Beware big tobacco bearing gifts: tobacco industry corporate social responsibility activities in Greece

The WHO recommends that parties of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) should “denormalize and, to the extent possible, regulate activities described as ‘socially responsible’ by the tobacco industry, including but not limited to activities described as ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR)”.1 2 However, governments continue to accept and endorse CSR activities led by tobacco companies, a trend that has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic.3 This report highlights recent CSR activities by Papastratos, the Greek subsidiary of Philip Morris International (PMI).4During the pandemic, Papastratos has been involved in various activities described by the company as CSR, which have given the company a platform to promote its activities and speak directly to the Greek government. The company’s largest initiative focused on supporting small retail businesses.5 To this direction, Papastratos has committed 10 million euros and collaborated with technology companies to provide discounts and offers for small retail businesses.6 In a shared press conference in September 2020, the Greek Minister of Development and Investment praised Papastratos for the ‘exemplary behaviour of corporate social responsibility’, calling other firms to follow.5 Papastratos also reportedly donated 50 ventilators and more than 250 000 masks to public hospitals (April 2020),7 an approach that seems to be part of a broader tobacco industry strategy of donating money and medical equipment to improve its image during the pandemic in multiple countries.3 These donations received global media coverage, including critical articles that labelled the donations a ‘publicity stunt’,8 a claim that PMI rejected.9 During the early stages of the pandemic, Papastratos announced that 237 of its employees volunteered in a local government programme to provide help to people that cannot or should not leave their houses.10 The company received public thanks and praise by elected officials, including the Minister of Health7 and the Chair of the organisation representing all Greek municipalities.10Such activities follow a pattern of increased presence of Papastratos in public life and government affairs in an effort to achieve more favourable regulatory environment for its products.11 Papastratos has donated equipment to the Hellenic Coast Guard (‘to combat trade of illicit cigarettes’) as part of PMI’s IMPACT initiative12 13 as well as 20 fire engines (reported cost of 1 million euros). The current Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis represented the Greek government in the ceremony for the donation of fire engines, and explicitly thanked Papastratos for their ‘useful donation’.14 15These recent interactions with government officials follow a series of high-level meetings between Papastratos and the Greek government over the past decade. For instance, when PMI extended its storehouse in Western Greece in 2013, the Greek Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras, invited the CEO of Papastratos to his formal residence, where he thanked the company for this decision and their support to the Greek economy.16 In 2018, the then Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, visited the renovated factory of Papastratos, where he praised the company’s decision to invest 300 million euros in the recovering Greek economy.17 18 Numerous other elected officials, including the former President of the Hellenic Republic, have attended Papastratos’ events.19PMI seems to maintain a direct line of communication with government officials at the highest levels, including the three most recent Prime Ministers of the country. Although there is no evidence that this communication has had a direct influence on governmental policies, there is no doubt that Greece has not made enough progress in implementing tobacco control policies in the past decade.20 21 Despite the rhetoric for a ‘smoke-free world’ PMI still sells 3.6 billion cigarettes in Greece annually22 and controls roughly one-third of the local tobacco market22 which is estimated to kill more than 26 000 people and cost billions of Euros every year.23 The story of the Trojan horse is well embedded in the Greek culture. However, Greek political parties and stakeholders consistently fail to recognise that donations and collaborations proposed by the tobacco industry serve the same purpose as the mythical gift offered to the people of Troy. Tobacco companies are using their marketing and financial power to influence governments and societies and stymie tobacco control policies that would damage their profits and save millions of lives. Like in many other countries, Greek stakeholders seem to have low awareness of these intentions and of the relevant WHO guidance, thus offering tobacco industry a platform to promote its agenda

Experimental Line Parameters of the b^(1)Σ^(+)_g ← X^(3)Σ^(-)_g Band of Oxygen Isotopologues at 760 nm Using Frequency-Stabilized Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy

Positions, intensities, self-broadened widths, and collisional narrowing coefficients of the oxygen isotopologues ^(16)O^(18)O, ^(16)O^(17)O, ^(17)O^(18)O, and ^(18)O^(18)O have been measured for the b^(1)Σg + ← X^(3)Σg − (0,0) band using frequency-stabilized cavity ring-down spectroscopy. Line positions of 156 P-branch transitions were referenced against the hyperfine components of the ^(39)K D_1 (4s ^(2)S_(1/2) → 4p ^(2)P_(1/2)) and D_2 (4s ^(2)S_(1/2) → 4p ^(2)P_(3/2)) transitions, yielding precisions of ~0.00005 cm^(−1) and absolute accuracies of 0.00030 cm^(−1) or better. New excited b^(1)Σg + state molecular constants are reported for all four isotopologues. The measured line intensities of the ^(16)O^(18)O isotopologue are within 2% of the values currently assumed in molecular databases. However, the line intensities of the ^(16)O^(17)O isotopologue show a systematic, J-dependent offset between our results and the databases. Self-broadening half-widths for the various isotopologues are internally consistent to within 2%. This is the first comprehensive study of the line intensities and shapes for the ^(17)O^(18)O or ^(18)O_2 isotopologues of the b^(1)Σg + ← X^(3)Σg − (0,0) band of O_2. The ^(16)O_2, ^(16)O^(18)O, and ^(16)O^(17)O line parameters for the oxygen A-band have been extensively revised in the HITRAN 2008 database using results from the present study

Deflection of ultra high energy cosmic rays by the galactic magnetic field: from the sources to the detector

We report the results of 3D simulations of the trajectories of ultra-high energy protons and Fe nuclei (with energies $E = 4 \times 10^{19}$ and $2.5 \times 10^{20} eV$) propagating through the galactic magnetic field from the sources to the detector. A uniform distribution of anti-particles is backtracked from the detector, at the Earth, to the halo of the Galaxy. We assume an axisymmetric, large scale spiral magnetic field permeating both the disc and the halo. A normal field component to the galactic plane ($B_z$) is also included in part of the simulations. We find that the presence of a large scale galactic magnetic field does not generally affect the arrival directions of the protons, although the inclusion of a $B_z$ component may cause significant deflection of the lower energy protons ($E = 4 \times 10^{19}$ eV). Error boxes larger than or equal to $\sim 5^{\circ}$ are most expected in this case. On the other hand, in the case of heavy nuclei, the arrival direction of the particles is strongly dependent on the coordinates of the particle source. The deflection may be high enough ($> 20^{\circ}$) as to make extremely difficult any identification of the sources unless the real magnetic field configuration is accurately determined. Moreover, not every incoming particle direction is allowed between a given source and the detector. This generates sky patches which are virtually unobservable from the Earth. In the particular case of the UHE events of Yakutsk, Fly's Eye, and Akeno, they come from locations for which the deflection caused by the assumed magnetic field is not significant.Comment: LaTeX + 2 postscript figures - Color versions of both figures (highly recommended) available via anonymous ftp at ftp://capc07.ast.cam.ac.uk/pub/uhecr_gmf as fig*.g

Concurrent Kleene Algebra: Free Model and Completeness

Concurrent Kleene Algebra (CKA) was introduced by Hoare, Moeller, Struth and Wehrman in 2009 as a framework to reason about concurrent programs. We prove that the axioms for CKA with bounded parallelism are complete for the semantics proposed in the original paper; consequently, these semantics are the free model for this fragment. This result settles a conjecture of Hoare and collaborators. Moreover, the techniques developed along the way are reusable; in particular, they allow us to establish pomset automata as an operational model for CKA.Comment: Version 2 includes an overview section that outlines the completeness proof, as well as some extra discussion of the interpolation lemma. It also includes better typography and a number of minor fixes. Version 3 incorporates the changes by comments from the anonymous referees at ESOP. Among other things, these include a worked example of computing the syntactic closure by han

Critical Exponents from AdS/CFT with Flavor

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study the thermodynamics of massive N=2 supersymmetric hypermultiplet flavor fields coupled to N=4 supersymmetric SU(Nc) Yang-Mills theory, formulated on curved four-manifolds, in the limits of large Nc and large 't Hooft coupling. The gravitational duals are probe D-branes in global thermal AdS. These D-branes may undergo a topology-changing transition in the bulk. The D-brane embeddings near the point of the topology change exhibit a scaling symmetry. The associated scaling exponents can be either real- or complex-valued. Which regime applies depends on the dimensionality of a collapsing submanifold in the critical embedding. When the scaling exponents are complex-valued, a first-order transition associated with the flavor fields appears in the dual field theory. Real scaling exponents are expected to be associated with a continuous transition in the dual field theory. For one example with real exponents, the D7-brane, we study the transition in detail. We find two field theory observables that diverge at the critical point, and we compute the associated critical exponents. We also present analytic and numerical evidence that the transition expresses itself in the meson spectrum as a non-analyticity at the critical point. We argue that the transition we study is a true phase transition only when the 't Hooft coupling is strictly infinite.Comment: 31 pages, 21 eps files in 12 figures; v2 added one reference and one footnote, version published in JHE

Photometry of the Chromospherically Active Binary HD 197010

For the past several years we have been conducting a study of the spectroscopic and photometric characteristics of a sample X-ray emitting stars from the Einstein Observatory Medium Sensitivity Survey identified as probable binary systems by Fleming (1988) and Fleming, et al.(1989). One of these stars, HD 197010 ( = 1E2038.3-0046 = SAO 144692 = BD -1degree 4025) was discovered to be a short period eclipsing binary by Robb, et al.(1990). The ephemeris he presented was based on observations in 1989 and 1990, but only the 1990 observations included points at eclipse minimum. We report here on first results of almost a year of observations at Gettysburg College Observatory and the National Undergraduate Research Observatory, permitting a new determination of the photometric ephemeris of HD 197010