February 26th, 2010
VANCOUVER, British Columbia
They already called her “Queen Yuna” in South Korea.
And on Thursday night, Kim Yu-na’s reign over the women’s figure- skating world officially began.
Kim won the Olympic gold medal, soaring to a world-record 228.56 points and shattering her previous mark by more than 18 points. It was one of the greatest performances in figure-skating history and was sure to set off wild celebrations from Seoul to Pyongchang. It was South Korea’s first medal at the Winter Olympics in a sport other than speed skating.
“If this was track and field, we just watched an 8-second 100 meters,” said Jamie McGrigor, a skating analyst doing in-house radio commentary.
The judges thought so. They gave her a free-skate score of 150.06, which was an astonishing 13 percent higher than her previous world record of 133.95.
“I am really happy,” Kim said. “I still can’t believe the score I received. I’m really surprised. It’s almost as close as the men’s score.”
Longtime rival Mao Asada of Japan won the silver medal, but it was no contest — even when Asada landed both her triple axels, one in combination with a double toe loop.
Joannie Rochette, skating four days after the sudden death of her mother, won the bronze, giving Canada its first women’s medal since Liz Manley’s silver in 1988.
The Americans, meanwhile, went home without at least one medal for only the second time since 1952. American Mirai Nagasu did finish fourth. U.S. champion Rachael Flatt dropped to seventh.
Kim Yu-na
Kim came in bearing almost incomprehensible pressure. Not only was the reigning world champ the biggest favorite since Katarina Witt in 1988, but she also carried the weight of an entire nation on her slim shoulders.
The most popular athlete in South Korea, she’s been dubbed “Queen Yu-na” and she needs bodyguards whenever she returns home from her training base in Toronto. Anything she does creates a frenzy, and even a simple practice draws a rinkful of photographers.
Kim seemed to shrug it all off this week, saying after the short program that it felt like any other competition. But it was clear Thursday that it meant so much more.
There were simply no flaws in her performance, from her skating to her expressions to that cobalt blue dress.
When she finished, the audience could almost see the pressure fall away as she bent over and cried. The tears fell no matter how hard she tried to blink them back, and she held up her hands helplessly when she reached coach Brian Orser. So many stuffed toys and flowers littered the ice that the full complement of sweepers had to be deployed — not once, but twice.
It almost wasn’t fair that Asada, skating next, had to try to one-up that.
She couldn’t. Not even close.
Asada, who has swapped titles with Kim since their junior days, is one of the few women who even tries a points-packing triple axel, and she did two on this night. But she melted down later.
For Rochette, the medal was a culmination of “a lifelong project with my mom.” Therese Rochette, 55, had a massive heart attack just hours after arriving in Vancouver to watch her daughter skate.
Supported by her father, Normand, and longtime coach Manon Perron, Rochette decided to go ahead and compete.
source: www.kansascity.com
tags: olympics, sport author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
February 23rd, 2010
A young pair of ice dancers lifted the host country out of its Winter Olympic gloom with a golden performance on Monday just as Canadians were questioning their team’s medal-winning capability.
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who began skating together as children, brought home Canada’s first Olympic gold in ice dancing to lift a host nation struggling to cope with a demoralising ice hockey defeat and diminishing medal hopes.
The win capped a day on which Germany clinched gold in the women’s cross country team sprint to go level with the high-flying Americans on seven gold medals apiece in 10 days of Olympic competition.
Norway, a country with a far smaller population which usually punches above its weight at Winter Games, moved to outright third by winning a sixth gold in the men’s cross country team sprint.
Canada are now right behind Norway with five golds and Virtue and Moir are set to become the sweethearts of the Games.
Wearing classic white and skating to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Virtue and Moir concluded their mesmerising routine with him on his knees and her face in his hands—bringing the home crowd to its feet to the chant of “Canada, Canada, Canada.”
“This is for Canada and Canada is with us,” said Virtue, aged 20 to Moir’s 22.
Their American training partners Meryl Davis and Charlie White took silver and relegated the Russian favourites Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin to bronze. It was the first time in 34 years that Europeans did not win the ice dance gold medal.
That was not the only novelty, though. British siblings Sinead and John Kerr mixed things up a little as the sister lifted the brother in a rare case of ice dance role reversal.
SILENCE CRITICS
Virtue and Moir’s triumph may silence, at least for now, a rising crescendo of criticism about the host nation’s “Own the Podium” programme to win a glut of medals on home soil.
With wry Canadian humour, locals began calling the multimillion-dollar investment in athletes “blown the podium” or “flown the podium” after coming up dry in Alpine skiing and watching neighbours the U.S. strike a rich seam of medals.
Canada’s doubts turned to depression after the ice hockey- crazed country lost to the American men on Sunday, in a game that was the most watched sports programme in Canadian history with 10.6 million viewers.
As Canadians began to lose their cool in the middle of the Games, the country’s Olympic Committee (COC) made a plea to wait and see what the last week of the Games held for the nation of 34 million people.
“It’s painful to do the autopsy while the patient is alive and kicking,” COC chief executive Chris Rudge said in a view later validated by the ice dancing gold.
Canada’s women will get another chance at gold on Thursday when their ice hockey team square off against the United States in the final.
Both teams dispatched their semi-final rivals with ease on Monday, the Americans crushing Sweden 9-1 and Canada blanking Finland 5-0.
It will not be so easy for the Canadian men, for whom anything other than winning ice hockey gold would be deemed a national failure.
They remain in the competition but the loss to the U.S. has left them facing a qualifying playoff with Germany for the daunting prospect of meeting Russia in the quarter-finals.
Canadian head coach Mike Babcock tried to offer reassurance to his compatriots.
REVENGE OF THE CURLERS
“We’ve just chosen a longer route to get to where we want to go,” he said.
Canada did partially avenge their southern neighbours on Monday, by eliminating the U.S. men’s curling team following a 7-2 victory.
“We felt we owed them one after the hockey last night,” Canadian curler John Morris said.
Austria, another traditional winter sports powerhouse struggling in Vancouver, made a brighter start to the final week of competition when Wolfgang Loitzl, Andreas Kofler, Thomas Morgenstern and Gregor Schlierenzauer joined up to win gold in the team ski jumping.
A late surge by Claudia Nystad enabled Germany to win the women’s cross country final ahead of Sweden, who had led at every exchange.
Germany looked to be on course to win the men’s final too when they led at the final changeover but Norway’s Petter Northug unleashed a powerful burst to snatch his first gold of the Games after failing to win in three individual events.
source: sports.yahoo.com/olympics
tags: olympics, sport author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
February 15th, 2010
Two U.S. rockets slammed into a home Sunday outside the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah, killing 12 civilians after Afghanistan’s president appealed to NATO to take care in its campaign to seize the town.
Inside Marjah, Marines encountered “death at every corner” in their second day of a massive offensive to capture this bleak mud-brick city filled with booby traps, hardcore Taliban fighters and civilians unsure where to cast their loyalty.
Marines confronted a fierce sandstorm as they ducked in and out of doorways and hid behind bullet-riddled walls to evade sniper fire. To the north, U.S. Army troops fought skirmishes with Taliban fighters, calling in a Cobra attack helicopter against the insurgents.
Insurgents littered the area with booby traps and explosives before the offensive, and the sound of controlled detonations — about three every hour — punctuated the day along with mortars and rocket fire.
“Our children are very scared by the explosions. When will it end?” asked Zaher, a 25-year-old poppy farmer who like many Afghans goes by one name.
The civilian deaths were a blow to NATO and Afghan efforts to win the support of residents in the Marjah area, a major goal of the biggest ground offensive of the eight-year war. Marjah, which had a population of 80,000 before the offensive, is a Taliban logistical center and a base for their lucrative opium trade which finances the insurgency.
The rockets were fired by a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, at insurgents who attacked U.S. and Afghan forces, wounding one American and one Afghan, NATO said in a statement. Instead, the projectiles veered 300 yards (meters) off target and blasted a house in the Nad Ali district, which includes Marjah, NATO added.
The top NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, apologized to President Hamid Karzai for “this tragic loss of life” and suspended use of the sophisticated HIMARS system pending “a thorough review of this incident,” NATO said.
Before the offensive began Saturday, Karzai pleaded for the Afghan and foreign commanders to be “seriously careful for the safety of civilians.”
Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omar said the president “is very upset about what happened” and has been “very seriously conveying his message” of restraint “again and again.”
Allied officials have reported two coalition deaths so far — one American and one Briton, who were both killed Saturday. Afghan officials said at least 27 insurgents have been killed in the offensive.
In unrelated incidents in southern Afghanistan, NATO said two service members died Sunday — one from small-arms fire and the other from a road side bomb explosion. The international force did not disclose their nationalities, but the British defense ministry reported that a British soldier died Sunday of wounds suffered in an explosion.
Marines and Afghan forces met only scattered resistance when they swooped down by helicopter on the impoverished farming community before dawn Saturday. A day later, however, Taliban attacks were escalating, with small bands of fighters firing rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at troops moving slowly through the bombs and booby traps hidden in homes, residential compounds and along the rutted streets.
“It seems these guys want to get a bit closer,” Lt. Carl Quist said as bullets whizzed overhead.
Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, a top Marine commander in the south, predicted it could take 30 days to clear Marjah because of all the hidden explosives.
Marines said they would have preferred a straight-up fight to what they called the “death at every corner” crawl they faced as they made their way through the town.
“Basically, if you hear the boom, it’s good. It means you’re still alive after the thing goes off,” said Lance Corp. Justin Hennes, 22, of Lakeland, Florida.
To bypass heavily mined bridges, Marine engineers erected their own Vietnam-era metal spans over canals that irrigate opium poppy fields.
As Marines pushed deeper into town, gunfire forced them to take cover in buildings and compounds not yet cleared of booby traps. In one compound, a dog trained to detect explosives discovered a massive bomb hidden in a pile of trash.
Some troops complained that the strict rules issued by McChrystal to spare civilians were making their job more difficult and dangerous. Under the rules, troops cannot fire at people unless they commit a hostile act or show hostile intent.
U.S. soldiers operating near Marjah said the Taliban can fire on them, then set aside their weapon and walk freely out of a compound, possibly toward a weapons cache in another location.
A few crafty, determined insurgents can keep a larger force engaged for hours with some degree of impunity.
“The inability to stop people who don’t have weapons is the main hindrance right now,” said 1st Lt. Gavin McMahon of Brooklyn, N.Y. McMahon. “They know how to use our ROE against us,” referring to the Rules of Engagement.
In areas where troops have wrested control from the Taliban, the second phase of the operation is under way — trying to convince civilians that their future lies with the government and not the insurgents.
Several shuras, or meetings with community leaders, have been held in Marjah and the surrounding Nad Ali district with more planned.
In one village, Qari Sahib, Afghan officials met with residents Sunday, promising to provide security, pave a road and build a school and a clinic. In exchange, they urged the villagers to renounce the Taliban and push militants to reintegrate into society. To show good faith, a resident who had been arrested for alleged militant activity was freed.
“This is all to the benefit for you people but we need your cooperation,” Deputy Gov. Abdul Sattar Mirzekwal, told more than 100 villagers gathered outside a mosque. “Do not let the Taliban come into your area and disrupt security.”
Most villagers at the shura expressed support for the government. Others expressed skepticism, laughing and paying little attention to the officials’ promises.
Abdul Wali, a 23-year-old farmer, said he hoped people would give the government a chance.
“I’m afraid that if they do not join with the government, there will be fights, clashes and gunbattles in our village,” he said. “I hope the government will fulfill all the promises it is making.”
____
Associated Press writers Noor Khan in Kandahar, Rahim Faiez in Helmand province, and Deb Riechmann, Heidi Vogt and Tini Tran in Kabul contributed to this report.
source: news.yahoo.com
tags: news author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
February 1st, 2010
From the minute she stepped out of her convertible Rolls Royce decked out in a solar-system-inspired gown, Lady Gaga and her three distinct outfit changes grabbed all the attention–even though the singer herself only grabbed two awards for her five nominations.
After dazzling the red-carpet oglers with her otherworldly Armani getup, Gaga opened the awards with a duet with Elton John that was preceded by a shortened arrangement of her seemingly unstoppable hit, “Poker Face.” The performance was unforgettable, but her golden hairdo and pink frock was left behind in favor of high-cut, dazzling emerald leotard with platinum blonde, iron-straight extensions. Add to that sparkling fuschia triangles covering her eyes, it was almost enough to distract from what at best appeared to be a very uncomfortable wardrobe malfunction.
Lady Gaga
After being ceremoniously deposited into a giant cauldron of flames, Gaga reemerged onto the stage sans eye glitter and plus one very effervescent Elton John for a remix of his iconic number, “Your Song.” This time her shining locks had been dulled by smoke and ash and her eye make-up duly smudged.
And though Gaga wouldn’t step another foot onto the stage for the remainder of the evening, that didn’t prevent the sartorially adventurous star to indulge in one final metamorphosis. In typical Gaga fashion, the self-styled artist forwent pants for sheer and shimmering pantyhose topped with a cropped silver jacket and lightening bold headgear.
source: new.music.yahoo.com
tags: fun, information author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
January 17th, 2010
You pride yourself on your open, honest relationship. But that doesn’t mean you should blurt out any thought that comes to mind.
Sometimes, a comment that seems perfectly harmless to you might be hurtful, awkward or just plain irritating to your boyfriend.
1) “My ex did the exact same thing!”
Whether it’s a desirable resemblance (they both always hold the door open) or a less desirable one (neither one showers often enough), your boyfriend never wants to hear that he’s anything like your ex. Ever.
You don’t want him to feel like you’re always comparing the two of them, do you? Think about it: Do you really want him to imagine that he does other things just like your ex? Doubtful. Plus, he might think you’re still hung up on your former flame.
Either way, a comment like this won’t do much for his self-esteem. So the next time you experience boyfriend deja-vu, keep it to yourself.
2) “Helen’s pregnant … Shhhh”
Remember on Sex and the City when Carrie tells Aidan that Miranda’s pregnant but that he can’t tell Steve? Remember how upset Aidan was to hear the incriminating news? Your boyfriend doesn’t want to hear information that could get him into trouble. And even if he does want to hear it, he really shouldn’t.
Don’t burden him with someone else’s secret. And besides, if he does spill the beans, your friend is going to be mad at you, not him.
Along the same lines, he doesn’t want to hear about your friend’s yeast infections, her irregular periods or her IBS. It’s bad enough he has to hear about yours.
3) “When we’re married/have kids…”
It’s natural to fantasize about wedded bliss and the three kids you and your beau will one day spawn — you’re only human. And sometimes you might even entertain this fantasy very early on in a relationship. But unless you want to scare him away permanently, keep thoughts like these in your head where they belong.
Even if he himself has thought about your happily-ever-after future, he probably doesn’t want to hear it described out loud just yet. Wait until you’re sure you’re on the same page regarding marriage, kids, and the future of your relationship before you start prophesizing. A gut feeling probably isn’t good enough.
4) “Do You Think She’s Pretty?”
When you ask a question like this, your boyfriend knows he can’t win.
If he says “yes,” you’ll probably get jealous and upset. You might even follow up with “Is she prettier than me?” Talk about a loaded question!
Of course, if he says “no” (and she clearly is pretty), you’ll accuse him of being a liar. You’ll wonder what else he’s lying about, even as you assure him you don’t mind if he says “yes.” Pfff…as if you’re that insecure!
Has he managed to convince you that he genuinely doesn’t find her attractive at all? You’ll wonder what his bad taste says about you.
See?
5) “I’m fine” or “Never mind”
Your face says it all. So does the fact that you haven’t said a word in the past hour. And the way you snapped over the misplaced remote control isn’t hiding anything either. But when he asks if you’re okay, you say you’re fine. At this point, your boyfriend wants to tear his hair out.
Passive-aggressive behavior doesn’t help anyone. First, you miss an opportunity to actually address what’s bothering you. You also bottle up your frustrations and create new problems. By the time you actually try to tackle what’s really bothering you, you’re both too upset about too many things to have a constructive discussion.
tags: fun author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
January 16th, 2010
Osama bin Laden
The U.S. State Department has updated its 1998 file photo of al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, digitally altering it to account for a decade of age and possible changes in his facial hair.
There is a $25 million bounty on bin Laden’s head for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. Bin Laden is now 52. And he is believed to be hiding in the lawless Pakistan frontier bordering Afghanistan, though his exact whereabouts have been unknown since late 2001, when he and a small contingent of body guards walked out of the Tora Bora mountains, evading air strikes and U.S. special forces and Afghan militias,
The photos and bounty on bin Laden and 41 others wanted for terrorism are on the State Department’s Web site, http://www.rewardsforjustice.net.
Osama bin Laden
tags: information, news author: Robby Dream comments: No Comments
