Greeks Markets Dive, Hong Kong “Breast Attack”
Monday, August 3, 2015
The Big Sell: Greece’s primary stock market dove 22.87 percent this morning when trading resumed after the markets were closed for five weeks during the country’s financial crisis. It didn’t come as a surprise. By comparison, the biggest drop in the US market came on 1987’s infamous “Black Monday” when the market dove 22.61 percent.
Finish Line: The World Anti Doping Agency said yesterday that blood testing shows there’s a crisis with mass amounts of doping going on in international athletic competition. Tests of 12,000 blood samples from 5,000 athletes revealed what were described as “extraordinary” amounts of doping.
Reports say that track and field athletes from the 800 meter run to the marathon tested suspicious or highly suspicious. They also said that at least a third of the medal-winners at world championships and the Olympics from 2001 to2012 tested as suspicious.
Possibly most striking, more than 80 percent of Russia’s medals were won by athletes with suspicious tests. Russia’s sports minister calls the allegations “nonsense.”
The Hunted: Zimbabwe, which wants to arrest an American dentist who killed Cecil the lion, says another American illegally took out a lion back in April. Officials say that Dr. Jan Casimir Seski, a gynecological oncologist in Pittsburgh, killed a lion with a bow and arrow on a farm in an area where lion hunting is banned. Seski is a pioneer in what is called “bloodless” surgery, but he’s an avid big game hunter. One bow hunting website shows him smiling over a dead elephant with the caption, “Congratulations to Dr. Jan Seski on another fine elephant with the bow and arrow.”
Summer in the West: A wildfire in northern California has blown up to nearly 50,000 acres, burning 20,000 acres overnight Saturday. At least 24 homes have been destroyed. The fire is burning in a remote area east of Clear Lake.
The number of acres burned in the West so far this season is approaching 6 million, and likely to surpass the 2011 number of 6,091,572 acres.
Nation: A 9-year-old batboy died yesterday after he was accidentally hit in the head Saturday night by a warm-up swing of a bat at summer collegiate baseball tournament in Kansas. Kaiser Carlile grabbed the bats for the Liberal Bee Jays of Liberal, Kansas. Players said he idolized the team.
World: Protesters marched in Hong Kong yesterday, many of them wearing women’s bras outside their clothing, objecting to the sentencing of a woman to 3 ½ months in jail for assaulting a police officer with her breast during a street demonstration. The slogan: “Breasts are not weapons.” One woman said, “I believe we are all baffled as to how a breast attack works.”
Hoofbeats: Triple Crown winner American Pharoah was back on the track yesterday, winning the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. Most horses of Pharoah’s stature are retired for breeding, but his owners say they can’t stable a horse that loves to race as much as Pharoah.
Everybody Out of the Pool: The International Olympic Committee says it’s going to test for disease-causing viruses in the sewage-laced waters off Rio de Janeiro in advance of the summer Olymics next year. This comes after The Associated Press tested the water in which about 1400 swimmers and sailors will compete and found high levels of viruses from sewage.
The Thin Line: The Trump presidential campaign has fired one of its staffers for racially charged Facebook posts dating back to 2007. Staffer Sam Nunberg is accused of referring to Rev. Al Sharpton’s daughter with a racial slur and saying President Obama is a “Socialist Marxist Islamo Fascist Nazi Appeaser.” Now we have an approximation of the limit for the Trump campaign.
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