Jack Livings, from Newsweek in New York, argues that if doping were allowed in the Tour de France, fans wouldn't care:

In a race already marred by doping scandals, the Tour de France last week suffered what some commentators are calling a potentially fatal overdose. But no true follower of cycling's main event could have been surprised by the ejection of leader Michael Rasmussen or the pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov, nor Cristian Moreni or Patrik Sinkewitz, under a cloud of suspicion. Riders have been using illegal performance enhancers of one type or another for as long as there's been a Tour. So when race director Christian Prudhomme last week declared that his top priority was to "give the Tour de France back to the hundreds of thousands of people who've been lining the sides of the roads since the Tour began," many probably wondered what he was talking about; it never went away in the first place. In most places around the world, television viewership of the Tour is up over last year and, despite rumblings about Rasmussen's missing some pre-race checks, 80 percent of Denmark's population tuned in to watch their countryman blaze up the Alps to win the yellow jersey.

The deadly crash of a TAM Airlines jet at São Paulo's Congonhas airport on July 17 was just the latest example of the aviation woes plaguing Argentina and Brazil. Over the past year, South America's two largest countries have suffered two deadly accidents and a number of close calls—almost all for a surprising reason. In both states, civil aviation is controlled by the armed forces, which managed to maintain this jurisdiction when the nations returned to democratic rule in the 1980s.