This year is, of course, 2016 – an even year. I like even years or, rather, I regard odd years with dread. For in those odd-numbered years, the European football seasons routinely terminate towards the end of May as usual, and then the following weeks pass within what is for me a hazy mental cloud of wondering how to pass my time, indeed of wondering why I am even here. Even years, on the other hand, always manage to fill this particular period with meaning, with purpose, via the great football tournaments, either the World Cup or – this year – the European Championship.

You might object, “Well, you only need to make it to the beginning of July – then you have the Tour de France!” Yes, but that always strikes quite a different sort of note. The football tournaments are drama; the Tour de France, in contrast, is comedy.

Or perhaps I should specify further: The Tour de France is of course farce. No need to get very “in” to it, to recognize or memorize the rider who might happen to “win” it: sooner or later his accomplishment will be rescinded due to revealed doping of one sort or another. This ultimately makes the phenomenon only interesting in that faint way that WWE (that is, professional “wrestling”) matches are interesting: you can only marvel at how people can take so seriously something that is obviously so fake.

Now we have reports that a completely different problem has arisen to erode the Tour’s credibility further: that of hidden motors installed to provide competing riders with a bit of mechanical assistance.

This first came up last January at the world cyclo-cross championships in Belgium, where the Belgian favorite in the women’s under-23 event, one Femke van den Driessche, was indeed disqualified for having used a small motor installed on her rear wheel.

The officials in charge of this year’s Tour de France are ready to prevent any sort of monkey-business like that from occurring. This was announced today by no less than France’s Secretary of State for Sports, Thierry Braillard, who stated that there would be an extensive system of thermal cameras to catch such hidden motors. In fact, for some reason it is the French Atomic Energy Agency (CEA, in French) that will be installing them – yep, that’s what the article says – cameras so sensitive that even motors not in use will be detectable. Apparently, experiments run this past weekend gave these officials confidence that they will work as promised.

“It is very important that we can detect a cheat,” as the president of the Union of International Cyclists, Brian Cookson, pointed out at today’s very same press-conference. Well, yes . . . I guess, although the Tour does not have a very good record in doing so, or at least in detecting cheats in time to actually deny them the glory of appearing on the victor’s podium at the Tour’s end. Then again, its officials are fighting against the inexorable advance of science, after all – medical science, and now, mechanical and miniaturization science.

This is further a “special” year in that, shortly after the Tour is wound up, the Summer Olympics start in Brazil. And again we will have a classic WWE-type farce; indeed, from the turmoil that has already gone on about doping in athletics – including, of course, the exclusion of the entire Russian track and field team – the Tour will surely only be the appetizer to a veritable feast of cat-and-mouse intrigue in Rio between cheating athletes and those who are responsible for catching them.

It will be amusing, no doubt – but, as usual, nothing to take very seriously.

The just-murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was 55 when they shot him last Friday night, and as he made that fateful walk across Moscow’s Great Moskvoretsky Bridge he was in the company of his 23-year-old Ukrainian girlfriend (and fashion model), Anna Durytska. Although that great disparity in age will surely prompt tsk-tsk’s even in this day and age, surely any man who shows himself ready to face down the criminal Russian political establishment over many years must surely be vouchsafed certain sweet side-benefits. Even the sainted Václav Havel was said to be something of a womanizer – when he didn’t find himself in jail, of course – and in the eyes of many he lined up his second wife, a prominent Czech actress, rather too quickly after the death from cancer of his first wife, Olga. These must be classic alpha males we are dealing with here, after all.

But back to Ms. Durytska, who had to endure the horrible experience of seeing her lover, with whom she was holding hands during a romantic midnight stroll on a bridge, cruelly shot down and killed right before her. According to all accounts, the first thing she did was call the police, and then call her mother back in the Ukraine. The police naturally had to take her in for questioning, but, according to the on-line account at BBC News, she was then allowed to return to the Ukraine, and her lawyer stated that the police had been “acting correctly.” (That BBC site also – inevitably? – is topped by a glamor head-shot of Ms. Durytska, just in case anyone wanted to doubt her modeling credentials.)

Other reports, however, paint a picture that was much more unpleasant for Nemtsov’s girlfriend.

She was retenue – “retained,” of course – in Russia, which hints of a certain freedom of movement denied. And in the actual linked news report, taken from Le Point, that is the case. “The investigators interrogated me and wouldn’t tell me when I would be free nor why they were detaining me [there],” Ms. Dyritska is quoted as complaining. “I have the right to leave Russia, I am not a suspect. I am a witness and I gave them all the information that I had, I did everything I could do to help the investigators.”

Inna Durytska, Anna’s mother, already figures in this tale through that midnight telephone call (she was also naturally Anna’s first destination when first arriving back in the Ukraine – Anna is 23, remember), and she became plenty worried. “I was afraid they would accuse her of murder, simply because they need some Ukrainian trail of clues.”

But again, I’m just a little concerned by this discrepancy between the BBC’s account and others’. And it is not just L’Actualité24/Le Figaro, either: this other piece in Germany’s FAZ – surely a source you can trust most of the time – also reports of Ms. Durytska having her departure from Russia “obstructed” (gehindert; it also has yet another shot of her fair countenance, for those who cannot get enough). And surely we all can intuit that a visit to the Russian police – under any circumstances, much less when one is associated with someone so much out of favor with the authorities – is likely to be quite unpleasant.

So what’s going on with the BBC? Or could it be (as ungentlemanly as it may seem) that the Moscow police authorities really gave her no harsher treatment – and detained her no longer – than any witness ordinarily has the right to expect, so that there is an element of personal hysteria here which the BBC was prudent – even gentlemanly – to ignore?

BTW I just heard on VRT, Flemish Radio, that Boris Nemtsov was buried today at the same cemetery that holds the grave of investigative journalist Anna Politovskaya, another figure whose mysterious street-murder (in 2006; well OK, in her apartment building’s elevator) was mighty convenient for Vladimir Putin.

UPDATE: Whatever the true nature of her treatment in Moscow, Die Welt reports that Anna Duritskaya has had to seek police protection in the Ukraine after receiving multiple threats to her life.

Unwise! It looks as if the new Greek premier Alexis Tsipras is alienating those within the EU who otherwise could be potential allies.

“Spain and Portugal exasperated by Tsipras’ remarks.”

Tsipras is already under fire to some degree in his home country due to the temporary settlement he reached with the Eurogroup earlier in February which gained for Greece needed additional financing for another four months, but at the cost of what seemed to be several retreats from the ambitious plan to reject outsider-imposed austerity that had led his Syriza party to electoral victory in January. On Saturday (28 February) the French newsmagazine Le Point reported him hitting out at what he perceived as the distinct lack of support he had received in those negotiations from countries you would think were in the same situation as Greece, namely Spain and Portugal, accusing them of wanting to lead Greece down the road to a “financial asphyxiation.”

Top politicians from those two countries were quick to react, including Spain Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who told a party gathering in Seville that “[w]e are not responsible for the frustration that the radical Greek Left created by making promises that it knew were unsustainable.” Meanwhile, the spokesman for the ruling PSD party in Portugal termed Tsipras’ accusations “very grave, lamentable and false.”

The thing is, that party gathering Rajoy addressed in Seville was of the Partido Popular, Spain’s right-wing, Christian democratic party, while although that “PSD” of the Portuguese ruling party’s name translates to “Social Democratic Party,” it is also of the center-right. Syriza, as everyone knows by now, is of the Left; indeed, that word is an acronym of the party’s longer, formal name which translates as “Coalition of the Radical Left.”

All this stands to reason when you see how the two Iberian countries are not hitting it off with the new Greek government if only because, clearly, in the context of the on-going EU sovereign debt crisis, “conservative” means plodding onward with the terms of the bail-out packages granted by the infamous “Troika” (made up of the EU – meaning mainly the Eurogroup, but also the Commission – the ECB and the IMF). “Radical,” on the other hand, certainly means trying to break out of that arrangement. Although not necessarily only “Radical Left”: indications are that the neo-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party, and so of the Radical Right, should it come to power – Heaven forfend! I understand that much of its leadership is in jail, anyway – would be similarly dismissive towards the terms of Greece’s bail-out package, or worse.

On the other hand, if everyone would just stop and think a bit, it’s clear that all periphery Eurozone countries still laboring under bail-out packages should have many powerful interests in common. First and foremost, any softening of terms that an aggressive, daring national government might be able to grab/cajole from the “Troika” authorities (going all the way to outright debt cancellation) would naturally be something that fellow countries in the same situation should be able to claim for themselves as well. Such considerations clearly were at least in the back of the mind of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and other Eurogroup officials who took such a hard line against the new Syriza government’s proposals. For now, it seems this hard-line faction has managed to keep even other Eurozone countries still suffering under bail-out-mandated austerity firmly within the corral.

Surprise and delight prevailed in Havana following yesterday’s simultaneous announcement by both governments of the resumption of full diplomatic relations. Our man/woman (no by-line) from Le Figaro was there, as reported by the French newssite L’actualité.com.

Well, OK: half-surprise. It seems people there in Havana, at least, had been aware for weeks that some sort of breakthrough in US relations was coming. There is no explanation how they knew.

Further, those in the US now raging against Obama’s move are at least right in one respect: Raúl Castro’s government really wanted this:

The Revolution moves no one to dreams anymore on the Communist island. Even if the regime of Raúl Castro is not in danger, or even hard-pressed (contrary to the repeated proclamations from the Cubans in Miami), the Cuban president had been preparing for this opening to the US for a long time.

Actually, the American authorities might have been pursuing exactly the wrong strategy for all these decades:

As an old Cuban Communist Party cadre, Mirta, confided recently: “How could the American authorities have followed such a stupid policy for fifty years? If they had raised the embargo, normalized relations with Cuba, the regime would have crumbled all by itself.”

Note well that, in fact, the embargo is not raised: that’s something only Congress can do. In any case, according to this piece American culture has long ruled on Havana’s streets anyway, with “caps, glasses [meaning sun- ?] and gadgets” bearing some variation of the Stars & Stripes representing highest style. One has to wonder, though, exactly what sort of “gadgets” the Figaro reporter witnessed there, considering Cuba’s well-known reputation for being a virtual open-air museum of lovingly cared-for fifties-vintage American cars. PalmPilots, maybe? Transistor radios?

Anyone else out there into the Asterix & Obelix cartoons? It’s true that these cartoon tales of plucky Celtic warriors beating back the Romans in ancient Gaul were originally French, but they soon went international, with the requisite translations, and now seem to rival even Peanuts as an ongoing commercial vehicle for all sorts of lucrative tie-ins.

Astrix & Obelix originally meant Goscinny & Uderzo, the story-writer and cartoonist, respectively, but all that commercial money has been smoothing the retirement only of Albert Uderzo (now 87) for the longest time, as Goscinny died back in 1977. (The latter’s Wikipedia entry states he died “during a routine stress test at his doctor’s office” – whoops!) Uderzo recently re-emerged in public for an interview on the French radio station Europe 1.

The highlight of that interview was when he was asked “Which politician could incarnate Asterix?” His answer:

Maybe Asterix resembles the President of the Republic. He’s a person who doesn’t attach any great importance to what people say about him and who just goes on his merry way.

Curious! Could the Europe 1 producers have succeeded in enticing to their studio a representative of the 5% or so of the French electorate which stills supports François Hollande? It’s clear that, among the vast majority of the rest, President Hollande evokes rather less flattering images, most notably those of the tabloid-photo variety of someone riding a motorscooter with a silly helmet on his head, having slipped out the Elysée palace to go meet his mistress in the neighborhood, as it apparently was his wont to do roughly a year ago.

Still, it’s possible that Uderzo is indeed a Hollande fan, as he also displayed in the interview his rather low view of his countrymen. “The French don’t like success,” he declared on-air. “They envy success. They always find something so they can say that it’s no good.” And as evidence Uderzo mentioned the latest Asterix album he brought out (now on his own), Asterix Among the Picts, which in the end sold quite well in the face of mostly negative reviews.

As for drawing, he admitted “I don’t feel so much like it anymore. I have done so many [drawings]!” As I said, he’s 87 years old: he deserved to be done with all that long ago.