• Africa is a Country looks at how Ethiopians interpret the 1966 visit of Haile Selassie to Jamaica.
• The Building Blog depicts how a California town is literally being visibly distorted by seismic forces.
• Bloomberg considers the import of Beyoncé's debut of Lemonade on Tidal.
• Bloomberg View notes how the China-Venezuela money-for-oil pact is failing and ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera America's Steve Friess reports on conflict between Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims in the Detroit area on the location of a mosque in a Christian neighbourhood, a conflict rooted in past conflicts.

The nation’s largest concentration of Iraqi Christians, many driven from their homeland by persecution at the hands of Muslim groups, ( Read more... )

Open Democracy's Gary Kent writes about the issues likely to face a separatist Kurdistan.

Baghdad's obstinacy is also driving independence but Kurdistan is landlocked and many are wary of putting all their eggs in the Turkish basket, which once prompted former KRG Prime Minister Barham Salih to argue for three export routes through Iraq, Turkey ( Read more... )

I've been sitting on Banen Al-Sheemary's Open Democracy essay from March, talking about conflict and prejudice in the very diverse Arab community in the Michigan city of Dearborn, for some time. Conflicts between different groups, like the Lebanese who have accumulated the most social capital and various refugee groups which fare poorly, are sad ( Read more... )

An interesting discussion on Facebook was started when someone shared a New York Times op-ed, "Let Syrians Settle Detroit" by David D. Laitin and Marc Jahrmay. The idea is provocative, but--I think--sound.

Detroit, a once great city, has become an urban vacuum. Its population has fallen to around 700,000 from nearly 1.9 million in 1950. The city ( Read more... )

• blogTO examines the nature of Toronto's abundant consumption of electricity.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study of the atmosphere of Wasp 80b.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that Russian rocket manufacturer Energomash may go out of business as a result not of sanctions but of threatened sanctions.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money does not approve of Kenya's plan to ( Read more... )

CBC reported that Canada will be extending its participation in the multinational campaign against ISIS.

Canadian fighter jets will soon be launching airstrikes in Syria now that the House of Commons has approved the federal government's plan to expand and extend its military mission in Iraq ( Read more... )

At Al Jazeera, Miroslav Zafirov makes the reasonable point that ISIS exists substantially because of support lent to Sunni Islamic radicals under Saddam Hussein's regime. (Substantially, not entirely, not mostly.)

In 1986, at a meeting with representatives of the pan-Arab national command - the supreme ideological body of the Baath Party - Saddam ( Read more... )

National Geographic's Peter Schwartzstein reports about the dwindling isolation of the Iran-Iraq frontier, often reinforced by landmines, that helped the Persian leopard survive in this border area.

Laced with land mines and roamed by packs of dedicated poachers, it's an environment seemingly calculated to imperil even the most fleet-footed animal ( Read more... )

Writing for the Inter Press Service, Mohammed A. Salih looks at the awkward three-way relationship between Turkey, an increasingly independent Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Iraqi central government in Baghdad.

After a period of frostiness, Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Turkey seem intent on mending ties, as each of the parties show ( Read more... )