Turkmenistan, which ranks up with Burma and North Korea as one of the most appallingly totalitarian countries on earth and which only recently opened its doors to foreign investors, is building Avaza, a $5 billion resort complex on the Caspian Sea. Set for completion in 2020, a goal that's remained intact despite the global recession, Avaza will include high-rise hotels, sports facilities, conference centers, and, of course, a man-made island (which, when seen from the air, will resemble a crab--President Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov's zodiac sign). As the project was just getting started in early 2008, a government press release outlined the vision for Avaza's opulence:

Pleasure boats will furrow the river with the original bridges thrown across. Restaurants, cafes, sports grounds and footpaths will be constructed on the river banks. The river and lakes will be located in the natural hollows blended well with the local landscape. The lakes will surround the cozy beaches and when the gale will rage throughout the sea tourists can swim in the calm lakes.

Similarly, Kazakhstan is building Aktau-City, which will cost $38 billion and, like Avaza, will be completed by 2020. Construction of hotels and shopping malls is currently underway, and the complex already boasts, interestingly, an academic showpiece: Caspian State University of Technology and Engineering, which opened earlier this year.

So how do Avaza and Aktau-City seem to be faring thus far, in the less-than-stellar economic climate? Not well.

Avaza had trouble filling guestrooms after the first hotels opened this summer and fall. “[T]he ministries in Ashgabat received orders to select staff to be sent to spend a few nights in the five-star hotels. Some had to pay the hotel bills from their own pocket,” Farid Tuhbatullin, the head of the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights, recently told Transitions Online, a news website that covers Central Asia. It doesn't help that Turkmenistan also has short summers--meaning, beach-going in February won't work as well as it does in Dubai--and an archaic visa process, or that it borders those havens of stability, Iran, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. And Aktau-City has some, er, environmental hazards to consider: According to the website Eurasianet, "[R]adioactive waste from Aktau’s disused Chemical Ore Mining and Smelting Complex has gathered [nearby]." What's more, in attracting investors and tourists, both Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan must contend with bad international reputations--the former's being worse than the latter's--on human rights, corruption, and other governance issues.

Okay, strictly speaking it's the "Maulaffenturm", the Tower of the Mouth-Ape. And that's really a pun, because in German "Maulaffen" means "gawker". And up on the side of the tower, sitting on a rain spout, there's a little gargoyle. It's vaguely simian, with long arms and a mouth hanging open in indignation or glee. It's hard to be sure, because 600 years of rain and wind have worn on him. He's sort of an ape-ish shaped lump. But his mouth is definitely open.

[. . .]

Fladungen... well, it's a dead end. You couldn't easily move an army through the surrounding hills or over the High Rhoen plateau. And if you did, you'd be nowhere very interesting. And it's not rich; it's one of the coldest corners of central Germany. The surrounding hills are rather bleak, with soil suited only to sheep-herding. Until the late 20th century, this area was more or less Germany's Appalachia.

[. . . W]hile Fladungen has never been large, it was -- back in medieval times -- the most important town for half a day's travel around. So it had all the trappings of a medieval market town: a large church, a large town hall, a town wall.

And a jail.

Never let it be said that the fat cats on Wall Street don't care about the stray kittens living in their gutters.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs wants the world to know that it did not abandon unfortunate felines after reports suggested the world's most influential and profitable investment bank skipped out on a $2,000-ish veterinarian bill for five black kittens found on the construction site of its New York headquarters.

“We want to make this very clear,” a Goldman representative said Thursday. “All of the kittens have been adopted and we paid the bills. We are very happy they have found homes.”

Underscoring the bank's commitment to all things adorable, the company called back minutes later after making the statement to elaborate: “I would also like to add that we would never abandon kittens. Thank you.”

The rapid spread of the story, through a newspaper report and the Internet, points to a more serious image problem at Goldman: No matter what it does, critics and conspiracy theorists are quick to seize on any story that casts the bank as a symbol of Wall Street excess and greed.

The kitten saga started in August, when Rich Brotman found them near Goldman's nearly finished $2-billion (U.S.) head office.

Mr. Brotman, who runs a rescue service called City Critters, approached the bank about paying for any associated medical costs, and took the kittens home to get them used to humans.

Mr. Brotman convinced Goldman to canvass its employees to see if any would open their homes to the kittens, which were nicknamed BlackBerries because of their dark fur.

And that's where things started to get a little hairy. An editorial in a weekly Manhattan newspaper suggested Goldman had not delivered the promised veterinary cheque as of the end of October, months after the kittens were rescued. Worse, the paper alleged the bank hadn't bothered to help to find loving homes for the hapless strays.

The blogosphere ignited with indignity – how could a bank that posted a $3.18-billion quarterly profit refuse to help? Maybe its critics were right, and it really was a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” as a Rolling Stone profile characterized it in a recent issue

Have you ever participated in a seance? If not, would you consider it? What spirit would you summon and what question would you ask them? Do you believe we can get messages from the dead?

Say it ain't so, prime minister.

Even Stephen Harper's own cabinet seems to be having trouble accepting that the man with the famously frosty relationship to the national news media doesn't consume Canadian news.

"I tend to watch American news," Harper said this week during a question-and-answer session at a Canadian Chamber of Commerce convention in Toronto.

"I don't like to watch Canadian news and hear what Allan (Gregg) and everybody else is saying about me. My hobby is to watch politics elsewhere."

Gregg, a pollster and CBC pundit, was in the audience.

Industry Minister Tony Clement was aghast Thursday when asked about Harper's news viewing habits.

"I'm sure he does" watch Canadian news, Clement said outside the House of Commons.

Told of Harper's assertion, Clement was frankly skeptical.

"We're news junkies, all of us are. Come on. You know what we're all about."

Peter Kent, the junior foreign minister and a former Global TV newscaster, said Harper "absolutely" watches Canadian news, but backed off when pressed.

"Well, I've never sat with him but I assume that he ..."

A Siberian tiger that brutally mauled a man Monday morning was only doing what comes naturally, say Calgary zoo officials.

"Vitali did nothing wrong. It's his natural behaviour. They broke into his home," said zookeeper Tim Sinclair-Smith later in the day.

Just after 1 a.m. local time Monday, a pair of 27-year-old men scaled the zoo's 2.4-metre-high fence near the west public gate.

Inside, they hopped another one-metre-high fence designed to keep the public at a safe distance from the Siberian tiger enclosure.

While the man was standing in front of a second fence that keeps the cats secure, a two-year-old male tiger named Vitali caught his arm through the wires, biting and swiping at him. The man's friend managed to free him and the pair scrambled to safety.

"I think it's fair to say that, if anybody puts their mind to it, they can breach any kind of security — and that certainly seems to be the case here," said the zoo's director, Grahame Newton.

[. . .]

Zookeepers say the tiger, "one of our most laid-back cats," was likely spooked by the intruders.

The cat, who showed signs of being stressed after the break-in, suffered no injuries to his paws or mouth and eventually calmed down.

"He's perfectly fine. A tiger is a carnivore, so they're going to behave naturally, and that's his natural reaction," said Sinclair-Smith.

The tiger was either acting out of aggression or protecting himself, said Dr. Sandie Black, the zoo's head vet.

"(The tiger) has a fairly significant armament at his disposal: very sharp claws. My guess would be that the gentleman was hooked by a claw and his arm dragged in and continued to be attacked from that point."

A 29-year-old woman who fell three storeys to her death at a University of Toronto building early Thursday was on a first date with the man who was exploring the structure with her, police said.

Police arrived at 1 Spadina Cres. near College Street and Spadina Avenue at around 2 a.m. in response to reports of a man and woman trying to jump from one level of the building to another.

The man was able to make the jump, but a wire fence that the woman was leaning on gave way, police said. She fell into a courtyard in the centre of the building.

The woman was rushed to St. Michael's Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

The two were walking home at the end of their first date when they decided to explore the building, said Staff Sgt. Deb Abbott.

[. . .]

Police said earlier in the day that the pair were hunting for ghosts in the 134-year-old building, which they believed was haunted. But they backtracked Thursday afternoon, saying they could not confirm that account.

Looking north from College and Spadina
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

In January 2001, 50-year-old artist and lecturer David Buller was found stabbed to death in his studio in the building at 1 Spadina Crescent.

The unsolved killing may have fed rumours that the building, erected in 1875, is visited by ghosts.

[. . .]

Ghost tours do take place at other university buildings but 1 Spadina Crescent is not among them, said Richard Fiennes-Clinton, a guide with Muddy York Walking Tours.

He said he had never been able to unearth ghost stories related to the structure but said he could understand why some might believe otherwise given the building's imposing style.

The ghost research society, which has had a website for almost 13 years, also said it had never had any reports or even queries related to paranormal activity at the building.

"Because it's kind of a Gothic looking building, maybe they were under the impression somehow it was haunted. It looks kind of eerie," Durroch said.

"You can enjoy ghosts and hauntings, you can do so safely without breaking any laws or trespassing. Thankfully, this is an isolated case in Canada but there have been several similar incidents in the United States where tragic circumstances were the outcome."

Iraqi officials have discovered that they may have an air force, after all.

The Defense Ministry revealed Sunday that it recently learned that Iraq owns 19 Russian-designed MIG-21 and MIG-23 jet fighters, which are in storage in Serbia. The ministry said Iraqi officials are negotiating with the Serbs to restore the aircraft.

The Serbian government has tentatively promised to make two of the aircraft available “for immediate use,” according to a press release from the ministry. The rest would be restored on a rush basis, the ministry said.

The party has adapted its blue and green tree as it seeks to rebrand its traditionally "stuffy" image.

The logo was displayed on the Conservative Party website as part of events billed as Conference Pride at the annual political gathering in Manchester.

More than 700 delegates are expected to attend a £15-a-head cocktail party at the Spirit Bar, in the heart of the city's famous gay village, where they will be entertained by a live performance by disco diva Angie Brown.

Andrew Brierly, 29, a party activist from Clapham, south London, said the event is a sign the true-blue party was "modernising" its image to appeal to new voters.

He said: "By hosting events like this it is hoped that voters will recognise that the Conservative party is at the forefront of agenda-setting politics.

"The party is modernising at it is not afraid to broach traditionally taboo subjects such as the rights of the homosexual community.

"I think it is refreshing that this event will be held in Manchester and hopefully will show homosexual party members that the time of locking themselves away in the so-called 'closet' has long since passed."

The event will be compered by Margot James - the party's vice-chairman and first openly lesbian candidate - and Iain Dale, the first openly-homosexual Conservative to contest a parliamentary election.

It was a scheme to bomb downtown Toronto that even a confessed conspirator now acknowledges as "a despicable crime."

Prosecutors say the ringleaders debated whether to plant metal chips in bombs to maximize the number of people injured - and spoke of their co-ordinated explosions dwarfing the impact of the 2005 London subway bombings that killed 50 commuters.

A penitent Saad Khalid yesterday asked a Superior Court judge for clemency during sentencing.

"I acknowledge that I made a huge mistake and not a day passes by that I am not filled with regret for my role in this despicable crime," Mr. Khalid told the court.

Having already pleaded guilty to involvement in the foiled bomb plot, he became the first person arrested to speak of the crime.

"I am not a lunatic who is hell bent on destruction of Western civilization," said the 22-year-old, who explained that he was a middle-class McMaster University student from a good home. His mistake, he said, arose from a "disagreement on the issue of Canadian foreign policy, specifically Canada's involvement in Afghanistan."

[. . .]

"I know now that resorting to violence is not the way to bring about social or political change," said Mr. Khalid, wearing a dark suit and sporting a short haircut.

He also told Mr. Justice Bruce Durno that he has a better understanding of Islam since being jailed.

On a day when five co-ordinated car bombs in Kandahar killed dozens of Afghan civilians, Mr. Khalid didn't say precisely what he was thinking when he helped unload boxes of fertilizer from the backs of trucks three years ago. That was on June 2, 2006, the day that police swept across the Toronto area to arrest 18 Muslim youths.

They are alleged to have discussed targets for fertilizer-laden U-Haul vans rigged with cellphone detonators: The Toronto Stock Exchange, the Toronto headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and an unspecified military base along Highway 401.

The man accused of being the ringleader was allegedly spotted at public libraries in Mississauga with "a soldering iron, spools of wire and batteries," and searching on Google for terms such as "ammonium nitrate," "nitric acid" and "rocket fuel." While he is said to have given pagers and computer memory sticks to underlings to avoid police surveillance, the digital devices were intercepted.

It's alleged that the No. 2 bomb plotter was heard discussing the acquisition of chemicals, setting up delivery locations and the purchase of airline tickets to Pakistan.

The document says the two ringleaders said the plot would "screw Stephen Harper." Other times, they predicted the bombs would "result in Canadians not leaving their homes due to fear" and prompt Canada to withdraw troops from Afghanistan because "it is not tough like Britain or the United States."

When the government announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would, in the next few months, come falling out of the sky, officials said that there was little risk to people because satellites fall out of orbit fairly frequently and much of the planet is covered by oceans.

But they said precious little about the satellite itself.

Such information came instead from Ted Molczan, a hobbyist who tracks satellites from his apartment balcony in Toronto, and fellow satellite spotters around the world. They have grudgingly become accustomed to being seen as "propeller-headed geeks" who "poke their finger in the eye" of the government's satellite spymasters, Molczan said, taking no offense. "I have a sense of humor," he said.

[. . .]

In the case of the mysterious satellite that is about to plunge back to Earth, Molczan had an early sense of which one it was, identifying it as USA-193, which gave out shortly after reaching space in December 2006. It is said to have been built by Lockheed Martin and operated by the secretive National Reconnaissance Office.

Another hobbyist, John Locker of England, posted photos of the satellite on a Web site, galaxypix.com. John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private group in Alexandria, Virginia, that tracks military and space activities, said the hobbyists exemplified fundamental principles of openness and of the power of technology to change the game.

"It has been an important demystification of these things," Pike said, "because I think there is a tendency on the part of these agencies just to try to pretend that they don't exist, and that nothing can be known about them."

On Thursday night, Molczan participated in a talk called "The Other Night Sky" at the Power Plant, in conjunction with their ongoing summer exhibition, “Universal Code.” (Watch for our review of the exhibit, coming later this week.) He was joined by Trevor Paglen, an artist-geographer taking part in the exhibition with a large-scale installation featuring moving satellite orbits projected onto a massive blue globe.

Paglen is fascinated by the things that the American military doesn’t want us to see and the aesthetics of this secret world. He told the story of a covert satellite payload—code-named AFP-731—launched by the space shuttle Atlantis in February of 1990. About a month later, it was reported that this satellite had exploded in orbit and that the mission, whatever it had been, was a failure.

This is where Molczan enters Paglen’s story, as he and his network of observers began reporting an object in the night sky following the orbit and flying at the altitude of the “lost” satellite. Further research revealed that a patent had been filed in the United States that same month for a satellite signature suppression shield. As word spread of the discovery that AFP-731 (or “Misty,” as it is known) was likely not destroyed and was still racing around the globe carrying out undisclosed tasks, the satellite soon vanished from Molczan’s night sky. Those in the community believe that the unwanted attention he brought upon this secret payload had Toronto added to the suppression shield’s target locations.

Paglen wove the concept of democracy in with his narrative, something that both men consider to lie at the heart of this practice. Molczan believes that “space belongs to all of us” and that “the truth is out there for anyone to see.” Paglen recalled conversations the two have had, telling the audience that “Molczan reminded me that perhaps truth is sometimes like a point of light reflected in the evening sky, able to be seen by anybody who bothers looking through a telescope, [and] of the notion that, in a democracy, you’re supposed to have a right to your own opinion, but you're not supposed to have a right to your own facts.”

What is surprising is that Molczan is able to conduct his detailed monitoring from his downtown Toronto apartment. It would seem that a bright urban centre, rife with light pollution, is not the ideal place to track reflections in space. Torontoist asked Molczan about the viewing conditions in the city. “I’m a homebody," he responded. "I fantasize about spaceflight and all that, but the reality is that I’m happy to do this from my balcony or my bedroom window… Luckily I’m in one of the few high-rise buildings that has a roof that’s safe to visit, and I can go up there and have an amazing view of the sky, almost to the horizon in most directions. So, the city actually turns out to be not bad. It’s terrible for normal astronomy, if you want to see distant galaxies and that stuff, it’s horrible, but it’s quite tolerable. It could be better, but it’s tolerable."

• 3 Quarks Daily blogs about a worrying rumour that the founder of mercenary company Blackwater has been killing witnesses against him.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason questions whether or not the modern world's predilection for safety is good or paralyzing.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the search for fragments of the planetismal which hit Earth and so created the moon, a bizarrely large low-density gas giant, and evidence of a massive planetary collision a hundred light years away.


• Far Outliers comments on the extent to which Xinjiang has been only loosely held by China.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros reports on the lawsuit lodged against a Greek journalist who documented a long history of complicity with Milosevic's Serbia and its atrocities, while Edward Lucas takes apart claims that rising HDI indices correspond to rising fertility rates.


• Hunting Monsters examines the problems facing the near-country of Kosovo.


• Joe. My. God lets us know that New York City coffeehouses are cracking down on WiFi users who just occupy space after their first cup.


• Language Log considers
  
• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley reviews book examining Italy's disastrous performance in the First World War.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that the discrepancies in life exptancies between the United States and countries with socialized medicine can be more than accounted for by better habits among non-Americans.


• Slap Upside the Head announces that an Ontario political candidate who talked about the need to kill gay people was convicted of inciting hatred, and examines the claim of a Malaysian doctor that gay sex makes one more susceptible to swine flu.


• Spacing Toronto's Shawn Micallef reminisces about the old Toronto beach area of Sunnyside.


• Strange Maps features the first road map of the United Kingdom.


• Towleroad points to the Crazy of many of the opponents to Obama's health-care plan.


• Will Baird reports on a massive tropical storm on Saturn's atmosphere-heavy moon Titan.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a children's book driven by Tatar nationalism.

• 3 Quarks Daily's Robin Varghese wonders if Google is killing individuals' ability to recognize even basic things.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason photographs the busiest highway in Canada, the 401, at its busiest.


• 'Aqoul notes that Algeria's latest economic policies look very bad and that there were recently riots between Chinese migrants and Algerians.


• blogTO's Derek identifies the most unsafe roads for cyclists in Toronto, with the commenters throwing in their own suggestions.


• Daniel Drezner writes about the current system of international relations as if it was The Birthday Club.


• Demography Matters' Aslak Berg writes about the very difficult situation faced by an arguably already overpopulated Yemen still seeing high population growth, and Claus links to a video on human evolution and wonders how sub-replacement fertility is evolutionarily adaptive.


• Far Outliers links to an article arguing that where Indonesia is a successful emerging pluralistic democracy and economic power Burma is doing nearly the exact opposite.


• A Fistful of Euros' Douglas Muir reports that the aftermath of the sale of Serbia's oil company to Gazprom is going as well as one could expect.


• Hunting Monsters reports on the phantom country of Nagorno-Karabakh.


• Inkless Wells' Paul Wells reports on the latest in a series of polls demonstrating that contrary to mythology, Québécois--especially Francophones--are more likely to support strict jail sentences for criminals that many English Canadians elsewhere.


• Language Hat reports that an Indonesian tribe is adopting Korea's hangul script for their language, the first time ever, apparently, that hangul has been used for a language other than Korean.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Dave Brockington memorializes the late filmmaker John Hughes of 1980s fame.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio discusses his participation in a Slate series examining how the United States could collapse.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the fact that a woman who said that British Columbia's school system discriminated against non-heterosexual children by not providing so-called "reparative therapy" had her complaint dismissed.


• Strange Maps hosts an unusual early modern map that shows Europe upside down. Literally.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales wonders (1, 2) if the Russian elite has decided to adopt Huntington's clash of civilization theory and make Russia into the central state of Orthodox civilization.


• Noel Maurer reports on a Brazilian plan for a high-speed rail link that actually makes sense economically.


• The Vanity Press reports on the fact that a faked birth certificate actually belonging to Obama was actually an editing version of South Australian David Jeffrey Bomford.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that many of the small peoples of Russia's Middle Volga region are upset with Moscow's centralizing and potentially even assimilatory policies, and argues that the Abkhazian/South Ossetian precedent might encourage the peoples of the Russian North Caucasus to break away.