To follow up on an earlier GeoCurrents post on the geography of milk consumption, let’s consider the global patterns of where and to what extent meat, poultry, and fish are consumed.

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While in Western countries the issue of abortion concerns the legality of pregnancy termination (and it is more generally a women’s rights issue), in Eastern Europe the high rates of abortion present a bigger problem. But not all countries in the former Soviet bloc follow the same trends when it comes to birth control practices.

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Tensions remain high between Russia and Japan over the legal status of the four Southern Kuril islands.

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Several Russian news websites report that life expectancy in Moscow has reached 75 years. The improvement is quite marked, as the corresponding figure in 2010 was only 73.6 years.

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Maps such as the one on the left reveal a severe demographic imbalance in the sex ratio (the number of males divided by the number of females) in Russia. While few countries in the world have an even gender distribution, Russia experiences a strong female bias, with only 86 men for every 100 women. There are several serious reasons to ...

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The meanings of many toponyms are rather uncreative, describing features of the physical or social landscape. Perhaps one of the most common among those “dull” place names are those that mean “new city” or “new town”.

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Siberia is a heavily Russified area – linguistically and culturally – of the Russian Federation. Not only do many ethnic Russians live there, but most members of the indigenous groups speak Russian, at varying degrees of fluency.

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Norway has officially crossed the 5 million mark on Monday March 19, 2012. But not all child-related stories from Norway are that rosy.

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In a recent New York Times article, Thomas L. Friedman discusses a correlation between natural resource exploitation and human resources development. The correlation is negative: the more oil a country pumps or the more diamonds it digs, the lower its high school students score in standardized testing of math, science and reading comprehension skills.

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As we saw in yesterday’s post, California’s Russian-speaking community is concentrated in the San Francisco region. The nine counties of the Bay Area – Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma – are home to more than 40,000 Russian speakers. The love affair between Russians and the San Francisco Bay Area is of ...

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