• blogTO shares the new face of the Broadview Hotel.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the joys of the unscreened life.
• Dead Things reports on a study suggesting that although humans are violent by the standards of mammals, we are among the least violent primates.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the discovery of five sizable planets orbiting ( Read more... )

• Antipope's Charlie Stross fears the arrival of fascism in Britain after the murder of Jo Cox.
• Centauri Dreams reports on SDSSJ1043+0855, a white dwarf apparently consuming a rocky planet.
• The Crux notes discussion of terraforming Mars.
• The Dragon's Tales notes the revealing result of a study of the crops that ancient Indonesians brought to Madagascar.
• ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that Québec chain Simons will be opening up stories in Toronto and Mississauga in the coming years.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly notes that The Devil Wears Prada actually offers good advice to job-seekers.
• Centauri Dreams notes a search program for planets at Proxima Centauri and considers Proxima's linkage to the Alpha Centauri A- ( Read more... )

I've some links up at Demography Matters, reporting on some interesting migration-related news articles.

Al Jazeera America's Alia Mazek has an extended study of two Algerian emigrant sisters, one ending up in the United States and the other in France, and their contrasting experiences.

Both were part of a diaspora, and they had landed in places quite different. France and the U.S. were unalike in many ways - in their attitudes toward racial and ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams looks at how the inability to make contact with the long-departed ISEE-3 probe offers hints as to the problems with long-duration spaceflight.
• The Dragon's Gaze considers Beta Pictoris' planets, one paper considering the orbit of Beta Pictoris b and another wondering if the identified planet might in fact be massive dust clouds from ( Read more... )

This morning as I was riding the subway to work, I read of one Canadian convert to Islam turned, a Nova Scotian-born Calgary resident born Damian Claremont who just died in Syria.

A 22-year-old Canadian-born Muslim convert who left Calgary for Syria in November 2012 has been killed by Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces during rebel infighting, CBC News ( Read more... )

This is somewhat surprising news. (The CBC's Greg Weston did the report.)

CBC News has learned that two Canadians linked to al-Qaeda and killed while staging a bloody attack on an Algerian gas refinery earlier this year were former high school friends in their early 20s, one from a Greek Orthodox family, and both from a comfortable middle-class ( Read more... )

David Ljunggren's Reuters article notes the contretemps brewing between Algeria and Canada as the latter demands evidence for the claim that Canadian citizens were involved in the hostage-taking ( Read more... )

This Canadian Press report carried by the Vancouver Sun may have significant ramifications. I'll be looking for followups.

The Islamist militants who attacked a natural gas plant in the Sahara included two Canadians and a team of explosives experts who had memorized the layout of the sprawling complex and were ready to blow the place sky-high, ( Read more... )