For the seventh consecutive year, Lance Armstrong has  won the Tour de France. One day and 125 miles remain of the 2005 Tour, but Armstrong’s results in the time trials today have lent him an unbeatable 2 minute, 46 second advantage over the Tour’s next fastest rider, Ivan Basso. His victory in Paris tomorrow will mark the end of a cycling career which many believe will remain unsurpassed.

Linda Robertson reports in the The Miami Herald that the physical attributes Armstrong was born with and has worked to strengthen are exceptional.

”His oversized heart can pump nine gallons of blood per minute compared to five for the average person. His lungs can absorb twice as much oxygen. His muscles produce half as much lactic acid and can expel it faster, which enables him to ride harder up the steep slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees and recover quickly.”

Physiologist Edward Coyle has worked with Armstrong for eight years, studying Armstrong’s body’s responses to a dedicated training regimen. Although Coyle’s findings show Armstrong belongs in the top 98th percentile of human beings, Coyle notes that the physical traits Armstrong possesses are not the only reason he has proven to be a world-class cyclist.

“There are about 1,000 people in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 20 with the same physiological potential as Lance, but none of them will achieve what he has without the training and daring of Lance,” Coyle explains.

Robertson points out that cyclist Jan Ullrich shares several and even surpasses one of Armstrong’s physical attributes (“[Jan’s] oxygen capacity is higher”), but he has not reached the victories Armstrong enjoys. What has given Armstrong the edge over athletes like Ullrich? Robertson believes that Armstrong’s will to win is stronger, his discipline unrivaled.

Tomorrow after the Tour ends in Paris, Lance Armstrong will leave the world stage and begin his retirement from his cycling career in order to begin another career he has stated he anticipates will bring him immense satisfaction: fatherhood. He will leave the world wondering how many Tours he might have continued to win, had he not opted to retire at 33; and whether any cyclist will match the remarkable dedication Armstrong has brought to cycling — the mental fortitude and stamina many suspect are responsible for his victory over cancer.

In Los Angeles, the fight for diversity extends to the choice a person makes regarding transportation. It’s not merely the idea that what you drive is a reflection of your social status or dating potential. There’s an unspoken, competitive edge in the smoggy city where commuting and traveling across town to several destinations every day have become standard expectations for the “reliable” employee. Paradoxically, the yearly increase of cars and traffic in Los Angeles, which perpetually threaten to slow the city to a halt, may give cycling a new, more acceptable, and even enticing image as a transportation alternative.

BikeSummer’s Los Angeles citywide cycling festival has let some air out of the myth that to live in Los Angeles, residents need cars. The festival ran through June into the first days of July and hosted hundreds of events, showcasing the advantages of traveling by bicycle in a city with ideal cycling weather, raising cyclist awareness through visibility, and strengthening the cycling community one city at a time. An annual bike extravaganza, BikeSummer was established in 1999 and is held by various hosting cities, which have included San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver, Portland, New York, and Seattle.

Newly awakened Los Angeles cycling advocates can join several local Critical Mass rides, support the efforts of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition in making Los Angeles streets safer for bicyclists, and look up bicycle routes across the city on the bicycle-centered alternative to MapQuest, BikeMetro. Ken Kifer’s cyclist Web pages provide a wealth of cyclist-related articles, one of which questions the viability of “fearmongering,” an attitude which, through an emphasis on the inspiration of fear,

…discourages vehicular cycling and by doing so increases the number of deaths; bicycling is at worst no more dangerous than driving an automobile and has compensatory health benefits that greatly overshadow the risks.”

In the same week that a Japanese school district incorporated a contentious revisionist history textbook into its curriculum, activists established The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, which will be devoted to documenting the lives of the sex slaves who have been written out of the textbook.  

The first of its kind in Japan, the museum will open its doors in August to catalogue the narratives of the approximately 200,000 women who were consigned to sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

Mimi Hanaoka

In a grim year for Sino-Japanese relations, the board of education in Otawara, Japan, has chosen to use a contentious history textbook that will widen the rift between the two nations. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanjing Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident,” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, and the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.” All this in the same week that Japan and China have been snarling at each other across the East China Sea over oil drilling rights in a contested maritime region.

Although only 2,300 students will be using the textbooks, and although the publisher, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, has fallen well short of its goal of installing its books in 10 percent of the nation’s middle schools — at last count only 0.04 percent of middle schools used the first edition of the textbook — the move will escalate the nations’ recently frustrated relations.

Earlier this year Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest the textbook.

Mimi Hanaoka

A scant 20 some-odd years since the last time someone was ushered to a prison cell for homosexual behavior, Spain follows the heels of the Netherlands and Belgium to be the third country in Europe to  sanction gay marriages, and now Carlos Baturin and Emilio Menéndez — who met during Franco’s reign when homosexual behavior was an invitation to jail — are Spain’s first gay married couple.

For those who are baffled by the hellish maze of technicalities that characterizes gay marriage and partnership rules around the globe, the BBC provides an easily digestible summary of various nations’ policies.

Mimi Hanaoka

As the death toll mounts and the grim personal accounts of the tragedy surface in the aftermath of the series of four synchronized bombings that tore through London Thursday, Muslims in Britain are now living in their own on sphere of dread under the constant threat of arbitrary assignments of blame; by Saturday The Muslim Council of Britain had received 30,000 doses of hate mail, several of which read: “It’s now war on Muslims throughout Britain.”

Mimi Hanaoka

The timing of the recent London terrorist attack, according to café babel’s Chris Yeomans, is a threat not only in the practical sense of what terrorism means to people living on British soil, but also because it diverts aid and energy away from other key concerns.

…[T]he attacks could not have come at a worse time for Blair. Hosting the G8 in Gleneagles and at the start of the UK six-month presidency of the European Union, Blair’s mandates to increase aid and debt relief to Africa and for European reform may well fall by the wayside as the powerful nations, especially the United States, become more insular and refocus their efforts on the bellicose notion of a ‘War on Terror.’

Further, as Yeomans points out, energy spent on the “War on Terror” is an investment in the “politics of fear” which “gives credence to the state to further curb the liberties of its citizens.” In case anyone needs a refresher on the “politics of fear,” Matt Stone’s animated sequence in Michael Moore’s 2002 film, Bowling for Colombine, illustrates the concept brilliantly.

Italian politicians might do well to consider Yeoman’s call to place careful thought above reactionism, in the case that Italy does wind up as the target of the next terrorist attack.

However tragic the London attacks have been, we must not opt for a knee-jerk reaction, for if we erode our own democracy then we are doing the terrorists’ job for them.

Curbing a 10 billion-dollar-a-year business is a painfully ambitious goal, but TIPinAsia is determined to restrain the trade in human traffic. The recently launched website functions both as an educative tool — it outlines the laws regarding human trafficking in Cambodia, Thailand, and East Timor — and as a channel of communication that will link agencies that work on behalf of victims of human trafficking, with the ultimate goal of prosecuting traffickers in addition to raising awareness about the issue.  

With the United Nations’ assertion that human trafficking has been on the rise for the past decade, TIPinAsia will be helping to stem the flow of the ever-increasing tide of human traffic.

Mimi Hanaoka

“[T]he more time we spend thinking about this sensible, pragmatic jurist, the better. Perhaps it will convince President George W. Bush that he can best serve the country, and his own party, by nominating a new justice with the same values.”

According to today’s article on United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the International Herald Tribune, in order to look to the future, the United States — and its president — would be well advised to take a close look at what they’ll be replacing. O’Connor’s decision to retire has come as no great surprise to the nation during this presidential term; the anticipated replacement of judges on the Supreme Court by the incoming president was one of the issues on the forefront of the 2004 election. This is no time to give in to knee-jerk reactions provoked by the omnipresent percolations between political parties. Perhaps the replacement choices aren’t obvious. As the article points out, O’Connor’s own nomination in 1981 was not.

True, O’Connor has the dubious fame of being the “first woman justice in American history.” Her role as a tiebreaker was more consistent throughout her career than her judgments on women’s issues. She is known for her “skepticism about doctrinal and ideological absolutes, and her concern about the effect of her decisions on real people.”

As Adam Liptak writes in his article for the same paper, O’Connor was not the obvious choice at the time she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, who fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. Twenty-four years ago, there were few women at the time with the necessary credentials while now the number is significantly higher: in 1981, 48 of 700 active federal judges were women; today there are 201 women and 622 men.

Current speculation holds that Bush will aim to please the conservatives or the growing Hispanic population. As to whether he will replace O’Connor with another woman, according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, political scientist Linda Fowler of Dartmouth College believes that “ideology…trumps gender.” In other words, the political climate of the moment seems to hold political beliefs as a factor of higher significance than the current gender of potential nominees.

Are they right? As reporters Linda Feldmann and Warren Richey write, “[if Bush] replaces O’Connor with a man, the high court goes back to eight men and one woman, hardly a balance that looks like America.” They also quote the venerable Justice O’Connor at the beginning of their article:

“Wise old men and wise old women usually decide cases the same way.”