'Violence will not be tolerated by our armed forces'

As news stories go, it didn’t seem the most – well… newsworthy. A bit like being told France is full of French people or the Sahara desert has lots of sand.

Nevertheless, someone at the BBC decreed that it was the most interesting item on what was admittedly a fairly quiet morning for news.

“Younger members of the armed forces returning from duty are more likely to commit violent offences than the rest of the population,” we were told. Then, standing back a little from this less-than-amazing assertion, the newsreader added the rider, “a study suggests”.

In other news, professional sportspeople tend to be fitter than the man on the Kesgrave omnibus. A study suggests.

But let’s consider this a moment. The violence of young servicemen  may not be surprising, but it is worth thinking about.

The report, first published in the medical journal The Lancet, comes from analysis by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London. It is based on the records of 14,000 British service personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And the headline story is about people who are paid to be violent abroad continuing to be violent when they get home. As if anyone should be shocked by that.

There are, of course, several reasons why this might happen. And several ways, too, of spinning the figures.

Supporters of military discipline may point with pride to the fact that military personnel are slightly less likely to break the law than the average person.

As if there was any average person out there. It might be interesting to see how the forces compare in this respect with people in other jobs – with teachers, for example, or the police. Or journalists. Or the unemployed.

Those figures, however – without which the bare statistic about the military doesn’t really mean a lot – are not available.

On the other side of the coin there’s the fact that men under 30 who have been in combat zones are three times more likely to commit violent offences than those who haven’t.
An army man says “the vast majority” of forces personnel commit no offence.
Someone else might think it shocking that 20 per cent of our young soldiers have committed a violent offence after coming home. That’s one in five of those under-30s.
One suggested reason for this aggressive behaviour is the mental problem now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s the aspect, naturally, that the Institute of Psychiatry is most interested in.
Age, rank and experience have all been identified as factors in the likelihood of violence.
Those under 30, those in the lower ranks, and those who have been shot at are likelier to offend. (And basketball players are likely to be taller than jockeys.)
Those who drink a lot are also more likely to get violent. (And jockeys tend to be slimmer than sumo wrestlers.)
Put those findings together (not necessarily the bits about jockeys) and you have a pretty obvious chicken-or-egg situation. Which came first, the drink or the stress?
And, to be fair to Professor Simon Wessely, who led the research, he’s aware of the most obvious fact underlying the whole issue.
“The military don’t select chess-playing choirboys,” he says. “They select people who often come from difficult and aggressive backgrounds – and they’re the ones who are most likely to end up in the parts of the military that do the actual fighting.”
Quite rightly, though, he’s concerned for the mental welfare of the troops.
And the inevitable difficulty many have in adjusting between “out there” and “back here”, where vastly different behaviour is expected of them.
Acting in what might seem a properly military way on patrol in Kabul may not look so good in Tavern Street. (It may not look that great to the ordinary people of Kabul, either, but that’s another matter.)
The MOD spokesman quoted in the BBC report seemed unaware of the irony in his words when he said: “Any violent offence is unacceptable and will not be tolerated by our armed forces.”
Professor Wessely doesn’t draw – at least, not publicly – what seems to me the no-brain conclusion from all of this research.
That if we really cared about our young people; if we really considered their mental (and physical) well-being; if we really didn’t want them to behave violently back here (or out there); if we really supported our troops… we wouldn’t go sending them off into needless wars in the first place.

 

 

 

The inconvenience of Fukushima

You have to admire the politeness and reserve of the Japanese. On a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant last week – or what’s left of it – the manager, Takeshi Takahashi, apologised to visiting journalists for the inconvenience of the disaster that took place there two years ago this week.

Some inconvenience.
One BBC report of the visit suggested that fuel rods with “the potential to wipe out the northern hemisphere” were teetering at the top of an unstable 100ft tower.
Not the most reassuring report I’ve ever taken in with my breakfast. And not, perhaps, quite the most balanced.
But even the calmest assessments of the situation are troubling, to put it mildy.
That “teetering tower” is the plant’s reactor building four, where more than 1,500 highly radioactive spent fuel rods sit in a cooling pool three storeys up. They are outside the reactor's steel and concrete containment vessel.
The complicated operation to remove the rods to a place of relative safety will take more than two years to complete. And it won’t start until the end of this year, after a separate building has been completed around the outside of the existing one.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, says the building is safe. But then it would undoubtedly have said the same thing the day before the tsunami struck in 2011.
If another big earthquake hits the region any time soon, who knows what will happen?
And then there’s reactor building three. Unvisited – unvisitable – by journalists, managers or safety crews because its twisted, rusting steel and concrete hulk remains too radioactive.
Remote-control cranes peck at the rubble, under which lie more spent ruel rods.
Meanwhile, water leaking into the basements around the reactors is too contaminated to be flushed out to sea. Instead it is pumped into huge storage tanks for “safe” keeping.
There are already hundreds of the specially-built 1,000-tonne tanks. A new one has to be built every two or three days. What happens in a couple of years when there is no room on the site for more tanks is an open question.
For now, the clean-up operation is employing 3,000 workers. I can only begin to imagine how stressful their job must be.
“We need to remove the broken and damaged fuel and safely isolate it,” Mr Takahashi explains.
“This work will take 30 to 40 years. Even during the process we should never release any radioactive material into the surrounding environment.”
That should safely see out Mr Takahashi’s career, and probably that of his successor’s successor.
Well, maybe not that safely.
Who can say what further shocks the earth’s itchy crust may have in store within that sort of timescale?

---

One of the first questions posed about Fukushima – even while the devastated people were fleeing their homes, or the place their homes had been – was: Who pays?

And the answer, quick as a nuclear flash, came back from the insurance companies of the world: Not us.
It was said in a way that was obviously meant to be reassuring. Even if Japan is totally engulfed by the sea, it won’t mean meltdown for the rest of the world’s economy. Or at least for its insurance companies.
Two years on, it’s clear that the companies that built and serviced the disaster-hit plant – the American firm General Electric and the Japanese Toshiba and Hitachi – have got away scot-free too.
And that despite the fact that the official review ordered by the Japanese government found that faulty, outdated equipment played a major role in the catastrophe.
Most of the enormous cost of trying to clear up the environmental damage has fallen on the Japanese taxpayer.
None of the hundreds of thousands who lost their homes, their livelihoods, their communities, their loved ones have received enough compensation to rebuild their lives.
Early on in the aftermath, it was reported that the disaster would make many countries look again at their laws governing liability for such events.
So far just one country has actually enacted a law to make the suppliers of nuclear equipment liable in case of disaster. India.
 

Stand up for the fox

 

Statistics that float around the internet, especially in forums such as Facebook, are notoriously unreliable. And they can be very difficult to check.

But even if the figures are imprecise, a very clear case is made here: “Four fox attacks on children reported in last 10 years, leading to a call for a cull on foxes; 6,000 dog attacks on children requiring hospital treatment each year, not leading to a call for a cull on dogs.”
Frankly, I’m extremely sceptical about even those four reported fox attacks.
Of course, I’m not calling for a cull on dogs (though a case might be made for some of their owners). Just for a little balance and sanity.

Protest votes a fillip for the real Nasty Party

Last week’s Eastleigh by-election was hailed by many people – not least UKIP themselves – as a triumph for the UK Independence Party. But it was really a triumph for the Liberal Democrats.

It was, after all, the junior partners in the government coalition who won the seat. UKIP came second, an achievement that wasn’t so much good news for them as bad news for the Conservatives.

The Lib Dems won despite their part in a rightly unpopular government.

Despite the fact that the previous (and previously popular) holder of the seat had lost it over a well-publicised guilty plea to a charge of perverting the course of justice.

Despite the campaign being overshadowed, right up to polling-day, by some very seedy allegations indeed against the party’s former chief executive.

And despite the fact that they have clearly been displaced by UKIP as the party that attracts the protest vote.

Many people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 in protest against both the Labour government and the Tory opposition are highly unlikely to do it again.

And one hopes that few people would vote for UKIP if there was any danger of them actually getting into office. Or if anyone actually took the trouble to find out what they really stand for.

Their chinless leader, Nigel Farage, may be a decent comedy turn but he’s a deeply unappealing politician.

The funniest thing about his quip against the Tories – “now the party of gay marriage and windmills” – was that those are arguably the best things David Cameron and his party stand for. (Not that I think gay marriage is an issue worth troubling with. I find it equally baffling that any gay couple would think getting married mattered, or that anyone else would think it mattered to prevent them.)

Farage’s own party pretends to be a single-issue lobby against the European Union, the gravy train on which he and 11 of his colleagues are passengers. But it does profess other policies.

Policies which mostly fall into one or more of three categories: the barmy, the nasty and the deluded.

Their tax policies, for instance, would add up to a severe worsening of the country’s economic mess – and that’s before you even consider the potentially disastrous consequences of quitting Europe.

Their underlying theme is, surprise surprise, to benefit people like themselves – small to middling self-made businessmen. So, then, abolition of employers’contributions to National Insurance, inheritance tax and (unspecified) “taxes on small businesses”.

They want to reduce government spending drastically – yet spend 40 per cent more on defence and double the number of prison places.

It doesn’t come anywhere near adding up – except to a sense that they want to take over the Tories’ old mantle of Nasty Party.

They also want, somewhat irrelevantly, to repeal the ban on smoking in pubs and hold a referendum on the hunting ban. And, interestingly, to bring back student grants – which sounds superficially appealing but is totally inconsistent with their other financial ideas.

Their real doorstep appeal, though, is on immigration. And it’s there that their true xenophobic nastiness comes to the fore.

The point is quite well made by one of their former MEPs, who defected to the Conservatives during the Eastleigh campaign.

Spanish by passport, Argentinian by birth, and a woman, Marta Andreasen was always a somewhat eccentric UKIP member.

She explained her decision to quit the party like this: “I agree that there should be proper controls on immigration, but UKIP’s position on this – warning that millions of Bulgarians and Romanians would come to this country – was one of the things that contributed to my leaving the party.

“We were coming too close to the BNP. We were on the margins of the racists.”

Pretty narrow margins, I’d say.

The Bulgarian/Romanian question, of course, has yet to be proven either way.

It may be that, like so many Poles, they will come here, take a look, then go home again.

Or that, as with the Lithuanians and Latvians, their presence here in fairly small numbers relative to the UK population will be enough to cause real problems in the countries they have left.

As foreign secretary William Hague admits, any estimate of the number of Bulgarians and Romanians who will head for the UK once current restrictions end next year can only be guesswork.

Hague, understandably, wants to tackle what he calls “benefit tourism” – “so that people are not drawn to our country, or any country, just by being attracted to the benefits”.

Of course, Hague’s government has the answer to that in its hands. And one it sometimes seems intent on pursuing.

Wreck the benefits system entirely – and with it the NHS and the education system too – and no one will want to live here. Including those of us who already do.

That ought to suit Farage and his chums down to the depopulated, non-European ground.

 

The wolf in your home has been misunderstood

As I sit down to write this column, my friend has just settled down at my feet. This is normal.

Occasionally, as I type, he will shift to a slightly different position or sigh quietly, more or less impatient for me to finish and take him for a walk.

He, just as much as the Star’s print schedule, sets my deadlines.

He is my loyal companion. He is the wolf in my living-room (or, just at the moment, in my study).

My wolf

“The wolf in your living-room”: you have no doubt heard the phrase. It is snappy, attention-catching, memorable. And it is basically true.

But it is also misleading. And it has been used to justify a great deal of dreadful treatment of humanity’s best mate.

Often by people whose intentions are good, but who have been misled by what they have been told by supposed “experts” whose own understanding has been based on a misunderstanding.

I have myself, in the past, treated my best friend badly. Not from malice, but because – like so many people – I had been given bad advice.
So let me try to correct that bad counsel by summarising one of the most important points made by John Bradshaw in his outstanding book In Defence Of Dogs.
Professor Bradshaw has been studying dogs, and their owners, for over 25 years. He probably knows as much about pet dogs as anyone in the world.

The fact that his book is a bestseller can only be good news for a lot of dogs – a lot of wolves in a lot of sitting-rooms.

Your dog may not look much like a wolf (mine doesn’t really, as you can see), but it is one.

In fact, many dogs (mine included) look more like wolves than, say, a chihuahua looks like a great dane, a newfoundland like a dachshund, or a pekingese like a greyhound. They are all, biologically speaking, the same species.

In the past, many dog-trainers, breeders and self-appointed “experts” have taken this to mean that every dog is at heart eager to take control of its pack – or the human family who have taken it into their home.

Many still spout this belief. TV’s popular, and undeniably charismatic, “dog whisperer” Cesar Millan, still talks about “dominance” as if it was the one thing motivating all dog behaviour.

Millan, to be fair, doesn’t make this a reason to ill-treat dogs – but many do.

Such inhumane devices as choke-chains and – heaven help us – “shock collars” are based on this barbaric principle.

As is the idea that it’s a good thing to beat your poor dog into “submission”. Or to shake it, pull its ears or roll it over to “show it who’s boss”.
Bradshaw shows convincingly that the chief effect of such treatment is to make your dog scared of you. And fear is a powerful motivator of aggression, or “bad” behaviour. The exact opposite, in fact, of what’s intended.
A dog that bites, either a person or another dog, isn’t making a bid for dominance. It’s almost certainly acting out of fear.
So how should we teach our dogs to know their place? Love them, treat them well, and you shouldn’t need to.
Though it’s necessary to train them to behave in the ways our society has come to expect, that is more effectively done through kindness than cruelty.

The same is true, of course, of other creatures. Young humans, for instance.

Ah, you’ll say, young humans aren’t pack animals with an instinct for dominance. Maybe, maybe not. But neither are dogs – or, as it turns out, wolves.

So where did this idea come from?

Professor Bradshaw tracks it to three simple misunderstandings.

First, the study of wolves. Because this is difficult to carry out in the wild, it has mostly been done in zoos.

In the wild, wolves naturally live in family groups. Leadership is shared by the parents – there is no need to fight for it.

In zoos, wolves have normally been kept with non-relatives. The dynamic is different. Instead of family relations there is fear, anxiety, uncertainty.

To consider relations among zoo wolves to be “natural” is like observing prisoners in a jail and imagining you’re watching family life.

Secondly, it’s now known through DNA that dogs are mostly descended from the European grey wolf. Of all the types of wild dog, the one they are least related to is the American timberwolf – which happens to be the type that has been most studied.
Finally, there is the dog’s unique evolution, which has been tied up with that of humankind for upwards of 10,000 years.
The first domesticated dogs would have been the wolves that were most trusting (and trustworthy) around humans. Every dog since is descended from those tame individuals.
The descendants of the warier, less tame individuals went on being wild wolves, persecuted for centuries and so made even less tame, breeding out the trusting.
Just as, over millennia, the breeding of dogs by people has progressively selected the most useful, the most trainable, the friendliest. And, increasingly, the most aesthetically pleasing.

There’s no more reason to expect your dog to behave like a wolf than to look like one. For good evolutionary reasons, its main aim in life is to please you, not supplant you.

And now I’ve got that off my chest, it’s time for a walk with my pal.

 

What else are they selling us without telling us?

LES MISERABLES really is the show of the moment. Alain Boublil, who wrote the words for the hit musical more than 30 years ago, could hardly have known how topical it would become in 2013.
Consider these words, sung by the evil publican Thenardier (the “master of the house”) and his scheming wife:

“Food beyond compare, food beyond belief,
Mix it in a mincer and pretend it's beef.
Kidney of a horse, liver of a cat,
Filling up the sausages with this and that.”

Quite makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? Almost enough to make you want to pop out for a Shergar-burger.
Sorry. Actually, my favourite among the recent deluge of related jokes is this: “I had a Tesco burger last night – I’ve still got a bit between my teeth”.
But the current food scandal is really no laughing matter. And it’s not as straightforward as it might seem, either.
Emotion-based scruples aside, horse is a better-quality meat than beef – especially the kind of “mechanically-recovered”  beef that goes into cheap burgers. So all those ready meals and convenience foods that have just been removed from the shelves were probably of higher, not lower, nutritional value than they were meant to be.
Throwing it away is a shocking, almost criminal, waste. Not least of the horses that went into it.
If they really were, as is suggested, tired old nags driven off Romanian streets by new regulations against horse-carts, then it’s doubly sad.
Not least for the owners who have lost their fellow-workers and companions, fed into the mincer of the European cheap-food chain.
I don’t much fancy the thought that I might be chewing on Dobbin in my cottage pie.
But then there are good reasons not to eat beef too – none of them anything to do with whether it’s actually horse rather than cow.

• Reason 1: If it’s from the USA, there’s a good (or rather, evil) chance it’s been reared in conditions of overcrowding that would horrify a decent person.
• Reason 2: If it’s from South America, it’s probably been raised on grazing-land that was recently rainforest and should have been left that way.
• Reason 3: Wherever it’s from, raising one meal of beef takes land, time and resources that could have fed many families. Overall, worldwide, the eating of large quantities of beef by the relatively rich is one of the reasons why so many other people can’t afford to eat properly at all.
• Reason 4: The mass farming of cattle is believed by many scientists to be among the significant causes of global warming, partly – but not only – for reason 2 above.
• Reason 5: It’s not actually very good for you anyway. Not like a nice horse steak, for example. And certainly not in the quantities people in Britain, western Europe, and especially America, gulp it down.

It would probably be good for all of us, and the world, if we ate less meat. Not just beef, but meat of all kinds.
The amount of animal flesh so many of us consume is unhealthy for all concerned. It’s simply not viable to produce so much meat in ways that are sustainable and humane.
Vegetarianism is one answer. Simply cutting down drastically on how much meat we all eat is another, possibly better one.
It would mean we could afford – from every point of view – to eat better meat; quality over quantity.
If anything good has come out of the scandal now galloping across Europe, it’s the awareness that has been raised. The shining of a light into some very murky places indeed.
You thought your nicely packaged lasagne came from a supermarket shelf. But before that it came from a factory somewhere in Europe. And before that, various parts came from other factories in other places – Romania, Poland, France or wherever –  whose sources and methods you may never have seen, imagined or wanted to.
The real scandal is not that something labelled “beef”  might include horse. It’s not even that it might be full of drugs administered to living horses in Britain, exported for slaughter, then imported back as ready meals.
It’s that all these things were going on unknown, apparently – even by the companies selling us the stuff –  until now.
It’s makes you wonder what else they’re selling us without telling us.
If the production line that ends on your table begins in a back yard in Bucharest, where else might it pass through on the way?
This whole seedy saga has revealed some things we might never have considered or wanted to know. But now we do.
When it’s over, dropped off the news agenda, let us not forget what we have learned.
It’s always good to know what you’re eating. Unless, perhaps, you’re dining Chez Thenardier.

Crazy growth of the gambling habit

I NEVER invited Ray Winstone into my living-room with his incoherent EastEnders blather and I wish he’d get lost.
The Italian footy presenter Tiziano Crudeli with his increasingly over-the-top “game on!” squealing is equalling irritating.
The Sky tag-line “It matters more when there’s money on it”is a) untrue, b) insulting to the genuine sports fan, and c) another example, like those above, of a worrying trend in our society.
Just when smoking has been driven off our screens, out of pubs and workplaces and into a less-cool hinterland of chilly corners, a new evil has arisen as if to fill its place.
As if alcohol wasn’t already addiction enough to inflict on our vulnerable young, we now have the destructive power of gambling.
All right, it isn’t new. Betting on sport is at least as old as organised games.
But the emergence of “in-play” betting via the internet, and our bombardment by TV and online advertising of gambling of all kinds, amounts to an epidemic.
When grown men can sit at their office desks gambling away their earnings on such vagaries as “next goalscorer”, “next corner”, or “number of yellow cards”, someone has a problem.
When poker – after snap, the dullest card game ever devised until you add the cash – has whole TV channels devoted to it, there’s something badly wrong.
And when teenagers can be initiated into the gambling habit via“free” games on Facebook and other websites, we’re stocking up a mountain of trouble for their future.
The 12-year-old who “borrowed” his dad’s credit card to register with an online poker site lost £7,000 before the card was stopped. But his is by no means the worst case. He may well never do it again.
Unlike the 60,000 British 12- to 15-year-olds now estimated to be “problem gamblers”.
Or many of the 28 per cent of children who have played a free online gambling game in the past week.
For many – I hope most – of those, the habits ingrained now may lead to nothing worse than a weekly flutter on the National Lottery and an annual punt on the Grand National. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The glory of Norwich

WHAT is Britain’s finest building?

I don’t mean the most famous or the most iconic – so no, not Big Ben or Tower Bridge. They are good examples of Victorian engineering and triumphalism, though I prefer the Natural History Museum and the Crossness sewage pumping-station.

And please don’t say Buckingham Palace, which – whatever you may think of the institution it houses – must have a claim to being Britain’s ugliest building.

London gets more than its fair share of attention. And frankly, though many of its very street names ooze with history, and many of its common homes have a certain aura, most of its well-known buildings are more famous than fine.

So forget London and come up quickly, if you can, with a mental list. A Top Ten of great British buildings.

I’ll bet it consists of one or two castles, maybe, and a load of cathedrals. Perhaps, since this after all is sylly (i.e. ‘holy’) Suffolk, your local parish church.

And I’ll bet most – very likely all – of your private list were late medieval. That is, built between say 1100 and 1600.

First on my list would be Durham Cathedral. Other contenders would be King’s College Chapel, along with the cathedrals at Lincoln, York, Wells, Canterbury, Salisbury, Gloucester and – topping all of those – Norwich.

It’s not just the structure itself that is so lovely, though it is a particularly elegant example of Gothic airiness in beautifully warm Caen stone. What makes Norwich really stand out for me is its unrivalled collection of roof bosses.

All up the superb length of the high nave, and right round the cloister, every intersection of the vault arching has a delightfully carved scene, most of them biblical.

There are scenes from the life of Noah (at least one of which, below, might surprise you by its, um, ‘explicit’ nature), Salome dancing with the head of John the Baptist, exuberant musicians and feasting monks.

They are, taken together, probably the best collection of in-situ medieval imagery in Britain. Yet bizarrely little known.

When you add that the great east window of St Peter Mancroft rivals King’s Chapel for the finest stained glass in the kingdom, it may seem ironic that Norwich was revealed last month as the least religious city in Britain.

No cheap partisan jokes, please. To my mind, this distinction is another thing for our northerly neighbour to be proud of.

At least it would be if it weren’t simply a chance matter of demographics.

The 2011 Census figures showed religious affiliation across the country at a new low, with self-confessed Christians clocking in at 59 per cent of the population and those claiming “no religion” 25pc.

That’s Christians down 13 points from 72pc at the previous count, no-religion up ten points from 15pc. Those describing themselves as Muslim went up from 1.8pc of the population in 2001 to 4.8pc in 2011.

But those figures are misleading in several ways.

For one thing, the question of religion was only introduced into the census in 2001, so it’s hard to say anything meaningful about any trend.

For another, as Richard Dawkins and the British Humanist Association were keen to point out, there wasn’t actually a question “Do you have a religion?” If there had been, it’s fair to assume the figure for Christians might have been a lot lower.

“Christian” is, after all, the default position in this country for a great many people who never set foot in a church for any purpose other than weddings and funerals.

If the question had been about regular active participation in religious ceremonies, the non-religious would surely have been a large majority.

Meanwhile, in addition to that glorious cathedral, Norwich has more medieval church buildings put to new, non-religious, uses than any other. And that really is something to be proud of.

The reasons for it being bottom of the religion league table are, I suspect, two-fold.

No strong Roman Catholic tradition (in recent centuries, that is – all those churches, including the cathedral, were Catholic when they were built). And fewer adherents than most other British cities to the one religion that is really “trending” these days – Islam.

 ----

ONE long-tailed tit and one fieldfare – lovely to see, but these are not birds that usually travel singly. Where were their flocks?

In fact, where were the other birds? The finches in particular. One solitary female chaffinch is scant consolation for the flocks of green and goldfinches I’ve noted down in previous years.
The weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch was a worryingly disappointing one for me. If my severely slimmed-down list of sightings is typical, it will look like a disastrous for the RSPB – and the birds of Britain.

• Footnote: The day after I wrote this, my birdfeeder - sadly virtually ignored all winter - attracted a pair of siskins; my gardening was accompanied by three robins, one of which settled on my hoe almost as soon as I laid it aside; and I saw the first two housesparrows I've seen in our garden in all the seven years we've been here. Signs of spring (I'd better get on with that hedge-laying!)

 

----
 

WHAT a small world it’s become. And what a weird one it would seem to our ancestors – even our grandparents or our younger selves.

There I sat in Suffolk with my breakfast, watching a tennis match between a Chinese woman and one from Belarus, taking place in Australia.

Gobsmacking, really, when you think about it.