adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

News

Canadian athletes have mixed feelings over Russians competing in Paris

Published

 on

 

A complex issue evokes complex feelings among Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes bound for Paris.

The International Olympic and Paralympic committees allowing some Russian and Belarusian athletes entry into the 2024 Summer Games is a thorny topic.

The curtain had barely come down on the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing when Russia invaded Ukraine with Belarusian support.

The IOC will allow several athletes holding Russian and Belarusian passports who can prove they don’t support the invasion to compete as an “Individual Neutral Athlete” or AIN in the Olympic Games. In the Paralympic Games, they will compete as a Neutral Paralympic Athlete (NPA).

As of Sunday, 15 athletes with a Russian passport and 17 Belarusians were both cleared and accepted invitations to compete in Paris under the AIN banner, according to the IOC website. Another 28 athletes declined invitations.

No athletes from those countries can participate in team sports. No flag, anthem or colours symbolizing Russia or Belarus will be allowed, and no Russian or Belarusian government or state officials were invited to Paris.

The Olympic Games officially start with Friday’s opening ceremonies, although some preliminary competition gets underway Wednesday. The Paralympic Games open Aug. 28 and close Sept. 8.

Multiple international sports federations, but not all, banned Russians and Belarusians outright after the invasion, so it’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind for some Canadian athletes who became accustomed to their absence.

“I’m more curious about what the environment will be like at the athletes’ village knowing that a Ukrainian athlete has to live with a Russian athlete. Will it create tension or awkwardness?” asked Olympic weightlifting champion Maude Charron.

Russia hasn’t been recognized as a country at the Olympic Games since 2016 because of evidence of state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

And it’s doping that still rankles race walker Evan Dunfee.

“They haven’t cleaned up their house. They haven’t admitted that what they did was wrong,” he said. “There’s still systematic problems on the doping side of things. I view it through that lens a little bit still partly because that’s a world I know way better.”

Women’s rowing eights cox Kristen Kit has opinions on both the doping and military front.

“I am on the World Anti-Doping athlete council so I have been a part of some meetings on this topic,” she said. “As a person of Ukrainian descent, my dad is a first-generation Canadian, I do feel strongly that Russian athletes and Belarusian athletes who have ties to the military, whether they’re paid by the military, or they have appeared in any type of advertisement or promotion of the military, they should not be allowed to compete.

“I understand that it’s very hard to do due diligence on everyone competing, I actually do feel it’s very important, because there is proof. There is evidence of the Russian government using athletes to validate their operations in Ukraine.

“From an anti-doping perspective, we have advocated and we have looked for every opportunity to make sure that Russian and Belarus athletes are participating in the clean sport movement. The IOC is working very hard to make sure there’s pretesting. We can always do more. The WADA athlete council is also always advocating for more, but we are choosing to trust the process.”

Russians won’t compete under the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) moniker as they did in Tokyo and Beijing. The IOC booted the ROC in October for absorbing sports organizations in Ukraine.

Montreal lawyer Dick Pound’s 44-year tenure as an IOC member encompassed the exclusion of South Africa from the Olympic Games because of apartheid, and countries boycotting both the 1980 and 1984 Summer Games.

Now an honorary IOC member, Pound has broad experience in the clash of sporting ideals and geopolitics.

“You have this collision between one philosophy, which is the Olympics welcome everybody and you’re not tarred with anything because your passport comes from a particular country. That runs head-on into the political reality, which is politicians don’t care, they just want a blanket sanction against any Russian or Belarusian,” Pound said.

“It’s messy, but you’re trying to get through some kind of message that we really do welcome people who are not involved in the war or the conflict.”

There will be fewer AIN athletes in Paris than the 335 ROC athletes in Tokyo and 215 in Beijing, but their presence in Paris remains a hot-button topic in the sporting world.

“I’m very much in support of Ukraine and Ukrainian athletes,” said Canadian distance runner Charles Philibert-Thiboutot. “To me, being a Ukrainian athlete and having to line up beside a Russian athlete I would probably be devastated. However, I do think that putting conditions on athlete participation based on army enrolment or political engagement or political views is really something that is tricky.

“I’m all for the Ukrainian athletes, but how do we handle this is a very difficult question.”

Russia’s invasion occurred eight days out from the 2022 Paralympic Games opening ceremonies. The IPC banned Russians and Belarusians from Beijing citing athlete safety in the village, and the concern that athletes and coaches would refuse to compete against athletes from those countries.

The IPC has since aligned with the IOC in allowing vetted athletes to compete under sanctions.

Boccia athlete Alison Levine was not happy when she heard January’s announcement that ROC would not be stripped of its result from the 2022 Olympic figure skating team event despite the disqualification of a team member for doping, and that Canada would remain fourth.

“It’s a punch to the gut of athletes like myself that believe in fair, true sport, to have them still representing their country, but not representing their country, and everyone knows it,” Levine said.

Given other conflicts in the world, there’s plenty of “whataboutism” when it comes to athlete participation in multi-sport Games, including Israel-Hamas warfare that started in October.

The decision to compete in a World Cup in Cairo in November 2023 so soon after that violence began and so geographically close to it was not an easy one for the Canadian women’s sitting volleyball team. Canada did travel there and won.

“That was a big decision whether to go or not with respect to the Israel-Palestine war,” said team member Heidi Peters. “That was a big thing, safety concerns, general perception of it, everybody having a different perception and different comfort level, travelling to said destination and managing everybody’s feelings around that.

“Even around COVID, even within our teams, we have different opinions on vaccines and different things can get really political. That’s a really hard thing to navigate. We’ve had a lot of really hard conversations on our team and have people who have different beliefs on different things. We are able to work through it and genuinely see each other’s perspectives.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 21, 2024.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Teen smoking and other tobacco use drop to lowest level in 25 years, CDC reports

Published

 on

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.

There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.

“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”

A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.

The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.

Use of other products has been dropping, too.

Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.

Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.

The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.

Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.

Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,

Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Alabama man arrested in SEC social media account hack that led the price of bitcoin to spike

Published

 on

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.

Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”

But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.

Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.

Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”

An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.

The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Tech firms remove social media accounts of a Russian drone factory after an AP investigation

Published

 on

 

Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.

Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”

But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.

In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.

The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.

The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.

In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”

Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.

It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.

TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.

The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.

Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.

The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.

Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.

Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.

In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”

According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.

Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.

Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”

That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.

TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.

Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.

___

Find more AP coverage at

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending