[LINK] "Vladimir Putin dissolved Roscosmos, Russia's federal space agency"

The Dragon's Tales linked to Engadget's report that Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, has just been abolished.

With the flourish of a pen earlier today, Russian president Vladimir Putin officially put an end to Roscosmos, the country's federal space agency. That decree capped off over a year's worth of organizational despair as the agency saw its ten-year budget cut (again), the loss of a handful of spacecraft and the misuse of over 92 billion rubles (or $1.8 billion) in part thanks to a pervasive culture of corruption. Don't worry about the country's spacebound ambitions, though — Roscosmos will be reborn as a state-run corporation on January 1.

So, what does that actually mean? Well, we're not really sure yet. With some luck, the new Roscosmos will operate with a stricter level of government oversight to help reign in costs and complete the construction of a 342 square mile Cosmodrome near Russia's far-eastern border with China. Its structure as a corporation, though, could mean the revived agency is better equipped to compete in the realm of commercial spaceflight — a notion Putin is clearly fond of. After all, the rise of ambitious US competitors like SpaceX could put a damper on Russia's surprisingly lucrative spaceflight business. In mid-2015, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Congress the going rate to stick six US astronauts on Soyuz rockets through 2017 would be $490 million — that works out to a cool $82 million per seat, up from roughly $70 million the year before. Feeding and swapping out our astronauts in low-Earth orbit is big business, so don't expect a whole lot of the organizations day-to-day launch business to change much.

[LINK] "Amerindians in Guyana Leery of Emerging Oil Economy"

Marginal Rervolution's Tyler Cowen just noted Neil Anthony Giardino's article at Intercontinental Cry, noting the concern of indigenous peoples in Guyana that they will be cut out of their country's impending oïl boom. (Marginal Revolution's discussion concentrâtes on the implications for the wider country.)

This September Lenox Shuman and fellow Arawak Amerindians marched to the Prime Minister’s office in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, wearing war paint and clutching bows and arrows. It was a display of cultural identity that ended in a pledge to defend the country against neighboring Venezuela, who has laid claim to more than half of this small South American nation for more than a century.

The territorial feud intensified this May after Exxon Mobil, under contract from the Guyanese government, announced the discovery of vast amounts of oil in the disputed Essequibo region. The finding could be worth more than 10 times Guyana’s current economic output. But Amerindian communities in the country, often the casualties of extractive industries like logging and mining, are less optimistic about an emerging oil economy.

Shuman, who is Toshao, or chief, of a village called St. Cuthbert’s Mission, a small village in the country’s interior, is doubtful the oil will be a boon for Guyana’s indigenous population.

“I would be surprised if this oil discovery actually has any indigenous element or interest in it, because historically [politicians] have never looked at us as beneficiaries to any of their policies,” says Shuman, who nevertheless stands by Guyana’s territorial integrity.

[ISL] On the fallout from the sale of passports by St. Kitts and Nevis

Tristin Hopper's National Post article "‘Greed’ blamed after Canada punishes St. Kitts and Nevis over its buy-a-passport program" looks at the aftermath of a program in St. Kitts and Nevis that sold passports to foreigners. It brought in capital, but it's alleged that there was a lack of oversight.

The Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis had harsh words for the excesses of the buy-a-passport program that got his Caribbean country on Canada’s bad list.

It was “all because one man was caught up with his greed and hubris and self-interest,” Prime Minister Tim Harris recently told his country’s parliament, as reported by the St. Kitts and Nevis Observer.

Anybody with $250,000 could buy a St. Kitts and Nevis passport without so much as visiting the island nation. The country even started selling diplomatic credentials, most notably for Iranian businessman Alizera Moghadam, who entered Canada with a diplomatic passport he claims to have purchased for $1 million.

The United States soon warned that “illicit actors” were freely roaming the globe under the St. Kitts and Nevis name. Canada then upped the ante by ending a much-cherished visa waiver for visiting Kittitians and Nevisians.

And to Parliament, Harris laid the blame on predecessor Denzil Douglas, whom he ousted in a February election.

[LINK] "Battle of St-Lawrence shipwrecks found off Gaspé coast with help of fisherman"

CBC's Marika Wheeler notes how the memories of a Gaspé fisherman helped pinpoint the location of a German submarine destroyed in the Second World War.

On Sept. 15, 1942, teenager Guy St-Croix was out fishing off the coast of Gaspé, Que. when he found himself caught in the middle of a deadly naval battle.

The 17-year-old was watching a convoy of 30 merchant ships sailing out to sea when another fisherman turned to him and remarked, "Now would be a good time to see if there are any submarines in the Gulf."

"He didn't even finish his sentence when the first ship exploded," St-Croix said.

The boat had been hit by a torpedo launched from a German U-boat.

St-Croix saw two ships sink that day. Four people died.

Seventy-three years later in the fall of 2015, a team of wreck hunters went looking for those ships. But they weren't where the military records said they should be.

So they turned to eyewitnesses for help.

[LINK] On the newly alleged homosexuality of China's first premier, Zhou Enlai

Reuters' Ben Blanchard and Benjamin Kang Lim reports on the suggestion of a Hong Kong-based author that Zhou Enlai, China's first premier, was gay. The suggestion that subtle clues were simply overlooked does not seem at all incredible to me.

A book to be published in Hong Kong in the new year says Zhou Enlai, Communist China's much-respected first premier, was probably gay despite his long marriage, and had once been in love with a male schoolmate two years his junior.

It is a contention certain to be controversial in China, where the Communist Party likes to maintain its top leaders are more or less morally irreproachable and where homosexuality is frowned upon, though no longer officially repressed.

The Hong Kong-based author, Tsoi Wing-mui, is a former editor at a liberal political magazine there who has written about gay-themed subjects before though this is her first book.

She re-read already publicly available letters and diaries Zhou and his wife, Deng Yingchao, wrote, including ones that detailed Zhou's fondness for a schoolmate and emotional detachment from his wife, to conclude that Zhou was probably gay.

Zhou was premier from the revolution in October 1949 that brought the Communist Party to power until his death from cancer in 1976, a few months before the death of his revolutionary colleague Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China.

[LINK] "Will Barnes And Noble Save Itself By Selling Alcohol?"

io9's Andrew Liptak notes that American bookstore Barnes & Noble may be interested in selling alcoholic beverages, the better to attract customers and events.

Barnes and Noble is starting to do what a number of smaller booksellers have long realized: it’s not just a destination to get a book off the bookshelf: bookstores are increasingly becoming event locations, sporting a wide range of author signings or other similar types of activities for book lovers.

Alcohol and books have been paired up before: there’s Books & Brews, a brewery and bookstore in Indianapolis, and certainly more than a couple book clubs with beer out there. Barnes and Noble already has some infrastructure set up in their 647 stores with their cafes: adding on beer and wine wouldn’t be a huge step for them.

This probably won’t be a silver bullet for the company, but it is a good, incremental move that could help stave off closure. Getting people in the door and engaging with authors and the shelves is a good step, but the company has deeper issues that they’ll have to solve: namely, by focusing more completely on books, rather than the other things that they’ve brought in to the store in the last decade. Borders, which closed several years ago, had similar issues: and as they struggled to find a way to make ends meet, they looked to things like games and toys, rather than the product that should have defined them.

[LINK] "Post-Christmas boom in e-books expected to fade"

The Globe and Mail's Shane Dingman reports on an interesting trend in e-books.

When it comes to the business of books – a staple of under-the-tree gifting – there are actually two Christmas stories.

The first – for physical books – ramps up throughout December and ends by Dec. 25. In Canada, a typical week sees about 700,000 books sold. But, in the weeks before Christmas, that number jumps to two or three million, according to sales tracking data from BookNet Canada.

The second story – for e-books – begins Christmas Day in the hours after new e-readers are unwrapped.

“The most wonderfully insane time of year is from about 3 p.m. on the 25th, extending into January and February,” says Michael Tamblyn, who in November was named CEO of Kobo, the Canadian-founded maker of e-readers and seller of e-books. Kobo was sold to Japanese retailer Rakuten in 2013, but Mr. Tamblyn – a long-time employee – stayed through the transition, most recently as second in command to former CEO Takahito Aiki.

From the start, e-books have bucked the retail trend. Mr. Tamblyn recalls Kobo’s first big white-knuckle Christmas in 2009: “We came out of November and into December expecting to see that ramp, and it didn’t come ,” he says, able to laugh now at how the fledgling company contemplated doom. “And then on Dec. 25, people unwrapped their device, plugged it in for three hours to charge, and then the avalanche hit.”

But, this year, there were reasons for concern leading up to Mr. Tamblyn’s first Christmas at Kobo’s helm. First, e-book sales have been flat for the past 18 months to two years, according to Noah Genner, CEO of BookNet Canada, which tracks about 85 per cent of Canada’s book sales. Mr. Genner pegs e-book sales at about 17 per cent or 18 per cent of Canada’s book market. Second, the post-Christmas boost is under threat.

[LINK] "A conflict of faith between Russia and Ukraine"

Al Jazeera's Tamila Varshalomidze notes how the collapse in Russia-Ukraine relations is encouraging many Orthodox Christians in Ukraine to break away from churches linked with the Russian Orthodox Church, with entire parishes breaking away.

Father Sergei Dmitriev meets us at a hospital in Kiev where he has been admitted for two weeks suffering from kidney problems. We suggest holding our interview in the garden of the hospital's church, just a few metres away. The Father refuses, sternly but politely. He will "never set foot" on the ground of the Church, he says, accusing it of "using propaganda to cover up Russia's involvement in the Ukraine conflict".

The Church he is referring to is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy which is ultimately governed by the patriarch of the Russian Church, who is accused of being an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Moscow Patriarchy is different from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchy, which was established after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. And the two churches are perceived as taking very different positions on the current conflict.

Before the conflict, a divided Church had hardly been an issue for Ukrainians. Worshippers would usually choose which church to attend for prayers and services based on where they were and their personal preference for the individual priests.

But that began to change when the conflict broke out and some Ukrainians found themselves questioning the supposed pro-Russian position of the Moscow Patriarchy.

[PHOTO] Grotto, St. Cecilia Catholic Church, Toronto

The grotto hidden in the rear of west-end St. Cecilia Catholic Church (163 Annette Street) was still green yesterday afternoon.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes the quiet death of the payphone in Toronto.


• Centauri Dreams considers Centaurs as possible impactors.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the exotic materials likely to exist on super-Earths.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a Taiwan presidential candidate opposed to union with China.


• Far Outliers notes the origins of the Soviet ethnofederal system.


• Joe. My. God. notes the questioning of Bowe Bergdahl's Taliban captors as to whether Obama was gay.
  
• Marginal Revolution notes
  
• The Russian Demographics Blog takes a look at Russia's Turkic minorities and polities, like Tatarstan, and how the anti-Turkish policies are playing there.


• Towleroad notes the Israeli lawmakers who boycotted the swearing-in of the first out gay member of the Knesset.


• Window on Eurasia notes how Tatarstan and Sakha are continuing their relationships with the Turkic world.

[DM] "In memoriam Edward Hugh"

At Demography Matters, I posted the below note in memory of my co-blogger there Edward Hugh, who died today in Spain.

* * *

I was shocked to learn this afternoon of the death, in Girona, of Demography Matters' founder Edward Hugh. Alas, the obituary written by Xavier Grau and published in Ara is, sadly, undeniable. The world is missing a wonderful man.

Wikipedia's summary of his life serves as a perfectly adequate introduction, and reminder, to the man and his work.

Edward Hugh, dubbed by The New York Times as "the blog prophet of Euro zone doom" was a Welsh economist based until his last days in Catalonia, Spain, where he lived since 1990. He spoke French, Catalan, Spanish and English.

Born in Liverpool, Edward Hugh, who "attracted a cult following among financial analysts", studied at the London School of Economics but was drawn more to philosophy, science, sociology and literature. His eclectic intellectual pursuits kept him not only from getting his doctorate but also prevented him from landing a full-time professor’s job.

By inclination a macro economist, his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes often took him far from Economics and towards fields like demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. In particular his work was centred on the study of demographic changes, migration patterns, and the impact of these on economic growth.

In 2014 he published his first book entitled "¿Adiós a la Crisis?". He wrote the book in Spanish and it discusses the economic situation in Spain.

He worked on a book with the provisional working title "Population, the Ultimate Non-renewable Resource".

News of his death has spread quickly in the online communities where he was so actively until recently, on Twitter and (in the blogosphere) at A Fistful of Euros thanks to PO Neill.

As a long-time co-blogger and collaborator, all I can say right is that I will miss Edward. He was a man with a vision, a particular understanding of the way the world had developed and would develop, that merited sharing. On a more personal level, Edward's encouragement to me as a blogger and writer remains cherished.

He will be missed.