Jockstrip: The world as we know it

EU lashes out at British media fallacies

BRUSSELS, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- The European Union has had enough of the British media and created a Web site to dispel stories such as pigs must have toys, The Times of London reports.

The Web site is aimed at all European media, but nearly 90 percent of the stories come from Britain. The site is most easily located by searching for its name -- Get Your Facts Straight.

The site lists actual headlines then clarifies the misleading facts or refutes them entirely.

Among the headlines were "The euro causes skin diseases and makes you impotent," "EU says pigs must be given toys," "Yogurt to be banned" and "Europe says playground swings are too high."

With regard to a Feb. 4, 2004, article in The Sun headlined "Sex toys must be handed in," the site refutes the newspaper's statement women "must take back old vibrators for recycling before they can buy a new one." The EU explains rather, "There is no requirement for anyone to hand in old electrical goods before being allowed to purchase new ones, merely that they should be able to do so free of charge if they so wish."

Father arrested in hockey coach attack

TORONTO, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- The father of a Toronto hockey player was free on bond on charges he attacked a coach for benching his son.

Bradley Desroche was ordered to undergo anger management counseling Monday for allegedly choking Junior Canadiens' Coach Mark Teskey, who took Desroche's son out of the action during a weekend game, the Toronto Star reported Tuesday.

Officials said hockey is an emotional game and parents get caught up in the emotion. However, Greater Toronto Hockey League President John Gardner resisted calls to hire security guards. Gardner said he would meet with the league's board about training coaches to deal with potentially violent parents.

"What we should be trying to do is giving coaches a heads-up to deal with emotional problems as soon as possible," Rob Toffili, general manager of the Junior Canadiens, told the newspaper. "We have to consider preparing our coaches to look for potential hotspots so that these things don't happen."

Harvard chief on defensive with women

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 18 (UPI) -- Harvard University's president, Lawrence Summers, is standing by his remarks gender might affect success in science and math, the New York Times said Tuesday.

Summers created a furor among some 50 academics at a conference Friday at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., when he suggested gender might explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Denice Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, rose to challenge Summers, while Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology walked out midway through Summers' remarks.

"I'm sorry for any misunderstanding but believe that raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important," Summers told the newspaper.

Summers cited research showing more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.

Serbian war thugs turn to writing for cash

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- A growing number of former Serbian warlords have turned to writing masterpieces of literature, the International Herald Tribune reported Tuesday.

The latest nationalist work to sweep Belgrade is "Iron Trench," written by Milorad Ulemek, who human rights groups claim was responsible for some the worst atrocities in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

A former commander of the Serbian secret police's military branch, Ulemek is on trial for the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was shot and killed outside his office in March 2003.

Meanwhile, fugitive Radovan Karadjic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 Bosnian bloodbath, has published four books while in hiding.

Nationalist admirers of Ulemek and Karadzic declare their works masterpieces of Serbian literature, comparable in style to the works of Albert Camus and James Joyce.

Tuesday, another former president of Bosnian Serb republic, Biljana Plavsic, who is in a Swedish prison serving a sentence for war crimes, is releasing her book about the war.