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Messi’s boyhood club Newell’s creates school for kids with disabilities

AFP/Editor

Stefano may be just a kid, but he feels like a champion when he dribbles and scores like his beloved Lionel Messi.

The boy is one of nine children who just enrolled at the brand new football school for kids with learning disabilities, created by the Argentine great’s childhood club Newell’s Old Boys.

“We’re a real football family. My husband played for the club, my other two sons did too and the oldest got to the fourth division,” said Stefano’s mother, Marisa Meroi.

“Stefano wanted to be like his brothers,” she said.

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Now he gets to practice dribbling, passing and shooting like his football hero who was on the Newell’s books as a child.

“I like Messi, I like (Nacho) Scocco (a Newell’s striker). I play well. I love my family, I love my mom,” said Stefano, 10, who has Down’s syndrome, adding that the club is “my life.”

Stefano gets kitted out in the Newell’s colors and then joins the eight other children aged from 6 to 12 with similar learning disabilities at the Griffa Sports Center used by the first team.

Based in Rosario, some 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, Newell’s are not the only club to launch such an initiative but theirs is a weekly training session that is free for the participants.

Going to training is a highlight of the day for the children, but also for the parents who watch their young players’ progress from the sidelines.

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Sometimes the parents also join coaches in holding kids by the hand as they learn to control the ball. Some children shoot into an empty net before celebrating wildly.

Stefano is skilful and a natural footballer.

“He plays in another club with kids that don’t have special needs. Now he’s crazy about this. It’s amazing to have an inclusive school given the times we live in,” said Meroi.

– All champions –

Gonzalo Cejas is the father of Valentino, another of the school’s young athletes.

“I’m happy that he’s playing a sport. He likes playing with the ball. Right away we signed up so he could experience this. There are a lot of Nuls fans in the family,” he said, using the local nickname for Newell’s.

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Silvina Casella, whose son Lazaro is in the program, says this is just one of “several sports” they’re going to try to “see how he gets on.”

Despite the fact that the school could tend to their child’s special needs, it took some convincing for Lazaro’s father to get onboard.

The city is split along footballing colors between Newell’s red and black and Rosario Central’s blue and yellow.

“We decided he would come despite his father being a Rosario Central fanatic,” said Casella.

When the session ends, Meroi and the other parents put on their masks. Covid-19 has ravaged Rosario as it has the rest of the Argentina, which has recorded more than 2.8 million cases and over 61,000 deaths.

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FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Arrested in Mexico and Deported to U.S.

Authorities in Mexico announced Thursday that Samuel Ramírez Jr., a U.S. citizen accused of murdering two women and listed among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, was arrested in the northern state of Sinaloa.

Ramírez Jr., 33, was detained Tuesday in Culiacán just 1 hour and 13 minutes after being added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Ten Most Wanted list, the agency said in a statement.

The suspect, who was born in California, has already been deported to the U.S. state of Washington, where he faces charges related to the fatal shooting of two women at a bar in Federal Way in May 2023.

A court issued an arrest warrant for Ramírez in November last year, and the FBI initially offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to his capture, later increasing the amount to up to $1 million.

“To protect individuals’ privacy and ensure continued cooperation from the public, the FBI does not confirm the identity of those who provide information,” the agency said in its statement.

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UN experts warn Nicaragua runs vast transnational network to monitor exiled dissidents

Nicaragua maintains an “extensive” transnational network to monitor and intimidate opposition figures living in exile, affecting “hundreds of thousands” of people, the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua warned on Tuesday.

In a statement, the experts said their report “details an extensive transnational architecture of surveillance and intelligence used to monitor, intimidate and attack the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans living abroad.”

The report, which will be presented on March 16 to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, states that the structure maintained by the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo includes the army, the police, migration authorities and diplomatic missions.

According to the statement, “the government has arbitrarily stripped 452 Nicaraguans of their nationality, left thousands more exiled in a situation of de facto statelessness, and prevented many from returning to Nicaragua.”

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Trump: ‘We Think It’s True’ Amid Claims Iran’s Supreme Leader Was Killed

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he believes multiple reports claiming the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the U.S. and Israeli offensive against the Islamic Republic are likely true, though he stopped short of confirming the news.

“We have a feeling that the information is correct,” he said, according to NBC News. “I don’t want to say anything definitive until I see it, but we think that’s the case. And many of their leaders have disappeared,” he added.

Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were “many indications” that Khamenei had died in an attack on his residential compound.