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A Finnish man attempted to 'hijack' a plane using a Toblerone chocolate bar, demanding to be taken to Sochi so he could watch the Winter Olympics. Antti Oskari Manselius, 23, from Finland, had wrapped two economy class blankets around his head, wearing a third as a cape when he waved the chocolate bar 'like a sword' as he walked towards the cockpit. Manselius also made a false bomb threat on the Cathay Pacific flight from Amsterdam to Hong Kong on February 14, and said he was robbing the plane, airplane staff said. SNIP He said he was trying to entertain...

Australian swimming great Ian Thorpe is in intensive care in a Sydney hospital receiving treatment for an infection that could result in him losing the use of his left arm, Australian media reported on Tuesday. The five-times Olympic champion reportedly contracted the bug after surgery at a hospital in Switzerland, where he now lives. In February, Thorpe's manager James Erskine said the 31-year-old was suffering from depression after being found disorientated and behaving oddly near a vehicle in Australia after taking a mixture of anti-depressants and painkillers for a shoulder injury. Thorpe, who made his Games debut in Sydney in...

The future of the Sochi Olympic venues is unclear. Alexander Valov, a Russian reporter for BlogSochi, visited Sochi's "coastal cluster" — a site that includes six venues, the Olympic Village, and the Olympic Park, all built from scratch on an undeveloped plot of land — and he took some eerie photos this week. He called the area around the Olympic Village "Dead City." The photos are a reminder that much of what was built for the Olympics has no long-term use. While a few arenas and other buildings have plans going forward — the media center is being turned into...

Demonstrators from both ends of Brazil's political spectrum clashed briefly Saturday in Rio, where leftists came to blows with a group commemorating 50 years since the military coup. More than 2,000 people meanwhile demonstrated in Sao Paulo, sending out a message to President Dilma Rousseff which read, "Dilma, listen, there will be fighting at the (World) Cup," and there were smaller protests in various other Brazilian cities. "Democracy doesn't exist in Brazil -- we don't have a majority but a slew of minorities, such as Indians and feminists, with Dilma in charge," activist Felipe Paulomo told AFP. "Our government is...

At 15 years of age, Amy Purdy took up snowboarding and quickly advanced in the sport she came to love and master. At 19, Amy contracted meningococcal meningitis. She had less than a 2 percent chance of living. Amy miraculously survived, but not without the life-altering loss of her spleen, her kidneys, the hearing in her left ear and both of her legs below the knee because of the ravage of the disease upon her circulatory system. But against all the odds, Amy learned not only to walk again but also to snowboard. In fact, she became a world champion!...

Costas In Context: His critics owe no apologies by Daniel Clark In a March 3rd appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, NBC sports anchor Bob Costas complained that right-wing ideologues had taken his Olympic remarks about Vladimir Putin “out of context.” Let’s see if that’s true. On the night of the opening ceremonies, Costas said this about the Russian president: “Just in the past year, Putin brokered a deal to allow Syria to avoid a U.S. military strike by giving up its chemical weapons, and helped bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear intentions. He has repeatedly showcased his...

Bob Costas got his infamous case of Olympic pink eye from botched Botox, a source claims to Page Six. NBC’s prime-time Olympics host, who had to take a six-day absence after coming down with viral conjunctivitis in both eyes, contracted the infection after a Botox procedure to smooth out wrinkles prior to the Olympics. Our source said, “Bob’s eye infection was due to botched Botox. This isn’t the first time he’s had it.” NBC strongly denies that Costas — who arrived to host the games in Sochi with a forehead smoother than the Olympic luge track — developed the infection...

The United States announced Monday it would boycott the upcoming Paralympic Games in Sochi to protest Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, as a State Department spokesperson said it was “likely” that the U.S. would impose sanctions on Russia. The boycott effectively means a presidential delegation will not be attending the games, an announcement that comes as President Obama and Congress scramble to respond to Russia’s aggression on Ukrainian territory in Crimea. “In addition to other measures we are taking in response to the situation in Ukraine, the United States will no longer send a Presidential Delegation to the upcoming Winter Paralympic...

MOSCOW - The Sochi Olympics "opened Russia's soul" to the world and wrongfooted critics of the host country, President Vladimir Putin said in remarks broadcast on Tuesday. Taking stock after Russia topped the medals table and avoided major security problems at its first post-Soviet Games, Putin said constructive criticism from the International Olympic Committee had helped make Sochi 2014 a success. But there were other critics whose jabs were motivated by "the competitive struggle in international politics, maybe even geopolitics". "They used the Olympic project to achieve their own aims in the area of anti-Russian propaganda," he said. "Because when...

As soon as the Winter Olympics draw to a close tonight in Sochi, another sport will begin: debate over whether the city will actually benefit from hosting the games. “If costs are the benchmark for ‘successful’ Games,” says Janice Forsyth, Director of the International Center for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, “Sochi is the most unsuccessful games in history, bar none.” The Sochi organizing committee spent an estimated US$51 billion on the Games, surpassing the next most expensive Olympics (Beijing Summer Games, 2008) by about $8 billion. The problem is that “rarely, if...

From the opening ceremony with a malfunctioning ring, to police officers singing Get Lucky, the Sochi Winter Olympics have been a games to remember. But tonight marks the end for the highly controversial games, which are also the most expensive in Olympic history. Showing that the country has a sense of humour, dancers during the opening section of the show mocked the moment a ring failed to open during the opening ceremony. The joke was followed by an opulent show of ballet, circus performances and classical music, an ode to the country's rich literary history - before the Olympic flame...

I thought I did. Now I know I did. Why is it so hard for the blow hards on our alphabet news networks to give credit to a movie about Texas whose score was written by a Russian born American composer.Obviously, the Russians are proud of him.Why isn't our media? Just because he was a patriot in Hollywood in a time when it wasn't overwhelmingly dominated by Marxists?As soon as the opening dance becomes available on You Tube, I would appreciate it if someone would post it!

<p>Abortion proponents push for easy access to abortion, deemphasizing its after-affects to the point they absolutely refuse to acknowledge post-abortion depression, which further incapacitates those actually living through it.</p> <p>This is such a tragedy. Charlotte Dawson, RIP, was born in New Zealand but achieved fame in Australia as a model and a judge on Australia’s Next Top Model.</p>

The Canadian men’s hockey team took gold on the final day of the 2014 Olympics, defeating Sweden 3-0 in the gold medal game at the Bolshoy Ice Dome on Sunday.

SOCHI, Russia — Ukraine's victory in the women's biathlon relay was the standout moment of the Sochi Olympics, a powerful symbol of unity during the country's bloody political crisis, IOC President Thomas Bach said Saturday. In an interview with The Associated Press, Bach praised Ukraine's athletes for staying in Sochi to compete for their country despite the violence and turmoil that has left scores dead back home. "In this moment, mourning on the one hand, but knowing what really is going on in your country, seeing your capital burning, and feeling this responsibility, and then winning the gold medal, this...

The head of Russia’s Communist Party held up a hammer-and-sickle Soviet banner during a flower ceremony at the Winter Olympics, leading to a confrontation with staff over violating Olympic rules that bar political statements at the games. A series of photographs taken Friday night shows Gennady Zyuganov in a group of five men in the stands displaying the historic Soviet Banner of Victory toward the podium while medals were being awarded in three short track speedskating events at the Iceberg Skating Palace. The banner was a replica of the flag raised by Soviet soldiers in Berlin in 1945, in victory...

Before he headed to Moscow in January 2012 as Barack Obama’s new ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul was itching to get out of government. He had dreams of moving back to Palo Alto. The weather’s nice, his family missed the place. But Obama had come to rely on McFaul, a longtime Russia scholar and the National Security Council’s point man on the country. So he offered him a posting he couldn’t decline. McFaul’s academic specialty is revolution—a detail that Vladimir Putin, hounded by a bubbling uprising, immediately seized on. State television vilified McFaul as the man Washington had sent to...

Rematch of the epic gold medal game from Vancouver. Winner will face Sweden in the gold medal game. Let's hope the USA can get its revenge.

Change.org, a website that hosts public petitions, crashed Friday morning after a flood of users signed a petition to investigate a controversial Olympic figure skating result. Russia's Adelina Sotnikova won the gold medal in an upset over South Korea's Yuna Kim. After the event, a Change.org petition called "Open Investigation into Judging Decisions of Women's Figure Skating and Demand Rejudgement at the Sochi Olympics" was started by a user named "Justice Seeker." It went viral in a way the website had never seen before. "The petition gained 700,000-plus signatures in just six hours and is sending traffic to our site...

Dear Entertainment Tonight: You had invited me to do an interview concerning the Ladies’ Figure Skating results and my advice for gold medal winners. I had agreed subject to you allowing me to also use the interview to raise awareness to the more than 70 people killed and 600 injured in the Ukraine in their fight against Ukrainian government corruption. Unfortunately, you pulled a “bait and switch” on me and instead dealt with issues in your program irrelevant to anything that we had agreed to discuss. I should have known better than to trust you after having only recently learned...