A 14-year-old girl has made history by becoming the first African American to win the 96-year-old US Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Zaila Avant-garde, a sporting prodigy with several Guinness World Records to her name for dribbling multiple basketballs at a time, won the event by correctly spelling Murraya – a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees.
The confident teenager from New Orleans appeared relaxed, peppering pronouncer Jacques Bailly with questions about Greek and Latin roots, and bantering with the judges and moderators before jumping and twirling for joy on stage as she was told she was right and was declared the champion to claim the $50,000 (£36,308) top prize.
Image: Zaila routinely practiced spelling for seven hours a day
“I was pretty relaxed on the subject of Murraya and pretty much any other word I got,” she said afterwards.
It wasn’t all plain-sailing, though. She had struggled with another botanical word.
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Pausing at the unstressed sound in the middle of Nepeta, a word for another plant genus, she collected herself, started again, and nailed it.
Zaila, who hopes to one day play in the WNBA or even coach in the NBA, described spelling as a side hobby, even though she routinely practiced for seven hours a day.
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She is the first black contestant to win since Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998, also the only international winner.
Image: Zaila won the event by correctly spelling Murraya – a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees
Ahead of the final, she told the Associated Press that she hoped to inspire other African Americans, who she said might not have the money to pay for the tutorials needed to be competitive.
She even thought of MacNolia Cox, who in 1936 became the first black finalist at the bee and wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the contestants.
Image: Zaila jumped up and down on stage after winning the competition
Many top Scripps spellers start competing when they are of nursery age. Zaila only started a few years ago, after her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the competition on TV and realised his daughter’s affinity for doing complicated maths in her head could translate well to spelling.
She began working with a private coach, Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student and the 2015 Scripps runner-up.
Image: The 14-year-old only started competing in spelling competitions a few years ago
He said: “Usually to be as good as Zaila, you have to be well-connected in the spelling community. You have to have been doing it for many years. It was like a mystery, like, ‘Is this person even real?’
“She really just had a much different approach than any speller I’ve ever seen. She basically knew the definition of every word that we did, like pretty much verbatim. She knew, not just the word but the story behind the word, why every letter had to be that letter and couldn’t be anything else.”
Image: Zaila is the first black contestant to win the event since Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998
Zaila’s win also breaks a streak of at least one Indian-American champion every year since 2008, with children of South Asian descent dominating the competition.
Chaitra Thummala, 12, of San Francisco, came in second after misspelling neroli oil, but still took home $25,000 (£18,156).
Bhavana Madini, 13, of New York finished third with the $15,000 (£10,893) prize, after being eliminated while trying to spell athanor – a type of furnace.
The competition finals returned before a live audience at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando after being cancelled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Anti-Trump protests took place across America on Saturday, with demonstrators decrying the administration’s immigration crackdown and mass firings at government agencies.
Events ranged from small local marches to a rally in front of the White House and a demonstration at a Massachusetts commemoration of the start of the Revolutionary War 250 years ago.
Thomas Bassford, 80, was at the battle reenactment with his two grandsons, as well as his partner and daughter.
He said: “This is a very perilous time in America for liberty. I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”
At events across the country, people carried banners with slogans including “Trump fascist regime must go now!”, “No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state,” and “Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight,” referencing the university’s recent refusal to hand over much of its control to the government.
Some signs name-checked Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian citizen living in Maryland, who the Justice Department admits was mistakenly deported to his home country.
People waved US flags, some of them held upside down to signal distress. In San Francisco, hundreds of people spelt out “Impeach & Remove” on a beach, also with an inverted US flag.
People walked through downtown Anchorage in Alaska with handmade signs listing reasons why they were demonstrating, including one that read: “No sign is BIG enough to list ALL of the reasons I’m here!”
Image: Pic: AP
Protests also took place outside Tesla car dealerships against the role Elon Musk ahas played in downsizing the federal government as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The protests come just two weeks after similar nationwide demonstrations.
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Organisers are opposing what they call Mr Trump’s civil rights violations and constitutional violations, including efforts to deport scores of immigrants and to scale back the federal government by firing thousands of government workers and effectively shuttering entire agencies.
The Trump administration, among other things, has moved to shutter Social Security Administration field offices, cut funding for government health programs and scale back protections for transgender people.
US vice president JD Vance has met with Pope Francis.
The “quick and private” meeting took place at the Pope’s residence, Casa Santa Marta, in Vatican City, sources told Sky News.
The meeting came amid tensions between the Vatican and the Trump administration over the US president’s crackdown on migrants and cuts to international aid.
No further details have been released on the meeting between the vice president and the Pope, who has been recovering following weeks in hospital with double pneumonia.
Mr Vance, who is in Rome with his family, also met with the Vatican’s number two, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher.
The Vatican said there had been “an exchange of opinions” over international conflicts, migrants and prisoners.
According to a statement, the two sides had “cordial talks” and the Vatican expressed satisfaction with the Trump administration’s commitment to protecting freedom of religion and conscience.
“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees and prisoners,” the statement said.
Francis has previously called the Trump administration’s deportation plans a “disgrace”.
Mr Vance, who became Catholic in 2019, has cited medieval-era Catholic teaching to justify the immigration crackdown.
The pope rebutted the theological concept Mr Vance used to defend the crackdown in an unusual open letter to the US Catholic bishops about the Trump administration in February, and called Mr Trump’s plan a “major crisis” for the US.
“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly,” the Pope said in the letter.
Mr Vance has acknowledged Francis’s criticism but said he would continue to defend his views. During an appearance in late February at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, he did not address the issue specifically but called himself a “baby Catholic” and acknowledged there were “things about the faith that I don’t know”.
While he had criticised Francis on social media in the past, recently he has posted prayers for the pontiff’s recovery.