Group items tagged

Klete Keller, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer, is facing federal charges for his alleged role in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week.

Keller faces three criminal counts, according to court documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: obstructing law enforcement, knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

It was not immediately clear if Keller, who resides in Colorado, has been taken into custody.

A Ukrainian skeleton athlete flashed a small sign that read “ No War in Ukraine ” to the cameras as he finished a run at the Beijing Olympics on Friday night.

he gesture came as Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine, stoking fears in the West that Moscow is planning an invasion. Russia insists it has no such designs but doesn’t want Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to be allowed to join the western NATO alliance.

Shortly after the race, the International Olympic Committee said there would be no repercussions for the athlete. There had been a question of whether the body might consider Heraskevych’s act a violation of Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter. That rule, in part, states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

In a survey released on Monday in Japan, 83 percent of those polled said they did not want Tokyo to hold the Olympics and Paralympics. That total was up 14 percentage points from a survey in April.

And a top medical group, the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, also wants the games canceled, the news agency Reuters reported.

Japan has seen its number of coronavirus cases grow with the spread of deadlier and more contagious variants. The country has been reporting as many as 6,000 cases a day in recent weeks, after recording 1,000 daily in early March.

Taiwanese athletes compete as Chinese Taipei at the Olympics as part of a decades-old agreement with China brokered by the International Olympic Committee. China claims the self-ruled island of Taiwan as its own territory and has an ongoing policy of diplomatic and military intimidation.

Officials in Taiwan said the country would “adjust” its plan not to have an opening ceremony delegation in Beijing after repeated requests by the IOC to attend and fulfill obligations under the Olympic Charter.

The Taiwanese team, which has four athletes competing at the Beijing Games, had also identified COVID-19 security among reasons not wanting to send officials to the ceremonies.

The separate remarks, made on Sunday morning news programs, came before a video was released online showing two young men who said they were behind suicide bombings in the central Russian city Volgograd last month that claimed 34 lives. In the video, the men threaten to carry out more attacks. In a statement posted with the video on its website, the militant group Vilayat Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, The Associated Press reported.

“They’re not giving us the full story about, what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups — the terrorist groups who have had some success — are they still plotting?”

“If necessary, all those tools will be activated.” He added that if foreign athletes wanted to provide their own additional security, “there is nothing wrong with that,” as long as they coordinated with the Russian authorities.

South Korea has offered high-level talks with North Korea next Tuesday to discuss its possible participation in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.

Kim Jong-un, said earlier he was considering sending a team to Pyeongchang in South Korea for the Games in February.

South Korea's president said he saw the offer as a "groundbreaking chance" to improve relations.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Tuesday called on the United States to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics set to take place next February in Beijing.

"[The U.S. should] go to Japan, go to India and all these other allies and say look, until we have a full investigation of that lab, until we know what is in it, what precautions are being done to make sure nothing comes back out of that lab and until we know what China knew, when they knew it and what they did about it, we're not going to support the Olympics."

"I think what is really important is Congress needs to go through and find out exactly what the National Institute of Health knew about the Wuhan lab, what they knew about any of thinks viruses that existed, if they funded anything and what they did about it," Haley told Fox News on Tuesday.

Japan's Olympic organizing chief resigned Friday following a groundswell of criticism that his remarks more than a week ago showed disdain for women and that he tried to maintain the male-dominated status quo by installing his own replacement on the Tokyo Games organizing committee.

Yoshiro Mori, 83, acknowledged that his remarks, to the effect that women's speaking time at Japanese Olympic Committee meetings should be limited because they talk too much, were inappropriate and had caused much chaos.

But in other comments he appeared utterly unapologetic, insisting that his remarks weren't meant to demean women and any problems were largely a matter of interpretation. He also accused his critics of being disrespectful toward the elderly and the media for whipping up dissent.

The Biden administration will not send any American government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, making official a diplomatic boycott to pressure China for human rights abuses.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that while American athletes would be able to compete in the Winter Games in Beijing, there would be no delegation of American officials.She said the boycott was a response to human rights abuses in Xinjiang.“This is just an indication that it cannot be business as usual,” Ms. Psaki said. “That does not mean that is the end of the concerns we will raise about human rights abuses.”

“This boycott is a necessary step to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to human rights in the face of the Chinese government’s unconscionable abuses,” Mr. Menendez said, adding that he hoped other nations would join the United States.

Perhaps the most significant outpouring of indignation came in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing games, when the worldwide Olympic torch relay was disrupted by protesters in London, Paris, and San Francisco, and led to boycotts of French companies in China. At one protest outside the French retailer Carrefour in the city of Qingdao, protesters directly linked historic and modern issues when they toted signs saying, “Say No to Carrefour! Say No to French Imperialists! Strongly Protest Britain and France Invading China in 1860! Strongly Protest [Britain and France] Slandering Our Olympics in 2008!”

Russia's status as a sports superpower and its participation in track and field events at next year's Olympics came under threat Monday after a report accused the Russians of widespread, state-supported doping reminiscent of the darkest days of cheating by the former East Germany.

The findings by a commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency were far more damaging than expected. It means that two of the world's most popular sports — soccer and track and field — are now mired in scandals that could destroy their reputations.

The WADA investigation's findings that Russian government officials must have known about doping and cover-ups, with even its intelligence service, the FSB, allegedly involved, threatened to severely tarnish President Vladimir Putin's use of sports to improve his country's global standing. Russia hosted the last Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and will hold the next World Cup in 2018.

Japan will consider various options such as having fewer spectators and mandatory coronavirus testing for a “simplified” Olympic Games next year to avoid the outright cancellation of the event, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Thursday.

John Coates, the head of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) inspectorate for Tokyo, has said a lack of a defence against the new coronavirus threatened the Games and organisers had to start planning for what could be a “very different” Olympics if there were no signs of COVID-19 being eradicated.

he Yomiuri, citing government and organising committee sources, said making Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests mandatory for all spectators — in addition to athletes and staff — and limiting movement in and out of the athletes village were among the options Japan would discuss with the IOC.

“There is a sort of religion of language in France,” said Julien Barret, a linguist and writer who has written an online glossary of the language prevalent in the banlieues where Ms. Nakamura grew up. “French identity is conflated with the French language” he added, in what amounts to “a cult of purity.”

France’s former African colonies increasingly infuse the language with their own expressions. Singers and rappers, often raised in immigrant families, have coined new terms.

Ms. Nakamura’s dance-floor hits use an eclectic mix of French argot like verlan, which reverses the order of syllables; West African dialect like Nouchi in the Ivory Coast; and innovative turns of phrase that are sometimes nonsensical but quickly catch on.

President Barack Obama will ask the U.S. Congress for more than $1.8 billion in emergency funds to fight Zika at home and abroad and pursue a vaccine, the White House said on Monday, but he added there is no reason to panic over the mosquito-borne virus.

Zika, spreading rapidly in South and Central America and the Caribbean, has been linked to severe birth defects in Brazil, and public health officials' concern is focused on pregnant women and women who may become pregnant.

Obama's request to Congress includes $200 million for research, development and commercialization of new vaccines and diagnostic tests for the virus.

The warning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has intensified a debate across Latin America over the hemisphere’s growing vulnerability to mosquito-borne diseases. These concerns are especially acute in Brazil, the region’s largest country, where officials hope that tourism can help revive a beleaguered economy as they prepare to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Alves added that he expected the Zika outbreak to ease to the point that the Olympics here in August would not be affected.Yet others in Brazil applauded the C.D.C.’s alert, pointing to the country’s struggle not just with Zika, a virus with origins in Uganda that is thought to have made the leap to Brazil in 2014, but also with two other mosquito-borne viruses, dengue and chikungunya. Last year, Brazil registered more than 1.6 million cases of dengue, a virus causing fever and joint pain, with 863 people dying from the disease.

Dr. Kuri said the C.D.C. was “within its rights” to issue the travel warning, but he argued that the blanket admonition did not make sense when th

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told a visiting South Korean delegation that he was willing to hold talks with the U.S. about giving up nuclear weapons and normalizing relations with Washington, officials in Seoul said Tuesday.

North Korea’s government issued no statement of its own on Tuesday. On Monday, state media there said Mr. Kim had exchanged “in-depth views on the issues for easing the acute military tensions” on the Korean peninsula.

On Tuesday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted: “Possible progress being made in talks with North Korea. For the first time in many years, a serious effort is being made by all parties concerned.

For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

North and South Korea have begun talks on Pyongyang's plan to send an art troupe to the Winter Olympics taking place next month in the South.North Korea agreed last week to send a delegation to the Games, easing months of tensions between the neighbours over its nuclear programme.

The two sides are meeting in the shared border village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ), also known as truce village.

Moranbong: Pyongyang's propaganda girl band