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...Last month in Miami, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) convened the latest in a series of meetings meant to hash out the science behind medical conditions that make it difficult to determine an athlete's sex. Long a topic of debate in Olympic circles (mandatory gender testing began in the 1960s), sex ambiguity hit the headlines again last year when South African runner Caster Semenya won the women's 800-m world championship in Berlin by an astonishing two-second margin. Fellow competitors raised concerns about Semenya's masculine appearance, prompting track and field's governing body to order...
...past, sports governing bodies and even the Olympics have permitted athletes with DSDs to compete. In the 1996 Atlanta Games, the last Olympics with mandatory gender-verification tests, seven females were found to have androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a person is genetically male - that is, her 23rd chromosome pair is XY - but is resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. As a result, the body doesn't hear the signal to develop as a male and so develops externally as a female. All seven athletes were allowed to compete in Atlanta...
When a string of Chinese dissidents were arrested or detained last year, the cause was often attributed to the large number of sensitive anniversaries that fell on the 2009 calendar. The first anniversary of the riots in Tibet, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic all contributed to a defensive official outlook and a cold climate for civil rights in China. But that bleak trend also offered the hope that in the coming year, with a calendar relatively free of delicate periods, China's grip on free speech...
...that hasn't happened. The Chinese government has cracked down on activists just as aggressively during the first few weeks of 2010 as it did last year. In the past week, a court in Sichuan sentenced an activist investigating the deaths of children in schools that collapsed in the 2008 earthquake, a court in Beijing confirmed a lengthy jail term for the author of a 2008 pro-democracy manifesto, and the family of a trailblazing defense lawyer marked the one-year anniversary of his disappearance, which was presumably at the hands of state security officers. "This series of repression against...
...story is like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels meets The Golden Girls, with a slightly odd, Germanic twist. Angry about losing $3.5 million in investments last year in the recession, a wily gang of German pensioners were bent on revenge, prosecutors say. So they allegedly did what some who've lost fortunes in the downturn have probably thought about at one point or another: they allegedly abducted their financial adviser and locked him in a cellar for days, demanding he help them get their money back. Now the retirees - all over the age of 60 - are on trial...