Emotional Julian Alaphilippe dedicates Tour de France stage win to late father


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A year after thrilling his home nation for a fortnight on last year's Tour de France, Julian Alaphilippe produced an almost carbon-copy capture of a stage win to claim the overall leader's yellow jersey again on Sunday.

On the day's final climb, Alaphilippe launched a blistering attack to clinch bonus seconds at the summit before a white-knuckle descent to the finish line in Nice where the second stage victory also gave him bonus seconds.

Delirious with joy at his repeat performance former soldier Alaphilippe began punching towards the sky, as he turned to see just how close behind him the onrushing peloton was to overtaking his escape trio on the Promenade des Anglais finish line.

He had held off Marc Hirschi to edge home by half a wheel after leaving Britain's Adam Yates behind in a final dart for the line.

The set-up of the second stage was eerily close to how Alaphilippe stole away from the peloton last year on Day 3 to Epernay and eventually led the Tour for 14 days before wilting on the penultimate stage to finish fifth overall.

No Frenchman has won the Tour de France since 1985.

An emotional Alaphilippe dedicated his victory to his late father Jo, who passed away in June at the age of 80 after a long illness.

"It's always special to win on the Tour and it's a strange year. I haven't won a race since the start of the season," Alaphilippe, who was in tears after the race, said. "I continued to work hard and I stayed serious despite the tough times. I just wanted to dedicate this victory to my dad. It was important to me.

"I really wanted to try something and I had nothing to lose. It really hurt me, I was digging deep at the end there.

"It's a great pride and responsibility and I will defend this honour day by day, I won't be giving it up tomorrow that's for sure."

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Gallery from Stage 1 of the Tour

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Jumbo-Visma may however be furious at the circumstances accompanying the win.

Shortly after Alaphilippe's attack, Team Ineos' Michal Kwiatkowski somehow backed into Jumbo co-captain Tom Dumoulin and knocked him to the floor.

The Dutch outfit had been leading the head of the peloton all day, but suddenly they had to slow down and abandon their pursuit of Alaphilippe.

It was also a tough day for the sprinters, with Saturday's yellow jersey winner Alexander Kristoff, of UAE Team Emirates, among those to finish over 28 minutes down on Alaphilippe.

Key findings of Jenkins report
  • Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
  • Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
  • Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
  • Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."
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The biog

Alwyn Stephen says much of his success is a result of taking an educated chance on business decisions.

His advice to anyone starting out in business is to have no fear as life is about taking on challenges.

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Mr Stephen sells his luxury fragrances at selected perfumeries around the UAE, including the House of Niche Boutique in Al Seef.

He relaxes by spending time with his family at home, and enjoying his wife’s India cooking. 

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How Voiss turns words to speech

The device has a screen reader or software that monitors what happens on the screen

The screen reader sends the text to the speech synthesiser

This converts to audio whatever it receives from screen reader, so the person can hear what is happening on the screen

A VOISS computer costs between $200 and $250 depending on memory card capacity that ranges from 32GB to 128GB

The speech synthesisers VOISS develops are free

Subsequent computer versions will include improvements such as wireless keyboards

Arabic voice in affordable talking computer to be added next year to English, Portuguese, and Spanish synthesiser

Partnerships planned during Expo 2020 Dubai to add more languages

At least 2.2 billion people globally have a vision impairment or blindness

More than 90 per cent live in developing countries

The Long-term aim of VOISS to reach the technology to people in poor countries with workshops that teach them to build their own device

Key developments

All times UTC 4

Dust and sand storms compared

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