Latest news with #Chen
Fox Sports
6 hours ago
- Sport
- Fox Sports
15-year-old Aphrodite Deng becomes first Canadian winner in US Girls' Junior history
Associated Press JOHNS CREEK, Ga. (AP) — Aphrodite Deng became the first Canadian winner in U.S. Girls' Junior history, beating Xingtong Chen of Singapore 2 and 1 on Saturday in the 36-hole final at Atlanta Athletic Club. The 15-year-old Deng won her third junior major title of the year, following the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley in April and the Mizuho Americas Open in May. She earned a spot in the 2026 U.S. Women's Open at Riviera. 'It really means a lot. I just can't believe that I won,' Deng said. 'I didn't really think about the end result because I knew there were a lot of good players here. I just tried to win each match.' Deng had a 4-up lead over the 16-year-old Chen — the first player from Singapore to reach the championship match — after 18 holes. Chen cut the deficit to two twice on the second 18, the last with a par win on the 34th. Deng ended it on the 35th by matching Chen's par. 'I think I stayed in the moment throughout the whole match,' Deng said. 'I did get a little tired at the end. I learned that I'm pretty consistent and I'm pretty good, and I think that I stay pretty calm in front of a crowd and cameras.' ___ AP golf: in this topic
Winnipeg Free Press
6 hours ago
- Sport
- Winnipeg Free Press
15-year-old Aphrodite Deng becomes first Canadian winner in US Girls' Junior history
JOHNS CREEK, Ga. (AP) — Aphrodite Deng became the first Canadian winner in U.S. Girls' Junior history, beating Xingtong Chen of Singapore 2 and 1 on Saturday in the 36-hole final at Atlanta Athletic Club. The 15-year-old Deng won her third junior major title of the year, following the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley in April and the Mizuho Americas Open in May. She earned a spot in the 2026 U.S. Women's Open at Riviera. 'It really means a lot. I just can't believe that I won,' Deng said. 'I didn't really think about the end result because I knew there were a lot of good players here. I just tried to win each match.' Deng had a 4-up lead over the 16-year-old Chen — the first player from Singapore to reach the championship match — after 18 holes. Chen cut the deficit to two twice on the second 18, the last with a par win on the 34th. Deng ended it on the 35th by matching Chen's par. 'I think I stayed in the moment throughout the whole match,' Deng said. 'I did get a little tired at the end. I learned that I'm pretty consistent and I'm pretty good, and I think that I stay pretty calm in front of a crowd and cameras.' ___ AP golf:
USA Today
7 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Summer of Aphrodite: Deng, 15, becomes first Canadian champion of U.S. Girls' Junior
The summer of Aphrodite is upon us. Aphrodite Deng, a 15-year-old from Canada, captured the 2025 U.S. Girls' Junior on Saturday at Atlanta Athletic Club in Georgia, topping 16-year-old Xingtong Chen from Singapore 2 and 1 in the 36-hole championship final for her first USGA title and biggest win of her life. It's also the first time a Canadian has won the U.S. Girls' Junior title. "It feels unreal, and I can't believe it," she told NBC Sports' Kay Cockerill. "It was really hard to keep the lead, especially the last few holes because I got really tired. During my break, I just rested well." Deng led 4 up after the morning 18 holes on Chen, the first player from Singapore to play in the championship match of the U.S. Girls' Junior. In the afternoon, Chen won two of the first five holes to shrink her deficit to 2 down, but Deng fought back, building her lead back to 4 up with five holes to play. But Chen wasn't done. She made birdie on the 32nd hole to win the hole and then won with par on the 34th when she was three down, forcing a 35th hole. However, both players made par on the long par-3 17th, giving Deng the Glenna Collett Vare Trophy. "She played really solid, and it was a really good match," Deng said of Chen. The victory for Deng is the latest in a long list of big wins this year. It started taking the title in the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley and followed that up with winning the Mizuho Americas Open. Now, she's a USGA champion. Last year, the junior circuit belonged to Rianne Malixi and Asterisk Talley, who combined won three USGA championships with Malixi beating Talley in the championship finals at the U.S. Women's Amateur and U.S. Girls' Junior. 2025 belongs to Aphrodite Deng, who can now try to match Malixi with a win at the U.S. Women's Amateur next month at Bandon Dunes.
Boston Globe
10 hours ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Tear it down, they said. He just kept building.
Advertisement From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live. 'They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,' he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month. 'But the advantage is that it's conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,' he added. 'Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.' Chen's house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou province, in southwestern China. It evokes a Dr. Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in 'Harry Potter.' Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to 'Howl's Moving Castle.' Advertisement To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity. To Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbors and seemingly even common sense. He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build. Chen's parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave. When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier. Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money. They visited a secondhand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns. Then, Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Chen did it alone. Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth. 'I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,' he said. 'And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.' Advertisement He was also fueled by resentment toward the government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family. By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbors had all moved into the new apartment buildings about 3 miles away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.) Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country's modernization push. The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called 'nail houses,' for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared. Still, few stick out quite like Chen's. A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesperson, insurance agent and courier. But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay. 'I don't want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,' he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove. In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending. In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China's poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.) Advertisement But Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies. On the first floor, Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou. On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology. The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle. On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles. With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: 'That's what makes it fun.' (His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.) Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys. He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure. 'There's a law of increasing entropy,' Chen said. 'This house, if I didn't care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.' He added, 'But as long as I'm still standing, it will be too.' Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than $20,000 on building materials. He has also spent about $4,000 on lawyers. His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Chen's whims. His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns. They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy. Advertisement 'Now we just don't go over there,' said Tianliang, Chen's brother. 'There's no need to listen to what they say about us.' In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.) But others expressed admiration for Chen's creativity. Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close. 'There are people who say it's illegal,' he said. Then he added, 'But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame.' This article originally appeared in
The Star
a day ago
- Politics
- The Star
CPC delegation visits Laos to strengthen ties
VIENTIANE: Chen Zhou, deputy head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, led a CPC delegation to visit Laos from Wednesday (July 16) to Friday (July 18) at the invitation of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. During the visit, Chen met with Thongloun Sisoulith, general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee and Lao president, and Bounleua Phandanouvong, acting head of the LPRP Central Committee's Commission for External Relations. He also held brief discussions with leaders from various Lao Party and government departments. The two sides exchanged views on the relations between the two parties and the two countries, as well as issues of common concern. They agreed to follow the important consensus reached by the top leaders of both parties and countries, enhance strategic mutual trust, deepen interparty exchanges, expand pragmatic cooperation, promote the steady and long-term development of the China-Laos community with a shared future, and make positive contributions to maintaining regional peace and development. - Xinhua
