SAN ANTONIO, Texas // Were the Portland Trailblazers rattled, literally, before their 114-97 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference semi-finals of the NBA play-offs on Thursday?
A snake – the Trailblazers think it was a rattlesnake – turned up in the locker of their reserve forward Thomas Robinson before the game, ESPN reported.
Robinson said he had only seen snakes on the Discovery Channel until now.
“I was scared,” he said. “I ain’t gonna lie, I was scared.”
He said he screamed and lept “about five feet high and 20 feet back”.
Reserve guard Will Barton, Robinson’s neighbour in the locker room, said he himself kept calm while hopping up on a chair.
There was all kinds of commotion until team trainers caught the creature.
A Spurs official said the snake was determined to be non-poisonous before being safely released back into the wild, ESPN said.
The snake was black and white, the Spurs’ colours, Robinson noted.
The report said that Spurs shooting guard Danny Green collects snakes.
“That’s the No 1 suspect right there,” Barton said with a laugh.
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Sepsis arises when the body tries to fight an infection but damages its own tissue and organs in the process.
The World Health Organisation estimates it affects about 30 million people each year and that about six million die.
Of those about three million are newborns and 1.2 are young children.
Patients with septic shock must often have limbs amputated if clots in their limbs prevent blood flow, causing the limbs to die.
Campaigners say the condition is often diagnosed far too late by medical professionals and that many patients wait too long to seek treatment, confusing the symptoms with flu.
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Rating: 4/5
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Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
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Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
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Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
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Sector: Online grocery delivery
Staff: 200
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Company name: Yeepeey
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A widely accepted definition was made by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2019: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” It further defines it as “inciting hatred or violence against Muslims”.
