Latest news with #Race
New Straits Times
2 days ago
- Sport
- New Straits Times
Verstappen and Hamilton unhappy with 'overcautious' rain delay at Spa
SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium: Multiple world champions Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton both accused race organisers of being overcautious on Sunday when the start of the Belgian Grand Prix was delayed by 80 minutes following heavy rain. Four-time world champion Verstappen said he believed that instead of suspending the race after one formation lap behind the Safety Car, Race Control should have kept the field out on the track to clear standing water. "It wasn't even raining," he said, referring to the decision taken at the scheduled race start time of 1500 local time (1300 GMT). "Of course, between Turns One and Five, there was quite a bit of water. "But if you do two or three laps behind the Safety Car, then it would have been a lot more clear -- and the rest of the track was ready to go anyway. "It's a bit of a shame. I knew that they would be a bit more cautious because of Silverstone, but this also didn't make sense. "Then, it's better to say 'let's wait until it's completely dry' and we'll start on slicks because this is not really wet weather racing for me." Instead of staying out, however, the field were taken back into the pit lane to wait for more than an hour, waiting until improved weather conditions prevailed. The race then began with a rolling start after four laps behind the Safety Car. Verstappen finished off the podium for the third consecutive race as series leader Oscar Piastri led team-mate Lando Norris home in a convincing McLaren 1-2. Ferrari's Hamilton said race organisers had over-reacted after Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli and Alpine's Isack Hadjar collided at Silverstone in poor visibility. "We started the race a little bit too late, I would say," he said. ""I kept shouting that 'it's ready to go it's ready to go', but they kept going round and round. "I think they're probably over-reacting from the last race, where we asked them not to re-start the race too early because the visibility was bad. "This weekend, I think they just went too far the other way. We didn't need a rolling start." After a disappointing Saturday when he was twice eliminated in the first part of qualifying, for the sprint race and the Grand Prix, the seven-time world champion responded with a rousing drive through the field from 18th to finish seventh. "I always love races like that where you're challenged and have to make your way through the field," said the 40-year-old Briton. "But, ultimately, I'm disappointed to have had not such a great weekend -- definitely one to forget, but at least I've still got some points. "And, we outscored Mercedes, but I've got to go back -- and you can't always get it right. There are lots of factors that contributed to Friday and Saturday, but ultimately me. Obviously I recovered a little bit today, but big thanks to the team. I will try and come stronger next week." However, Williams driver Carlos Sainz supported the decision as "a safe call" given the history of the sprawling high-speed circuit. "My respect to the Race Director because he told us after Silverstone - and the accidents at Silverstone - that he would play it safer here and that is what he did," said Sainz. He accepted that the race could have started much earlier on a 'normal' circuit, but pointed out that as a result of the decision taken the race was run for a full 44 laps. "On a normal track, yes," he said. "I think maybe we could have started earlier by five or ten minutes. But at Spa-Francorchamps, and with the history of the track, it is better to be safe than sorry. "You got the whole race. You got to watch the full race. So, I don't think it was a bad call. A safe call, yes." The Spa-Francorchamps circuit has been the scene of 53 fatalities including two in the last six years due to poor weather conditions.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Belgian Grand Prix build-up - radio & text
Race at 14:00 BST - Norris on pole position, Piastri 2nd, Leclerc 3rd Verstappen wins sprint race Laurent Mekies' first race as Red Bull boss after sacking of Christian Horner Listen to BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra 2 commentary at top of page from the Belgium Grand Prix from Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Get involved #bbcf1 Belgian Grand Prix build-up - radio & text
Observer
4 days ago
- Sport
- Observer
Oman Kite Festival 2025 concludes in Sur
The Oman Kite Festival 2025 came to a close after ten days of competitions and vibrant events held across several coastal locations in the Sultanate of Oman. The festival, which ran from July 15 to 24, brought together more than 90 athletes from around the world. Organized by OMRAN Group in partnership with Oman Sail, Visit Oman, and the Oman Adventure Centre, the festival aimed to promote adventure and experience-driven tourism by showcasing the Sultanate's diverse coastal landscapes and supporting the growth of unique tourism offerings across the country. The closing ceremony was held at The Beachfront in Sur, South al Sharqiyah, under the patronage of Dr. Yahya bin Badr Al Maawali, Governor of South Al Sharqiyah, and in the presence of Dr. Khamis Salim Al Jabri, CEO of Oman Sail, as well as senior representatives from OMRAN Group and sponsoring entities. The festival welcomed the participation of 90 athletes from around the world, who competed in a series of thrilling races. The highlight was the multi-stage 'Oman Downwinder' race, which unfolded over four legs: from Barr Al Hikman to Masirah Island, followed by a route from Masirah through Ras Al Ruwais, then from the Pink Lagoons to Al Ashkharah, and finally from Ras Al Jinz to Ras Al Hadd. In addition to the Downwinder, the festival featured the 'Kite Course' race along the shores of Barr Al Hikman, the 'Coastal Race' in Masirah Island, and the 'Slalom' event in Ras Al Hadd.
Spectator
6 days ago
- Spectator
With glee to the silvery sea
Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as 'the Scottish Riviera'. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands 'the Naples of the North!' (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to 'The Drier Side of Britain'. A North Eastern Railway poster proclaimed: 'Scarborough Braces You Up. The Air Does It.' 'Come to Southport for Mild Winters,' begged the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. A poster launching a new line to the Kentish resort of Allhallows-on-Sea, 12 miles from Gravesend, came up with the rather weak boast that the place was 'Facing Southend'. Any British pursuit once popular enough had to have a boardgame to go with it. Race to the Ocean Coast, created by Chad Valley Co. for the GWR in the late 1920s, was a game for all the family. Hazards included 'communication cord pulled' and 'line under construction'. It didn't sell very well and was discontinued in 1932. But the craze for taking trains to the seaside carried on growing, as it had been steadily since the mid-1870s. A bench a quarter of a mile long was installed on the new 'excursion platform' at Scarborough station in 1883 to absorb the vast home-going crowds after their day out. To cater for northerners travelling south, there was a regular sleeper service from Glasgow to Brighton. That Scarborough bench still exists, unlike so much else mentioned in this book, discontinued or demolished and turned into a car park in the aftermath of the brutal and short-sighted Beeching report of 1963, which recommended the closure of 2,363 stations. Every few pages in this book there is mention of 1964 or 1965. Those years were as deadly for British railway stations as 1538 and 1539 were for English monasteries. On the subject of Scarborough, Martin adds that Edwardian crowds were so huge that the excursion platform wasn't sufficient and a whole new 'excursion station' had to be built, called Scarborough Londesborough Road. Alert to class distinctions, he notes that the Londesborough Road station was very much the 'tradesman's entrance': 'The premier Scarborough train, the ex-King's Cross Scarborough Flyer, wouldn't have been seen dead at Londesborough Road.' This is a very different book from Madeleine Bunting's The Seaside: An English Love Affair (2023), which was a work of gritty social journalism. She forced us to face the truth about the sometimes dismal and impoverished back streets of these places. Martin sticks more cheerfully to the trains, the stations, the arrivals and the departures, in the past and present. To spread joy about what's left, he travels on lines to the coast that remain open, evoking his journeys in infectiously enthusiastic detail – 'sand blowing on to Platform 4 at Cleethorpes'. 'The most interesting sights on the Atlantic Coast Line,' he writes, 'include the St Blazey freight yard just beyond Par.' I must go and have a look. He salutes the Victorian visionaries who got local coastal railway lines going, such as Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, who in the 1840s developed Fleetwood, Lancashire as a port and resort. To enhance my enjoyment, I kept referring to Google Maps and the National Rail app to see what Martin meant about, for example, how long it would now take to go by train from Pwllheli to Llandudno (just 50 miles). It would be a six-hour, 40-stop trip, requiring a change at Shrewsbury. His description of his journey from Euston to Pwllhelli, complete with the diesel smell and growl of the Transport for Wales Sprinter, almost made me want to have a go – except that, in the 'quiet carriage', a passenger started a phone conversation with: 'Hi, gang, can you hear me?' There are some lovely glimpses of the early-20th-century public's appetite for the seaside – those wonderfully disinhibiting places where, as Martin writes, 'clocks were floral, golf 'crazy', castles were made of sand and piers offered a walk to nowhere'. In order to avoid cramming too much into their heavy suitcases in the days before wheelie ones, passengers arrived sweltering in layers of overcoats. So great was the demand for the sea that in 1908 the Great Eastern Railway brought barrels of seawater to Liverpool Street. Londoners could order it to be delivered to their doors at 6d for three gallons. Martin's wistful, overarching story is that 'the cars killed the trains, the planes killed the seaside, and Dr Beeching assisted the car cause with unjustified enthusiasm'. But wherever Martin goes, local railway societies seem to be doing all they can to resurrect the closed-down lines. This book makes you long for Dr Beeching's evil work to be undone.
Black America Web
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Black America Web
From George Floyd to Jacques Beauregard: America's Racist Rebound
Source: Win McNamee / Getty Come, go back with me to the summer of 2020. Millions of people from all backgrounds flooded America's streets demanding justice for George Floyd and the long-dead victims of American racism. During this period of racial reckoning, something extraordinary happened: old statues fell. Confederate generals were pulled from their pedestals. Slaveholders were toppled from marble thrones. Base names, school plaques, and public memorials were reexamined and, at last, rejected. Even Aunt Jemima got fired. It was extraordinary not just because these relics had stood for so long, but because they were never supposed to fall. These monuments had been carefully built to last, not just in stone, but in story. They were erected not in the immediate aftermath of war or glory, but decades later during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as part of a larger campaign to rewrite history and reassert white supremacy. For generations, they stood unchallenged, unexamined, normalized. They didn't just commemorate the past; they distorted it, insisting that the Confederacy was honorable, that slavery was an unfortunate 'necessary evil' or just a 'dark chapter' in American history, and that white dominance was eternal. So, when those statues fell, they didn't just crack concrete; they ruptured a national mythology. They forced this country to ask: What kind of stories have we been telling ourselves? Whose version of history have we honored? And who has been erased, silenced, or trampled in the process? And then, the backlash came swiftly. Politicians, pundits, and self-anointed defenders of the 'real America' started foaming at the mouth and sprinting to pass legislation. They accused activists of erasing history, even though what had actually been toppled was propaganda. School boards started banning books. Governors began defunding diversity programs. The phrase 'Critical Race Theory' became a scare tactic. All of it—the removals, the debates, the bans—revealed just how fragile the American memory really is when forced to confront the truth. Because these weren't just arguments over monuments. They were battles over meaning. They exposed the deepest fault lines in this nation's relationship to its own past and made clear that history in America isn't just taught. It's fought. Now, flash forward to this week in Louisiana. While the rest of us are out here trying to survive climate collapse, student loan debt, and whatever new judicial hell the Supreme Court has cooked up, Governor Jeff Landry decided the real emergency was… a military base not being named after a Confederate family. With full-throated arrogance, he announced that the Louisiana National Guard Training Center in Pineville will once again be called 'Camp Beauregard,' a name previously stripped for its ties to the Confederacy and white supremacy. Beauregard was one of several Confederate figures, along with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, whose monuments were targeted for removal or recontextualization in New Orleans. But Landry, ever the political illusionist, insists this isn't about honoring General P.G.T. Beauregard. No, no—it's about honoring his father , Jacques Toutant Beauregard, a sugar planter and enslaver whose name never once graced a military base until now. What makes this move so brazen is that Landry didn't just resurrect a Confederate name; he found a new way to venerate the same old system. He skipped the general who fired the first shot of the Civil War and went straight for the man who owned people and passed that legacy down. Jacques Beauregard wasn't a national military hero. He didn't lead any major campaigns. His only enduring historical significance is the fact that he enslaved Black people and raised a son who fought to keep them that way. That's who Gov. Landry wants Louisiana to remember with pride. That's who he's asking soldiers, including Black soldiers, to salute. This isn't about history or reverence. It's about spite. It's about power. It's about turning back the clock on racial reckoning and reminding Black people exactly where we stand in the state's racial hierarchy: underfoot, beneath the boot, behind the name etched into government signage. Landry's stunt is not isolated. It's the latest chapter in the white nationalist scrapbook of American memory. Under Trump's influence, politicians like Landry are waging a full-blown war on the historical record. It's not just about books or bases. It's about declaring that the Confederacy never really lost. That even when the statues fall, the spirit behind them can still be revived through policy, propaganda, and PR. This is about Making America Great Again, and that requires restoring the myths that once held America together, even if they were built on bondage, theft, and mass murder. Landry's move to rename the base isn't some quirky homage to his state's past; it's part of the MAGA mandate to resuscitate the lost cause under a new name. It's about putting a fresh coat of patriotism on the same old plantation logic. They're not even hiding it. Landry paired his announcement with a gravestone meme reading 'WOKEISM.' He wrote in a Facebook post: Today, we will return the name of the Louisiana National Guard Training Center in Pineville to Camp Beauregard. In Louisiana, we honor courage, not cancel it. Let this be a lesson that we should always give reverence to history and not be quick to so easily condemn or erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged arbitrary by future generations.' As if restoring the name of a plantation-owning family is some brave act of historical preservation instead of a petty, ahistorical tantrum against progress. Nobody erased the dead. We just stopped pretending they were heroes. We stopped letting traitors to the United States, defenders of slavery, and men who fought to keep Black people in chains stand unchallenged on our public pedestals and government signs. That's not cancel culture, that's called accountability. That's a long-overdue course correction in a country that's spent centuries gaslighting its victims. And that line about how we shouldn't be 'so quick to condemn or erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged arbitrary by future generations?? Please. Chile, I'm a whole historian and I am absolutely here to condemn colonizers, rapists, enslavers, lynchers, and every power-drunk architect of racial violence who thought Black life was disposable. That's called ethical clarity. The Confederacy wasn't misunderstood. It wasn't unfairly maligned. It was a violent, racist rebellion whose leaders chose war to preserve slavery. I get so tired of people who argue, 'But we can't judge men of their time,' as if our enslaved ancestors weren't judging them in real time. You think they were sitting on cotton bales thinking, 'You know, Master really needs a DEI training and maybe he'll stop whipping us and give us our freedom.' These weren't confused or misguided men. They made deliberate , violent choices to dominate, exploit, and brutalize. And they built systems that still haunt us. Refusing to condemn that isn't neutrality, it's complicity. Judgment is how we learn. It's how we draw moral lines. If we can't say that enslaving people was evil, regardless of what century it happened in, then we have no business calling ourselves civilized. You want reverence? Give it to the ones who resisted. Give it to the ones who survived. The rest can stay condemned and thrown into the dustbin of history. The irony, of course, is that if Jeff Landry had actually read a history book, or even skimmed past the plantation chapter, he'd know that General P.G.T. Beauregard, the very Confederate his office is avoiding by name, went on to support Black suffrage. After the Civil War, General P.G.T. Beauregard, yes, the same man who ordered the first shots at Fort Sumter, actually did a political about-face. By the early 1870s, Beauregard became a prominent supporter of the Unification Movement in Louisiana. In 1873, he joined forces with a group of white and Black citizens to promote racial reconciliation and political cooperation, publicly advocating for Black suffrage and biracial governance. He gave speeches urging white Southerners to accept the political reality of Black citizenship and warned that continued resistance would doom the South to economic and moral ruin. Source: Win McNamee / Getty In fact, Beauregard's postwar rhetoric was so conciliatory that it drew criticism from former Confederates and Lost Cause diehards. He openly denounced Jefferson Davis and distanced himself from efforts to resurrect the Confederacy's ideology, calling instead for peace, unity, and pragmatic cooperation between the races. So yeah, it's wild that Jeff Landry and his people are bypassing that Beauregard, the one who tried, however imperfectly, to reconcile with reality, and instead resurrecting the plantation-owning father, Jacques Toutant Beauregard. But I get it. The son doesn't play well on Fox News. That Beauregard doesn't troll the libs. Landry needed a name that wouldn't complicate the white nationalist narrative. The general who advocated Black suffrage doesn't work for MAGA optics. So, what does this tell us, really? It tells us that we're in a new era of historical gaslighting. That the erasure we were warned about isn't coming from activists tearing down statues, it's coming from the state, putting them back up under different names. It tells us that white supremacy no longer needs to shout to be heard. It just needs to legislate. It needs to rename, reframe, and wait for the news cycle to move on. The press, for the most part, is missing the point. The coverage frames this as another skirmish in the culture war, a 'controversial renaming' or a 'reversal of a federal decision.' But too few are asking the deeper questions. Why make this move now? Why pour state resources into resurrecting the name of a man who profited from the forced labor of Black bodies when Louisiana remains one of the poorest, most underfunded states in the country? The answer is simple: trolling liberals and appeasing racists is more important to Jeff Landry than solving real problems. Bigotry is his budget. Spite is his agenda. This isn't just about one man's nostalgia or a misplaced reverence for 'heritage.' It's a coordinated strike in a broader campaign to whitewash American history. We are living in a moment where Black history is under siege. School curricula stripped of truth, DEI programs dismantled, and Critical Race Theory demonized as if it were some contagious affliction rather than a framework to understand systemic inequality. Naming a military site after a man whose fortune was built on human bondage isn't a tribute to courage. It's a provocation, a middle finger to those fighting for historical clarity and racial justice. This renaming is happening in the shadow of a larger, more sinister project: the attempt to rewrite the American story from the top down. Under Donald Trump's revived influence, we are watching the rise of a new Confederacy, not one built on cotton and cannons, but on false memory and white grievance. From banned books to curriculum whiteouts, from the demonization of 'wokeness' to the glorification of insurrectionists, we are being led down a path where historical violence is repackaged as patriotism, and those who name it are branded as enemies of the state. It's all a cowardly sleight of hand, a shell game played with history, and it tells us everything about where America is headed under Trumpism. If future generations judge us harshly, it'll be because we allowed men like Donald Trump and Jeff Landry to resurrect white supremacy and call it 'heritage.' Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of 'Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America' and the forthcoming 'Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.' Read her Substack here . SEE ALSO: Why White Folks Are Grieving Over Destroyed Relics to White Supremacy 'What Up, My Nazi?' Is Fox News Mimicking Black Reclamation SEE ALSO From George Floyd to Jacques Beauregard: America's Racist Rebound was originally published on
