Latest news with #Hobin
The Sun
05-07-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Luqman Hakim aims to shine with NSFC after European football stint
AFTER spending five years playing with Belgian club KV Kortrijk, young striker Luqman Hakim Shamsuddin is ready to make his mark with Negeri Sembilan FC (NSFC) in the upcoming season of the Malaysia League. He said that playing abroad since 2020 has taught him plenty about discipline, mental toughness and the high intensity of the game that he intends to put to good use this season. 'I believe that Negeri Sembilan is the team for me to play for in Malaysia. I'm attracted to the team because I'm confident in the management's plans, and I'm ready to play thanks to the guidance of head coach Mohd Nidzam Jamil. 'My target is to help restore NSFC's glory days. I hope Negri supporters can be patient and continue to support this team, as most of the players are new, so we need some time to play as a team,' he said after the opening of the Warrix Concept Store by Tunku Besar Tampin, Tunku Syed Razman Tunku Syed Idrus Al-Qadri, who is Negeri Sembilan Football Association (PBNS) president, here today. The 23-year-old said team understanding was crucial to ensure that the team achieves its goal of performing well, and said it was vital to translate the intensity of a game into consistent play on the field. 'The difference in playing abroad is the intensity of the matches, I realise the situation is different here and don't expect that it's the same as Belgium, but it will serve me well in helping the team create something positive this season,' he said. Luqman Hakim was the first Malaysian player to sign a contract with a major European club for five seasons in 2020 before he even turned 18 and spent the period playing for the main squad and the development team before being loaned to foreign clubs such as the Icelandic League's main team Njarovik FC and Japanese club YSCC Yokohama. At today's launch, Tunku Syed Razman said the Warrix Concept Store and the NSFC 'Hobin' membership card were important in strengthening the professional football ecosystem in the state. The Warrix Concept Store is a centre for obtaining official jerseys and sports equipment, while the membership card provides benefits such as exclusive discounts at selected stores, pre-sale tickets and activities with NSFC players. - Bernama
BBC News
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Shropshire belly dancer, 84, has navel approach to exercise
An 84-year-old belly dancer, whose twisting tummy was once frowned upon during a British midriff crisis, has urged people of all ages to keep active as she reflects on her Hobin, from Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, teaches a belly dancing class every week and says she is the oldest professional belly dancer in the UK."Life is precious," she said, taking stock of her art. "Exercise and dancing gives people a purpose... it's important because it improves muscle tone." Ms Hobin said that too many people were sitting down and watching TV instead of moving, which could cause back pain and mobility issues. But can shaking one's hips really avoid creaking hips? Well, according to Ms Hobin, her particular form of activity - a dance originating in ancient Egypt - has helped many of her students with physical health problems, including strengthening the upper back as well as boosting flexibility."It's changed my life," she said. "It's fantastic, it raises your energy levels and people can't believe my age, I've stayed slim since my 30s."She said the dance emerged after women in labour were encouraged to concentrate on their pelvic and abdominal regions to avoid the pain of contractions."Women tend to fight against contraction, but through the movements [they went with it], it's just nature," she such undulations - when presented on stage - once confused Britain which, she explained, could not easily disassociate the art from sex. Ms Hobin said there was a lack of understanding about belly dancing, particularly regarding sexualisation, whether that be through deliberate presentation or flawed perception, both of which she was against. "I was doing a lot of TV," she said of her past, "and producers told me there hadn't been a belly dancer who had gone far [on screen]. That really, really annoyed me - they assumed [I was like] a stripper or prostitute."In this country, [the dance was mostly performed] in nightclubs [or by] strippers."I don't encourage people to come showing their bellies and boobs. I like to encourage women from all walks of life, all shapes and ages – there's not a particular image you have to emulate."It's all meant that she somewhat struggles with the term belly dancing, although admits it's the one by which people most easily recognise the said she preferred to call it "the sacred dance of life", or at least "belly dancing for health and fitness". 'Blossoming self esteem' Ms Hobin said she had seen women's confidence and self-esteem blossom after taking up the dance."I've seen women who have been divorced and their husbands left them for someone else," she said."They didn't think they were good enough anymore, but they do dancing and it's helped them get in touch with themselves."[I've also seen] people who have been abused and said it helped them get in touch with their body and sexuality again." Ms Hobin said she was introduced to belly dancing in the 1970s. After seeing a newspaper article about a class, she thought the dancer looked "elegant and lovely" and decided to become a member. She said she had never looked back. She has been teaching her own classes since 1974 - with students including inmates at a women's prison - and has been invited all over the world to host belly dancing there are no plans to stop."I'll dance until I'm 120," she said. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Forbes
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
What It Took To Film ‘Secrets Of The Penguins' In -40° Cold
Two chicks face to face, still between their parents' legs. Filming penguins is always a bit of a marvel. Filming them while enduring hurricane-force winds on a frozen shelf in Antarctica for nine months, with no sunlight and limited food variety? That's a different kind of mission—closer to something out of NASA than Nat Geo. With Secrets of the Penguins, National Geographic's newest installment in its Emmy-winning 'Secrets of' series, the line between survival and storytelling blurred like never before. Premiering April 20 on Nat Geo and streaming April 21 on Disney+ and Hulu, the three-part series is a visual triumph made possible by engineering grit, field science, and the kind of rugged tech innovation typically reserved for space exploration. Helmed by BAFTA- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron, the series takes audiences from the volcanic shores of the Galapagos to the endless blue-white sprawl of the Ekström Ice Shelf. But behind the stunning visuals are months of unforgiving darkness, unpredictable ice, and a production crew that had to work smarter than the elements to document behaviors never before seen on film. For filmmakers Pete McCowen and Helen Hobin, this wasn't just about capturing nature—it was about becoming part of it. I sat down with the two of them--part of the team that overwintered on the Ekström Ice Shelf alongside a colony of 20,000 emperor penguins, enduring 274 days of isolation, including 65 consecutive days without sunlight--to talk about the experience. 'It was more, it was kind of depressive—not like depressive making sad, although there was an element,' McCowen said. 'It was just like… yeah, well, for me, I was tired a lot of the time. You sleep longer, and still really tired. So just not having the sun… there was a lethargy that was kind of with it.' The absence of light didn't just take a toll on morale—it created enormous challenges for cinematography. In the polar night, penguins go quiet, and everything slows down. The only sounds? The wind, and the scraping of claws against ice. 'Before the polar night, the penguins are really vocal,' Hobin said. 'Then when they go into the polar night, and the females leave to feed, and it's just the males with their eggs, it's just quiet… that was just a strange thing that I think, unless you're there, you can't necessarily appreciate.' Capturing the emotional stillness of a penguin colony in eternal darkness required a meticulous approach to equipment design. Traditional rigs wouldn't survive the cold—or the sheer physical brutality of the conditions. 'We had the camera body, the RED and then the CN20 long lens rigged fully together with all the cables set out… because if you try and touch a cable in the cold, it's very prone to snapping,' Hobin explained. 'We even went to using hot water bottles in cases for the batteries to keep them warm.' That's not metaphorical. The team literally insulated their gear with hot water bottles and created laser-cut foam inserts for their snowmobiles to keep camera setups intact and ready to shoot instantly. Every moment spent fumbling with gear in those temperatures came at a cost—to fingers, batteries, and hard drives alike. Seeing a single penguin in a zoo is cute. Seeing 20,000 of them in the wild, in silence, under a star-splattered sky, is a different experience entirely according to Pete and Helen. 'It seems like a kind of a fantasy landscape,' Hobin said. 'With these amazing creatures out in the middle of nowhere… I don't think I got over it by the time we left.' But the grandeur was a challenge in itself. 'You're blown away by the spectacle of all of it,' McCowen added. 'But one of the differences is, then how to film that that gives a sense of it to the audience, and also how to pick out one bit of behavior… and then you get a whole lot of photo-bombing penguins as well that just stand right in front of you.' Even with the best gear and intentions, the ice shelf had the final say. The production team followed strict protocols: satellite imagery, ice thickness drills, real-time weather updates, and a station chief with veto power. Still, nature had its surprises. 'One particular day we went out and a storm came in a bit earlier than we expected… and the drive back was like, 'Okay, where's the next marker?'' McCowen recalled. 'When we got back to the station, I was really, really glad to see Neumayer Station, because it was quite sobering how easy it would have been to get lost.' There were moments of levity too—Hobin admitted to singing loudly into the wind to calm her nerves during one especially harrowing ride through whiteout conditions. 'Because it was quite a tense situation finding our way back home again,' she said, 'I was the whole way home singing to myself out loud—which is a horror for anyone that's ever heard it.' Despite the hardships—or perhaps because of them—the footage achieved is nothing short of astonishing. From chicks leaping off cliffs to rare hybrids known as 'rockaronis,' Secrets of the Penguins captured evolution in motion. And thanks to strategic framing and platform-conscious editing, the series has already made its mark across digital platforms, with over 74 million TikTok views and counting. The audience reach wasn't just incidental—it was engineered. With visuals optimized for vertical and cinematic presentation, and data tagging for potential AI analysis, this is tech-enabled storytelling at its most forward-looking. In many ways, Secrets of the Penguins is less about the cold and more about the convergence of biology, filmmaking, resilience, and innovation. As climate change accelerates and ecosystems evolve faster than our ability to study them, series like this go beyond entertainment to provide ecological documentation, scientific collaboration, and maybe even emotional education. McCowen said, 'When it gets too cold, we retreat back to the station… and these little chicks… they're out there all the time.' And so were the filmmakers—quietly rewriting the rules of what tech, teamwork, and tenacity can accomplish at the end of the world.
