Word: pro
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...slightly tainted by quarterback Michael Vick's return to the NFL after his conviction for financing a dogfighting ring, or the renewed debate about Pete Rose's life-time ban from baseball. But spare a thought for Europe's rugby fans, whose excitement over the start of a new pro season has been replaced by disgust with the "bloodgate" affair - a scandal involving players faking gory injuries, and sometimes even being mutilated to mask the deception. (See TIME's Top 10 Sporting Comebacks...
...Monday, officials from the European Rugby Cup punished a gaggle of people from the storied London pro club the Harlequins for behavior that, even by modern standards, seems astonishingly under-handed. Harlequins staffers, the club's coach, and one player were banned from the sport for up to three years for staging a blood-gushing injury to help the team gain an illicit advantage over rival Leinster in the dying moments of a European Cup tournament quarter-final match in April. The goal: have a player simulate an open wound in order to exploit an exemption to substitution rules that...
...rugby's fans, they can only look sadly upon the incident as yet another, albeit extreme, example of the growing incidence of deception in what has long been known as the gentleman's sport. Ironically, as blatant cheating - from sham injuries to faked fouls - has proliferated in and polluted pro soccer, rugby's tradition of fair play, respect for rivals, and zip-lipped deference to referees has often been cited by soccer purists as an example to follow. Probably no more. (See pictures of soccer...
...people reacted. The Today Show's poll on whether she should have shown that much thigh got one of the show's biggest responses ever, with 83% pro-shorts. Local papers found "experts" to discuss the implications of the shorts for the Obama White House, international papers analyzed what it said about American culture, the blogosphere took up every angle from what this said about the objectification of women to the taxonomy of the shorts: Hot pants? Cutoffs? Booty Shorts? (See pictures of Michelle Obama's style evolution...
...that's exactly what happened when pro-al-Qaeda cleric Abdel Latif Moussa gathered about 100 of his heavily armed supporters in a mosque to denounce Hamas rule and declared himself the "Islamic prince" of the new "emirate." Hamas security men moved in to disarm the group, and 24 people, including Moussa and about 20 of his followers, were killed in the ensuing firefight. Their group, Jund Ansar Allah, claimed inspiration from al-Qaeda, and condemned Hamas both for maintaining a cease-fire with Israel and for its failure to impose Islamic Shari'a law after taking full control...