[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy notes a new detailed study suggesting that asteroid Hygeia is round. Does this mean it is a dwarf planet?
• The Buzz notes that the Toronto Public Library has a free booklet on the birds of Toronto available at its branches.
• Crooked Timber looks forward to a future, thanks to Trump, without the World Trade Organization.
• D-Brief notes how the kelp forests off California were hurt by unseasonal heat and disease.
• Bruce Dorminey notes an impending collision of supergalactic clusters.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how judgement can complicate collective action.
• Language Hat looks at the different definitions of the word “mobile”.

Language Log looks at the deep influence of the Persian language upon Marathi.

Marathi and Persian

• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how, if anything, climate scientists make conservative claims about their predictions.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if planned power outages are a good way to deal with the threat of wildfires in California.
• The NYR Daily looks at the ethnic cleansing being enabled by Turkey in Kurdish Syria.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews archeologist Arthur Lin about his use of space-based technologies to discovery traces of the past.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer looks at the staggering inequality in Chile, driver of the recent protests.
• At Roads and Kingdoms, Anthony Elghossain reports from the scene of the mass protests in Lebanon.
• Drew Rowsome tells how his balcony garden fared this year.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at stellar generations in the universe. (Our sun is a third-generation star.)
• Strange Company looks at the murder of a girl five years old in Indiana in 1898. Was the neighbor boy twelve years old accused of the crime the culprit?
• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine takes a look at social mobility in France.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little considers economic historians and their study of capitalism.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the pro-Russian policies of the Moldova enclave of Gagauzia, and draws recommendations for Ukraine re: the Donbas.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.
• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.
• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft–made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.
• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.
• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.
• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.
• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.
• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.
• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.
• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

[CAT] Five cat links: Port Hope, napping, cats vs. rats, Persian leopards, Gornick and Lessing

• The small Ontario town of Port Hope has a cat café now, the Toe Beans Cat Caf○, open six days a week and housing cats looking for new homes. Global News reports.
• This story of a Wisconsin man, a senior citizen, who comes in to a cat shelter to play and nap with the cats, is adorable. Global News reports.
• Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic notes a new study in New York City that has found that city’s stray cats seem not to hunt adult rats. The rats are, simply, too big.
• Erica Gies at The Crux describes the struggle to protect the Persian leopard of the Zagros Mountains, in the heart of divided Kurdistan.
• Over at the NYR Daily, Vivian Gornick considers, in the light of the writings of Doris Lessing, her experiences living with cats. What sorts of beings are they? What do they think? How accurately do we observe them?

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Toronto Fast Food, Presto, Toronto Days, photos, history

• Toronto Fast Food is apparently a thriving emerging restaurant chain in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil. Daily Hive reports.
• The TTC has suspended the installation of new Presto gates on account of widespread and apparently systemic flaws with their technology. Amazing. The Toronto Star reports.
• Shawn Micallef writes about Toronto Days, a marvelous exhibit of vintage photos taken in the Toronto of the 1980s and the 1990s, over at the Toronto Star.
• This NOW Toronto feature contrasting some of the oldest photos taken of the Toronto skyline with photos taken at those locations in our era shows the scale of our city’s growth.
• Elizabeth Berks and Richard Longley write at NOW Toronto about how, at the dawn of photography, Toronto was not only a much smaller city than it is now but a much narrower one, too.

[PHOTO] Eight photos of the Kurdish march on Yonge, Toronto, against Turkey in Afrin (#defendafrin)

The ongoing Turkish invasion of Afrin, westernmost of the three cantons of the autonomous Kurdish area in Syria commonly known as Rojava, just produced visible results in Toronto. As I got out at Wellesley station a bit before 6 o’clock, I heard a crowd marching down Yonge. I crossed the street, and prepared to photograph.

I was given a handout with the letterhead of the Democratic Kurdish Federation of Canada denouncing the inaction of outside powers–the West and Russia, specifically–in doing nothing to undermine the Turkish invasion of a self-governing Kurdish area. I accepted the handout, and kept it. I agree almost entirely with the sentiment, sharing the anger of people frustrated with yet another Turkish invasion of a self-governing Kurdish area outside its frontiers, feeling frustrated that a Turkish-Kurdish alliance once might think the most natural one possible in the MIddle East is being thwarted by Turkey run by people who betrayed their government’s liberal promise at the century’s beginning. I stood, and watched, because there was nothing else I could do but witness justified anger and share it.

(Certainly this group has links with radical Kurdish groups internationally. The last photo in this series shows a yellow flag flapped into a blur by the wind. When unfurled, the flag had on it a clear portrait of Abdullah Öcalan above a slogan demanding his release.)

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO considers some of the spendthrift things a millionaire could do in Toronto.
• James Bow remembers his 9/11 experience.
• Crasstalk features an essay by a New Yorker reflecting on her 9/11.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog reflects on how white power and white powerlessness can co-exist.
• Language Hat shares one book’s evaluation of Neapolitan dialect.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes one evaluation of Neapolitan.
• Otto Pohl notes how Kurdish history is less ethnically complex but more politically complex than Ghana’s.
• Towleroad notes the death of trans actress Alexis Arquette.
• Window on Eurasia describes Russia as, I would say, quasi-Bonapartist.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes that Suspect Video is liquidating its stock.
• James Bow likes a portable USB adaptor.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to an analysis of the spectrum of a Luhman 16 brown dwarf.
• Language Log notes Sino-Western characters.
• The Map Room Blog reports on a Twitter bot that randomly generates maps of fantasy settings.
• Maximos62 notes the terrible pollution produced by the Indonesian forest burning.
• Otto Pohl reports from Kurdistan.
• Torontoist shares a photo of a graffiti alley near Trinity Bellwoods.
• Window on Eurasia reports on current trends in Russian migration from Kazakhstan.
• Arnold Zwicky describes the female gaze of the paintings of men done by Sylvia Sleigh.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• News of Proxima Centauri b spread across the blogosphere yesterday, to Discover‘s D-Brief and Crux, to Joe. My. God., to the Planetary Society Blog, and to Centauri Dreams and The Dragon’s Gaze.
• blogTO notes the impending opening of Toronto’s first Uniqlo and suggests TTC buses may soon have a new colour scheme.
• The Dragon’s Gaze discusses detecting exo-Titans and looks at the Kepler-539 system.
• Marginal Revolution notes Poland’s pension obligations.
• The Map Room Blog looks at how empty maps are of use to colonialists.
• Steve Munro examines traffic on King Street.
• The NYR Daily looks at what an attic of ephemera reveals about early Islam.
• Otto Pohl announces his arrival in Kurdistan.
• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia note that more than half of Russia’s medal-winners at the Olympics were not ethnically Russian, at least not wholly.
• Window on Eurasia looks at Ukraine’s balance sheet 25 years after independence and considers if Belarus is on the way to becoming the next Ukraine.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes that Toronto’s old City Hall may yet become a shopping mall once the courts move out.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes that worlds without plate tectonics are doomed to stop being habitable, and looks at different kinds of cosmic ray environments.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the Iranian buildup in Syria.
• A Fistful of Euros has a reading list for Jeremy Corbyn.
• Otto Pohl talks about the historic role of German minorities in Africa and Asia.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of the Middle East’s Kurdish populations.
• Spacing Toronto looks at campus safety in the age of threatening tweets.
• Towleroad notes Michael Sam stating he could have had a better NFL career had he not come out.
• Transit Toronto notes the TTC has taken its tenth new streetcar into service.
• The Volokh Conspiracy looks at intersections between assisted suicide and religious liberty.
• Window on Eurasia notes controversy in Belarus over a Russian military base and looks at Circassians in Syria.

[LINK] “Vice journalists jailed in Turkey on terror charges”

Al Jazeera America reports on the arrest of two Vice News journalists and their translator in Turkey.

Two British journalists working for Vice News and an Iraqi fixer were arrested in Turkey’s southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Monday, accused of “engaging in terror activity” on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The journalists were detained late last week while reporting from a city in Turkey’s mostly Kurdish southeast. They were there to cover renewed fighting between the security forces and Kurdish rebels has killed scores of people.

A fourth suspect, their driver, was allowed to go free Monday.

The three have been taken to a jail in Diyarbakir ahead of an eventual trial. There were no further details over the evidence of their alleged links to ISIL.

The Toronto Star has more.

British journalists Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury and their Turkish translator were detained on Thursday while reporting from Diyarbakir, a city at the heart of deadly clashes between security forces and Kurdish rebels.

Kevin Sutcliffe, head of news programming in Europe, called the charges “baseless and alarmingly false.”
Hanrahan and Pendlebury were filming a documentary about police clashes with the pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

A court official said the court in Diyarbakir ordered the three arrested on Monday. It wasn’t immediately clear which organization the journalists are accused of aiding.

“Today, the Turkish government has leveled baseless and alarmingly false charges of ‘working on behalf of a terrorist organization’ against three Vice News reporters, in an attempt to intimidate and censor their coverage,” Sutcliffe said in a statement published on Vice’s website on Monday.