Ryan Lochte and three other U.S. swimmers were held up at gunpoint early Sunday morning. Lochte described the incident to NBC on Sunday afternoon. "We got pulled over, in the taxi, and these guys came out with a badge, a police badge, no lights, no nothing just a police badge and they pulled us over," Lochte said. "They pulled out their guns, they told the other swimmers to get down on the ground — they got down on the ground. I refused, I was like we didn't do anything wrong, so — I'm not getting down on the ground.

They started in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and became the hit of the 2012 Olympics. They’re not athletes, they’re not broadcasters, they’re not mascots. They are the remote-control go-fers of all the track-and-field events that involve throwing things for long distances. And they’re back for the Rio Games. They started in China as large, rocket-shaped buggies used to carry javelins back-and-forth. In London, they were mini-Mini Coopers, taking all manner of field-event items—hammers, discuses, shots—to and fro.

This Saturday, the U.S. women’s volleyball team will play the Puerto Rico women’s volleyball team in the opening round of the 2016 Olympics in Rio. You might wonder why two groups of U.S. citizens would compete against one another. After all, the Olympic Games are an international competition that, through medal counts, measures how athletes from different countries perform.

This time it's for real. Late Saturday night at the Rio Olympics, Michael Phelps dove into the pool with Team USA in second place in the 4x100 medley relay. Fifty seconds later, Phelps had pulled his team into the lead - of course - and given freestyler Nathan Adrian plenty of room for a victory. It was Phelps' fifth gold medal of these Games and 23rd overall (to go along with three career silvers and two bronzes) and it'll be his final one. "I am done, boys," he said with a smile in a group huddle after.

Leftover food from the Olympic Village in Rio is being cooked by a group of international chefs and then served to the city’s poor. Massimo Bottura, who runs the three-Michelin-star restaurant Osteria Francescana, and Brazil’s David Hertz hope to produce 5,000 meals per day from food leftover by the 11,000 athletes staying in the Olympic Village. The pair were inspired by a similar initiative, Refetterio Ambrosiano, that was launched in Italy last year. It brought 65 chefs from around the world together to cook meals using ingredients donated by the Milan World Expo.

There's something in the water at the Rio Olympics: Yet another pool has turned deep, bright green. This time, it's the water polo pool. On Tuesday, when the diving pool at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre mysteriously changed colors, Olympic organizers and FINA -- swimming's international governing body -- offered competing explanations why. The water of the diving pool at right appears a murky green as the water polo pool at left appears a greener colour than the previous day.

Another two golds last night for Michael Phelps, the most decorated American Olympian ever: That makes 21 gold medals in his career, 25 medals overall, and with his win in the 200m butterfly—a particularly personal win, given his loss in that event four years ago—Phelps now has 12 individual wins to bring him into a tie with the late, great Leonidas of Rhodes.

The Washington Post has a big team of journalists covering the Rio Olympics. Also covering the games for the paper: Robots. The Post is using homegrown software to automatically produce hundreds of real-time news reports about the Olympics. Starting tomorrow morning, those items will appear, without human intervention, on the Post’s website, as well as in outside channels like its Twitter account.

Russian athletes have been banned from competing at the Rio 2016 Paralympics following the country's doping scandal. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) had opened suspension proceedings following the McLaren report, and has now confirmed the ban. That report, published last month, detailed a state-sponsored doping programme operated by Russia. The Russian Paralympic Committee is to appeal against the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The International Paralympic Committee is set to do what its Olympic counterpart did not and ban Russia outright from its Games later this month, the Observer has learned. In the wake of the publication of Professor Richard McLaren’s report that revealed jaw-dropping details of systemic doping in Russia, the IPC provisionally suspended Russia from the Paralympics.

Spectators leaving the opening ceremony of the Olympics were confronted by the body of a man shot dead near Maracana Stadium. Eyewitnesses said early Saturday that blood poured from the body onto the road as medics tended to the man next to an ambulance. Loud multiple gun shots were heard earlier by photographers from The Associated Press, forcing games volunteers and others leaving Friday night' ceremony to duck for cover behind cars. A shooter was seen running from the scene and fleeing in a car close to a university parking lot.

Rio police say a man was shot dead near Maracana Stadium after Friday's opening ceremony.

The 2016 Summer Olympics are scheduled to begin today, but for some it has already began with a bang. Upon their arrival in Rio, a bus full of Chinese basketball reporters was caught in a roadside gunfight. Six locals were killed in the exchange, but no Chinese casualties have been reported. Initially, the Chinese-language Basketball Magazine posted on Weibo that Chinese national basketball team players had been caught near the flurry of bullets, where they would have presumably suffered from flashbacks to their two exhibition matches against Team USA last month.

The opening ceremony hasn’t even kicked off yet, and olympic photographers are already having a hard time in Rio. Case in point: News Corp photographer Brett Costello recently had $40,000 worth of camera gear stolen… in broad daylight… in a crowded cafe… in 10 seconds flat.

On a cool December night in Paris, at an awards ceremony in the city’s 3rd arrondissement, Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, took the stage to thunderous applause from an audience full of his fellow mayors from around the world. Paes’ voiced boomed as he stressed the importance of cities leading the fight against climate change — as chair of the C40 network, a group representing 80 world cities working together to combat the devastating effects of climate change, Paes is a prominent evangelist of the local leader’s power to champion sustainability at home.

The sand traps will be the least of the golfers' worries. The Golf Channel recently explored the Olympic golf course in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood of Rio, an upscale region nestled on the lakefront. While that makes for a picturesque setting, it also means the grassy slopes are a veritable Noah's Ark of Brazilian wildlife. Spotted so far on the links are: sloths, caimans, boa constrictors, mico monkeys, burrowing owls and 40 capybaras, the largest rodents in the world.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) today voted unanimously to include skateboarding in the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. The vote, which took place during the 129th IOC Session in Rio de Janeiro, the site of this year's Summer Games, was the culmination of a lengthy campaign to bring skateboarding to the Olympics. The Fédération Internationale Roller Sports (FIRS) was behind skateboarding's bid, though the World Skateboarding Federation (WSF) and International Skateboarding Federation (ISF) have both argued that they should oversee skating in the Games.

Forget about the floating tires. You can spot those in the water even in clean cities around the world. What gobsmacks you as you approach a canal near the Rio international airport, a body of water that flows into the city’s Guanabara Bay – home of the 2016 Olympics sailing venue — is the smell. It’s a gaseous stench: inhale it at your stomach’s own risk.

Rio 2016 organisers will launch a new project to give away more than 200,000 tickets to schoolchildren to help to fill the gaps in stands, the Guardian can reveal. Officials also told those coming to the Games to “fasten their seatbelts” for a bumpy ride following a cost cutting programme that has reduced the number of volunteers and reduced bills in a host of non-essential areas. Organisers said that because they had hit their 1bn Reais revenue target, they were in a position where they could give tickets away – despite having earlier promised not to do so.

In a move that could be interpreted as indulgent or prescient — or both — the U.S. men's basketball team at the Rio Olympics will stay aboard a luxury cruise ship rather than the spartan facilities at the athletes village. It appears the U.S. women will also be living aboard the Silver Cloud, according to media reports. The men's basketball team, made up of 12 highly compensated NBA stars, has a tradition of opting for upscale digs ever since professionals were allowed to play in the Olympics in 1992. And the men's team even stayed on a cruise liner once before, at the 2004 Games in Athens.