Search

"Misleading": IOC condemns "abuse" hurled at Olympic boxer

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has released a statement to condemn the "abuse" and "discrimination" that has targeted Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after her controversial match in Paris. The match, which was abandoned after just 46 seconds when her Italian opponent Angela Carini tapped out, caused quite the stir when Carini said she had "never been hit that hard in my life". Following the controversial match, Khelif's history came to light with many pointing out how she was permitted to fight at the Olympics despite being disqualified from the women’s boxing world championships last year for failing gender eligibility tests. Khelif, who was born female and has always identified as such, has been hit with a wave of transphobic abuse from high profile figures including J.K Rowling and Elon Musk after the revelations came to light. The 25-year-old athlete, who has been boxing since she was a child and has always competed in women’s categories, was tested by the International Boxing Association (IBA) with IBA president Umar Kremlev saying DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded”. For males, XY is the combination of chromosomes while XX is the combination in females. As Khelif has always identified as female, there are a number of medical conditions that can cause a woman to also have XY chromosomes. The IOC has since spoken out in defence of Khelif, denouncing the “abuse” levelled at the Khelif as “discrimination”, while confirming she had followed the eligibility criteria to compete at the Games. “Every person has the right to practise sport without discrimination,” the <a href="https://olympics.com/ioc/news/joint-paris-2024-boxing-unit-ioc-statement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> released on Friday said. “We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024." The second athlete in question is referring to fellow boxer, Chinese Taipei’s Lin Yu-ting, who underwent the same testing from the IBA and returned the same XY chromosome results as Khelif. “The two athletes have been competing in international boxing competitions for many years in the women’s category, including the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, International Boxing Association (IBA) World Championships and IBA-sanctioned tournaments." “The IOC is saddened by the abuse that the two athletes are currently receiving.” The statement went on to call out the IBA's DNA testing, reading, "The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years." "Such an approach is contrary to good governance." Image credits: Facebook/YAHYA ARHAB/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Editorial

Legal

13 money-saving tips that can be misleading

Differentiating bad advice from good People love giving advice, especially when it comes to saving money. However, that doesn’t mean you should believe in every piece of advice you hear. After all, following the wrong money-saving tips can actually cost you in the long run. To help you differentiate bad advice from the good, we made a list of 13 money-saving tips that actually don’t pay. Getting suckered into buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deals When it’s genuine, it is hard to resist. Whether it’s BOGO free or BOGO half price, you have to stop and ask yourself: would I really have bought this much of this item at this price anyway? If you’re shopping for jam and see BOGO free on jam, that’s probably a great time to stock up. But if you’re looking for a new pair of runners and see BOGO half off, stop and think. You went out looking to spend $60 on runners. Now you’re spending about $100. Did you even want two pairs? Will you wear them both? Do you even like the second pair? Building an emergency fund but not contributing to super It’s essential these days to have an emergency fund. Financial experts say you need six months to one year’s worth of expenses. But experts also agree that you need to look after your financial future. If you’re squirreling money away into an emergency fund or savings account but not putting money into a super fund or another long-term plan, you’re not preparing for something you know is coming: old age. And with compound interest being what it is, every day you put it off is dollars wasted. When it comes to saving, the simpler, the better. And what could be simpler than ‘The $5 Savings Plan,’ i.e. stashing every $5 note that comes your way? It’s a surprisingly effective way to put some money aside. A Boston Globe writer who stuck with the plan saved $12,000 in three years. Always choosing the cheapest price tag I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – buy cheap, buy twice. If you buy a screwdriver set for $1 at a dollar shop or get your shoes for a few bucks at a flea market stall, chances are you’ll be buying them again real soon. Cheaply made, poor-quality items may save you a few bucks in the short term, but you’ll only have to pay more later to replace them. And if you replace them with more cheap junk, you’ll be repeating the cycle. The only time this is not true is when you’re buying generic brands in the supermarket – you’re often getting the same product that’s in the brand-name packaging. Taking store credit card offers for discounts but paying the minimum That 30 per cent off is a good deal, if you actually pay off the balance in full right away. Sadly, many people find it way too easy to pay the much smaller minimum payment. Before long, you’re paying the minimum every month and adding more to the store card, and you’re suddenly a credit card revolver who is paying hefty interest charges. Not putting money in the parking meter for quick outings You may be a world-class speedy shopper or errand runner, but everyone’s luck runs out sometime. Chances are you’ll eventually get a ticket, which can run you anywhere from $45 to well over $200 in some cities, depending on where you live. Buying food in bulk and throwing half of it away When you see a whole bunch of bananas on sale for less than half the regular price, you grab them. Then you watch them turn black because you bought too many. While buying in bulk is good for lots of things, be careful when buying perishables. It’s not a bargain if you throw them away. Avoiding regular visits to the dentist It’s something I did as a student when money was tight. Well, after skipping regular cleanings and check-ups for a few years, I needed a bunch of costly fillings. Now I have a dental plan that covers check-ups, but even if you don’t, get to the dentist. It’s a lot better to pay for a visit now than to pay for major work later. Putting off investing until you're 'rich' It might be hard to think about investing when you’re not making a lot of money. After all, shouldn’t you wait until you’re well-established in your career to start thinking about that? Well, not really. Even if you just started out in your career, it’s never too early to start an investment account. According to Listen Money Matters, a Betterment (fixed-term) account is a good option for people who are just starting their portfolio. Avoiding all debt You probably know that an unpaid credit card balance or high-interest loan can significantly hurt your credit score. However, that doesn’t mean all kinds of debt will. According to Fidelity, certain kinds of debt with low-interest rates (like mortgages) can actually help you achieve your personal goals without harming your credit score in the process. While you should still try and make sure you pay your credit balance in time every month, there’s no harm in keeping an open mind when looking at loan options. Trying to buy a house as soon as possible Most of us regard owning a property as a sure sign of being established. However, rushing into buying a home can actually do more harm than good. Ending up with a mortgage that you’re struggling to pay off, or receiving a great job offer in a different city when you’ve already bought a house can actually harm your finances. After all, there is no harm in renting an apartment until you’re absolutely sure about your future plans. Depending on credit cards instead of an emergency fund One of the biggest financial mistakes you can make is to depend on a credit card during an emergency. Yes, you can put an unforeseen expense, such as an emergency bill, on a credit card and pay it later. However, thanks to interest, you’ll end up paying back a lot more than you spend. Your best bet in preparing for a real financial emergency would be building up an emergency fund, preferably consisting of three to six months’ worth of living expenses. Not sticking to a budget When you’re making enough money to cover your expenses, budgeting can seem unnecessary. However, without a budget, it’s easy to lose track of how much money you’re spending. To avoid spending yourself into debt without realising make a monthly budget and stick to it. Avoiding credit cards There’s no denying that credit card debt is harmful to your finances. However, that doesn’t mean you should avoid getting a credit card. As long as you pay your balance in full each month, making purchases with your credit card can be worthwhile. Written by Paul Michael. This article first appeared in <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.readersdigest.co.nz/culture/13-money-saving-tips-that-can-be-misleading" target="_blank">Reader’s Digest</a>. For more of what you love from the world’s best-loved magazine, <a href="http://readersdigest.innovations.com.au/c/readersdigestemailsubscribe?utm_source=over60&utm_medium=articles&utm_campaign=RDSUB&keycode=WRA93V">here’s our best subscription offer.</a>

Retirement Income

5 misleading foods that claim to be healthy

Food gives us the nutrients we need to survive, and we know a balanced diet <a href="https://www.who.int/behealthy/healthy-diet">contributes to good health</a>. Beyond this, many people seek out different foods as “medicines”, hoping eating certain things might prevent or treat particular conditions. It’s true many foods contain “<a href="https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/bioactive-compound">bioactive compounds</a>” – chemicals that act in the body in ways that might promote good health. These are being studied in the prevention of cancer, heart disease and other conditions. But the idea of food as medicine, although attractive, is easily oversold <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4404/How-cloves-garlic-guard-cancer.html">in the headlines</a>. Stories tend to be based on studies done in the lab, testing concentrated extracts from foods. The effect seen in real people eating the actual food is going to be different to the effects in a petri dish. If you do the maths, you’ll find you actually need to eat enormous amounts of particular foods to get an active dose of the desired element. In some cases, this might endanger your health, rather than protecting it. These four foods (and one drink) show the common healing claims around the foods we eat don’t always stack up. 1. Cinnamon Cinnamon, which contains a compound called cinnamaldehyde, is claimed to <a href="https://www.ibtimes.sg/cinnamon-your-best-companion-fight-obesity-study-suggests-side-effects-20788">aid weight loss and regulate appetite</a>. There is evidence cinnamaldehyde <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24019277">can reduce cholesterol in people with diabetes</a>. But this is based on studies of the chemical in large doses – not eating the spice itself. These studies give people between 1 and 6 grams of cinnamaldehyde per day. Cinnamon is about <a href="http://www.orientjchem.org/vol30no1/extraction-of-essential-oil-from-cinnamon-cinnamomum-zeylanicum/">8% cinnamaldehyde</a> by weight – so you’d have to eat at least 13 grams of cinnamon, or about half a supermarket jar, per day. Much more than you’d add to your morning porridge. 2. Red wine The headlines on the health benefits of red wine are usually because of a chemical in grape skins called resveratrol. Resveratrol is a <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/79/5/727/4690182">polyphenol</a>, a family of chemicals with <a href="https://theconversation.com/health-check-the-untrue-story-of-antioxidants-vs-free-radicals-15920">antioxidant</a> properties. It’s been <a href="https://theconversation.com/resveratrol-in-a-red-wine-sauce-fountain-of-youth-or-snake-oil-12743">claimed resveratrol</a> protects our cells from damage and reduces the risk of a range of conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease. There is some limited evidence that resveratrol has benefits in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4942868/">animal models</a>, although studies done in humans <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/71/12/822/1833632">have not shown a similar effect</a>. It varies by wine, but red wine contains about 3 micrograms (about 3 millionths of a gram) of resveratrol <a href="https://www.ajevonline.org/content/43/1/49">per bottle</a>. The studies that have shown a benefit from resveratrol use at least 0.1 grams per day (that’s 100,000 micrograms). To get that much resveratrol, you’d have to drink roughly 200 bottles of wine a day. We can probably all agree that’s not very healthy. 3. Blueberries Blueberries, like red wine, are a <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf034150f">source of resveratrol,</a> but at a few micrograms per berry you’d have to eat more than 10,000 berries a day to get the active dose. Blueberries also contain compounds called anthocyanins, which <a href="https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/2/1/1/4591636">may improve some markers of heart disease</a>. But to get an active dose there you’re looking at 150-300 blueberries per day. More reasonable, but still quite a lot of fruit – and expensive. 4. Chocolate The news that dark <a href="https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1114811/high-blood-pressure-diet-foods-dark-chocolate-lower-reading">chocolate lowers blood pressure</a> is always well-received. Theobromine, a chemical in chocolate has been shown to lower blood pressure in doses of about <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20823377">1 gram of the active compound</a>, but not at lower doses. Depending on the chocolate, you could be eating 100g of dark chocolate before you reached this dose. Chocolate is a discretionary food, or “junk food”. The <a href="http://www.nutritionaustralia.org/national/resource/australian-dietary-guidelines-standard-serves">recommended serve for discretionary foods</a> is no more than 600 kilojoules per day, or 25g of chocolate. Eating 100g of chocolate would be equivalent to more than 2,000kJ. Excess kilojoule consumption leads to weight gain and being overweight increases risk of heart disease and stroke. So these risks would likely negate the benefits of eating chocolate to lower your blood pressure. 5. Turmeric Turmeric is a favourite. It’s good in curries, and recently we’ve seen hype around the tumeric latte. Stories pop up regularly about its healing power, normally based on <a href="https://theconversation.com/science-or-snake-oil-can-turmeric-really-shrink-tumours-reduce-pain-and-kill-bacteria-76010">curcumin</a>. Curcumin refers to a group of compounds, called curcuminoids, that might have some health benefits, like reducing inflammation. Inflammation helps us to fight infections and respond to injuries, but too much inflammation is a problem in diseases like <a href="https://www.arthritis.org/about-arthritis/types/inflammatory-arthritis/">arthritis</a>, and might be linked to other conditions like <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.0000129535.04194.38">heart disease or stroke.</a> Human trials on curcumin have <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261561413002501">been inconclusive</a>, but most use curcumin supplementation in very large doses of 1 to 12 grams per day. Turmeric is about 3% curcumin, so for each gram of tumeric you eat you only get 0.03g of curcumin. This means you’d have to eat more than 30g of tumeric to get the minimum active dose of tumeric. Importantly, curcumin in turmeric is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918523/">not very bioavailable</a>. This means we only absorb about 25% of what we eat, so you might actually have to eat well over 100g of turmeric, every day, to get a reasonable dose of curcumin. That’s a lot of curry. What to eat then? We all want food to heal us but focusing on single foods and eating mounds of them is not the answer. Instead, a balanced and diverse diet can provide foods each with a range of different nutrients and bioactive compounds. Don’t get distracted by quick fixes; focus instead on enjoying a variety of foods. Written by Emma Beckett and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/these-5-foods-are-claimed-to-improve-our-health-but-the-amount-wed-need-to-consume-to-benefit-is-a-lot-116730">The Conversation.</a>

Body

Jenny Craig fined $37,800 for misleading ads

Jenny Craig has been fined AU$37,800 in Australia for misleading consumers in television advertisements featuring Mel B. The former Spice Girl singer featured in a series of ads for Jenny Craig as an ambassador to the program. The adverts, which ran from December 2017 to February 2018, promoted the line that people could lose up to 10kg of weight for a $10 program fee. But the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission issued three infringement notices, noting that the weight loss firm failed to disclose customers also had to purchase food at an additional cost. ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said they were “concerned” the ads may have misled consumers into thinking they could lose 10kg for just $10. “In reality customers would have had to spend far more than that,” she said. The ad also featured someone employed by the business, not an independent reviewer. “Businesses need to be transparent about any relationships with people providing a testimonial,” Ms Court said. “Consumers must be informed when a testimonial is given by someone who is employed by the business, and is not an independent reviewer.” Mel B is promoted as a success story on Jenny Craig, after she lost 16kg in five months. “After various attempts at different fad diets Mel B joined Jenny Craig,” the ad promotes. “In the five months that she was on the Jenny Craig Program she successfully lost 16kgs and reached her goal weight.”

Legal

5 of the world's most misleading airports

Think you know where you’re landing? Think again… 1. London Oxford Airport, UK Welcome to London! Or welcome to a regional airport in the Thames Valley almost 100 kilometres away from London itself. London Oxford Airport isn’t even that close to the town of Oxford and it will take you almost half an hour to drive there. 2. Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, Germany This international airport is just 10 kilometres from the city. The problem is, that city is Kirchberg, not Frankfurt. It’s around 125 kilometres to Frankfurt am Main, the fifth largest city in Germany and the place you probably thought you were landing. Get ready for a 90-minute car ride. 3. Paris Vatry Airport, France Parisian in name only, Paris Vatry Airport is a whopping 160 kilometres from the centre of the French capital. It will take you more than two hours to drive between the two, so be wary when booking one of the budget airlines that flies into this airport. 4. Munich West Airport, Germany With a name like Munich West, you could be forgiven for assuming this airport is just on the opposite side of the city. Not so. Munich West (or Memmingen as it is better known) is actually 110 kilometres from the city of Munich and it will take you over an hour to get there. On the plus side, the town of Memmingen is very pretty and you will be driving through the Bavarian countryside. 5. Oslo Torp Airport, Norway If you want to visit the Norwegian capital, don't land at Oslo Torp. The airport is around 120 kilometres to the south of Oslo itself and the drive will take you around 90 minutes. If you’re taking public transport, expect a much longer journey as you’ll be spending two and a half hours on connecting buses. Have you ever flown into these airports?

International Travel

Free online retirement calculators are misleading

Free online retirement calculators are a dime a dozen these days, and a recent study seems to indicate that this may well be an area in life where you get what you pay for. A <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/08/using-a-free-online-retirement-calculator-be-cautious.html" target="_blank">recent paper</a> from Barry S. Mulholland, assistant professor, Dept. of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University, suggests that many of these online calculators are offering misleading advice and should only ever be used with upmost of caution. The study also suggest that many of these tools offer a level of analysis that is not very accurate, in terms of what an individual needs to enjoy a secure retired life. For the study, Professor Mulholland and his colleagues compared the advice given by professional adviser software with that which was given freely by over 36 of the most commonly-used online retirement calculators found on the internet. And the results where startling. Professor Mulholland wrote, “Only 30 percent of the online tools suggested the clients needed to save more — the other 70 percent gave inaccurate advice by suggesting the family was on track for their retirement goals or gave an answer that wasn't clear on what they needed to do.” “But even the 30 per cent of tools that suggested more savings gave wildly different answers, so some of those may not be very useful.” Professor Mulholland’s paper suggests that part of what makes the advice offered by these online retirement calculators so misleading is the fact that even at the best of times they’re generally drawing from a limited amount of information. Professor Mulholland suggests that if you are going to use an online retirement calculator, make sure it’s one that takes the following aspects into account: <ul> <li>Age</li> <li>Income</li> <li>Assets</li> <li>Rates</li> <li>Household structure</li> </ul> Mulholland suggests in preparation of retirement it’s important to seek professional advice, and, “Keep reassessing on a regular basis... what you need to save for retirement and make the appropriate adjustments over time to successfully meet your retirement goals.” Related links: <a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/finance/retirement-income/2016/04/planning-an-emergency-fund-retirement/">Do you have an emergency fund?</a> <a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/finance/retirement-income/2016/03/maori-veteran-humbled-by-support-for-cut-pension/">Maori Veteran humbled by support for cut pension</a> <a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/finance/retirement-income/2016/03/products-up-to-date-ageing-population/">Are products keeping up to date with the ageing population?</a>

Retirement Income

Over 60

News

Shop

Catalogues

Travel

Health

Lifestyle

Finance

Entertainment

Property

Information