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Putin on vacation

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Shirtless photos of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signal it’s summer time in Siberia. Anchor Lisa Mullins has more.

• Putin’s action-man holiday album
• Sarkozy vacation photos

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LISA MULLINS: Vladimir Putin has been doing some diving of his own on vacation. The Russian prime minister has been enjoying some time off in sunny Siberia. Mr. Putin did some camping. He went white water rafting. He went swimming – doing the butterfly stroke and braving the bitterly cold water. He rode horseback – not bareback but bare-chested. We know this because there are pictures to prove it. Some of them are on our website, The World dot org. And Mr. Putin turns 57 years old this fall. He likes to maintain his manly physique and likes to invite the media in for a look-see. One of those looking is London Times columnist Matthew Parris who believes that Putin and his rippling pecks may be overexposed.

MATTHEW PARRIS: Riding bare-torsoed on horseback. I notice a report in the paper saying that he’s confirmed his status as a gay icon. I had no idea. I’m gay. I had no idea that Putin was a gay icon but he is perhaps going slightly too far the other way. John Major I think had the right approach. John Major enjoyed cricket and he would spend hours, days watching cricket matches and clearing his mind of the clutter of affairs of state.

LISA MULLINS: That’s Matthew Parris speaking to the BBC. By the way this macho persona is something that Vladimir Putin’s been cultivating for years now. Think of the old photos of him in his judo outfit. French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s been photographed in his swim trunks again this vacation along side his bikini-clad wife Carla Bruni. They’ve been swimming in the Mediterranean waters off Cap Negra and the Bruni family home. Now as for current British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Brown used to make regular trips to Cape Cod here in the United States but not this year. Gordon Brown is down in the polls. British politicians have been embarrassed by an expense-claim scandal so Brown is foregoing the glam. Instead he’s spending his summer vacation working as a community volunteer in Scotland. The Times of London newspaper disapproves. In an editorial today it said, “A man who doesn’t know how to take a holiday is a man who doesn’t know how to live and who cannot be trusted to know properly how to work.” Sometimes a world leader just can’t win.

[MUSIC]

MULLINS: Coming up a Brazilian campaign to get people to go in the shower. Really. This is PRI.

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