Cardiff approved for UEFA Cup

The Football Association have approved Welsh Championship side Cardiff City to represent England in the UEFA Cup next season should they win the FA Cup (or lose it, assuming Portsmouth finish sixth or worse in the league).
Furthermore, the FA have announced that the Welsh national anthem, Land of My Fathers (Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau), will [...]

Clinton wins PA

Yep, Senator Hillary Clinton’s still in the race, with a ten-point win over Sen Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. I guess all I can say is that this bodes very well for the man I’d like to see be the next top man in Washington, Sen John McCain. Still, the win for Sen Clinton quite clearly [...]

Zimbabwe Electoral Commission launches recount

Here we go, then — Mugabe’s cronies helping him snatch this election. The ZEC has ordered and begun a recount in 23 constituencies — all of which went for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Also, South African President Thabo Mbeki is surely complicit in this. A Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe has left [...]

VT, 12 months on

Today marks the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007 when Seung-hui Cho killed 32 people and himself. The BBC World Service enlisted Fred D’Aguiar, a lecturer at VT, to present a documentary looking back at the incident through poetry.
Elegy for the Tech (BBC World Service documentary)
32 people lost their lives [...]

Justice for the 96

Nineteen years.
Justice for the 96.

When you walk through a storm,
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Tho’ your dreams be
Tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your [...]

Quick note…

For anyone who actually regularly follows my blog (what? you mean you exist?!), I do apologise that I haven’t gotten any posts up recently. Been busy with stuff, and there are some issues, like Tibet and the Olympic protests, on which I’ve decided that it’s better to not comment on due to a possible conflict [...]

FA Cup Final: Cardiff’s UEFA Cup hopes

With Cardiff City’s big 1-0 win on Sunday over Barnsley in the second FA Cup semi-final, the Football Association, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) find themselves stuck in a right old quandry.
As Cardiff City — an FAW member (and only an associate member of the English [...]

BBC, are you listening?

It appears the answer is “no”. Despite well over 2,300 (at least 2,348 as of this writing) comments — mostly negative — on the three four five BBC blog posts about this so far: Steve Herrmann (1591), Ben Gallop (443), Julia Whitney (145), Steve Herrmann again (80) and Ben Gallop again (89), the BBC are [...]

news.bbc.co.uk layout changed — atrocious

(A newer blog post, with a helpful temporary workaround to coding issues at the BBC, is now up.)
I’m sure I’m not the only one who hates the new layout of news.bbc.co.uk. But, to start, if anyone from the BBC — Steve Herrmann, are you reading? — sees this, take heart in the fact that [...]