http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2082

EU powerless to halt ‘dog spinning’ in Bulgaria

29th Jul 2005

‘Barbaric practice must be stopped immediately’ - Euro-MP

THE EU is powerless to prevent the ‘barbaric’ Bulgarian tradition of ‘dog-spinning’, the European Commission has admitted.

Dog-spinning - in which dogs are suspended over water and spun repeatedly before being released to spin wildly in the other direction, disoriented and terrified - is still practiced to forecast prosperity is some remote Bulgarian villages.

“Dog-spinning is a barbaric practice and must not be allowed to continue into the 21st century,” said Caroline Lucas, a UK Green Party MEP who has called on the EU to stamp out dog spinning during negotiations over Bulgaria’s forthcoming accession to the union.

Dr Lucas, who is vice-president of the RSPCA and the European Parliament’s cross-party Animal Welfare Intergroup, said: “Dog-spinning is such a clear violation of animal welfare regulations that it must be comprehensively dealt with as part of Bulgaria’s entry negotiations with the EU.

“The European Commission must impose an immediate end to the practice.”

A spokesperson for European Health and consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou told Dr Lucas he shared her concerns on animal welfare in Bulgaria and would raise the issue’s with the Bulgarian government.

But he said ultimately the EU was powerless to intervene in the practice, as EU legislation for the protection of animals is principally concerned with animals on farms, slaughter of livestock, transport and laboratory animals.

“The EU’s competence to legislate… on cruelty towards dogs…is limited as this area remains under the sole responsibility of member states,” said the Commission.

Stop laughing. This is serious. But how do we impose sanctions on Bulgaria?

One of the names I remember hearing in the news often in my pre-teens was that of General William Westmoreland. He was the commander of US forces in Vietnam while Lyndon Johnson was President.

Westmoreland died on Monday at the age of 91. Clearly a major figure in one of the nastier of America’s many incursions into foreign affairs.

I’ll keep this post open for a while to link to obituaries and reaction to Westmoreland’s passing. I’ll kick it off with the Wikipedia page on Westmoreland, and a lengthy piece by New York Times obituarist Eric Pace.

• Washington Post obituary
• NPR Morning Edition - audio profile by Stanley Karnow
• The Guardian newsblog

Now I could understand if this stadium were called the Goodyear Grandstand or the Michelin Mansion. But whatever possessed the architects to create a stadium that looks just like a spare tyre from the outside?

This, as it happens, will be the main arena in Munich for next year’s FIFA World Cup.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15tonme.html

Cameroun international law consultant Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme has his say on the uselessness of Live 8.

Firefox 1.0.5 has been released. For me it was a seamless upgrade. More info and download links at Mozillazine.

http://asia.news.yahoo.com/050712/kyodo/d8b9kaf80.html

A restaurant in the Manchurian city of Jilin admits Japanese customers only if they firstly apologise for their country’s occupation of China in the 1930s.

I wonder what’s on their menu…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/08/blog_ambulance_chasers/

This item by Andrew Orlowski posted on The Register a couple of hours ago raises some thought-provoking issues about the techie reaction to major breaking news events such as 11/9/01, the Tsunami and Thursday’s bomb attacks in London.

Monique van Dusseldorp, writing for Poynter’s E-media Tidbits, gives what I think is a reasonably objective look at the way the London tragedy has been covered by the “new media”.

Orlowski is right in a sense. Self-analysis of the technological voyeurism of such a disaster is rather obscene (and arguably my post now, written barely 36 hours after the event, falls into that category). I think, in the fullness of time, however, it is worth studying the true value derived from the resultant wikis and moblogs - and what means we have of using these media to eliminate the causes of war and terrorism in the future.

The IOC meeting in Singapore has decided today that Beijing 2008 will be the last appearance of baseball and softball at the Olympic Games for the time being. They have been dropped from the 2012 games in London, but are theoretically eligible for re-inclusion in the Microsoft Seattle Olympics of 2016 (remember where you hear it first!)

This is a pity from my point of view, as baseball is one of the few Olympic competitions which capture my interest.

A brief IOC announcement is here. Five other sports are candidates for inclusion in 2012: Roller Sports, Squash, Karate, Rugby (presumably the seven-a-side mutation) and Golf! Later today, the IOC Executive Board will decide whether to submit any of the five to the IOC session, which is scheduled to wrap up tomorrow.

Hopefully, the IOC takes a big reality check and admits none of the five - and continues to reduce the Olympics in size in the years to follow.

I had intended to write this post about the pros and cons of London hosting the 2012 Olympics. That, however, has to go on hold for now.

The atrocities that took place at four locations in London on Thursday morning are very distressing. No ideological argument can justify mass murder, which is what this appears to be.

It was awful, to use an understatement, for this to happen in London the very day after the city celebrated the award of the 30th Olympic Games, and five days after the joy of the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. London has seen through the trauma in recent history of the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army, and before that, of the German blitzkrieg of the Second World War. I trust that its return to normality will be swift and orderly.

The multiple bombings on the London transport system, as in Madrid last year, are a sobering reminder to us all of the impact of terrorism worldwide. Innocent people are dying all the time from bombings in places as diverse as Colombia, Israel and Algeria, and in the major cities of Iraq it’s happening almost daily, or sometimes even more frequently than that.

Without wishing to diminish the tragedy of July 7’s bombings in London, I do wish that our leaders and our media would pay more attention to similar atrocities as they arise around the world, both Anglophile and non-Anglophile.

I won’t labour too long over links to coverage of the London attacks - lots of people covering that only too well - but The Guardian is an excellent starting point.

Two particular items of reaction I will point out: one is Mayor Ken Livingstone’s inspiring statement to reporters in Singapore yesterday (and hopefully I’ll find the complete audio later on).

On the other side of the ledger, Media Matters for America has noted a particularly galling exchange between two Fox “News” Channel talking heads yesterday.

London get the 2012 Olympics. New South Wales flog Queensland in SOO3. What an eventful five minutes.

Now, let’s concentrate on the G8. Several options for live audio from the Radical Radio Coalition’s G8 Audio website.