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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 …

TEHRAN: Arch foes Iran and the U.S. have found some common ground in the fight to save wrestling as an Olympic sport. U.S. wrestling coach Zeke Jones on Tuesday called the sport an important “ambassador,” suggesting possible cooperation to fight a decision by the International Olympic Committee to drop wrestling from the 2020 Games. “Wrestling has brought closer the people of Iran and the U.S.,” Jones …

PARIS: Wrestlers around the world on Wednesday vowed to fight to save the ancient sport’s Olympic status, after the International Olympic Committee voted to drop it for the 2020 Games. Japan and Turkey — whose cities Tokyo and Istanbul are bidding to host the Games in seven years’ time — led the calls for the world body to reconsider, as an online petition was organised urging a …

BEIJING: Three-time world table tennis champion Zhuang Zedong, a key figure in 1971’s groundbreaking “pingpong diplomacy” between China and the United States, died Sunday, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. He was 72 and had struggled with cancer since 2008. Zhuang won new fame by presenting a gift to American player Glenn Cowan, who had inadvertently boarded a bus carrying the Chinese team at …

LOS ANGELES: Shamed cyclist Lance Armstrong wants to return to competitive sport, but says the driving force behind his belated doping confession was the well-being of his five children. “The biggest hope and intention was the well-being of my children,” Armstrong told talk show host Oprah Winfrey in the second segment of their televised interview that aired on Friday. In the first installment aired …

DUBAI: Rafael Nadal’s comeback from a long-term knee injury has been put on hold by an illness that has ruled him out of an exhibition tournament in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. “Rafael Nadal has been forced to make a last minute withdrawal from the 2012 event due to a stomach virus,” organizers said in a statement released Tuesday. “Nadal, who …