• Claus Vistesen's Alpha Sources is very critical of Germany's plan to reduce unemployment by exporting workers to other countries, in the context the increasingly short supply of human capital in Germany and its region.


• Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing announces that a Maureen F. McHugh short story collection has been released online as a Creative Commons document. Remember China Mountain Zhang? Yes, same person.


• Centauri Dreams reports that planetary systems with gas giants orbiting close to the star (hot Jupiters) might still have Earth-like worlds orbiting further out in the habitable zone.


• Daniel Drezner reports on the sophisticated global coordination of Chinese protests against Tibet.


• Edward Hugh argues that the relative strength of the French economy is, with Germany's current and Spain's future weakness, the only thing keeping the Eurozone and the Euro up.


• Joe. My. God. seems to be unhappy that large majorities of young gays and lesbians in New York City expect to be monogamously partnered, with children, by the age of 30.


• Tyler Cowen suggests that one reason for high commodities prices is the inefficiency of China, currently in the middle of a massive rural-to-urban migration.


• Norman Geras manages to inadvertently point out, at least to me, that British Columbian writer and journalist Terry Glavin has a blog.

Joy Kogawa [. . .] stood once more in her childhood home this week, eager to guide a visitor through its emotional past.

From her former bedroom window, she gazed again at the famous backyard cherry tree that forms the heart of her memories and so much of her writing.

"It's the tree, more than anything else, that grips me," Ms. Kogawa said. "It's as if it has a message written upon it, that everything we've gone through in life is known. ... When it dies, I feel I will die."

Split in the middle, oozing sap, with many of its limbs missing, the gnarled, ailing tree is nonetheless draped in a glorious display of springtime blossoms, as much a miracle of survival as the house itself.

The modest bungalow in the city's now fashionable Marpole district was just days from destruction when a last-minute, anonymous donation of $500,000 allowed The Land Conservancy to buy it, with hopes of establishing a writers' residence and a tribute to Ms. Kogawa and her award-winning novel Obasan, about the tragedy of internment.

The donor's identity is to be disclosed at a ceremony this afternoon. But The Globe and Mail has learned that the improbably large sum came from Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth, sister of former Ontario lieutenant-governor Henry Jackman.

"Why? Because I have a tremendous fondness for Joy Kogawa," Ms. Ruth explained, adding with a modest chuckle: "And also because of the tax incentives of the Harper government. No capital gains on stock earnings given to charity."

Internment was a shameful act, she said. "I can remember reading Obasan and weeping at the pain."

Yet, Ms. Ruth said, Ms. Kogawa retains a deep sense of faith in humanity, that reconciliation and hope are still possible, even in the face of things that are terrible.

Writers residing in the house in the future will have to deal with that, Ms. Ruth said. "How can you sit at a desk and look out at that cherry tree and not think from whence all that came?"

[. . .]

"The story of this house has come to a wonderful place, like a new beginning," [Kogawa] said, groping to find just the right words.

"It had one birth. It lived its life, and then, instead of dying, it's been given a second chance. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing to have.

"It's going to live again. It will breathe. It will bring life to people. It will bring reconciliation. Those are the things this house has been called to do."

When the Iron Curtain between the then Czechoslovakia and Austria tumbled 18 years ago, residents of the grey, run-down and impoverished Bratislava crossed the nearby border, just 7 kilometres away, in search of jobs and western goods in better-off Austria.

Now the Slovaks are scouting Austria's border region in search of land or houses, which are substantially cheaper here than in booming Bratislava.

Three years ago Miriam's Slovak-Canadian husband Daniel Soska, 39, a regional sales director in a telecoms company, was one of them.

"If we wanted to have the same land 7 kilometres from downtown Bratislava on the Slovak side we would have to pay at least four times more per square metre," he said.

[. . .]

The expansion of the borderless Schengen area on December 21 will bring Wolfsthal even closer to the Slovak capital than it has been for 90 years - since the time when Bratislava, known then in German as Pressburg, belonged to the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

The village's population has been shrinking since the monarchy disintegrated into nation states after World War I and a border between Austria and the nascent Czechoslovakia emerged in its backyard.

In the years after World War II, the Iron Curtain came and a once-busy imperial tram line between Bratislava and Vienna, which passed through Wolfsthal, finally ceased to run. The village faded from a stop on a busy artery into a declining station in the middle of nowhere.

"This used to be the end of the world," said the 45-year-old Schoedinger, a former policeman whose entire life has been linked to the border. "I've witnessed everything that happened here," he added.

[. . .]

The village of 250 weekend inhabitants and 800 permanent residents, 40 per cent of whom are now under the age of 30, saw a rise in its population for the first time in 2001, the mayor said.

Schoedinger has been in talks with Bratislava's public-transport authorities so a regular bus line could start running between the city and his hometown as soon as the border controls disappear.

"Now we have a future," the beaming mayor said. "We live in a region between Bratislava and Vienna. That's what is important, not which passport we carry."

When Daniel Sosin was looking to buy a house for his family in the north-western Polish city of Szczecin he was aghast at how little he would get for his money. So he went looking across the nearby border with Germany, buying a 150-year-old house in the village of Penkun for about the same price as a bachelor flat in Szczecin.

"Poland is an unkempt country and I don't want to live like that," says Mr Sosin, an architect, sitting in his house overlooking a cobbled street in the heart of the village. "I want to live in a beautiful area. It will take Poland generations to get to the same level as here."

Mr Sosin is part of a wider trend as people from the new EU member states, often flush with cash from real estate booms in their home countries, are beginning to buy properties in nearby "old" EU states to the west. Penkun is in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one of Germany's most economically depressed areas. Thousands of young people have left for better prospects in the west, leaving behind empty houses and apartments that are being snapped up by Poles.

"We have a few dozen calls a day," says Mariola Dadun, owner of the A do Z real estate agency in Szczecin. "There are three reasons people are interested in Germany: prices, prices, prices."

[. . .]

In eastern Germany prices are also rising thanks to the arrival of the Poles. "Before Poland's entry into the EU there was depopulation here - a lot of houses were abandoned and there was no real estate market at all. The early pioneers who bought a few years ago were able to pick up houses for very little but prices have risen since then," says Jan Rybski, a property developer in Löcknitz, a German village 25km from Szczecin. "But even if land prices are becoming similar, you still get a lot better quality and infrastructure in Germany than in Poland."

Lothar Meistring, Löcknitz's mayor, is upbeat about the new Polish residents. Over 200 Poles live in the village and a further 400 in the immediate region. He says many have bought and renovated old properties or purchased land to build houses. "In many neighbouring areas they have to pull down houses because they are disused, as people move away. Here, it's the opposite - we are building new places."