Kroos named German footballer of the year
Berlin, Aug 5 : Real Madrid's Champions League winner Toni Kroos has been named German footballer of the year for the first time, Kicker magazine said on Sunday.
Also, Germany's Dzsenifer Marozsan of Olympique Lyon was voted as German female footballer of the year for the second straight year, reports Xinhua news agency.
Kroos, who won the Champions League with Real Madrid in May, stood out with 185 votes from sports journalists ahead of Freiburg striker Nils Petersen (39 votes) and Schalke's Brazilian defender Naldo (with 38).
Kroos, a rare bright spot in a German side that crashed out of the World Cup group stage as title holders, was second last year behind former Bayern Munich teammate Philipp Lahm.
"Footballer of the year -- that's a prize you do not get so easily -- and most importantly not everyone can win it," Kroos said in a statement.
Jupp Heynckes was voted coach of the year for leading Bayern Munich to the Bundesliga title in May before retiring.
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Mamata continues sit-in for second successive day over Bengal voter roll deletions
Kolkata (PTI): West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee continued her protest against alleged arbitrary deletions in the post-SIR electoral rolls for the second consecutive day on Saturday, after she spent the night at the sit-in site here.
Banerjee had begun the demonstration at Metro Channel in central Kolkata on Friday, accusing the Election Commission of conspiring with the BJP to “disenfranchise Bengal voters” ahead of the upcoming assembly elections.
The chief minister stayed overnight at the protest site, surrounded by senior Trinamool Congress leaders, legislators and party workers, turning the busy Esplanade stretch into a makeshift political camp.
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Addressing supporters on Friday afternoon, Banerjee alleged that large numbers of genuine voters were being removed from the electoral rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
The CM also reiterated her claim that several voters had been "wrongly marked as dead” and said she would present such individuals before the media and the Election Commission to expose what she described as an "attempt to manipulate the voter list to help the BJP in the upcoming assembly polls".
Senior TMC leaders and state ministers remained present at the venue, while party supporters gathered at the protest site in the morning.
The protest comes just days before the full bench of the Election Commission is scheduled to visit West Bengal, amid rising political tensions over the voter list revision ahead of the assembly polls.
According to official data released on February 28, as many as 63.66 lakh names — around 8.3 per cent of the electorate — have been deleted since the SIR process began in November last year, reducing the voter base from about 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore.
In addition, over 60.06 lakh electors have been placed under the “under adjudication” category, meaning their eligibility will be determined through legal scrutiny in the coming weeks, a process that could further reshape constituency-level electoral equations.
