• Bag News Notes comments on one of the iconic photos of the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath, of an elderly man on the ground in front of three cops. It turns out that the man, a jogger, ended up coming second in his age class.
• Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes that migration and economic development are quite compatible, even emigration--migrating ( Read more... )

Barrie McKenna's Globe and Mail article discussing what seems to be growing discussion in Iceland about replacing the Icelandic króna with the Canadian dollar has gone viral across my Facebook feed ( Read more... )

This Geocurrents post outlines the interesting situation of the peculiar Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Briefly, the islands can be described as almost Norwegian.

Svalbard, about the size of Sri Lanka or Tasmania, is [. . .] notable for its geopolitical anomalies. The coal-rich archipelago came to Norway through the Svalbard Treaty of 1920. The ( Read more... )

I've almost cleared out my backlog.

• AFP reports that the Inuit are upset that they've not been included as participants in an upcoming conference of Arctic foreign ministers.
• The Toronto Star announces that despite recent regulations limiting the number of bars in the neighbourhood, Ossington Avenue's art scene is still going.
• Wired speculates on ( Read more... )

Over at the National Post, Don Martin recently wrote about how the Mackenzie valley pipeline, something that would transfer natural gas from the fields of the frigid Mackenzie delta south to North American consumers and in so doing jumpstart the local economy, seems to have been dismissed yet again for not the first time in forty years. This time, ( Read more... )

The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders this past Saturday wrote about Canada's push to get its Arctic territorial claims recognized.

This new assertiveness has caught European and Russian officials off guard as Ottawa pushes to fend off attempts by other northern powers and the European Union to claim stakes in the Northwest Passage and the open seas ( Read more... )

From this Monday's The Globe and Mail comes Steven Chase's article "Military showed little enthusiasm in Arctic sovereignty patrol, report says".

The Canadian Forces have come under fire in an internal report highly critical of military leaders' lack of interest in an Arctic sovereignty protection exercise last August ( Read more... )