The UAE will be in the World Cup qualifying draw when it takes place in Doha on Friday.
Harib Abdullah’s goal was enough to give them a 1-0 win against South Korea at Maktoum Stadium on Tuesday night. It meant they will advance in the qualification process – although there is still work to do to make it to Qatar.
Group A table

Finishing third place in their Asian qualifying group meant UAE will now advance to the final eliminator process, to be played in Qatar in June.
Asian playoff
First, they will face a one-game playoff against Australia, who finished third in the other third round group of Asian qualifying, behind Saudi Arabia and Japan.
UAE will be looking to avenge defeat to the same opposition in Sydney in 2017, which ended the national team’s chances of making it to the World Cup in Russia.
Intercontinental playoff
The winners of that fixture face a final eliminator, against the fifth-placed side from South America’s regional qualifying structure.
Peru secured that place by a point ahead of Colombia, after they beat Paraguay 2-0 in Lima on Tuesday night.
Then what?
UAE will be part of the draw for the World Cup on Friday. The winners of the intercontinental playoff – so either UAE, Australia or Peru – will be placed in pot four for the draw, which means they will be among the lowest-seeded sides for the competition.
Other teams in that tier of the draw will be Ecuador, Saudi, Ghana and three sides who make it through the final eliminators in European qualifying.
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World Mental Health Day
What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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