Tag Archives: basketball

Basketball and peace in Korea

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This 5 July 2018 video says about itself:

North And South Korea Court Peace With Basketball Diplomacy In Pyongyang | NBC News [USA]

Two teams drawing on a mix of players from North and South Korea met in an exhibition game in Pyongyang.

From daily The Morning Star in Korea:

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

North and South Korea prepare for joint basketball games

DOZENS of South Korean basketball players arrived in North Korea’s capital today for a series of games the two Koreas hope will foster a spirit of detente generated by the recent North-South summit meetings.

The 50 players arrived in Pyongyang on two military aircraft.

South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung Gyon headed the delegation, which included 20 government officials and support staff and dozens of South Korean reporters.

North Korea’s Deputy Sports Minister Won Kil U led the North’s welcoming party.

The South Korean male and female basketball players are expected to play four matches with North Koreans tomorrow and Thursday. It was not clear whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would attend any of the games, but he did make a prominent appearance at a concert put on by South Korean musicians in Pyongyang earlier this year.

The exchanges are the latest result of a diplomatic outreach to the South that Kim announced during his annual New Year’s speech. That led to the North’s participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in February and two summits with South Korean President Moon Jae In.

Kim has also had three summits with China’s leader and met US President Donald Trump last month in Singapore.

Cho, the South Korean unification minister, said he felt “deeply moved” upon arrival because he could sense the change in relations in the past few months.

Basketball diplomacy has something of a history in North Korea.

Basketball made international headlines from Pyongyang when former NBA player Dennis Rodman arranged a game there in 2014 for Kim’s birthday.

South Korea’s Hyundai company built a basketball stadium in Pyongyang during the “Sunshine Period” of engagement between the North and South and a joint game was played there in 2003.

Two rounds of inter-Korean basketball games were held before that, in 1999.

TWO KOREAS BEGIN MOVING LAND MINES Troops from North Korea and South Korea began removing some land mines along their heavily fortified border, as part of a pact to reduce tension. [Reuters]

South Korea announced last weekend that the UN Security Council had finally granted an exemption from sanctions for its plans to work with North Korea on a joint survey as the first step towards reconnecting rail and road links between the two Koreas severed during the Korean War of 1950–53. While the US did not use its veto in the UN Security Council to block its ally, the Trump administration is increasingly dissatisfied with moves by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to foster closer relations with North Korea prior to a deal on its denuclearisation. Washington effectively delayed the planned survey in August, and again last month, by declaring that it could violate UN sanctions: here.

United States Republicans Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina

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This video from the USA says about itself:

Cruz Appoints Fiorina Vice President Of Imagination Land

27 April 2016

Major news! Ted Cruz has decided he’s going to name his pick for Vice President: Carly Fiorina. Now all he has to do is go back in time and prevent his past self from constantly losing primaries. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

“Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intends to name former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate if he succeeds in winning the GOP nomination, multiple sources reported Wednesday.

Cruz’s move is seen as a last-minute gambit in hopes of shaking up the race and blocking front-runner Donald Trump, who easily swept five primary states across the Northeast on Tuesday.”

Read more here.

That time Carly Fiorina swore ‘Ted Cruz cannot possibly beat Hillary Clinton’: here.

Twitter tees off on Fiorina joining Cruz — and her singing: ‘Every plant in my house just died’: here.

Inside the social media backlash against Carly Fiorina’s crooning embrace of Ted Cruz: here.

JOHN BOEHNER TOOK OFF THE GLOVES He called Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh.” [Igor Bobic, HuffPost]

This video from the USA says about itself:

Ted Cruz Tries Pandering To Indiana Hoosiers Fans, Fails

27 April 2016

Ted Cruz desperately needs to win Indiana to have any chance at a brokered convention, and the nomination. He recently bungled an attempt at pandering to a crowd of Indiana Hoosiers fans. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

“In what will henceforth be remembered as Ted’s Terrible Tuesday, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) bricked big in the night’s primaries and in an even more damning misstep, he completely botched a re-enactment of the timeless movie “Hoosiers” when he called a basketball hoop a “ring.”

Cruz chose to hold a rally outside Indianapolis at the gym where the iconic basketball movie was filmed. The GOP presidential candidate has touted his love of the 1986 film, which tells the inspiring tale of a small-town high school basketball coach played by Gene Hackman who leads his team to the state championship. Cruz elected to stump in Indiana instead of hanging around for a primary drubbing in five northeastern states.”

Read more here.

As the American political establishment enters the final stages of the primary contests to choose the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, the acute danger confronting the US and international working class emerges more clearly. The leading contenders in both parties, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, are committed to a vast military escalation following the November election: here.

Bobby Knight praises Donald Trump for being willing to start a nuclear war: here.

TED CRUZ’S TWITTER ACCOUNT LIKED A HARDCORE PORN VIDEO ON TWITTER You can’t even make this up. Needless to say, Twitter had a field day. [HuffPost]

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Millions of Eric Garner justice activists blamed for suicidal loner killing two policemen

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This video from the USA says about itself:

Notre Dame Women’s Basketball Team Wear I Can’t Breathe T-Shirts During Pre-Game Warmup

20 December 2014

Notre Dame’s women basketball players came out for pregame warmups Saturday wearing “I Can’t Breathe” shirts.

The Irish joined a growing list of teams wearing similar shirts in support of the family of Eric Garner, who died in July after a New York police officer placed him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him.

By Sandy English in the USA:

New York City police pledge “wartime” response to killing of two officers

22 December 2014

The fatal shooting of two New York City police officers on Saturday has been followed by a series of extraordinary statements from the police union and its political allies. Charging that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has “blood on his hands,” the police are demanding a crackdown on protests and the criminalization of all opposition to police killings.

Officers Raphael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were sitting in their vehicle in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn when, shortly before 3 pm on Saturday, the apparent shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, approached the car and killed both.

Brinsley, 28, had driven from a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland to Brooklyn after shooting and wounding his former girlfriend. The young man, who was clearly mentally unbalanced and evidently suicidal, seems to have been motivated in part by the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City.

After he shot Ramos and Liu, Brinsley was pursued by police into a nearby subway station, where he killed himself.

The response of the police has bordered on mutiny. As Mayor de Blasio walked to a press conference on Saturday, dozens of police officers demonstratively turned their backs on him.

Police have issued a series of denunciations of de Blasio for having indicated some sympathy for demonstrations against police violence held in the wake of a grand jury’s decision not to charge NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Garner.

The Sergeants Benevolent Association tweeted on Saturday, “The blood of 2 executed police officers is on the hands of Mayor de Blasio.”

Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), the police union, echoed these remarks while seeking to link the anti-police violence protests to the killings by a mentally unbalanced individual. “Those that incited violence on the street, under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. We tried to warn—‘it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated,’” he said on Saturday.

This is nothing less than a call to attack and ban any public criticism of police abuse as an illegitimate incitement to violence.

“That blood on the hands, starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor,” Lynch declared.

A twitter post by a managing editor at AOL News reproduced a memo, attributed to the PBA, declaring: “The mayor’s hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words, actions, and policies. We have, for the first time in many years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.”

A PBA spokesman has denied that the memo came officially came from the organization.

However, these remarks were immediately endorsed by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who declared on Fox News on Sunday: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

In response to these fascistic statements, which reek of a police-state mentality, de Blasio released a tepid statement criticizing the “irresponsible, overheated rhetoric that angers and divides people,” while reiterating his support for the police and “the entire NYPD community.”

The pledge of a “wartime” response from the police should be taken as an ominous warning. It is yet another manifestation of the enormous power that has been built up in these state institutions and the deep decay of democratic rights in the United States, fueled by endless war abroad and immense social inequality within the country.

The police forces act more and more as independent sources of authority. They have been given the power to kill with impunity—in the case of Brown, Garner and countless others. In response to popular outrage over these killings, the ruling class has deployed its highly militarized police against demonstrations.

The police themselves work in close coordination with the military and the intelligence agencies. In response to protests in Ferguson, Democratic Party Governor Jay Nixon activated the National Guard, a branch of the Armed Forces, and declared a preemptive state of emergency.

On Saturday, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin activated the National Guard in preparation for further protests over the police killing of Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed schizophrenic black man who was shot 14 times by a Milwaukee police officer in April.

A Republican senator attributed the assassination-style killing of two NYC police officers to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Appearing on KMBZ in Kansas City on Monday, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) speculated that criticism of police tactics from his own constituents in the aftermath of the shooting may have “led to the deaths of those two officers”: here.

NYPD AND THE CHOKEHOLD “The similarities are striking. Both Anthony Baez and Eric Garner, in their final moments, were put into chokeholds by officers from the New York City Police Department. Both of the cops involved were white, while Baez and Garner were minorities and unarmed. Both men’s deaths set off protests across the city, their names added to a long list of black and Latino men who have died in altercations with police. But Francis Livoti, the officer who killed Baez, ultimately spent seven years in a federal prison. In December, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner’s death.” [HuffPost]

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Greek nazi anti-African racism

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This basketball video from the USA says about itself:

A Day In The Life Of Giannis Antetokounmpo

Aug 7, 2013

Follow Bucks rookie Giannis Antetokounmpo along as he goes through his morning workout at the Training Center, meets the media, visits the front office staff and takes a tour of Palermo’s Pizza.

The Greek nazis of the Golden Dawn party don’t limit themselves to anti-Semitic witch-hunting … to violence against refugees from the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan … to stabbing Pakistanis … etc.

They attack Greeks of African ancestry as well.

From Dawn of the Greeks blog:

Golden Dawn leader in racist tirade against basketballer Antetokounmpo

Posted on August 28, 2013 by dawnofthegreeks

A Greek basketball player of Nigerian descent has come under racist fire once again from the leader of neonazi Golden Dawn.

In a tirade delivered on an online party broadcast, Nikos Michaloliakos attacked Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 19-year-old selected by the Milwaukee Bucks with the No 15 pick in the 2013 NBA Draft.

The Golden Dawn leader said that Antetokounmpo, who was born in Athens and was granted Greek citizenship in May, and his parents should have been arrested as illegal immigrants when they were received by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras at his office last month.

“A policeman should have arrested them outside the Maximos mansion [the prime minister’s office] and brought them to a detention centre, along with the other illegal immigrants,” Michaloliakos said.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Greek nazi fuehrer calls black basketball player ‘chimpanzee’

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This video is about Greek basketball player Giannis Adetokunbo.

From I Can’t Relax in Greece blog:

Basketball federation condemns Golden Dawn slur

Posted on 07/07/2013 by icantrelaxingreece

Michaloliakos’ comments about Antetokounmpo ‘unacceptable and racist’

In a television interview on Tuesday, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos likened Greek basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo [or: Adetokunbo] to a ‘chimpanzee’

The Hellenic Basketball Federation (EOK) has strongly condemned remarks by the leader of Golden Dawn who likened recent NBA draft pick Giannis Antetokounmpo to a “chimpanzee”.

The EOK on Thursday described the remarks as “unacceptable and racist”.

Giannis Antetokounmpo, an 18-year-old Greek shooting guard and the Athens-born son of Nigerian immigrants, was selected by the Milwaukee Bucks.

He was received on Wednesday by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras at his office.

Nikos Michaloliakos, the leader of Golden Dawn, likened the 2.06m player to a “chimpanzee” in a television interview on Tuesday.

On the show, Michaloliakos, referring to Antetokounmpo, asked whether “if you give a chimpanzee in the zoo a banana and a flag, is he Greek”…

(Read the full report on Eleftherotypia’s English website: http://www.enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.sport&id=1249)

Greece’s ruthless creditors said today that they would hand over more bailout cash if the government sacks thousands more public-sector workers: here.

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