• Bloomberg notes controversy over Sanders' attendance at a Vatican conference and reports on the proposal for a bridge linking Saudi Arabia and Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba.
• Bloomberg View notes mixed evidence behind the idea that separatism can work economically, and criticizes San Francisco's family leave policy as having too much impact on ( Read more... )

The transition of Canadian broadcaster and journalist Michael Coren, from a conservative Roman Catholic commentator most notable to me for his homophobia to an Anglican who has embraced gay issues, has from my perspective been sudden and remarkable. That homophobia was actually the motive force behind his religious transformation, as he wrote on ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Dara Doyle notes, in the context of Ireland's upcoming referendum on same-sex marriage, one consequence of its economic policy aimed at becoming a business hub: Big business is interested in the outcome.

When Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny rallied support for gay marriage ahead of a referendum this month, he got a little more than the ( Read more... )

Writing for Transitions Online, Felix Corley suggests that many religious communities in Russian-occupied Crimea--particularly ones with Ukrainian or Western links--are facing quiet repression.

Almost 18 years after it was founded, a small Catholic convent in Crimea's capital, Simferopol, was forced to close down in November when its three ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that crowd-funded transit might be coming to Toronto's Beaches.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her favourite shopping experiences in Paris.
• Centauri Dreams considers the question of how to name planets.
• Crooked Timber discusses predictions for the coming year which descend into Bitcoin debates.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a ( Read more... )

• Claus Vistesen's Alpha Sources considers the arguments for thinking stock markets will continue on their current course.
• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of eight potentially Earth-like worlds by Kepler, as does The Dragon's Gaze.
• Crooked Timber considers the future of social democracy in a world where the middle classes do badly.
• The Dragon's ( Read more... )

As described by Daniel Panneton at Torontoist, Guy Fawkes Night was in the mid-19th century an ethnically fraught holiday. Maybe that's why it isn't so big in a Canada where Roman Catholics now form a plurality of the population.

Irish Catholic migrants who came to Toronto in the late 1840s to escape the Famine found themselves in a British and ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes Ryerson University's new building on Church Street.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining comet-like exoplanets and links to another tracking two families of exocomets in the Beta Pictoris system.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the intelligence of raccoons.
• Steve Munro supports Olivia Chow as the best transit candidate.
• The Power ( Read more... )

• Discover's Collideascape notes that, even as agricultural land is falling worldwide, the productivity of this land is increasing even more sharply.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining the extent to which saline water might make cooler planets better for live, and to another paper suggesting that planetary magnetic fields are so importance ( Read more... )

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