In brief: Russian officials foil ’14 Olympics attack

Moscow – Russia claimed it has foiled a plot to attack the host city of Sochi both before and during the 2014 Winter Olympics, saying its agents discovered caches of weapons that included grenade launchers and surface-to-air missiles.

Government security officials blamed Chechen separatists and neighboring Georgia in the plot, although Georgian officials denied any links with the militants and called Thursday’s accusations a sign of Moscow’s “severe paranoia.”

Experts on the Caucasus region added, however, that the tiny breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, just a few miles east of Sochi on the Black Sea, could pose a realistic threat to the security of the games – a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Caucasus region is plagued with near-daily violence linked to an Islamist insurgency that spread from the Russian province of Chechnya to neighboring areas in the 1990s.

China clamps down on activist’s relatives

Beijing – Authorities in the hometown of blind activist Chen Guangcheng have notched up restrictions on members of his extended family while he awaits permission in Beijing to travel abroad under an agreement between China and the U.S.

Chen Guangcheng’s brother and sister-in-law have been placed under house arrest, his nephew is in police detention, and several other relatives face some form of restriction on their movements in their village in Shandong province, according to Chen, his lawyers and a rights group.

Chen’s flight from abusive house arrest in Shandong and into the protection of U.S. diplomats – which led to an agreement with Beijing to let him study in the U.S. accompanied by his wife and children – has exposed the impunity of local officials and embarrassed the central government.

“I feel that Shandong’s retribution against me has already started,” Chen said in an interview Thursday from a hospital where he is being treated for injuries suffered during his dramatic escape from his guarded farm house.