenan tribe of California had recognition of their native status stripped by the federal government in the 1960s, and they want it back. VICE reports.
• The dead of the Spanish Civil War are at last being extricated from their graves in Catalonia. This is a cause for political controversy. CBC reports.
• Rapid economic growth in the new, post-Communist, member-states of the European Union is starting to translate into growing political heft, Politico Europe notes.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about her love for New York’s famous, dynamic, Hudson River.
• Centauri Dreams notes the amazing potential for pulsar navigation to provide almost absolutely reliable guidance across the space of at least a galaxy.
• Far Outliers notes the massive scale of German losses in France after the Normandy invasion.
• Hornet Stories looks at the latest on theories as to the origin of homosexuality.
• Joe. My. God remembers Dr. Mathilde Krim, dead this week at 91, one of the early medical heroes of HIV/AIDS in New York City.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at what, exactly, is K-POP.
• Language Log notes that, in Xinjiang, the Chinese government has opted to repress education in the Mongolian language.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that the risk of war in Korea is less than the media suggests.
• At Chronicle’s Lingua Franca, Ben Yagoda looks at redundancy in writing styles.
• The NYR Daily looks at the complex relationship of French publishing house Gallimard to Céline and his Naziphile anti-Semitism.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the latest images of Venus from Japan’s Akatsuki probe.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes the apparent willingness of Trump to use a wall with Mexico–tariffs, particularly–to pay for the wall.
• Spacing reviews a new book examining destination architecture.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what I think is a plausible concept: Could be that there are plenty of aliens out there and we are just missing them?
• At Strange Maps, Frank Jacobs shares a map of “Tabarnia”, the region of Catalonia around Barcelona that is skeptical of Catalonian separatism and is being positioned half-seriously as another secessionist entity.
• Window on Eurasia notes that an actively used language is hardly the only mechanism by which a separatist identity can exist.