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The curtain finally came down on the glory days of Russian figure skating in Vancouver. The once-powerful team return home for the first time in 50 years without a gold medal in a debacle that has reached the highest echelons of government. With Russia set to host their first Winter Games in four years time in Sochi, they had at least been hoping to keep the flame alive with two gold medals in Vancouver. Hopes were high after Yevgeny Plushenko was lured out of retirement to defend his men’s title with ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin favorites as the reigning world champions.

Instead the team leave with just two medals - Plushenko’s silver in the men’s event and Domnina and Shabalin’s ice dancing bronze. Russian ice dancers had claimed all but tow golds since it was introduced to the Olympics in 1976. A beleaguered Shabalin said that the only way to reverse the trend was “to bring all the Russian coaches back to Russia. We did everything we could. We did not expect Russian figure skating to go down.” In pairs, they had won gold at 12 Olympics in a row, but European champions Yuko Kavaguti and Alexander Smirnov finished off the podium, as the advantage swung to Asia with Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo leading a Chinese 1-2.

Not since 1960 have skaters from Russia or the Soviet Union left a Winter Games without a figure skating gold. When Plushenko finished second to American Evan Lysacek in the men’s competition, there was furious talk back home of a conspiracy. Even Prime Minister Vladimir Puttin weighed in, saying Plushenko’s silver medal finish “was worth a gold medal”, while others decried injustice and called for officials to “protect the honour” of Russian athletes. Puttin personally invested much to secure the 2014 Sochi Games, and pride is at skate for Russian athletes to do well in four years’ time. While the collapse of the former Soviet structure of training, and the exodus of the top coaches to the United States and Canada, are seen as the part of the problem, former athletes are also blaming incompetence and corruption in state structures and federations.

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Shane Warne has said the Indian Premier League (IPL) may have to be moved to South Africa if terror threats against players were found to be credible. Warne has told the Australian media that the threat by an Al-Qaeda-liked organizations to target the IPL was a serious concern. “The threats of the past 24 hours have certainly got me thinking twice and is of deep concern to athletes across several sports. If the threats are proven to be real, then organizers of the IPL may look at moving the tournament. We moved it last year at short notice (to South Africa), so it can be done,” Warne has quoted as saying by Herald Sun on Wednesday.

But IPL retorted saying there is no need for a shift. “The security arrangements are perfect in the country. The South African national team is playing in India currently without any trouble. What bigger proof one needs to show that there are no security fears to the IPL. We are constantly monitoring the situation. There is no need to shift the IPL to anywhere,” Lalit Modi, the IPL Chairman said. According to the paper, Warne is waiting for the advice of Australian cricket’s security expert Reg Dickason before making a decision on whether to travel to India. The Rajasthan Royals skipper is expected to land in India lather this month. The report also said the Australian players are considering hiring their own security personnel.

“We will be staying in hotels and traveling in buses and as we saw with the Sr Lankan team in Lahore (which was attacked last year), it can be dangerous,” Warne told the paper. Rajasthan Royals, however, downplayed Warne’s concern. “He is quite comfortable with the security blanket provided by the IPL. I spoke to him a few hours ago and Shane is happy with the security arrangements provided by Nicholls and Steyn. There are no concerns at all. The IPL has been briefing us regularly,” Royals CEO Sean Morris told an English daily.

Twenty Australians, including Shane Watson, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds, will be taking part in the 45-day tournament but most current Australian players will be turning up only at the later stage of the tournament. As an IPL official said the presence or the absence of the Australians will have little impact on the tournament. Meanwhile, the South African Cricketers Association, the country’s official players’ body said, it is working with Cricket South Africa over the matter. “We can also advise the players only after we get to know the security details. We will suitably advise the players after getting all the information,” Saca chief Tony Irish told an English daily.

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Canada’s privacy commissioner accused Google on Wednesday of breaching privacy laws when  it launched its new online social network Buzz last week, and demanded compliance. “We have seen a storm of protest and outrage over alleged privacy violations and my office also has questions about how Google Buzz has met the requirements of privacy laws in Canada,” commissioner Jenifer Stoddart said in a statement. Buzz was added last week as a feature on Google’s Gmail, which reportedly has 146 million users worldwide.

Some Gmail users complained that they were automatically assigned a network of “followers” based on those with whom they communicated with most using Google’s email and online chat services, without notice or consent. The list of “followers” was also included in a widely available online profile. Stoddart said she reminded Google officials that the California-based company must abide by Canadian privacy laws when launching products in Canada. “We have an open line with Canada’s privacy commissioner - we had an in-depth discussion with her about how Google Buzz works and about the changes we made”, a Google official told AFP. “We are always happy to hear from privacy commissioners in Canada and in other countries.”

Google said it routinely briefs privacy commissioners regarding new products as a courtesy and to get feedback. The Internet giant has issued a public apology regarding the short-lived automatic social-network creation feature originally built into Buzz and introduced changes to try to address the widespread criticism. But Stoddart has yet to say whether she was satisfied with the fixes. Google is the second online company to be investigated by Canada’s privacy czar. Last year, Facebook agreed to better secure the privacy of its users worldwide after Stoddart probed its policy of holding onto personal information from deactivated accounts in violation of Canadian law. Facebook was also accused of not adequately restricting access by outside software developers to personal information people put on profile pages.

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Hamas sources have accused men they say were members of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas Fatah movement of helping Israel to kill a Hamas commander in Dubai, a link that would inflame hostility between the rival factions. Dubai police told a local newspaper on Thursday they were 99 per cent sure Israel was behind the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabouh in a Dubai hotel last month. Most of the suspects identified by the Dubai police carried European passports. The police have also said two Palestinians are suspected of providing logistical support in the operation. They have not named the pair, who were extradited to Dubai from Jordan.

Hamas security officials in Gaza, quoting colleagues living, like Mahbouh, in exile, say the tow Palestinian suspects had been members of the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza. The pair fled, they said, along with other Fatah activists and leaders, after a brief Palestinian civil war in 2007, when Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, leaving Abbas’s Fatah the dominant faction in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Fatah officials, speaking privately, said two men whose names have been circulated by Hamas officials had worked in Abbas’s Palestinian Authority security forces in the Gaza Strip until Hamas took over the territory in June 2007. But they denied that the two were still working for the same masters.

The Fatah officials, anxious to distance the main force within the PLO from suggestions it collaborates with Israel against its internal Palestinian enemies, said the pair might even have joined Hamas after the 2007 fighting in Gaza. A spokesman for the security forces of the Ramallah-based-Palestinian Authority said: “Hamas should extensively search the scope of penetration within its ranks that has led to the assassination of Mabhouh and other Hamas leaders.” Reuters, to whom Hamas sources gave the men’s name on Tuesday, has been unable to contact them. Emirati and Jordanian officials have declined to identify the Palestinians being held.

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US President Barack Obama has announced eight billion dollars in loan guarantees to build the first nuclear power plant on US soil in nearly 30 years. Obama said nuclear power must play a key role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Obama said nuclear power, despite concerns among some environmentalists over safety, must play a key role in an energy policy designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and wean the United States off foreign oil from volatile regions.

“On an issue which affects our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left and right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs,” Obama said. “We will have to build a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in America.” Obama said on a visit to a training center focusing on clean energy and low carbon energy technologies outside Washington. We are announcing roughly eight billion dollars in loan guarantees to break ground on the first new nuclear plant in our country in nearly three decades,” Obama said.

The loan guarantees will go towards the construction of two new nuclear reactors at an existing nuclear facility in Burke, Georgia, the White House said. At a time of economic blight when the administration is trying to create a new generation of clean energy jobs, Obama said the investment in nuclear power would pay off in employment opportunities in years to come. “It is a plant that will create thousands of jobs in the next few years and some 800 permanent jobs, well-paying permanent jobs, in the years to come. And this is only the beginning,” Obama said.

The president also warned that America’s competitors were beating it to the punch on nuclear energy, specifically mentioning longer-term investments by Japan and France in the industry. He sad of 56 nuclear reactors around being built around the world, 21 are in China, six in South Korea, and five in India - some of the key economies he most often mentions trailblazing the rivals to the United States.

“To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we will need to increase our supply the nuclear power. It is that simple. “Make no mistake: whether it is nuclear energy, or solar or wind energy, if we fail to invest in these technologies today, we will be importing them tomorrow.” Obama’s move uses a 2005 law that authorizes the Energy Department to guarantee loans to projects that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that the United States feared Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seizing control of large swaths of Iran’s political, military and economic establishment. “That is how we see it,” Clinton said in a televised town hall meeting of students at the Doha campus of Carnegie Mellon University. “We see that the government in Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship.”

The US, she said, was tailoring a new set of tougher UN sanctions to target the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls Iran’s nuclear program and which she said had increasingly marginalized the country’s clerical and political readership. Clinton’s remarks were remarkably blunt, given her audience in Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate with close ties to Iran. But they build on the administration’s recent strategy of branding the Revolutionary Guard Corps as an “entitled class” that is the principal menace in Iran.

The US, Clinton said, would protect its allies in the gulf from the Iranian aggression - a pledge that echoed the idea of a “security umbrella” that she advanced last summer in Asia. She noted that the US already supplied defensive weapons to several of these countries, and was prepared to bolster its assistance if necessary. “We will always defend ourselves, and we will always defend out friends and allies, and we will certainly defend countries who are in the Gulf who face the greatest immediate nearby threat from Iran,” she said. “We are also talking at length with our friends in the Gulf about what they need in the event that Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions.”

Pressed repeatedly by an audience of mainly Muslim students, Clinton said the US had no plans to carry out a military strike against the Iran. Still, the Obama administration moves from diplomacy to pressure, its policy is edging closer to the hard line toward Iran that Clinton advocated as a presidential candidate. At times on this trip, her public comments have sounded a lot like her worlds on the campaign trail. Her comments on Monday underscored the Obama administration’s determination to single out the elite corps as a way to curb Iran’s nuclear program. The administration is also working on a series of sanctions that would publicly single out the corps’ vast array of companies, banks and other entities.

The latest designations, which come two and a half years after the US first imposed sanctions on the corps, illustrate both the scope and limitations of the president’s pressure campaign. Senior White House officials described what they said would be a “systematic” effort to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and the Revolutionary Guards, which the West says is responsible for running Iran’s nuclear program.

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US vice-president Joseph R Biden Jr. and former vice-president Dick Cheney engaged in the last round of their war of words on Sunday in dueling television appearances, in which each offered sharply different positions on national security and forceful defenses of their administrations’ policies. Biden accused Cheney of trying to rewrite history in his critique of how the Obama administration had handled terrorism suspects and other threats to national security. Biden said some of the Obama administration efforts that have been criticized by Cheney were similar to decisions made during the Bush administration. He said Cheney’s fight seemed to be with his own administration.

“That’s Dick Cheney,” Biden said on ‘Face the Nation” on CBS. “Thank God the last administration did not listen to him at the end.” Cheney, on “This Week” on ABC, criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the attempted bombing of a jetliner in December, saying, “It is clear once again that the president Obama is trying to pretend that we are not at war.” He said “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, should have been an option when questioning the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Cheney also said the Obama administration was wrongly trying to take the credit for any progress in Iraq. “If they had their way, if we had followed the policies they had pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset,” he said, “Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.” The back-and-forth between Biden and Cheney highlighted the clashing visions of their administrations, particularly on national security, as well as efforts by conservatives to portray Obama as weak on that issue.

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Five Muslims who plotted an attack using using guns and explosives to protest against Australia’s part in the “war on terror” were jailed for up to 28 years on Monday, after the country’s longest extremism trial. The men, who cannot be named, were convicted in October of gathering firearms, chemicals and bomb-making instructions, along with a mass of Islamist propaganda, for the attack on an unknown target. Justice Anthony Whealy, who handed down the sentences at a purpose-built courthouse in Sydney’s west, said the plans were “often lacking in cleverness” but were well advanced when the five were arrested in 2005.

“There is no reason to doubt that, absent the intervention of the authorities, the plan might well have come to fruition in in early 2006 or thereabouts,” Whealy told the hearing of New South Wales Supreme Court. The men from Sydney, who are Australian citizens of Lebanese, Libyan and Bangladeshi descent, were handed maximum terms of 23 to 28 years, with the shortest non-parole period being 17 years and three months. The five, aged 25 to 44, showed little emotion and some of them smiled at each other when Whealy left court.

“That is a very big sentence - not even murderers get sentenced that much,” the sister of one of the men told reporters. “Twenty-three years, that is half of his life. It is not fair to him, our community or religion.” The judge had said there was overwhelming evidence they wanted to create “at the very least, serious damage to property” and posed a “serious risk” to the public, although it was not clear that they intended to kill. “On occasions they were inept and clumsy, but these factors did not make their conspiracy any the less dangerous,” he said.

Australia’s former conservative government was closely aligned to the policies of former US president George W Bush, and the country was one of the the first to commit troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The five took Australia’s involvement in those conflicts as “acts of aggression against the wider Muslim community”, prosecutor Richard Maidment told the court earlier. They spent months collecting chemicals, firearms and ammunition, and raids on their homes found “large quantities of literature which supported indiscriminate killing, mass murder and martyrdom in pursuit of violent jihad.” The men had pictures and videos showing the hijacked aircraft smashing in to the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, as well as beheadings and death on the battlefield, Maidment said.

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