Coming the day after WWE Money in the Bank and even with the game 6 of the NHL Stanley Cup finals (Chicago/Tampa Bay) as competition, WWE RAW ratings were way up this week to 4.10 million viewers — a whopping 15 percent increase from last week.
The strength was really in the second hour, and not for the third hour reveal of Brock Lesnar as Seth Rollins’ next WWE World Championship contender. By the way, the Stanley Cup final game on NBC did 7.59 million viewers.
The three hours were:
8 p.m. 4.10 million
9 p.m. 4.25 million
10 p.m. 4.00 million
Tonight on New Japan on AXS, the first of eight shows covering the 2014 G1 Climax tournament begins. For me, it’s one of the best tournaments there has ever been in professional wrestling. The level of match quality in each match was outstanding, and by the end of the tournament I was giving away so many stars it should have been considered illegal! The problem with so many great matches, however, is that it’s easy to forget a lot of them, with some becoming lost in a sea of excellent match quality. Thanks to these next eight weeks, however, I get to rekindle my memory.
Take tonight’s main event, for example. I had to look at my notes for last year’s show. I had given Shibata vs. Nakamura ****¼. Looking back, I probably wouldn’t have given it that after having just finished watching it again. But star ratings are superficial, what matters most is the enjoyment factor. Four stars or three, I’m glad I was able to take a trip back down memory lane, reliving some of the best matches from last year’s tournament. It’s gonna be a blast!
Tonight’s show is from Day 1 of the G1 Climax tournament from last year, taking place on July 21, 2014 in Hokkaido.
We start off with Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Tomoaki Honma. The funny thing about Honma’s run in this tournament is that he was never supposed to be in. This tournament was to show Kota Ibushi as a new threat in the heavyweight division. But a concussion suffered shortly before the tournament began put him out of the tourney and Honma stepped in. Honma is super over wherever he goes, despite constantly losing. But that’s his gimmick; he’s the underdog who takes his opponents to the limit, only to be caught and beaten at the very end.
This was how the match went; Honma kept coming back with offense until Tanahashi blindsided him with a dragon suplex. Honma immediately went up to his feet, but got taken out with a sling blade and was pinned with the high fly flow. This was cut short due to time restraints (all matches barring the main events will be going forward) but this was fun while it lasted.
That match is followed up with AJ Styles taking on Kazuchika Okada. Going into this match, Styles didn’t have a ton of buzz. He won the IWGP title, but it was due to interference, something hardly done in New Japan. Not to mention, his last few years in TNA were lackluster to say the least. But this was the match that changed everyone’s mind. Styles was in his element here, taking charge and having a fantastic match with Okada who was just as great. He picks up the win with a fierce rainmaker to the face, which doesn’t seem that cool to take, but fun to watch. Okada cuts a promo after the match saying he has three things to say. One, AJ, next time we meet we’re fighting for your belt. He also promised to win every single match in the G1. His third point…well, he has nothing, so he asks Gedo why no one’s been able to beat him. Gedo cuts a promo putting him over and saying he’ll win at the Seibu Dome.
Shibata is interviewed. He says nothing was special the day he fought Nakamura, but the matches this year was great. He felt a great significance being in that block. He thought about what fans would think, he was curious to see how they would see their fight as they had highy hopes. The Nakamura he met that night had a different aura about him than the one he faced ten years prior. For him, it felt the same as any other match.
The main event of the evening was Katsuyori Shibata vs. Shinsuke Nakamura. This wasn’t at the top of my list for top G1 matches, and looking back it wasn’t as memorable as other bouts – like I said earlier in this review, I’d pretty much forgotten about it until now. But with that said, it was a really good match. They started out slow, and I’m not sure if the crowd was ever really there to my liking, but this was good towards the end. Nakamura hit two boma yes but Shibata kicked out. He came back wit the the GTS then WAFFLED Nakamura with the penalty kick for the win. This was a good, stiff match.
Nakamura after the match says as long as the battle takes place in a New Japan ring, this never ends. Shibata in the post match interview says this isn’t over yet.
Back reflecting on the match, he wasn’t sure about the crowd reaction and was wondering if this was the match they wanted to see. Some say it was, others say he needed to improve. He saw Nakamura differently ten years ago; he guesses time has indeed passed.
A great show with a fun main event and highlights from two great matches. Next week, Katsuyori Shibata will be back as he faces Hiroshi Tanahashi as G1 coverage continues.
For tonight’s show, there will be a Miz TV segment with Daniel Bryan, plus the Bellas & Alicia Fox vs. Team BAD of Sasha Banks & Naomi & Tamina Snuka have been announced.
Four decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, the wall surrounding Spain’s largest mass grave is finally to come down.
After a six-year battle, the family of two brothers executed by General Francisco Franco’s troops in 1936 will on Monday see work begin on exhuming their remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the controversial monument containing Franco’s tomb where at least 33,000 Civil War victims are also interred.
A team of archaeological and forensic specialists will break through the wall surrounding the monument’s vast ossuary in search of the bodies of Manuel Lapeña, a leftist union leader and father of four, and his metalworker brother Antonio.
It will mark a pivotal moment in the long fight by victims’ families to finally locate their loved ones, whose fates have mostly been obscured beneath amnesty laws imposed after the death of Franco.
People set on fire photographs of Spain's King Felipe during the 87th Spanish Republic anniversary, paying tribute to people killed in the Spanish Civil WarCredit:
Francisco Seco/ AP
Eduardo Ranz, lawyer for the Lapeñas and several other families, said the exhumation was a “historic precedent” that would open the way for others who had “waited for so long”.
The only surviving son of Manuel Lapeña, also named Manuel, is now 94 years old and has never given up his desire to give his father a dignified burial. He says he should be laid to rest alongside his mother in their hometown in Zaragoza, not “interred alongside his killer, the greatest criminal”, a situation he describes as “an insult”.
His daughter, Purificación Lapeña Garrido, who has led the family’s legal fight, recounts how during her childhood he would say: “That’s the man that killed my father” every time Franco appeared on television.
She told The Telegraph that the extrajudicial executions of her grandfather and uncle were an “evil thing” that her family had lived with on a daily basis.
Many Spaniards were still unaware of the full horrors of the Civil War and dictatorship era, Ms Lapeña said, due to political resistance to digging up the past.
Spain's transition to democracy failed to confront the horrors of General Franco's rule, campaigners argueCredit:
AP
“They don’t want to know, they want everything to be forgotten,” she said, lamenting that “we are still like this after so many years.”
There are believed to be up to 140,000 victims of the Civil War and dictatorship still buried in over 2,300 mass graves across Spain.
But the drive to open up the Valley of the Fallen and other sites has met with strong opposition from authorities. While the Law of Historical Memory passed in 2007 effectively overturned the so-called Pact of Forgetting that had reigned since the transition to democracy in 1978, the current conservative government of Mariano Rajoy has firmly opposed any investigations of the country’s authoritarian past, leaving any excavations in the hands of local authorities or private initiatives.
In 2016, a court ordered Spain’s National Heritage body to facilitate the exhumation of the Lapeña brothers. But the Benedictine abbot who oversees the Valley of the Fallen refused to allow it, mounting appeals and even declining to appear at the Senate’s Justice Commission in March with the retort that senators could come to him. Spain’s Episcopal Conference finally stepped in and ordered him to stop blocking the works, the first stages of which are now scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.
The Lapeña family fear their fight may still not be over. The team could find technical obstacles to the exhumation, something that, after so many disappointments, Ms Lapeña worries could be used as an “excuse”.
To many, the continued existence of the monument is a disgrace. In March, a visiting delegation of MEPs described it as an “insult to the victims” out of place in modern Europe.
The Lapeña family says it should not be torn down, but that the site should de-consecrated, its towering 500ft cross demolished, all remains removed and an educational centre built.
Miguel Ángel Capapé, head of the historical memory association ARICO and Ms Lapeña’s husband, said a vast monument to a dictator who killed thousands would be “unthinkable in any other European country”.
The exhumations would take years, Ms Lapeña acknowledged. But for the families, their loved ones’ interment in a place where "they celebrate the dictator every day" was a "humiliation" that must be ended.
Today is Anzac Day, the national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, with events taking place across the globe to honour those who served in war.
Recognised annually on April 25, the day marks the anniversary of the first significant military action fought by Australian and New Zealand soldiers during the First World War.
On this date in 1915, the troops, who quickly became known as the Anzacs, landed in Turkey, joining the allied expedition that planned to capture the Gallipoli peninsula.
Since the date was officially named Anzac Day in 1916, remembrance services have taken place to celebrate the bravery of those who fought in Gallipoli, with memorial events now held to honour all…
The woman in a pink prison uniform greeted the judge in a lilting Caribbean English that took him by surprise.
“Did you enter Iraq illegally?” Judge Suhail Abdullah replied, somewhat brusquely, in Arabic. “And do you believe in the ideology of the Islamic State?”
Standing in the dock at Baghdad’s Central Criminal Court, Anisa Waheed Mohammed, 53, from Trinidad and Tobago, answered yes to the first question and no to the second, fearing any other combination would instantly condemn her.
“I had watched Isil videos with my husband and two daughters and we decided we wanted to go and be part of an Islamic society,” she said. “I did not know it was a warzone. When we arrived, all we saw was Iraqis…
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Italy’s 5-Star Movement and League neared a deal on Monday which they hope will fuse their very different election platforms into a workable coalition government, hours before pivotal talks with the country’s president.
Bidding to end a 10-week political stalemate, the parties met at the weekend to hammer out a policy programme, with 5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio and his League counterpart Matteo Salvini aiming to pick a prime minister who would be acceptable to both.
Their choice has not yet been announced, though Di Maio said on Sunday they were close to an "historic" agreement.
President Sergio Mattarella, who has the final word on nominating a premier, reminded the parties in a speech on Saturday that he is not obliged to accept their recommendation.
The anti-establishment 5-Star will go to the presidential palace at 4:30 p.m. (1430 GMT) and the far-right League at 6 p.m.
If Mattarella is satisfied with their choice, Italy could have a government in place by the end of the week. But should no agreement be reached, new elections are likely.
The two parties – the largest groups in the legislature and together able to muster a majority in both houses – were adversaries before the March 4 national election, which produced a hung parliament.
The party leaders will meet President Sergio Mattarella to present him with their nomination for Italy's new prime ministerCredit:
Andreas Solaro/AFP
Five-Star won 32 percent of the vote at the election and the League took 17 percent.
They have been negotiating since Thursday to try to settle on a "contract" of mutually acceptable policy commitments.
Mattarella, normally a low-profile figure, warned over the weekend about the importance of Italy running sound public finances and maintaining its traditional pro-European Union positions.
The economic promises made by both parties during the campaign seem incompatible with Europe’s budget rules, though investors – generally made uneasy by any prospects of fiscal slippage by governments – seemed little fazed on Monday, with Italian stocks and bonds trading flat.
Five-Star’s flagship policy of a universal income for the poor would cost an estimated 17 billion euros per year.
The League’s hallmark scheme, a flat tax rate of 15 percent for companies and individuals, is tipped to cut tax revenues by 80 billion euros per year.
Scrapping an unpopular pension reform would cost 15 billion euros, and another 12.5 billion would be needed to head off an automatic hike in sales tax due for next year.
Romain Grosjean has apologised for making comments calling into question the Haas F1 Team’s long-term commitment to remaining in the sport.
In the build-up to Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Grosjean was asked about his chances of staying with the team beyond the end of the current season.
He replied by talking about “the elephant in the room”, which he said was the question of whether Haas itself would still be in F1 in 2021.
That caused consternation within the Haas camp where the matter of the team’s long term future is unsurprisingly a highly sensitive issue.
Steiner unhappy with Grosjean ‘elephant in the room’ narrative
Team principal Guenther Steiner made his displeasure with the Frenchman’s comments clear over the weekend, stating that Grosjean’s answer “was the wrong answer” in the circumstances.
And now Grosjean has apologised for his original remarks and walked back his original comments about the team’s prospects.
“I’m sorry if I said anything wrong,” he told Motorsport.com after the race. “I said something that I shouldn’t have said.
“I didn’t want to create anything,” he added. “You know I’m sorry for the team. And all good.”
He added that the internal drama surrounding his original comments wasn’t going to end up as one of the centre pieces in the next series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive behind-the-scenes documentary series.
“There’s no Netflix episodes, there is no problem,” he insisted.
For his part, Steiner said he had been amazed when he had first heard about Grosjean’s “elephant in the room” comments but added that he had never actually been angry about them.
“I was never upset about it,” he said. “You know me, I react to something and I get over things pretty quick.
“I’m not upset, it was just like – I was amazed when I read it, because I wasn’t there obviously,” he added. “So I asked, but I’m fine with him. I have no problem.
“I think he realised [that] it was a tough question and he answered in a way, maybe, after thinking he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t maybe mean what he said, you know. I have no problem.
“If I get anybody mad if I say something not appropriate, I would have everybody mad at me! But I get over things pretty quick.”
Steiner was also feeling more upbeat after the race in which Kevin Magnussen scored the team’s first championship point of the season thanks to the decision to call in its drivers for a change of tyres before the start – even though they subsequently incurred a penalty in so doing.
“It was a great result for the team,” he said. “It’s fantastic, as at the moment we’re not in a position to do this under normal circumstances. The call at the beginning of the race was the decision which made this happen, the guys then just kept it up.
“Kevin did a fantastic job in the race, Romain just had a few issues with the tires. Thanks to the whole team for putting in the hard work and keeping on pushing – they never gave up; we never give up.”
Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers
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ANOKA, Minn. – Standing ovations at county board meetings are rare. But what Malik Stewart did a month ago at a state wrestling championship is even more unusual.
“It didn’t come out the best on my side but it did for him,” Stewart said, recalling the match. View video and continue reading at www.kare11.com
* Montez Ford, Angelo Dawkins and Oney Lorkin defeated Wesley Blake, Steve Cutler and Chad Lail. This started as Lail vs. Lorcan until Blake and Cutler ran in, then The Street Profits made the save
* Ricochet defeated The Velveteen Dream
* Candice LaRae and Nikki Cross defeated Bianca Belair and Lacey Evans
* Tommaso Ciampa defeated Kassius Ohno. Ciampa went to hit Ohno with the ring bell after the match but Johnny Gargano came through the crowd and made the save. Gargano went wild but out came Lorcan, The Street Profits and Candice to calm him down. Gargano removed his hoodie to reveal a neck brace
* EC3 defeated No Way Jose. This started with EC3 issuing an open challenge
* NXT Women’s Champion Shayna Baszler retained over Kairi Sane
* NXT Champion Aleister Black retained over Andrade “Cien” Almas