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LONDON: Six-time Olympic champion Chris Hoy, who spearheaded a golden period of British track cycling dominance, announced his retirement Thursday, content he had nothing left to prove after a long and stellar career. Britain’s most successful Olympian, who won two golds at the 2012 London Games to add to three from Beijing four years earlier and his first in Athens in 2004, said the time was …

HERMEL, Lebanon: One man was killed and several people were wounded Sunday when Syrian gunmen slammed rockets into Lebanon’s border village of Qasr in the Hermel region, a Lebanese security source said. Ali Hasan Qataya died after three rockets fired from the Syrian side of the border landed near the mosque in Qasr. Several residents were wounded and rushed to hospitals, the source …

LONDON: George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 89. Mary Lowe said her husband died Wednesday at a nursing home in Ripley, central England, after an illness. Lowe and his friend Edmund Hillary were the only two New Zealanders on the 1953 …

COPENHAGEN: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in remarks published Wednesday that his controversial comments branding Zionism a crime against humanity had been misunderstood. Erdogan, who has often attacked Israeli policies, triggered a storm of protest about his comments on Zionism at a UN forum in Vienna last month. “I understand that my statement in Vienna led to some debate. But no one should misunderstand …

LOS ANGELES: Olympic swimming great Michael Phelps has thrown cold water on a report that he would come out of retirement with a view to swimming at the 2016 Rio Games. “Why do I keep getting texts about coming back?” Phelps said on Twitter Friday night after a Florida television station reported he planned to return to the pool. Peter Busch of an NBC station in Fort Myers, Florida, …

TOKYO: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday Tokyo could be an inspiration for other cities if it wins the right to host the 2020 Olympics, after becoming the first place in Asia to get the Games in 1964. Promising his government’s “fullest” support for Tokyo’s new Olympic bid, Abe told inspectors from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that hosting the Games was his “life-long dream”. “Tokyo, 2020, will …

TUNIS: Salafist Muslims tried to prevent the filming of current Internet craze the “Harlem Shake” at a Tunis school on Wednesday, but were driven off after coming to blows with students, an AFP correspondent said. When the dozen or so ultra-conservative Muslims, some of them women in veils, showed up at the Bourguiba Language Institute in the El Khadra neighbourhood, a Salafist bastion, students shouted “Get out, get out!” …

SYDNEY: Former world swimming champions James Magnussen and Eamon Sullivan, and their 4×100-meter relay teammates, face possible sanctions including a loss of funding from the Australian Olympic Committee after admitting taking the sleeping medication Stilnox during a “bonding session” ahead of last year’s London Games. Magnussen, Sullivan, Tommaso D’Orsogna, Cameron McEvoy, James Roberts and Matthew Targett fronted a media conference Friday with Swimming Australia president Barclay Nettlefold, and released a joint statement …