Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes a Russian article suggesting that Turkey might interested in pushing the GUAM alliance into forming an alliance against Russia.

The Turkish government is seeking to revive GUAM in order to form an alliance of states against Russia broader than the pan-Turkic groupings it had promoted in the past, Aleksey ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Andreas Hein arguing that interstellar travel will be quite easy after the singularity hits, when our minds can be copied onto physical substrates.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that the dispute between Vietnam and China over their maritime boundaries runs the risk of intensifying.
• Far Outliers chronicles the ( Read more... )

• The Dragon's Gaze notes that while red dwarfs host giant planets less frequently than more massive stars, they don't do so that much more frequently.
• Eastern Approaches notes concerns with the Czech Republic's legislation on banning extremist ads, which may have targeted a Euroskeptic party.
• The Financial Times's World blog notes North Korea's self- ( Read more... )

• blogTO shares photos of Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when the downtown was dominated by ... parking lots.
• Centauri Dreams hopes that the 2030s will be the decade when Europa (and its sibling moons like Ganymede) get explored.
• Eastern Approaches guides readers through the competing Russian and Ukrainian iconographies of eastern Ukraine.
• ( Read more... )

• Eastern Approaches follows the story of Crimean Tatars who are now refugees in western Ukraine.
• At the Financial Times' The World blog, John Reed examines the unlikely media star who is Crimean attorney-general Natalia Poklonskaya.
• A Fistful of Euros' David Weman notes the United Nations vote against the annexation of Crimea by Russia.
• Geocurrents has ( Read more... )

• blogTO provides a history of Queen Street West's fabled Horseshore Tavern.
• Centauri Dreams features an essay by J. N. Nielsen arguing that the Kardashev scale of development of extrasterrestrial civilizations is misused. (Kardashev was talking about energy usage, we tend to talk about the size of a civilization.)
• The Everyday Sociology Blog features ( Read more... )

As if following up on Alex Harrowell's post at A Fistful of Euros about the origins of Crimean prime minister Sergey Aksyonov in the criminal and nationalist nexuses of the post-Soviet world, Taraz Kuzio has an Open Democracy article going into great detail.

Links between business, politics and crime in the former USSR began to surface in the ( Read more... )

• The Big Picture shares pictures of the ongoing confusion and human tragedy surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes preliminary results for the hunt of exoplanets around very cool stars.
• The Dragon's Tales, meanwhile, observes that the red-coloured formation on Europa's icy surface seem to be produced by ( Read more... )

• 'Aqoul's Shaheen touches on the famous case of a Muslim woman in France who was divorced because she wasn't a virgin and points out that the divorce was gramted on the well-established grounds of marrying under false pretenses. Worry might instead be profitably directed towards the misogyny inherent in the assumption that women must be virgins to ( Read more... )

I'm indebted to Will Baird for pointing out the recent reports that Russia appears to be trying to make the Moldovan region of Transnistria an a "second Kaliningrad."

Sponsored jointly by Russian big business and security services, a network of Greater Russia political and “civic” organizations is sprouting up in Transnistria, advocating the ( Read more... )