Ahead of the start of the 2016/17 Premier League season, The National’s team of sports editors, writers, and contributors predict which club they expect to underachieve during the upcoming campaign.
• STEVE LUCKINGS, SENIOR SPORTS EDITOR
West Ham. Slaven Bilic's side will struggle to replicate the stardust of last season and the Croatian has a history in club management of not kicking on in his second seasons.
• ANDY MITTEN, EUROPEAN FOOTBALL CORRESPONDENT
Arsenal. Fans think their side should be competing for titles. They've been slow in the transfer market and have tougher competition this season. Could finish outside the top four for the first time since 1996.
• RICHARD JOLLY, ENGLISH FOOTBALL CORRESPONDENT
Leicester City. Losing N'Golo Kante is a huge blow, and it remains to be seen how they will cope with Champions League football. With standards likely to be raised by many of the superpowers they embarrassed, they could play well and finish several places lower.
• The National's full predictions: Champions, top four, relegated, surprise team, player of the year, top scorer, player to watch
• THOMAS WOODS, SPORTS EDITOR
Tottenham Hotspur. Spurs missed their chance last season. They have a quality team, but all their rivals will improve and the weight of a Champions League campaign will see them miss out on Europe next season, especially with Liverpool in the mix too.
• GRAHAM CAYGILL, DEPUTY SPORTS EDITOR
Southampton. Sixth, and only three points off fourth, last season, and seventh and eighth the previous years show the club's consistency. Losing Ronald Koeman is a blow, as is the departure of striker Graziano Pelle, and it is hard to see them maintaining that form.
• STEPHEN NELMES, WEB EDITOR
Leicester City. The only way is down for the champions, it is a question of how far. Will still have designs on the top 10, but will likely be scrapping to a 12-14th place finish.
• JONATHAN RAYMOND, SPORTS WEB EDITOR
Arsenal. It's not a question of talent. There is plenty of that, enough to let their supporters dream of a title. But it felt for the first time last year like Wenger lost his grip on things, and it's not evident he knows how to turn it around at this point.
• JON TURNER, SPORTS WEB EDITOR
Manchester United. Have appointed one of the world's best managers, recruited some top talent, and are expected to break the transfer record for Paul Pogba. Anything less than a firm title challenge will be underachieving. However, the squad remains unbalanced and a top four spot is the best United can hope for.
• GREG LEA, PREMIER LEAGUE CORRESPONDENT
Everton. Ronald Koeman did an excellent job at Southampton but it could take him at least a year to lift Everton further up the table.
• JOHN MCAULEY, REPORTER
Arsenal. Second place last season was an improvement; fourth this time the very least their fans expect. They'll fall outside Champions League places for the first time in 19 years, possibly to 6th, and Wenger will fall on his sword.
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Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
PAKISTAN SQUAD
Abid Ali, Fakhar Zaman, Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Azhar Ali (test captain), Babar Azam (T20 captain), Asad Shafiq, Fawad Alam, Haider Ali, Iftikhar Ahmad, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper), Sarfaraz Ahmed (wicketkeeper), Faheem Ashraf, Haris Rauf, Imran Khan, Mohammad Abbas, Mohammad Hasnain, Naseem Shah, Shaheen Afridi, Sohail Khan, Usman Shinwari, Wahab Riaz, Imad Wasim, Kashif Bhatti, Shadab Khan and Yasir Shah.
Points about the fast fashion industry Celine Hajjar wants everyone to know
- Fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 per cent of global carbon emissions
- Fast fashion is responsible for 24 per cent of the world's insecticides
- Synthetic fibres that make up the average garment can take hundreds of years to biodegrade
- Fast fashion labour workers make 80 per cent less than the required salary to live
- 27 million fast fashion workers worldwide suffer from work-related illnesses and diseases
- Hundreds of thousands of fast fashion labourers work without rights or protection and 80 per cent of them are women
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Brief scoreline:
Burnley 3
Barnes 63', 70', Berg Gudmundsson 75'
Southampton 3
Man of the match
Ashley Barnes (Burnley)
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Children who witnessed blood bath want to help others
Aged just 11, Khulood Al Najjar’s daughter, Nora, bravely attempted to fight off Philip Spence. Her finger was injured when she put her hand in between the claw hammer and her mother’s head.
As a vital witness, she was forced to relive the ordeal by police who needed to identify the attacker and ensure he was found guilty.
Now aged 16, Nora has decided she wants to dedicate her career to helping other victims of crime.
“It was very horrible for her. She saw her mum, dying, just next to her eyes. But now she just wants to go forward,” said Khulood, speaking about how her eldest daughter was dealing with the trauma of the incident five years ago. “She is saying, 'mama, I want to be a lawyer, I want to help people achieve justice'.”
Khulood’s youngest daughter, Fatima, was seven at the time of the attack and attempted to help paramedics responding to the incident.
“Now she wants to be a maxillofacial doctor,” Khulood said. “She said to me ‘it is because a maxillofacial doctor returned your face, mama’. Now she wants to help people see themselves in the mirror again.”
Khulood’s son, Saeed, was nine in 2014 and slept through the attack. While he did not witness the trauma, this made it more difficult for him to understand what had happened. He has ambitions to become an engineer.
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THE TWIN BIO
Their favourite city: Dubai
Their favourite food: Khaleeji
Their favourite past-time : walking on the beach
Their favorite quote: ‘we rise by lifting others’ by Robert Ingersoll
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Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
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Ads on social media can 'normalise' drugs
A UK report on youth social media habits commissioned by advocacy group Volteface found a quarter of young people were exposed to illegal drug dealers on social media.
The poll of 2,006 people aged 16-24 assessed their exposure to drug dealers online in a nationally representative survey.
Of those admitting to seeing drugs for sale online, 56 per cent saw them advertised on Snapchat, 55 per cent on Instagram and 47 per cent on Facebook.
Cannabis was the drug most pushed by online dealers, with 63 per cent of survey respondents claiming to have seen adverts on social media for the drug, followed by cocaine (26 per cent) and MDMA/ecstasy, with 24 per cent of people.
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Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
