[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul features a photo essay made by Evan Panagopoulos in the course of a hurried three-hour visit to the Socialist Modernist and modern highlights of 20th century Kiev architecture.
• Bad Astrronomer Phil Plait notes how the latest planet found in the Kepler-47 circumbinary system evokes Tatooine.
• Centauri Dreams looks at tide and radiation, and their impacts on potential habitability, in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
• Citizen Science Salon looks at how the TV show Cyberchase can help get young people interested in science and math.
• Crooked Timber mourns historian David Brion Davis.
• The Crux looks at how the HMS Challenger pioneered the study of the deeps of the oceans, with that ship’s survey of the Mariana Trench.
• D-Brief looks at how a snowball chamber using supercooled water can be used to hunt for dark matter.
• Earther shares photos of the heartbreaking and artificial devastation of the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil.
• Gizmodo shares a beautiful Hubble photograph of the southern Crab Nebula.
• Information is Beautiful shares a reworked version of the Julia Galef illustration of the San Francisco area meme space.
• io9 notes that, fresh from being Thor, Jane Foster is set to become a Valkyrie in a new comic.
• JSTOR Daily explains the Victorian fondness for leeches, in medicine and in popular culture.
• Language Hat links to an interview with linguist Amina Mettouchi, a specialist in Berber languages.
• Language Log shares the report of a one-time Jewish refugee on changing language use in Shanghai, in the 1940s and now.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the horror of self-appointed militias capturing supposed undocumented migrants in the southwestern US.
• Marginal Revolution reports on the circumstances in which volunteer militaries can outperform conscript militaries.
• At the NYR Daily, Christopher Benfey reports on the surprisingly intense connection between bees and mourning.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw, responding to Israel Folau, considers free expression and employment.
• The Planetary Society Blog shares a guest post from Barney Magrath on the surprisingly cheap adaptations needed to make an iPhone suitable for astrophotography.
• Peter Rukavina reports on the hotly-contested PEI provincial election of 1966.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what the discovery of helium hydride actually means.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little praises the Jill Lepore US history These Truths for its comprehensiveness.
• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing divergences in demographics between different post-Soviet countries.
• Arnold Zwicky starts with another Peeps creation and moves on from there.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• D-Brief notes the first-ever use of Einsteinian gravitational bending to examine the mass of a star.
• Language Log announces the start of an investigation into the evolving rhetoric of Donald Trump. Something is up.
• The LRB Blog reports from Tuareg Agadez in Niger, about rebellions and migrant-smuggling.
• Marginal Revolution wonders what is the rationale for the extreme cut-off imposed on Qatar.
• Maximos62 wonders about the impact of Indonesia’s fires on not just wildlife but indigenous peoples.
• Personal Reflections notes the irrelevance of the United States’ withdrawal from Paris, at least from an Australian position.
• Savage Minds points to a new anthropology podcast.
• Window on Eurasia notes anti-immigrant sentiment in Moscow and reports on the use of Russia’s anti-extremism laws against Protestants.

[LINK] “Timbuktu’s slaves liberated as Islamists flee”

Sudarsan Raghavan’s article in The Washington Post from Timbuktu is the first article I’ve seen taking a look at the aftermath of Tuareg slavery in the Sahel, especially in the aftermath of the fighting in Mali.

Across this sand-swept city, hundreds of modern-day slaves are experiencing a sense of liberation, many for the first time. Nearly all the lighter-skinned Tuaregs and Arab Moors who for generations exploited them have fled the city, fearing reprisal attacks for supporting supporting the Islamists or the Tuareg separatists whose rebellion helped ignite the Islamist takeover of Mali’s north last year.

“Under the Islamists, blacks were exploited even more by the pink-skinned people,” said Roukiatou Cisse, a social worker with Temedt, a human rights group, referring to the Tuaregs and Arab Moors. “They told them, ‘We are with the Islamists. We are in power. We are the masters and you are our slaves. We will do what we want.’ ”

“Now, the slaves have profited by the pink-skinned people leaving.”

The jubilation underscores how deeply divided Mali’s northern communities became during the 10-month rule of the Islamists, who included homegrown jihadists, such as the Tuaregs and Arab Moors, as well as foreigners with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terror network’s West and North Africa branch. A French-led military intervention that began in January ousted the Islamists from towns in the north, though a guerrilla war continues.

Under the Islamists, many Tuaregs and Arab Moors took advantage of their shared ethnic backgrounds with the jihadists and asserted themselves over their black neighbors. The widened rift between the communities could take years, if not decades, to close, residents say.

“It’s a very deep wound that could prove difficult to heal. It could fester for 10, 20, even 30 years,” said Salem Ould Elhadje, 73, a local historian, who has written four books about Timbuktu. “One side no longer trusts the other side.”