• Bloomberg notes Saudi Arabia's efforts to cut Iran off from trade with its neighoburs, looks at how population growth in London will outpace--and be different from--population change in the rest of the United Kingdom, and reports on the plight of child labourers in Indonesia's tobacco fields.
• Bloomberg View argues Uber is no match for mass transit ( Read more... )

• Bloomberg notes Petrobras' dismissal of rumours it is threatened by the impeachment, observes that many Europeans expect a chain reaction of departures if the United Kingdom leaves, notes that a return to high economic growth in Israel will require including the Palestinian minority, and
  looks at Panamanian efforts to convince the world that the ( Read more... )

This Al Jazeera article looking at the enslavement of Southeast Asians in the Thai fisheries is depressing.

Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA's supply chains ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that graffiti artists around the world, including in Toronto, are promoting Justin Bieber's new album.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly likes pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's book about flight.
• Centauri Dreams notes one possibility for a Europa sample mission.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes simulations which suggest spiral arms in circumstellar disks ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that John Tory supports the decriminalization of marijuana.
• The Dragon's Gaze considers if there might be a hot Jupiter orbiting a pulsating star.
• The Dragon's Tales wonders if multicellularity in cyanobacteria three billion years ago helped drive the Great Oxidation Event.
• Far Outliers notes the 1878 introduction of football to Burma.
• A ( Read more... )

Nathan Vanderklippe's article in The Globe and Mail looks at how the so-called white elephant has become a vital element in statecraft in mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in Burma but also in Thailand.

White elephants hold power by virtue of a history possibly rooted in Vedic Hinduism, dating back more than two millennia, “where Indra, the ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers old friends.
• Centauri Dreams considers the search for extraterrestrial civilizations using infrared astronomy, concentrating on Dyson spheres and the like.
• The Dragon's Gaze has two links to papers looking at unusual brown dwarfs.
• The Dragon's Tales reports on the flora of late Permian Antarctica.
• Language ( Read more... )

National Geographic's Hereward Holland describes how an age-old history of cooperation between dolphins and Burmese fishers is being undermined by new destructive fishing techniques.

On a pale blue dawn on the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar (Burma), Maung Lay crouched at the front of his canoe, rapping the gunwale with a short stick. He then made a ( Read more... )

CNBC's Nyshka Chandran suggests that the Greater Mekong Subregion, uniting southwesternmost China with mainland Southeast Asia, may become a major manufacturing region as Chinese wages rise while the region integrates. It might be worth considering this in the context of China's potential emergence as an immigration destination, with Southeast ( Read more... )

Margie Mason and Robin McDowell's Associated Press article tracing the flight of two siblings--Rohinghya, Muslims persecuted in Burma--across Southeast Asia is compelling and terribly sad.

The relief the two children felt after making it safely away from land quickly faded. Their small boat was packed with 63 people, including 14 children and 10 ( Read more... )