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Canada’s goaltender Roberto Luongo celebrates with Jarome Iginla, Jonathan Toews (16) and Drew Doughty after beating Norway 8-0 on Tuesday in Vancouver. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

There was certainly no shortage of storylines to discuss in CBCSports.ca’s live chat on Day 5.

The men’s and women’s curling tournaments began, highlighted by Canada’s Kevin Martin and Cheryl Bernard.

Toronto native Patrick Chan began his quest to become the first Canadian male singles performer to capture gold as the men’s short program took centre stage.

But there is no doubt that the main event was Canada’s men’s hockey team opening its tournament against Norway with an 8-0 win.

Our team is ready. How about you? Log in and see what the CBC’s Jeff Marek, researcher extraordinaire Natalie Tedesco, and Noah Love of the National Post had to say about a busy night of Olympic action.

As an added bonus, figure-skating coach David Long was on hand to analyze all the action on the men’s side.

Canada’s Patrick Chan reacts as the marks are posted for his short program, while his coach, Christy Krall, looks on in the men’s figure-skating competition Tuesday at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)

Evgeni Plushenko of Russia leads the men’s figure-skating competition after scoring 90.85 in the short program Tuesday night at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

But the top three competitors, who all skated clean programs, are separated by less than one point.

American Evan Lysacek is second with 90.30 points. Daisuke Takahashi of Japan is in the bronze-medal position, at 90.25.

Toronto’s Patrick Chan is in seventh place.

The other Canadian in the field is Calgary’s Vaughn Chipeur, in 24th place.

The free skate is on Thursday at Vancouver’s Pacific Colliseum, the venue for all figure-skating events at the Winter Games.

More to come

San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman was arrested Sept. 6 after reality TV star Tila Tequila accused him of battery and false imprisonment at his suburban San Diego home. A lawsuit settlement has been reached, according to lawyers. (Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman and reality television star Tila Tequila have settled duelling lawsuits, lawyers say.

Merriman was arrested by sheriff’s deputies Sept. 6 after Tequila accused him of battery and false imprisonment at his suburban San Diego home.

Prosecutors declined to charge Merriman, but Tequila, whose real name is Tila Nguyen, filed a lawsuit that alleged the linebacker choked her.

Merriman sued for international interference with a contract, claiming the controversy delayed a T-shirt business he was negotiating with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Tequila’s lawyer, Cyrus Nownejad, said Tuesday he won’t disclose terms of the settlement. Neither would Merriman lawyer Andrew Skale, who said the dispute was resolved amicably.

Team Canada defence Dan Boyle (22) fends off Norwegian forward Per-Age Skroder in their Olympic opener on Tuesday. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Team Canada looked powerful in its Olympic opener, an 8-0 rout of Norway on Tuesday night.

Jarome Iginla led the offensive onslaught with a hat trick and Dany Heatley scored twice, while Mike Richards, Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry had the other goals.

Roberto Luongo recorded the shutout, stopping 15 shots.

The near-capacity crowd at Canada Hockey Place was anxious to see Team Canada begin the Olympic tournament. But just before Luongo led the Canadians onto the ice Tuesday, the fans were whipped into a frenzy when the scoreboard broadcast the gold-medal snowboard run of North Vancouver’s Maelle Ricker.

The crowd cheered wildly for Canada’s second gold medal at the Winter Games, but the men’s hockey team did not give the crowd much to hoot and holler about in the opening 20 minutes.

Canada outshot Norway 14-4 and was awarded two power-play opportunities in the first period, but both teams left for the dressing rooms scoreless. Canada lacked sharpness around the Norway goal and 32-year-old netminder Pal Grotnes made a couple of dandy glove saves.

One of those impressive stops was on Canada’s Sidney Crosby, who also had the Norway goalie beaten earlier in the period but had the puck roll off his stick before he could sweep it behind Grotnes.

Grotnes, who plays in the Norwegian league, is the same goalie who made 50 saves against Canada at the 2008 world championship, when Canada narrowly escaped with a 2-1 victory.

Another roar from the crowd during the first period was when Wayne Gretzky was shown on the scoreboard standing with friends and officials in a luxury box. Gretzky, of course, was involved in the opening ceremony last Friday, lighting the Olympic cauldron along with Catriona Le May Doan, Steve Nash, Rick Hansen and Nancy Greene-Raine.

Iginla gets offence going

The Canadians were much better in the second period because they put more traffic in front of Grotnes. This resulted in an early power-play goal from Iginla in the high slot and Heatley redirected a Chris Pronger point drive less than two minutes later.

Norway had an opportunity to get back in the game with a 48-second, two-man advantage. But instead of closing the gap, Canada’s Mike Richards put Canada ahead by three because of his hustle, moments after teammate Eric Staal’s tripping penalty had expired.

Canadian head coach Mike Babcock experimented with different forward and defence combinations after the disappointing first period. Iginla was moved up to replace Patrice Bergeron on the Crosby line with right-winger Rick Nash. Richards, Bergeron and Jonathan Toews became the fourth line.

In international hockey, teams dress a seventh defenceman and a 13th forward. The Canadian coaching staff gave most of the seven defencemen equal ice time. Dan Boyle and Shea Weber were usually the pair to start power plays for Canada and the second twosome was Pronger and Drew Doughty.

American skier Lindsey Vonn grimaces in the finish area during the women’s downhill training run at Whistler Creek on Monday. (Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images)

It has been nearly a week since Lindsey Vonn disclosed she had a severely bruised right shin, but it is still not clear how the injury will affect her medal chances in the Olympics, which begin for her Wednesday with the women’s downhill. Even Vonn’s mother, Linda Krohn, in a chance meeting in the Whistler village over the weekend, acknowledged that she knew little about the injury.

Lindsey and her husband, Thomas Vonn, who acts as her coach and adviser, have provided daily updates on her condition, but the signals have been confusing. On Sunday, she trained in the slalom, which should have bothered the shin injury because slalom requires dozens of quick, forward-pressing turns. Afterward, she said she felt “pretty good.”

On Monday, she trained on the downhill course, which compared with slalom should have been less taxing on the injury. Again she offered confusing signals: her time was first in the field, but she was doubled over in pain at the finish and appeared shaken.

“It’s throbbing really bad, and landing that last jump really hurt,” she said. “This is the worst course for my shin. It’s so bumpy.”

So an injury that was kept secret for a week and has since had a public week of scrutiny has nonetheless maintained a measure of mystery. Vonn will race Wednesday; that is the given. Once the prohibitive favorite in the downhill — she has won five women’s World Cup downhills this season — one does not know what to expect once she pushes out of the gate Wednesday.

Her motivations for disclosing the injury have been questioned, but Vonn said she originally kept it secret because she was hoping it would heal quickly. She said that when it became obvious she might not be able to ski in her first scheduled training run, last Thursday, she felt obligated to explain why. “Everyone would be wondering what was wrong with me,” she said.

So she chose to disclose the problem with her shin. When she skied a few days later and reported significant improvement, even smiling afterward, such an apparently quick recovery brought surprise, even suspicion.

It may be edifying to know a couple of things about the Vonn camp, often called Vonntourage. Thomas Vonn is the unruffled one, her trainers have a little mad scientist in them, and Lindsey is the most sensitive and emotive of the group.

So when she was hurt, she feared the worst: another Olympic dream dashed. (Her last Olympics, in 2006, were ruined by a precompetition crash that nearly kept her from racing.) Her trainers went to work with a bevy of clandestine, quasi-experimental therapies that have helped, and she has been greatly aided by several days of weather-related race postponements.

Throughout, day after day, her husband preached patience.

But Vonn is the one who feels the pain and demonstrates the most worry about it. As is her nature, when she speaks, she expresses how she feels physically and emotionally.

“Last week, I’m telling you I wouldn’t have been able to ski this course,” she said after her downhill run Monday. “I can’t tell you how much it has helped to have this break in the schedule.”

Thomas Vonn has continued to look long range, noting how much the shin injury has improved and reminding one and all how much resolve his wife has. One of her trainers, Martin Hager, said Sunday, “She is in good shape.”

Somewhere in the middle of those assessments is this reality: Vonn is injured and no one, including Vonn herself, knows exactly how her bruised shin will react — and how she will react to it. When one understands the personalities involved, the injury is probably better than she is making it sound and probably worse than her trainers are making it sound.

It is the downhill, a glamour event of the Alpine schedule and a demanding test. By Wednesday afternoon, we could finally know what effect one unseen, bruised lower leg may or may not have on Olympic skiing history.

Written by Bill Pennington, New York Times

Google says it will disable the auto-follow function in its new Buzz service to address privacy concerns. (Mark Lennihan/Associated Press)

Concerns around Google’s recently unveiled Buzz feature are deepening with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada looking into the social-networking tool.

Valerie Lawton, a spokeswoman for the privacy office, said the office is looking into concerns about Buzz.

“We understand the public concern about privacy issues related to Google Buzz,” she said. “Our office is looking at the issue.”

Lawton added that the office may comment further on Wednesday.

Google has ignited a hailstorm of criticism with Buzz, which adds real-time communication and media-sharing features found on popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to its Gmail service.

Buzz users can share status updates, news stories, videos and photos, and they can link in feeds from sites such as Twitter and Picasa.

The company unveiled Buzz last week as a feature inside Gmail. Once launched, Buzz automatically searched the user’s most emailed contacts and added them as followers, thereby inadvertently exposing potentially sensitive communications.

One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents.

In the United States, the Electronic Privacy Information Center said it plans to lodge a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission because Buzz is forcing Gmail users into a social networking service they don’t necessarily want.

Over the weekend, Google promised to implement changes, including a disabling of the auto-follow function in favour of suggested followers, to give users more control over their privacy. Buzz product manager Todd Jackson admitted the new service hadn’t been properly tested and apologized for the snafu.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” he told BBC News.

Google Canada spokesperson Wendy Rozeluk said the company has been talking with federal and provincial privacy officials, but would not comment on what was discussed.

The company is moving to implement changes as quickly as possible, with some of them taking effect this week, she added.

“We’ll be making some significant product improvements over the next few days based on user feedback,” she said. “The user always comes first.”

Social networking websites have kept Canada’s Privacy Commissioner busy recently.

Last summer, the commissioner’s office forced Facebook to make sweeping changes to its policies after finding that the site violated Canadians’ privacy rights. Last month, assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she was again looking into Facebook after receiving complaints that the website has not followed through on its promises.

Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart also last week announced upcoming consultations relating to privacy and cloud computing, another service of which Google is a big proponent. Stoddart said that by storing an increasing number of documents and files on servers hosted by third parties, Canadians are potentially making themselves vulnerable to privacy violations.

People carry an injured person in Port-au-Prince after a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Jan. 12. (Radio Tele Ginen/Associated Press)

Damage from Haiti’s catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake may be twice the value of the country’s annual economy, Latin America’s main development bank said Tuesday.

A report by three Inter-American Development Bank economists found last month’s earthquake to be more devastating than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was for Indonesia, and five times deadlier than the 1972 earthquake that hit Nicaragua’s capital.

“It is the most destructive [natural disaster] a country has ever experienced when measured in terms of the number of people killed as a share of the country’s population,” killing one in every 50 Haitians, the report said.

Economists Eduardo Cavallo, Andrew Powell and Oscar Becerra estimated the magnitude-seven quake wrought damage worth between $8.1 billion and $13.9 billion.

Haiti produced only $7 billion worth of goods and services in 2008, according to the World Bank.

“This is just an assessment of damage; it gives no indication of the amount of money to get the country back as if nothing had happened,” Cavallo told The Associated Press by phone. He said an ongoing assessment will be needed to determine the total amount Haiti needs to rebuild.

The authors used statistical models based on data compiled from about 2,000 natural disasters since 1970, taking into account estimated death tolls, levels of economic development and other factors — and they caution the study is preliminary.

They came up with a wide range of potential estimates, including one as low as $4.1 billion. But because there are few precedents for a disaster this size — it killed more than 200,000 people and struck directly at the heart of the country’s political and economic centre — Cavallo said they believe the final figure will be closer to their highest estimates.

Canadian skip Cheryl Bernard looks up ice after throwing a rock in the Olympic opener against Switzerland on Tuesday. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

Cheryl Bernard led Canada to a 5-4 win over Switzerland in the women’s curling opener at the Vancouver Olympic Centre on Tuesday.

Bernard trailed Swiss skip Mirjam Ott 2-1 at the fifth-end break. But the 43-year-old from Calgary scored a deuce in the sixth end to take the lead.

Ott played a quiet tap-back to tie it with a single in the seventh end, but Bernard regained the lead in the eighth.

Canada held the Swiss to one in the ninth, and then drew to the button for the 5-4 win in the 10th.

In other women’s curling round-robin action on Tuesday:

• Sweden edged Denmark 6-5.
• Japan beat the United States 9-7.
• Germany walked over Russia 9-4.

CBC curling analysts Mike Harris and Joan McCusker both say the final will likely feature China’s Bingyu Wang, the reigning world champion, against Sweden’s Anette Norberg, the defending gold medallist.

Ott took silver at the last two Winter Games, and was a formidable test for Bernard in the opener.

Canada will play Japan in further preliminary action at the Vancouver Olympic Centre on Wednesday morning.

Kevin Martin narrowly squeezed past Norway with a 7-6 win in extra ends earlier on Tuesday. Canada’s men’s squad is back in action on Tuesday night at 10 p.m. PT, taking on Germany.

Canadian skip Cheryl Bernard looks up ice after throwing a rock in the Olympic opener against Switzerland on Tuesday. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

Cheryl Bernard led Canada to a 5-4 win over Switzerland in the women’s curling opener at the Vancouver Olympic Centre on Tuesday.

Bernard trailed Swiss skip Mirjam Ott 2-1 at the fifth-end break. But the 43-year-old from Calgary scored a deuce in the sixth end to take the lead.

Ott played a quiet tap-back to tie it with a single in the seventh end, but Bernard regained the lead in the eighth.

Canada held the Swiss to one in the ninth, and then drew to the button for the 5-4 win in the 10th.

In other women’s curling round-robin action on Tuesday:

• Sweden edged Denmark 6-5.
• Japan beat the United States 9-7.
• Germany walked over Russia 9-4.

CBC curling analysts Mike Harris and Joan McCusker both say the final will likely feature China’s Bingyu Wang, the reigning world champion, against Sweden’s Anette Norberg, the defending gold medallist.

Ott took silver at the last two Winter Games, and was a formidable test for Bernard in the opener.

Canada will play Japan in further preliminary action at the Vancouver Olympic Centre on Wednesday morning.

Kevin Martin narrowly squeezed past Norway with a 7-6 win in extra ends earlier on Tuesday. Canada’s men’s squad is back in action on Tuesday night at 10 p.m. PT, taking on Germany.