[W]hile the allure of buying booze along with smokes and lottery tickets—not to mention a popular distaste for monopolistic alcohol selling practices—might have some people crying for change, craft brewers in the province prefer the system the way it is.
Ken Woods, the president of Etobicoke’s Black Oak Brewing, says the convenience-store model would lend itself well to large companies with aggressive marketing strategies and the money to pay for premium positioning in corner-store fridges. Smaller brewers, he fears, would be left out.
“Have you ever taken a look in a convenience store and seen any artisanal products, like artisanal potato chips?” he asks. “What convenience stores are great at doing is mass produced products that are very generic, very similar, and have got their distribution set.”
Woods estimates a move toward selling beer in convenience stores would hurt the market share of small, local brewers, and possibly put some out of business almost immediately.
On the other hand, he says the current competition between the LCBO and The Beer Store to offer customers a better tactile shopping experience—exemplified in LCBO product-sampling counters and The Beer Store’s new Beer Boutique locations—steers increasingly discerning customers toward craft beer.
Michael Arnold was involved in a push for booze in corner stores over a decade ago. Now, as the president of Trafalgar Brewery in Oakville, he says he initially tried to help convince the province that the move would benefit craft brewers. But he soon realized it wasn’t his brands the convenience stores ultimately wanted.
“You could just see, they saw us as a lever to get in to talk to the government,” he says. “But what they really wanted was to sell shelf space to Labatt and Molson. They knew nothing about craft beers.”
Like Woods, Arnold says that while the current system could be improved, he would rather work with it. The relatively low distribution fee the LCBO charges helps keep the prices of his beers down. The relatively small amount of shelf space in the average convenience store, meanwhile, would probably drive prices up. Smaller brewers, Arnold thinks, would end up “paying a premium for the bottom right-hand corner.”
Taking a page straight from the government book, they suggest that the troops are fighting Islamists and the remnants of the civil war that plagued the country in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. But others have focused on a more nuanced portrait, suggesting that this is really about is control of the lucrative drug traffic in the region. Before he became the most wanted suspect in Tajikistan, Ayombekov was on government payroll as the commander of a border guard unit responsible for policing the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. People have pointed out that he has been engaged now for a number of years in drug trafficking, as well as other smuggling operations, of which he has only now been accused by the government. However, it is highly unlikely that the officials in Dushanbe were unaware of what was taking place for some time. As the International Crisis Group laid out in 2009 in its report Tajikistan: On the Road to Failure, there has been a strong belief amongst many observers in Central Asia that officials at the highest levels in the government are complicit in the drug trade. The influx of wealth and the display of material goods in this impoverished country attest to this in the minds of Tajiks. Even in Khorog it is not unusual to see expensive cars owned by those with no visible source of livelihood or income, and it is not unusual to hear comments about it either.
[. . .]
What has happened in the past few years, according to both those allied to the government of President Rahmon and those in the opposition, is the gradual sidelining of anyone deemed a potential rival, shrinking the political space to the point where very few people find themselves part of the trusted inner circle. The lack of a broad coalition has not necessarily reduced the possibility of dissent, as the information control in and out of the country is nearly not as controlled as it is in Uzbekistan. But it has reduced the possibility of being heard, which makes life very uncertain and subject to the whims of those in power. What happened in Khorog seems to have taken many by surprise–even though there have been indications that the government had planned to deal with the local drug traffickers at some point–because it sets up a direct confrontation between the center and MBAP as a whole, something none of them would have wished. Although reliable figures are unavailable, it is widely reported that gun battles in the city have brought a number of civilian casualties. Furthermore, the total communication blackout imposed on MBAP has effectively made hostages out of the people of Khorog, as well as their friends and family outside the region who are unable to contact them.
[. . .]
Some news reports have emphasized the differences between the Pamiris, the largest ethnic group of the area, and the rest of the country. The Pamiris are an ethnic minority who belong to the Shia Ismaili branch of Islam, while the people in the rest of the country are Sunni Muslims. There are differences of language and traditions within the Pamiris, but on the whole they have come to see themselves as set apart from other Tajiks. To some this fact of difference has the greatest bearing on the crisis unfolding now. A sense of a united Pamiri identity against any outside intrusions has found a footing amongst those whose sense of helplessness grows as the siege of Khorog continues. While it has roots in a long history, the increasing vigor of the Pamiri identity was forged by the traumas of the civil war, in which Pamiris were targeted not just as members of the opposition, but for merely being Pamiri.
Nikolic promised during his campaign that "Serbia will not stray from its European path." Be that as it may, remaining on the “European path” will prove difficult if the new President begins to exploit the status of both Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed, his election may encourage Serbian leaders in northern Kosovo and in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska to harden their positions and press more vehemently toward secession.
Nikolic's other maneuver will be to pivot toward Russia in order to gain financial and political backing. On his first foreign trip, Nikolic was warmly received in the Kremlin where President Vladimir Putin confirmed that the Serbs were Russia's spiritual brothers. But despite all this melodrama, the relationship between Moscow and Belgrade over many years has been marked by mutual exploitation rather than enduring love.
[. . . U]nlike Milosevic, who manipulated Russia to his advantage, Serbian nationalists today seem naive and gullible. Nikolic once asserted that he would prefer to see Serbia as a Russian province rather than as a member of the EU. The Kremlin now views Serbia as a useful surrogate in the middle of the Balkans, where even its traditional ally, Bulgaria, has joined NATO and rejected several exploitative Russian energy deals.
Serbia is promoted by the Kremlin as a bastion against American influence throughout Southeastern Europe. Combining pressure, incentive, and blackmail, Russian officials have warned Belgrade that any move toward NATO membership would result in a loss of Russian support for not recognizing Kosovo. Moscow would also prefer that Belgrade remain outside the EU to avoid implementing its legal standards, especially in business transparency. Instead, Moscow proposes that Serbia join its opaque Eurasian economic bloc.
While in Moscow, Nikolic also claimed that he may recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states despite Georgia’s protests. Serbia’s parliament will evidently consider formal recognition during the coming weeks. Moscow has tried to entice and cajole various allies into recognizing the two breakaway territories, with almost no success. Although Serbia may calculate it will gain substantial Russian loans as a reward, such recognition will further dent its EU aspirations.
Nikolic took his begging bowl to Moscow seeking an $800 million loan, as Russia had previously promised a $1 billion dispersal but has delivered only $200 million so far. But the new Serbian government must carefully read the conditions of any loan. Russia is not dispensing charity; it is seeking to create political dependence and to control Serbia's energy infrastructure as its state companies develop pipeline projects across the Balkans. It is Belgrade's responsibility to make sure that the undying love that Nikolic has declared for Russia on behalf of the Serbian people does not result in Serbia becoming a victim of date rape.
Not long ago, while making a presentation about possible destinations for an interstellar probe, I called Gl 581d the most likely candidate for habitability yet discovered among nearby stars. I knew the planet was problematic, perhaps too far on the outer edge of the habitable zone to be a realistic candidate, although this seems to depend on a variety of factors including atmospheric modeling. But what I had really been pondering in deciding whether or not to include Gl 581d in the talk was whether its purported sister world, Gl 581g, should be brought into play.
Steven Vogt (UC-Santa Cruz) and colleagues were getting ready to distribute their new paper making a further case for a super-Earth in the habitable zone, one that seemed to be ideally placed for liquid water to exist on the surface. Bring that into the discussion?
I decided against it, because the controversy over this world continues and Centauri Dreams seems a better venue than a short public talk to get into the details. Let’s begin here, then, with Michel Mayor and the Geneva team, who had already identified four planets in the system, including Gl 581c, itself a target of speculation about whether or not it might be in the habitable zone. But Gl 581c looks to be too hot to support life, leading to the renewed interest in Gl 581d. This work was accomplished using data from the HARPS spectrograph on ESO’s 3.6m La Silla instrument.
What Vogt and team did in 2010 was to combine the earlier HARPS data with 122 additional measurements made using the HIRES spectrometer at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. It was from this combined dataset that Vogt drew evidence of two new planets: Gl 581f (with an orbital period of 433 days) and Gl 581g, with a period of 36.5 days. It wasn’t long after this that Francesco Pepe (Observatoire de Genève) added another 60 HARPS measurements to the earlier ones and announced his team could not confirm the presence of either of the two worlds Vogt had found. In his new paper, Vogt’s team questions whether Gl 581f or Gl 581g would have been detectable using the 179-point HARPS data set on its own.
I’m moving through the details here quickly — the paper is available on the arXiv site and I encourage you to look at it. But new work by Thierry Forveille (Institut de Planetologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble) added another full observing season of HARPS data and still found no trace of Gl 581f or Gl 581g. It’s this set of expanded HARPS radial velocity data that Vogt’s new paper goes to work on, and it reaches a significantly different conclusion (F11 in the excerpt below refers to Forveille’s paper):
… we have shown in the present work that the F11 Keplerian solution is dramatically unstable over a wide range of starting conditions, and is thus untenable. F11’s conclusion of there being only four planets in the system was based on this unphysical model and can thus be discounted. Furthermore, the data points that were apparently omitted from the F11 analysis were dropped solely based on deviation from their 4-planet model, thus unfairly and specifically suppressing evidence for any additional planets in the system.
Things are, as you can see, heating up. What Vogt is talking about is that his simulations of the Forveille Keplerian models — with the Gl 581 planets in eccentric rather than circular orbits — showed that these orbits were unstable. This is important because Forveille used the Keplerian model in assessing the likelihood of the existence of Gl 581f and Gl 581g. In fact, among 4000 eccentric orbit simulations, not one survived beyond 200,000 years, with only 24 surviving for at least 20,000 years. All 4000 simulations ended with a collision between the two inner planets. By contrast, all 4000 simulations based on circular orbits turn out to be stable for at least 100,000 years.
Using stable, circular orbits for its modeling, Vogt’s team sees a fifth planet (V10 below refers to Vogt’s 2010 paper):
Contrary to F11’s conclusions, we find that the full 240-point HARPS data set, when properly modeled with self-consistent stable orbits, by and of itself actually offers confirmative support for a fifth periodic signal in this system near 32-33 days, and is consistent with the possibility of having been detected as GJ 581g at its 36-day yearly alias period by V10. The residuals periodograms both of our interacting and non-interacting fits and of the F11 four-planet circular fit reveal distinct peaks near 32 days and 190 days. Both of these residuals peaks are largely simultaneously accounted for by adding a fifth planet at 32.1 days to the system.
According to Vogt, we wind up with a planet with minimum mass of 2.2 times that of Earth orbiting at 0.13 AU, “solidly in the star’s classical liquid water Habitable Zone.” That, at least, is what the data analysis produces if we assume circular orbits of the four known planets and work out the reasons for the further perturbations that Vogt’s team sees as evidence for a fifth planet. Vogt believes a 5-planet model with all circular orbits trumps a 4-planet model with eccentric planetary orbits, but adds that it may take time and further data to give a definitive answer.
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