Add thick fog to the list of tough conditions on the Alpine skiing courses at the Sochi Olympics.

With recent warm temperatures softening the snow, and fog shrouding the race hill, organizers called off a free skiing session Monday to keep the course intact for Tuesday’s women’s giant slalom.

Women’s race director Atle Skaardal tells The Associated Press that Monday’s session was canceled “to save the hill.”

Racers were still allowed to ski on an adjacent training hill, although some said visibility was too low for competition.

Skaardal acknowledged that if the fog remains, it could cause problems for Tuesday’s race, saying: “I don’t know if they’ll see anything.”

Skaardal said skiers need to see at least three gates ahead through the fog for a race to be held.

The Olympic flame towering over Fisht Stadium in Sochi, Russia, is so massive it literally can be glimpsed from space.

The astronauts on the International Space Station took a photo Wednesday showing the flaming cauldron as the spacecraft drifted over Russia’s premier vacation spot on the Black Sea.

The otherworldly picture taken from 220 miles up in the air by one of the crew members of Expedition 38 shows the bright and colorful outline of the stadium with the Olympic flame burning at night.

In a report from Sochi Wednesday, NBC’s Brian Williams said the soaring torch is the most powerful, and the loudest, of any Olympic Games.

Back on Earth, the hulking cauldron has become a prime destination for athletes and visitors alike who wish to bring home a distinct ‘selife.’

A woman who has lived alone for 26 years in Siberia is appealing for someone to live with her because she is lonely.

Agafya Lykova, who is now nearly 70, is the sole survivor of the Lykov family who decided to cut themselves off from civilisation in 1936.

But she has wrote to a Siberian newspaper begging for another Christian to come and live with her at her home which is hundreds of miles from its nearest town.

Her parents decided to cut themselves off from civilisation in 1936 to escape persecution faced under Stalin.

However, officials visit Agafya every year to check she is okay.

According to The Siberian Times she was born in either 1944 or 1945 and it was not until 1978 that their hermit huts were spotted from the air in the Sayan Mountains by a party of Soviet geologists.

Her father was Karp Lykov who led the family into the wilderness. His sons were Savvin, 45, and Dmitry, 36, and daughters Natalya, 42, and Agafya, who was 34 when they were found. The children’s mother Akulina had died in 1961.

Her siblings died in the 1980s and Agafya’s only companions is now two nanny goats, a male goat, eight cats, a rooster, hens and a dog called Taiga.

Russian police say they have detained 14 suspected members of a banned radical Islamic organization.

A police statement said officers confiscated weapons, ammunition and “extremist literature” during Wednesday’s operation in Moscow.

It said the suspects belonged to Takfir Wal-Hijra, a group it said was founded in Egypt in the 1970s. Russia’s Supreme Court banned the group in 2010.

Russia says it can manage the threat Islamic extremists might pose to the Winter Olympics, which take place in Sochi early next year.

A Russian court on Monday jailed for life three men from Ingushetia over their role in the 2011 bombing of a Moscow airport that killed 37 people, a news agency reported.

The court found the men guilty of facilitating the bomber’s travel to Moscow and providing him with explosives, the Interfax news agency said. The bomber’s brother, who said he knew nothing about the attack, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, it said.

The January 2011 attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo airport also wounded 180 people. Doku Umarov, the rebel leader from the Muslim-dominated region of Chechnya, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Russia has bolstered its security efforts ahead of the Winter Olympic Games in the southern city of Sochi. Umarov has urged militants to target the Games.