Sports News

 Real Madrid vs Barcelona 3-2: La Liga El Clasico – as it happened

That’s it from our live coverage of El Clasico.

Real Madrid move 11 points clear at the top of La Liga despite Barcelona twice taking the lead at the Bernabeu.

Jude Bellingham’s 91st-minute winner has surely handed Madrid their 36th league title with only six games to play.

Barcelona’s miserable week is complete after they crashed out of the Champions League while Madrid progressed to the semifinals.

We hope you enjoyed the coverage and can join us again soon for more live action. Stay across Al Jazeera Sport in the meantime for all our news and features.

Oor now, though – from me Kevin Hand – it’s goodbye.

 

Madrid move 11 points clear of Barcelona

Having come from behind twice, Madrid move 11 points clear of Barca at the top of La Liga and that must be that for the title race.

Jude Bellingham’s 17th goal of the season sealed an incredible El Clasico for the home side.

League title number 36 awaits for Madrid

Only six games remain for Barcelona to overturn an 11-point lead for Madrid.

Jude Bellingham’s strike may have won it in injury time but surely a draw wouldn’t have been enough for Xavi’s side to mount a serious title push at this late stage.

RR R

 Monday numbers: Earth Day 2024 and the b environmental challenges posed by plastics

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Today in the 55th Earth Day – an annual commemoration that was, amazingly enough, conceived and launched in 1970 by an unlikely bipartisan pair of American politicians — Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Republican U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey of California.

The “history” section of the Earth Day website provides a powerful reminder of both how different that era was in many ways from our own – the anti-Vietnam War movement, for instance, was integral to the launch of the event — but also in other ways, (as an era that was then plagued by “oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife” and in which young people were deeply concerned about their future wellbeing), how much our two times have in common.

This is from the website:

“Inspired by the student anti-war movement, Senator Nelson wanted to infuse the energy of student anti-war protests with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a teach-in on college campuses to the national media, and persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair.

…Nelson recruited Denis Hayes, a young activist, to organize the campus teach-ins and to scale the idea to a broader public, and they choose April 22, a weekday falling between Spring Break and Final Exams, to maximize the greatest student participation.”

The website relates that under the leadership of Hayes and the staff he put together, the movement took off and by its launch on April 22, 1970, “20 million Americans — at the time, 10% of the total population of the United States — [took to] the streets, parks and auditoriums to demonstrate against the impacts of 150 years of industrial development which had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts.”

What’s more, the event immediately helped spark a flurry of progressive national policy change in Washington – a time in which Republican Richard Nixon served in the White House:

“By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first-of-their-kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Two years later congress passed the Clean Water Act.”

As people around the world commemorate Earth Day 2024, environmental degradation is, tragically, a vastly more serious threat than it was in 1970. Whether it’s the climate emergency and increasingly severe weather patterns it’s spurring, sea-level rise and desertification, global species extinction, water and air pollution, the spread of toxic “forever chemicals” like PFAS, the present generation has its work cut out for it.