Take a good look at the below tableau: Such a scene of triumph and female empowerment, smiles all around, the Russian flag wielded like a blanket and the (bizarre, disjointed) logo of the 2012 London Summer Games looming off to the left.

Sadly, as was revealed to the world not so long ago – by the WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency – if that Russian flag stands for anything these days, it stands for a state-sponsored campaign of deliberate cheating at international athletics competitions through doping and other artificial (and banned) chemical advantages. The two “athletes” pictured here, track-and-field runners Mariya Savinova and Ekaterina Poistogova, were both on a list of five published in November for which the WADA recommended a lifetime ban from any further competitions. (As you will further be aware, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) also banned all Russian track-and-field athletes from the upcoming Rio Olympic Games.)

Gee, people pay billions to build facilities and throw a a high-level athletics party (OK, “competition”), invite you to come join in – and then you cheat! Not being especially grateful for the hospitality there, wouldn’t you agree? That may be why, as the Volkskrant reports here, the British athletic federation, UK Athletics, has just put out a quite remarkable anti-doping proposal, entitled “Manifesto for Clean Athletics.” Here are the introductory words of Chairman Ed Warner:

Greater transparency, tougher sanctions, longer bans – and even resetting the clock on world records for a new era – we should be open to do whatever it takes to restore credibility in the sport. And at the heart must be a proper and appropriate funding regime for the anti-doping authorities to help confront the new challenges they face. Clean athletes the world over deserve nothing less.

“Greater transparency” means recording all doping-checks and their results in an open register, according to this proposal; “tougher sanctions, longer bans” means establishing a minimum ban of eight years for cheaters. There are a number of other interesting suggestions here as well (e.g. if your athlete is caught cheating, you as a federation compensate the lost prize-money to those athletes of other federations who were honest) which you can read, in English, on the UK Athletics website. But the one that particularly catches the eye, of course, is erasing all athletic records and just starting over. Why not indeed? (more…)

From all the talk in recent years about Social Media, you would think media outlets (especially) would be quicker to use them.

Case in point:

Japan ambassador returns to Beijing amid territorial spat http://t.co/b6rSwGyl

July 16, 2012 5:32 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Reuters

Reuters Top News

“Territorial spat”: so now you have all sorts of fuss & bother about supposed rising tension on either side of the East China Sea, even though the Reuters article quotes the Japanese Foreign Minister denying that the temporary recall had anything to do with any disputed waters.

And well he might deny that:

LeMonde Unbearable tragedy: National mourning in #Japan as 1st #panda born there in 24yrs (@ #Tokyo zoo) dies http://t.co/bq5d6bdl

July 16, 2012 1:05 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

As should be obvious, the ambassador had to return to receive detailed information and instructions for complaining to the Chinese about that mother panda they had provided to the Tokyo Zoo – clearly unable to produce a live offspring!

Did I go to sleep and miss a couple of months? Is it already “silly season” – those depths of summer when real news is so scarce that radio time, newspaper pages, and weblog entries must be filled instead with the trivial and inane (if hopefully amusing)?

Well, you should know by now that you can count on EuroSavant for that sort of thing every so often. The latest bit is from Japan, as reported by Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad within – surprisingly! – the “.biz” business section of its website: Bra stimulates women to seek a man.

Yes, it seems the Land of the Rising Sun has somewhat of a demographic problem, in that its women are increasingly disinclined to marry, preferring to devote themselves to their careers. Now the lingerie company Triumph International has come to the rescue, with its new “Husband Hunting Bra” (available on the Japanese market only, for reasons which will soon become obvious). It’s a bra, all right, but the star attraction here is the digital clock built in on an extension underneath the garment’s supporting sections. There are two set of numbers there that count down; I assume that they represent months and days, for the idea here is that the bra’s owner sets herself a deadline for catching a man, programs it into the digital clock, sets it going, and so has a constant prod to action there on her chest. How to stop the clock? I’m glad you asked: above that clock-section, in the sweet spot between the cups, there’s a slot just big enough to accommodate the insertion of one engagement ring. Upon such an insertion, the clock mechanism stops.

Those Japanese do sometimes inspire the darndest things, don’t they? Oh, and Triumph has even taken care to discourage any sort of pre-marital hanky-panky, in that below the clock part you have printed in big Japanese characters a message which according to the Niewsblad article reads “In search of a husband.” Imagine taking a girl home, getting to third base with her – and recall that the Japanese are very into baseball – and encountering that! Maybe at this point you’re suspecting that I made all of this up, but be my guest and click through to the article: even if you know no Dutch, you’ll find there, appropriately enough, a set of two illustrations showing what I mean, as displayed by a rather cute young Japanese model.

I generally don’t like to do two blog entries, in the same day, coming from one media source, since there’s truly a wide world of European on-line magazines, newspapers, and weblogs (that I can read and understand) out there. But oooh la la! – when I saw the link to this blog-entry – “The Women of Silicone”! – on the Libération website when researching my own Pervez Musharraf entry, I just thought you would want to know about it. As you can intuit already, it is definitely a change-of-pace!

The weblog itself, situated on the Libération servers, is called The 400 Asses: Planet Sex, Viewed and Recounted by Agnès Giard. (That’s “ass” as in “human rear end,” “bum” if you like,” not “horse-like beast of burden.” And that’s Agnès herself at the top-right, peering down into her web-camera – don’t you agree that she is trying to look as Japanese as she can?) And this entry that is entitled “The Women of Silicone” is a quite fascinating report – with pictures! but mostly just of faces – on the booming Japanese “love doll” industry. Yes, those life-sized, hyper-realistic feminine figures which, as Agnès relates, “millions of men buy, clothe, care for and . . . love.” (more…)

In the end, last Thursday’s and Friday’s Madrid Iraqi Donors’ Conference seems to have turned out better than expected. The coverage in Denmark’s Politiken (Japan Gives Iraq $5 Billion) gives a final verdict that is middle-of-the-road: yes, donor countries “reached deeper into their pockets than had seemed would be the case even hours before the conference closed.” (As the headline recounts, Japan upped its contribution during the course of the conference, ultimately offering a soft loan of $3.5 billion, and an outright grant of $1.5 billion.) On the other hand, Politiken still calls the results disappointing for the Americans, who had hoped to call forth much more money than the result of $18 billion to add to the ca. $20 billion that the US Congress approved (half of it a loan). On yet another hand, the article points out, for a long time there were doubts whether there would even be enough support to hold the conference in the first place.

Overall, the world’s press has plenty in the results of the Madrid Conference to see either a glass half-full or half-empty, according to the given newspaper’s (and/or its journalist’s) inclination or political stance. It’s rather more refreshing to come across a piece of commentary on these happenings which is willing to put them into a wider context, even if it turns out to be a very anti-Coalition one. This is what we have in the article in the Danish commentary newspaper Information entitled A New Iraq. (more…)