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This year’s South Carolina Forensic Coaches Associatin State Tournament featured a first-time winner as Roann Abdeladi of Greenville Tech Charter High School captured the championship by five ranks over Unshu Biyani of Riverside High School. The victory is the first for Greenville Tech, with Abdeladi thwarting Riverside’s effort to have back-to-back winners after Nida Ansari won last year’s title.
The tournament was cumulatively tabbed, with a competitors preliminary, semi-final, and finals rankings factoring into their total score. Abdeladi won the final round with a composite score of six versus Biyani’s score of nine. Fifth place finisher Jordan Childs of Riverside also finished the final round with a total of nine ranks.
Andrew P. Clater of Bob Jones Academy finished third.
All of the finalists earned an automatic qualification to the 2015 Extemp TOC at Northwestern University.
Here are the results of the 2015 South Carolina Forensic Coaches Association State Tournament (Click here for tab sheet):
Two weeks ago, extempers from South Dakota competed in the South Dakota Activities Association State Tournament. South Dakota has two classes for its state tournament, which are then divided into International and United States Extemp categories.
For the last fifty years the Colombian government has been fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist outfit. The conflict has claimed 220,000 lives, displaced an estimated five million people, and harmed Colombia’s international image. Under former President Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian government launched an aggressive campaign against the FARC, which at one time controlled a vast amount of territory in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Uribe’s tactics, some of which were criticized by the Western world, succeeded in weakening the FARC’s leadership, but did not force the group to the negotiating table. President Juan Manuel Santos, who served as Uribe’s Minister of Defense, has taken a more conciliatory line toward the FARC, entering into peace negotiations with the group in November 2012. Those negotiations have borne some fruit, with the FARC declaring a unilateral ceasefire in December and both sides making progress on issues such as land reform and the FARC’s participation in politics. Santos has said that he wants a peace agreement by the end of the year, but issues such as disarming the FARC, compensating victims of the violence, dealing with the human rights abuses that took place during the conflict, and political resistance by right-wing politicians may scuttle a peace deal.
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Texas usually hosts one of the largest state tournaments in the country and this year’s Texas Forensic Association (TFA) State Tournament lived up to that billing by attracting more than one hundred competitors in International Extemp and ninety-nine competitors in United States Extemp.
Durham Academy claimed its fifth extemporaneous speaking state championship in six years last weekend at the North Carolina Tarheel Forensic League State Tournament. Connor Leech of Durham defeated Elizabeth Kingaby of Central Cabarrus High School by two ranks for the title, thereby continuing an impressive streak of dominance by Durham in the category. However, Kingaby nearly won the championship, taking two of the three first place ranks in the final round. An errant sixth place rank doomed her title hopes.
The Ohio High School Speech League (OHSSL) held its state tournament last weekend at Canfield and Boardman High Schools. Forty-seven extempers participated in the International Extemp half of the tournament and fifty extempers participated in the United States Extemp half.
The assassination of Russian political activist Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on February 27 shocked elements of the Russian dissident community. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister in the late 1990s, had been active in protesting Russia’s involvement in the Ukrainian civil war, and he was a vocal critic of the authoritarian tactics of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some of his supporters allege that Putin was to blame for the assassination. They contend that Putin may not have ordered the killing, but his nationalistic rhetoric that has labeled dissident Russians as “traitors” and “fascists,” created the atmosphere that led to Nemtsov’s death. The Russian government argues that Putin is not responsible for the crime, saying that Nemtsov’s fellow opposition leaders, radical Islamists, or a scorned lover in Nemtsov’s past – or that of his young Ukrainian girlfriend Anna Durytska – were to blame. American and European officials condemned Nemtsov’s killing, arguing that it shows that Russia is continuing to veer away from democratic processes and growing increasingly intolerant of dissenting views as its economic situation worsens.
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