• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait evaluates the doability of Elon Musk's proposal for colonizing Mars.
• blogTO notes that Casa Loma will be transformed into a haunted house for the month of October.
• The Dragon's Tales notes NASA's belief that Europa almost certainly has watery plumes.
• False Steps shares an early American proposal for a lunar base.
• Far Outliers ( Read more... )

Friend of the blog Jussi Jalonen recently noted on Facebook that the Turkish shootdown of a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on the Turkish-Syrian border, the pilots successfully escaping in parachutes only to be shot dead by Syrian Turkmen Brigades in Syria, underlines the complexities.

The Syrian Turkmen are a substantial ethnic minority, apparently ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that you can now LARP at Casa Loma.
• Centauri Dreams notes the odd reddish marks on the surface of Saturn's moon Tethys.
• Crooked Timber takes issue with David Frum's misrepresentation of an article on Mediterranean migration.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the discovery of the aurora of a nearby brown dwarf.
• The Dragon's Tales notes evidence of ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the heavy level of pollution in Toronto Harbour following recent rains, and suggests Toronto is set to get gigabit Internet speeds.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her recent vacation in Donegal.
• Centauri Dreams revisits Robert L. Forward's Starwisp probe.
• Crooked Timber speculates that there is hope for rapid action on ( Read more... )

Michael Petrou of MacLean's notes the relative success of the Islamic State in finding recruits in Kosovo.

An April report by the Kosovo Center for Security Studies (KCSS) reveals that as of January, some 232 Kosovars have joined Islamist militant groups in Syria and Iraq, a rate of 125 recruits for every one million people living in the country. ( Read more... )

Writing in Al-Monitor, Ben Caspit speculates that Israel might well intervene in Syria on behalf of the Druze minority in the south of the country, adjoining Israel and with a substantial population of co-religionists inside the Jewish nation-state.

While Israel is gearing up for the “day after Assad,” without knowing what that day without ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Donna Abu-Nasr looks at the various strategies used by Muslims in Berlin to prevent disaffected young people from going off to join ISIS. Engagement, it seems, is key.

Security services say it’s crucial that imams and Muslim families help combat extremism in a way they can’t, even if that means they are blamed inside their communities ( Read more... )

I have a brief post up at Demography Matters ruminating on the expansionof Jollibee international ly as a marker of the growth of Filipino diaspora populations.

This Toronto Star article by Manisha Krishnam makes for grim reading, especially since the neighbourhood of Parkdale is one of the few downtown (or near-downtown) neighbourhoods still affordable for low-income people. The effect on Toronto's Tibetan-Canadian community is also noteworthy.

Property manager Akelius Canada applied to increase the rent ( Read more... )

New York Magazine's Adrian Chen takes a look at the phenomenon described in the title. The goat heads may, or may not, have connections to any number of Latin American and Caribbean folk religions. Chen's engrossing investigation on the ground is fascinating journalistic ethnography.

At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn ( Read more... )