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Showing posts from October, 2019

Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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South Africa: No Warm Welcome From Home Affairs At Beit Bridge

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We cannot have a Home Affairs department that is corrupt,’ declared President Cyril Ramaphosa in early October – while Barbara Dale-Jones was experiencing exactly that while travelling to Zimbabwe. As Ramaphosa visited the department’s head office in Pretoria, engaging staff and senior management on strategies to speed up visas and make it easier for visitors to enter the country, hundreds of Zimbabweans and South Africans experienced only frustration, corruption and prejudice at the hands of Home Affairs officials. Earlier this month, I travelled through the Beit Bridge border post from South Africa to Zimbabwe. The exercise took five hours in heat of more than 45 degrees Celsius. It was a horror and one that gave me a lot of time to reflect on what I was seeing. At first, the behaviour of the South African Home Affairs officials seemed like incompetence and laziness. They did not seem to have a properly functioning system in place. By the time I had crossed the bridge int
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It's Woodward not Solskjaer who needs to be fired

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PREMIER LEAGUE  /  13 OCTOBER 2019, 4:00PM  /  OLIVER HOLT Ed Woodward is being blamed for Manchester United's decline. Photo: Jason Cairnduff/Reuters Under the aegis of the Glazer family, Manchester United have become a giant, suppurating mess of a football club. Blinded by the pursuit of cash, the club fleeces its fans and rakes in record revenues even as the team flails. The idea Old Trafford remains a Theatre of Dreams has become a joke. For some time, it has played host to a pageant of the mediocre and the dire. As United flounder in mid-table and approach the latest staging post in their fall from grace with the visit of reborn Liverpool next Sunday, speculation continues to grow about the future of manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and his replacement if he is fired. You’ve heard the names: Julian Nagelsmann, Massimiliano Allegri and Mauricio Pochettino have all been mentioned as candidates. It is said that if United lose to Jurgen Klopp’s side at Ol
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There are days when 'my husband and I don't eat at all' - Families survive on one meal in drought-hit Zimbabwe

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2019-10-05 17:04 (File, Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Multimedia    ·    User Galleries    ·    News in Pictures Send us your pictures   ·   Send us your stories Related Links Zimbabwe's leader begs for patience to fix ailing economy Zim ban on mobile money challenged in court Zim president: Our economy is dead In eastern Zimbabwe's parched Buhera district, Omega Kufakunesu's family has been forced to scale down daily meals to just a portion of vegetables and sadza, a thick maize-meal porridge. In the morning only the children get the porridge, and everyone skips lunch. "During the day we have wild fruit collected by the children, and at night we have smaller portions of sadza with vegetables," harvested from the communal village garden, said Kufakunesu, sitting outside her thatched round hut. A palmful of shumha, a drought-resistant wild fruit, is all she will eat during the day until dinner time. "We ha
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Inside Xanadu 2.0: Take a sneak peek into Bill and Melinda Gates’s Washington mansion

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  LIFESTYLE HOME GARDEN HOME Bill Gates and Melinda’s 27-year-old marriage has come to an end. Picture: Anthony Bolante/Reuters Inside Xanadu 2.0: Take a sneak peek into Bill and Melinda Gates’s Washington mansion By Staff Reporter   May 11, 2021 Questions have been asked as to who is likely to get Bill and Melinda Gates’ 6 100² lakeside mansion in Washington State once their divorce is settled. But it would seem Melinda doesn’t really want it. In a profile in Fortune magazine published in 2008, she said when she arrived in Gates’ life the house caused her to have “a mini sort of personal crisis”. It was partly built when she married Gates in 1994. She described it as “a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare… with enough software and hi-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a video game”. So with the help of interior designer Thierry Despont – who has worked on the Palm Court of New York’s Plaza Hotel, and the Ritz in Paris – she helped create a home
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Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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Are there any planets outside of our solar system?

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  Academic rigour, journalistic flair COVID-19 Arts  +  Culture Business  +  Economy Education Environment  +  Energy Health  +  Medicine Politics Science  +  Technology In French Artist illustration of an exoplanet.  dottedhippo/iStock via Getty Images Are there any planets outside of our solar system? July 19, 2021 2.06pm SAST Author Jean-Luc Margot Professor of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles Disclosure statement Jean-Luc Margot receives funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and philanthropists. Partners University of California  provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US. The Conversation is funded by the National Research Foundation, eight universities, including the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University and the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Pretoria, and South Africa. It is hosted by the
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