[NEWS] Ten Window on Eurasia links

• What will become of the Azerbaijani language in education in Iran? More here.
• Is a Russia-Belarus state union feasible? More here.
• Is Estonia, as some would have it, a viable model for the Finnic Mordvin peoples of the Russian interior? More here.
• Will Russia be happy with its alliance with China if this makes it a secondary partner, a relatively weaker exporter of resources? More here.
• How many Muslims are there in Moscow, and what import does the controversy over their numbers carry? More here.
• Is the Russian fertility rate set to stagnate, leading to long-term sharp decline? More here.
• If 10% of the Russian working-age population has emigrated, this has serious consequences for the future of Russia. More here.
• Irredentism in Kazakhstan, inspired by the example of Crimea, is just starting to be a thing. More here.
• The decline of Russian populations in the north of Kazakhstan, and the growth of Uzbeks, is noteworthy. More here.
• The different Russian proposals for the future of the Donbas, an analyst notes, are built to keep Ukraine a neutral country. More here.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes a study suggesting the Milky Way Galaxy took many of its current satellite galaxies from another, smaller one.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks of the importance of having dreams.
• Centauri Dreams shares a study explaining how the debris polluting the atmospheres of white dwarfs reveals much about exoplanet chemistry.
• D-Brief notes that the intense radiation of Jupiter would not destroy potential traces of subsurface life on the surface of Europa.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the strange musical career of Vader Abraham, fan of the Smurfs and of the Weepuls.
• Aneesa Bodiat at JSTOR Daily writes about how the early Muslim woman of Haajar inspires her as a Muslim.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how an influx of American guns destabilizes Mexico.
• The LRB Blog looks at the American abandonment of the Kurds of Syria.
• Marginal Revolution notes how many mass protests are driven by consumer complaints.
• The NYR Daily has an interview with EU chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, on the future of sovereignty.
• Strange Company looks at the Dead Pig War between the US and the UK on San Juan Island in 1859.
• Towleroad features the defense of Frank Ocean of his PrEP+ club night and the release of his new music.
• Understanding Society looks at the sociology of norms.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia and Ukraine each have an interest in the Donbass being a frozen conflict.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the weird masculinity of the pink jock.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Winnipeg, Vancouver, Stockholm, Vienna, Mariupol

• The salvaging and restoration of the Fortune Block in downtown Winnipeg is a victory indeed for preservationists. CBC reports.
• One hopes that Vancouver manages to settle on a plan for revitalizing its West End beaches. Global News reports
• Guardian Cities suggests that Stockholm has done a good job of keeping a proper work-life balance for its residents.
• Guardian Cities reports on the specific contributions of women to modern Vienna.
• Open Democracy reported before the Ukraine elections from the Donbas front line city of Mariupol, seeing how exhausted the locals were.

[DM] Some links: immigration, cities, small towns, French Canada, Eurasia, China, Brexit, music

Another links post is up over at Demography Matters!

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.
• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.
• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)
• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick’s Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.
• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I’m skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city’s population is of Muslim background.
• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I’m inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.
• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.
• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: New York City, Lisbon, Lagos, Donetsk and Luhansk, Hong Kong

• CityLab looks at the sheer density of the Marvel universe in New York City.
• CityLab reports on how the Portuguese capital of Lisbon is suffering a rash of thefts of its iconic tiles.
• A series of private movie screenings in Lagos are explored in CityLab, as a way of building community.
• Open Democracy takes a look at how the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the occupied Donbas, are now being run.
• Guardian Cities reports on how urban explorers and photographers in Hong Kong are trying to archive images of their changing city.

[DM] Some news links: public art, history, marriage, diaspora, assimilation

Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.

• CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
• JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
• Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
• Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
• VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family’s earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)

[NEWS] Five links from around the world: Montenegro, Donbas, Warmbier, IKEA in India, futures

• This Open Democracy article examines how, exactly, Montenegro could start a Third World War. (It would need help from the Great Powers, for starters.)
• Politico Europe notes that wildlife seems to thrive on the depopulated front line in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas.
• Doug Bock Clark writes at GQ about the sad story of Otto Warmbier, finding much evidence to confirm that he was not tortured but rather that he suffered a sadder fate.
• The New York Times takes a look at the first IKEA in India, still recognizably an IKEA but tailored to fit local conditions.
• Douglas Rushkoff writes at The Guardian about the blind alleys of nihilism and fear that at least some corporate futurists and transhumanists are racing into.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about what goes into her creation of comfortable outdoor spaces. (I approve of the inclusion of blue; green is also nice.)
• D-Brief notes that the strong stellar winds of TRAPPIST-1 means that the outermost worlds are best suited to retain their atmospheres and host Earth-like environments.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that Russia has shown video of its latest crop of doomsday weapons.
• Joe. My. God. notes the duet of a German astronaut on board the ISS with Kraftwerk.
• JSTOR Daily considers if fear of race mixing, and of venereal disease, were important factors in the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in 1833.
• Language Log notes differential censorship in China aimed at minority languages, using some books to be shipped from Inner Mongolia as an example.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that Russian support for Trump was less a well-thought plan and more a desperate gamble with unpredictable and largely negative consequences for Russia.
• The LRB Blog notes the perception by Proust of time as a dimension.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how the Apollo missions helped clear up the mystery of the origins of the Moon.
• Window on Eurasia notes how the Donbas republics are inching away from Ukraine by seeking associations with adjacent Russian regions.

[NEWS] Five notes about frontiers: South Tyrol, Brexit, Alps, eastern Ukraine, Djibouti

• Alessio Colonelli takes issue with the granting of a right to Austrian citizenship to only select residents of South Tyrol, over at Open Democracy.
• Immigration to the United Kingdom may be falling, Bloomberg reports, but this is not to the advantage of the British economy.
• Migrants trying to travel from Italy to France are unwittingly risking the terrible snow-bound conditions of the Alps. The National Post has the story.
• Bloomberg View suggests one way forward for peace in eastern Ukraine. I’m not sure, frankly, that this is a plausible path (that there are any, even).
• Politico Europe takes a look at the exceptional strategic importance of Djibouti for militaries around the world, the US and China included.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about a week of her life as a freelance writer, highlighting so much of her work relates to social connections as opposed to actual writing.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas shares an astonishingly prescient take by E.B. White on the power of television from 1938.
• Hornet Stories notes the efforts of the Indonesian government to get the Google Play Store there to block 70 apps used by LGBT people.
• At In a State of Migration, Lyman Stone looks at demographic trends in Hawaii, the other major insular possession of the United States. Low fertility and a high cost of living may actually lead to population decline there, too, in the foreseeable future.
• Joe. My. God. notes the death, at 59, of trailblazing gay comedian Bob Smith.
• JSTOR Daily links/u> to a paper noting how Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Uprising played a critical role in shaping post-war Jewish identity.
• Towleroad notes the announcement of an astonishingly preserved 1945 film clip showing gay men, out, at a pool party in 1945 Missouri.
• Window on Eurasia notes one prominent Donbas separatists’ push for an aggressive response to the Ukrainian government over the collapse of Minsk, including an attempt to reclaim the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts from Kyiv.