Repeating Islands

A huge drilling rig arrived Thursday in the warm Gulf waters north of Havana, where it will sink an exploratory well deep into the seabed, launching Cuba’s dreams of striking it rich with offshore oil, the Associated Press reports.

The Scarabeo-9 platform was visible from Havana’s sea wall far off on the hazy horizon as it chugged westward toward its final drill site about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, and 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of Key West.

Spanish oil company Repsol RPF, which is leasing the rig for about a half-million dollars a day, said it expects to begin drilling within days to find out whether the reserves are as rich as predicted.

“The geologists have done their work. If they’ve done it well, then we’ll have a good chance of success,” Repsol spokesman Kristian Rix said by phone from Madrid. “It’s been a long process, but now we’re at the point where we discover whether our geologists have got it right. It’s a happy day.”

It’s been a long, strange journey for the Scarabeo-9, Repsol and Cuba, a process shadowed at every step by warnings of a possible environmental debacle and decades of bad blood between Cuba and the United States.

The U.S. trade embargo essentially bars U.S. companies from doing oil business with Cuba and threatens sanctions against foreign companies if they don’t follow its restrictions, making it far more complicated to line up equipment and resources for the project.

To avoid sanctions, Repsol chose the Scarabeo-9, a 380-foot-long (115-meter), self-propelled, semisubmersible behemoth built in China and Singapore and capable of housing 200 workers. The rig qualifies for the Cuba project because it was built with less than 10 percent U.S.-made parts, no small feat considering America’s dominance in the industry.

While comparable platforms sat idle in the Gulf of Mexico, the Scarabeo-9 spent months navigating through three oceans and around the Cape of Good Hope to arrive in the Caribbean at tremendous expense.

Even after the rig is in place, the embargo continues to affect just about every aspect.

The Scarabeo-9′s blowout preventer, a key piece of machinery that failed in the 2010 Macondo-Deepwater Horizon disaster, is state of the art. But its U.S. manufacturer is not licensed to work with Cuba so replacement parts must come through secondary sources.

It’s also more complicated to do things like the maintenance necessary to keep things running smoothly and decrease the chances of something going wrong.

If it does, Cuba would be hard-pressed to respond to a major spill on its own, and getting help isn’t as simple as making a phone call to Washington. The embargo would require licenses to be issued for all manner of equipment and services for an emergency response.

Few U.S. companies so far have gotten permission to work with the Cubans in the event of a spill — representing just 5 percent of all the resources thrown at the Macondo blowout, according to an estimate by Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

Two U.S. companies have received licenses to export capping stacks, crucial pieces of equipment for stopping gushing wells, but related services like personnel and transportation have not been green-lighted, Hunt said.

“So what you have is a great big intelligent piece of iron without a crew,” he said. “You can’t just drop it on the hole and hope (the spill) will stop. It’s not a cork.”

Even Tyvek suits worn by cleanup crews cannot currently be exported to Cuba because potentially they could be used for the construction of bacteriological or chemical weapons, Hunt added.

Meanwhile cooperation between the two governments, which often struggle to see eye-to-eye on things as basic as delivering each other’s mail, has been only bare-bones.

“With any other country — Mexico, Canada or Russia — we would already have in place agreements between the coast guards of the two countries,” said Dan Whittle, Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “There would be contingency plans written and publicly available. There already would have been drills, a comprehensive action plan for responding to a spill.”

“We don’t have that yet.”

There has been some movement.

U.S. inspectors examined the rig last week in Trinidad and gave it a clean bill of health, though notably said that did not constitute any certification. And American representatives at a regional oil meeting last month in the Bahamas were left impressed by their Cuban counterparts’ openness and willingness to share information.

But the countries’ proximity has increased fears of a disastrous spill with the potential to foul not only Cuba’s reefs and gleaming, white-sand beaches, but also, swept up by the Gulf Stream, the coast of Florida and the Atlantic Seaboard up to North Carolina.

Curiously, those fears have been cited by people on both sides of the embargo issue: Some say the prospect of environmental disaster shows the U.S. needs to lift the embargo and work with the Cubans in the interest of safety; others say the fact that the trade ban failed to prevent Cuba from drilling shows it needs to be made even tougher.

Some of the harshest criticism has come from Cuban-American members of Congress such as House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who recently accused the Obama administration of dropping the ball on Cuban drilling.

“Oil exploration 90 miles off the Florida coast by this corrupt, unaccountable dictatorship could result in horrific environmental and economic damage to our Gulf Coast communities, in addition to enriching the Castro tyranny,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

The exact size of Cuba’s offshore reserves, estimated at 5 billion to 9 billion barrels, is still unknown. And production would not come online for years, so any windfall is still on the horizon. But island officials are hopeful of a big strike that could inject much-needed cash into their struggling economy, and they’re not asking anyone for permission.

“Cuba is going through its own change regardless of American foreign policy,” said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate who met with Cuban officials in Havana this week on oil and other matters.

“This discovery, or potential discovery, of significant amounts of oil could dramatically change the economy of Cuba, and change the relationship with the United States in small ways and large,” Durbin said while visiting Haiti on Thursday.

For the original report go to http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jDc8hPz02rwSetJe3GF6wLaBchgg?docId=17641c8970354633802a689144daf494

Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs attracted a huge audience when shown in the wake of last summer’s riots. His new film, The Nine Muses, uses Homer to explore mass migration to Britain. Sukdev Sandhu reviews the film in this article for London’s Guardian.

John Akomfrah, widely recognised as one of Britain’s most expansive and intellectually rewarding film-makers, has never been afraid of a battle. Back in the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens, he tried to screen Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane at the film club of the Southwark further education college, where he was studying. “There were rows. Black kids were throwing chairs everywhere. They were saying ‘you can’t show this’. So we stopped the film and had a discussion: what do you mean, ‘We can’t show this film’? It was clear there were forms of propriety for black spectatorship. Rather than run back into the field, I thought: let’s just accelerate it. Let’s push these boundaries a little bit more.”

In 1982 he began to do just that, co-founding the Black Audio Film Collective with a group of friends he’d grown up with in London or met at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Over the next 16 years, moving as seamlessly between the form of cine-essay and what they called slide-tape texts as they did between the worlds of the gallery and the newly created Channel 4, they sought to create a new language for migrant cinema. They crafted diasporic films that eschewed social realism and agitprop, took aesthetics as seriously as they did subject matter, and were informed by the canon of non-western moviemakers (Ritwik Ghatak from Bengal, Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, Santiago Álvarez from Cuba), as much as they were by the giants of the Atlantic avant garde.

Not everyone thought this was possible. Akomfrah recalls that when he first approached the Arts Council for money for an avant-garde group, “they told us straight: you can’t be avant garde because blacks can’t be avant-garde film-makers”. Others, such as Salman Rushdie, who wrote a much-debated essay about Handsworth Songs (1986) for the Guardian, felt the collective’s work was pretentious and more preoccupied with theories of representation than with representing the second-generation migrants whose rioting had occasioned the film. In the US, according to the New York-based artist and writer Coco Fusco, the collective’s work was almost inexplicable. “There was shock, incredulity, negativity. They encountered chauvinism from African Americans who wanted to know: who were these blacks with funny accents? They were thought to be too intelligent for ‘the people’.”

Akomfrah finds the charge of being an apolitical dilettante absurd. He was born in Ghana in 1957, and both his parents were involved with anti-colonial activism. “My dad was a member of the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah‘s party. My mum had met Malcolm X in Accra in 1965. We left Ghana because my mum’s life was in danger after the coup of 1966, and my father died in part because of the struggle that led up to the coup. In 1976 my friends and I seriously considered going to enlist in the MPLA to fight in Angola. We wanted to be of use. I’m glad we didn’t. The generation before us spoke of going home; we realised what fighting we were going to do in both a literal and a metaphorical sense had to take place here.”

For Akomfrah, that fighting initially took the form of politics: “As a kid I went to an Althusserian study group; there were lots of young black kids there trying to get their heads around Althusser!” As a student activist he was a “serial occupier” and sit-in organiser, and consequently got expelled from many FE colleges. But the fight, for him, was also carried on in the realm of the imagination: he regularly sneaked in to see Tarkovsky and Fassbinder films at the Paris Pullman Cinema on the Fulham Palace Road. “I could see all these people were as fascinated with me as they were with the screen. They couldn’t work out why this kid was so transfixed.”

This commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films. Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) draws on the photographer James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968) to fashion a probing, internationalist vision of the black radical leader that is far removed from the conventional hero projected in Spike Lee’s biopic the previous year; The Last Angel of History (1995) advanced the concept of the “data thief” as part of its argument about science-fiction elements in the music of Sun Ra, George Clinton and Lee Scratch Perry.

Akomfrah’s new film, The Nine Muses, is a multilayered, gorgeously shot and affecting work that interweaves archival footage of black and Asian people travelling to and working in Britain with moody, elliptical shots of an anonymous black figure alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Split into nine chapters, each of which is dedicated to one of the Greek muses, and sprinkled with quotations ranging from the Odyssey to The Waste Land, it suggests that stories normally seen through the lens of postcolonialism could just as easily be seen in existential or mythic terms. In doing so, it invites viewers to reflect on the labels by which history – especially diasporic history – is framed and categorised.

“It’s important to read images in the archive for their ambiguity and open-endedness,” Akomfrah argues. “Migrants were often filmed in relation to debates about crime or social problems, so that’s how they get fixed in official memory. But that Caribbean woman standing in a 60s factory isn’t thinking about how she’s a migrant or a burden on the British state; she’s as likely to be thinking about what she’s going to eat that evening or about her lover.”

One of the most striking features of The Nine Muses is its sound design by Akomfrah’s fellow Black Audio founder, Trevor Mathison, which meshes Arvo Pärt liturgical pieces with spirituals and Indian courtly music. The desire to create new kinds of Afro-Asian ambience stems partly from Akomfrah’s youthful enthusiasm for post-punk bands such as Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire, which explored the subversive potential of noise. “The avant garde saw our emphasis on the audio as a thought crime, a heresy. It was all about the image for them. They frowned on the sonic, treating it as an impure intrusion into a hallowed field. It was a weird hangover from high modernism, especially as if you watch a Dziga Vertov film you’ll see the early avant garde was as interested in sound as in images.”

The work of Black Audio and Akomfrah has been increasingly celebrated by the art world recently. Kodwo Eshun, one half of the Turner prize-nominated Otolith Group whose experimental films owe a debt to Black Audio, says: “From the moment I first saw Handsworth Songs it became impossible for me to settle for anything less.” Moreover, a new generation of film-makers and students, frustrated by the format-driven orthodoxies of mainstream TV and weaned on the serendipities of YouTube, is also discovering the work.

In the wake of last summer’s riots, a screening of Handsworth Songs at Tate Modern attracted a huge audience, which then stayed for a three-hour conversation. “Especially after having spent much of the last 20 years being told by apparatchiks that there’s no life in experimental film, it was shocking,” Akomfrah says. “These were inquisitive, intellectual magpies confronted by the same questions as we were in the 1980s: how much can we call political, given that the powers that be are saying it’s all criminal or without any basis in politics? They believed, like I do, that the moving image has a role to play in galvanising these debates.”

• The Nine Muses was released on Friday 20 January.

For the original report go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/20/john-akomfrah-migration-memory?newsfeed=true

Well, it IS the weekend and we just began the new semester, so here’s a bit of silly news. The Queen is about to be ousted as Jamaica’s Head of State and we have Prince Harry coming on a Caribbean tour to celebrate grandma’s 60 years as Queen. This weekend, however, the Duchess of Cambridge—yes, Kate of the humongous wedding herself—is reported to have flown to Mustique via St Lucia. Oh, joy! There are no photos so the pictures above are old—and for all we know she is shopping for groceries at her supermarket in Wales as I write this. But here is People magazine’s report:

Rainy and 48 degrees in London on Friday. No matter: The Duchess of Cambridge – with parents Michael and Carole, and sister Pippa – is off on a sunny vacation, PEOPLE confirmed in this report by Simon Perry.
Passengers on a British Airways flight from London’s Gatwick Airport to St. Lucia in the Caribbean were surprised to see the family in the first class section on Wednesday, a photographer blogged. Their presumed final destination: one of their regular holiday haunts, the private isle of Mustique.
It is believed that Prince William is not with them, as the search and rescue helicopter pilot is spending this week at his RAF base in Anglesey, Wales, after hunting last weekend on an estate in Spain with brother Prince Harry.

Mustique, where Kate and William have been frequent visitors, is a well-known, pricey haunt for such celebrities as Mick Jagger and Queen Elizabeth’s late sister, Princess Margaret. It was even inspected as a possible honeymoon destination for William and Kate.
The trip to the sun comes just days after Kate’s 30th birthday on Jan. 9 and before Carole’s 57th at the end of the month.
The Palace had no comment on Kate’s vacation.

Given that we are giving Kate’s vacation its own post, I don’t want other royal families to feel neglected by Repeating Islands (we may be refused press credentials for the next wedding) so we should also note that Prince Albert of Monaco and his new wife Charlene spend some time in Antigua a couple of weeks back. Here’s a photo of their romantic holiday (yuck!):

And, more formally, the Dutch Queen Beatrix, her heir Wilhem-Alexander, and his Argentine-born crown princess, Máxima, did a formal tour of everything connected to the Netherlands in the Caribbean region. Here’s a photo of the irrepressible Máx in Aruba so she does not feel slighted by our attention to Kate, as she, too, will be queen one day.

For the original People report go to http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20395222_20563244,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines

It might just be too little, too late for ABC, Alexandra Gratereaux reports in Fox News Latino. 

For the third week in a row members of the Puerto Rican community, led by the organization “Boricuas for a Positive Image,” have protested outside of ABC’s studios in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood.

ABC cancelled its new cross-dressing comedy “Work It” after just two episodes. According to reports from zap2it.com ABC has not acknowledged the reason for the cancellation.  The Puerto Rican campaign grew out of anger after one of the characters of the show said during the pilot episode: “I’m Puerto Rican. I would be great at selling drugs.”

The remark ignited a firestorm. Puerto Ricans to ABC: We are Not Drug Dealers!

Thursday was no exception as young and old protestors from the Latino and Black communities chanted in the frigid evening for ABC to apologize.

Julio Pabón, co-founder of “Boricuas for a Positive Image” along with Lucky Rivera, said that despite ABC canceling the show, they deserve a public apology. “Canceling the show does not cancel the problems,” Pabón told FOX News Latino during the protest Thursday evening. We are trying to prove them wrong. Just because [we are of this] race does not mean we do bad things.

- Kimberly Villanueva, 14 Yr-Old Protestor

“Racist jokes like these [cannot] continue to happen,” he added.  “We have to have an apology and a meeting to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The Puerto Rican and Latino community in New York City – we are 5 million strong. 1 trillion dollars in purchasing power deserves more respect.”

Rivera added that it’s a shame drugs are corrupting the community.

“The drugs in our community [and] in Puerto Rico that is the problem,” Rivera said. “Drugs are destroying our kids, our people and our island.”

New York City councilman Charles Barron thinks ABC should give the Puerto Rican and Latino community in NYC, “a program produced by the community, for the community.” “We are the children of Fidel Castro,” Barron said fired up in front of the crowd. “We are the children of Malcom X, we are the children of Che Guevarra and our weapon is our culture. We demand that ABC respect the Black community, respect the Latino community.”

The former black panther, who was involved  in having ABC take “Like It Is” off the air in 2001— a public affairs show about issues affecting the Black community— thinks the  protests should escalate if ABC keeps ignoring them.

“When I met with them for “Like It Is” they said the Black and Latino communities are a large part of their audience,” Barron said. “If you’re going to make dollars off of us then you better respect us.”

“We should keep the pressure on,” he added. “They should keep a Latino program on there that is representative of the community, produced by the community, for the community.”

Other bystanders, such as filmmaker and actor Stuart Luth, says he found the protests interesting and necessary.

Luth is white but married to a light skinned Puerto Rican, screen writer and actress Viviana Rodríguez a.k.a. Viviana Leo her stage name.

Luth is currently in the process of producing a film titled “White Alligator”  which focuses on racism in the entertainment industry and his wife’s experience trying to break down those barriers.

He says it is important to highlight these issues and plans to continue coming to the protests each week.

“This is the first protest of this sort that I’ve seen as we’ve been trying to make this film,” Luth said. “In the Latino community [there is] a misrepresentation of race.”

“People [are] trying to create labels and put them in boxes.”

Luth, 32, grew up in New Jersey and now lives in the Upper West Side. The filmmaker recalled his wife feeling some of the same emotions the protestors described when seeing “Work It.”

“My wife was always too white to be Hispanic and too Hispanic to be white,” he said. “So much of our perceptions are created by the entertainment industry. Their stereotypes are holding us back.”

Luth adds that he did not expect to see so many young people, in particular young Latino men protesting.

“As an outsider that didn’t know what was going on there was a lot of strong masculine energy there,” said Luth. “They were given a chance to express a part of them that was dormant for a while. A chance to join the conversation and say this is not the way we are.”

Some of the younger protestors were sisters and Bronx natives, Ashley and Kimberly Villanueva, who vow to continue attending the protests and spreading the word in their high school and on social media.

“We are trying to prove them wrong,” said Kimberly Villanueva. “Just because [we are of this] race does not mean we do bad things.”

Kimberly Villanueva, 14, and her sister Ashely, 16, attend Bronx Academy of Letters High School. They said they were compelled to join the protest after learning about the show “Work It” from their father, who is a part of “Boricuas for a Positive Image.”

“My dad works in a company where there are carpenters, construction workers, people that are not selling drugs and making good money,” said Ashely Villanueva. “I am going to bring this up to my teacher, [since] I’m taking a discrimination class.”

Closing up the protest by singing the Puerto Rican national anthem was Connecticut resident Héctor López.

López, 69, says that even though he lives far away, it’s very important for him to support this cause.

“This is a movement for all Latinos,” said López. “We need to claim our rights.”

For the original report go to http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/entertainment/2012/01/20/abc-protest-continues-puerto-ricans-demand-apology-want-new-programming/

Ambassador Dudley Thompson, a historic figure in Jamaica and the Pan-African global movement, died Friday, a day after his 95th birthday, Jacqueline Charles of The Miami Herald reports.

He was a historical figure in the politics of Jamaica and in the larger global struggle to unite people of African descent. Hard to miss with his cheerful disposition, intellect and passionate conversations, Ambassador Dudley Thompson drew crowds no matter where he went.

A former Jamaican cabinet minister who served as a minister of national security, justice and foreign affairs, Thompson died Friday morning in New York, the day after he turned 95. He was scheduled to celebrate the next week in New Jersey. He lived in Weston.

“We will miss his intellect, his stature,” said Jamaica’s Miami Consul General Sandra A. Grant Griffiths, whose office confirmed the death. “He was all over the place.”

Griffiths last saw Thompson in December when he attended a holiday gathering at her residence. There, like elsewhere, he drew crowds to his side as he discussed Jamaica, and Africa, the continent where he served as an envoy in several countries including Nigeria, Namibia and Ghana, and practiced law as a young man. It was while defending the late Jomo Kenyatta during his Mau Mau rebellion trial in Kenya that Thompson became well-known across Africa.

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller described Thompson as “a man of firm convictions, articulate, sharp on his feet and witty. Dudley Thompson loved his country with a passion and served it with honor and distinction.”

Thompson was up with the times. He blogged and had his own website. www.DudleyThompson.4t.com. His dream was to see a united Africa and was president of the World African Diaspora Union..

According to his website, he was born in Panama and raised in Jamaica. He served in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II, and he was a Rhodes scholar. In the early 1950s, he practiced law in Tanzania and Kenya, and became involved in the nationalists struggles in both countries.

In October, Thompson made history when the African Union made him the first person to become a citizen of the continent and gave him a passport. Dozens of African presidents attended the ceremony, said Djibril Diallo, senior advisor to the executive director of the UNAIDS and advisor to the President of Senegal on Diaspora Affairs.

Diallo said Thompson left him a voice mail on his cell phone just days ago telling him to call because he had some suggestions on their ongoing collaboration to promote Africa.

“I was working on getting him an honorary ambassadorship for the entire African continent,” said Diallo, whose relationship with Thompson dates back more than 20 years. “He’s amazing as a Pan-Africanist, and has worked to the last hour just preaching Africa and the diaspora.’’

For the original report go to http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/20/2599977/pan-african-and-jamaican-statesman.html

YardEdge announces that on Saturday January 21, 2102, Griot Music presents an art exhibition, a recital featuring the poetry of Cherry Natural, Randy McLaren, Najuequa Barnes, Ganja, Samuel Gordon, and Simone C. Simpson. There will also be a performance by the 2010 Global Battle of the Bands winner Dubtonic Kru and 2011 Global Battle of the Bands Jamaica winner Di Blueprint. Headliners Tanya Stephens and Tessanne Chin will follow with a live show. Then the after party will continue with selectors ZJ Electra and DJ Smoke (Rennaissance).

These events will take place at the Courtleigh Auditorium in New Kingston, Jamaica. Doors open at 7:00pm.

Photos: Tanya Stephens (above) and Tessanne Chin (below)

For more information, see http://www.yardedge.net/happening-on-the-edge-2012/eclectic-the-ultimate-concert-and-after-party-january-21

As part of the activities honoring Cuban Theatre Day [Día del Teatro Cubano] on January 22, Casa de las Américas (Havana, Cuba) sends its first call for its Latin American and Caribbean Theater Season and Mayo Teatral 2012, during which various workshops will be held. Held from May 4 to 13, Mayo Teatral offers a cycle of events dedicated to the centennial of the great playwright and Cuban intellectual Virgilio Piñera.

La Casa de las Américas invites participation for its Latin American and Caribbean Theater Season and Mayo Teatral 2012, which will be celebrated on May 4-13, bringing together a representative sample of the varied work of the current Latin American and Caribbean theater scene. Theater groups from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic will participate for the first time in our event; therefore this edition will be characterized by the novelty of the proposals and the wide variety of languages, with ten scene guest stage performances.

In addition, Casa will present a selection of best material premiered on the island in the last biennium as well as a Piñera Cycle, with staging of Virgilio Piñera’s works, carried out by Cuban troupes and directors.

There will also be workshops by experts in the field, such as Ailyn Morera (Costa Rica); Antonio Zúñiga (Mexico); Rodolfo Guerrero (Mexico); Francisco Sánchez, Pablo Obreque and César Espinoza (Chile); and Lowell Fiet (Puerto Rico/USA).

For more information on events, lodging and more, see eventos@casa.cult.cu

For original post (in Spanish), see http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6649

Photo above: a scene from Mayo Teatral 2010, from http://www.caimanbarbudo.cu/artes-escenicas/2010/06/escenas-de-identidad/

The Guajataka Downhill Festival, held every year in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, is just around the corner: today! The festival goes from January 20 to 22, 2012. Today, Friday January 20, the Guajataka Downhill 6 will offer a welcome cocktail will be hosted at Hotel Guajataca from 6:00 to 9:00pm. The organizers remind us that this will be the last chance for any international or local racer to finish registration and/or payment for participation.

Keep in mind that part of the festival weekend includes the Guajataca Music Festival. On Friday, the line-up includes rock bands Vivanativa and La Secta. On Saturday, featured artists include Cultura Profética (reggae band) and live Dj’s Lady Liquid, Dj Xtasys, Z Boys, and Dano (electronic, dubstep, D&B, house, and electro fusion). Sunday features the well-known indie rock band Indigo and reggae band Yerba Bruja.

Also on Sunday, January 22, Guajataka Downhill will be hosting the “Underground Surf Series” Local Surf Contest event on Guajataca Beach.

See video of a Guajataca 2012 pratice run here (with music by Skrillex, “Ruffneck Bass”—love it!):

For photos of last year’s races, see http://www.longboardism.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=Guajataca+Downhill&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=20

It is once again time for the Grenada Arts Council’s 48th Annual Art Show 2012. Because the Arts Council received many requests from young artists who have visited the gallery, participation is now open to artists 14 years of age and up, residing in Grenada and Grenadian artists living abroad. Submission dates are January 26-28, 2012.

The show will take place at the Grenada Arts Council Gallery, located at 9 Young Street, in St. Georges, Grenada. Opening night is February 2, 2012, and the exhibition will run until April 28, 2012.

The Grenada Arts Council is a volunteer non-governmental organization, dedicated since 1964 to the development of the visual arts of Grenada. Our Permanent Collection established in 1995 to keep an archive of Grenadian art in Grenada continues to grow, with two acquisitions this year. As a stakeholder in the recently launched Tourism Strategy, (bridging Heritage and Art), the Grenada Arts Council on behalf of Grenada’s artists, looks forward to a year of positive energetic inclusion within the larger cultural engine, and close productive collaboration with the Ministries of Education, Youth Empowerment and Finance, as well as the Ministry of Tourism, the Board of Tourism and the Cultural Foundation.

For more information, write to gac.asp@gmailcom or see http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=108606914 and http://grenadaartscouncil.blogspot.com/#!/2011/12/gac-bridges-heritage-and-art-in-tourism.html

For rules, see http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=108606914

For entry form, go to http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=108606916

Taller de Otra Cosa and Producciones Teresa, no inc. present Coraje II [Courage II]—a theatrical production written and interpreted by Teresa Hernández and directed by Miguel Rubio. The play will be on stage from January 20 to 22, and 27 to 29, 2012, at the Victoria Espinosa Theater (at the corner of Calle del Parque and Ponce De Leon Avenue; Bus Stop 23) behind the Francisco Arriví Theater in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Show times are as follows: Friday and Saturday at 8:30pm and Sunday at 4:00pm and 7:00pm.

About the play, which was performed at the Teatro de la Luna 14th International Festival of Hispanic Theater, Rosalind Lacy writes:

Hernandez is a teller of unsettling stories with long, run-on sentences, and low-level humor. Her focus is on violence in a highly militarized country engaged in wars overseas as well as turf wars over the drug trade at home. She adopts different characters and voices to teach us how to cope with a surreal, modern age in which you’re safer and better off in the army than on the city streets.

Her edgy, satirical dialogue, as Nancy, the dutiful, doting daughter, the care-giver for her shell-shocked, veteran father, is a mix of disjointed memories, sprinkled with unifying refrains. “The devil is on the loose, sister, that’s how it is…amen,” or “Praise be to him!” Her disjointed ramblings in Coraje II are unique in that she shows us how-to-survive. This superb actress, who can change her mood from cynical to stoical with a raised eyebrow, is as courageous as she is experimental as a writer. With a flair for panache, Hernandez does both succinctly and delightfully well.

This versatile actress draws excerpts from playwright Bertolt Brecht’s gloomy poetry, which she speaks and sings directly to us. Also she derives inspiration from his great anti-war epic, Mother Courage, the inspiration for Coraje II/Courage II. A detailed plot is provided in the lobby. Read it to enhance your enjoyment of the performance.

For more information, you may call (787) 607-6724 or write to puchiplaton@gmail.com

For a preview, directed by Gabriel Coss, see http://vimeo.com/35141075

For a review on the play in English, see http://dctheatrescene.com/2011/11/04/coraje-ii-courage-ii/

For a review in Spanish (which includes a video and the photo above), see http://www.80grados.net/2012/01/otro-teatro-en-teresa-hernandez/

Kevin Edmonds, NACLA’s new Caribbean blogger, has posted this report on NACLA’s website. You can follow his reports by clicking on his name above.

Two thousand and twelve holds both a great deal of uncertainty and cautious optimism for the Caribbean. The election of new governments over the past year in Jamaica and St. Lucia, the controversial re-election of an incumbent in Guyana, and the selection of Michel Martelly out of a flawed election in Haiti has sent mixed signals about the overall direction the region is taking. With the global economy still in an extremely volatile state, the predominately service-oriented economies of the Caribbean remain extremely vulnerable to the action or inaction of Europe and the United States.

In Guyana, December’s election saw Donald Ramotar of the incumbent People’s Progressive Party emerge with the win—albeit with a minority government. The delayed release of election results triggered a wave of controversy and political tension within the country that has yet to cease. The Opposition leader, David Granger, just announced the possibility of a snap election in the country to capitalize on the current controversy surrounding the PPP.

In Haiti, the sombre two year anniversary of the earthquake has come and gone, signalled by another round of lofty reconstruction promises in what many consider to be a tragically stalled effort. The accountability and legitimacy of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti continues to erode after being unapologetic for their role in introducing cholera into the country and releasing a group of Uruguayan soldiers accused of raping a young boy without charge, despite the existence of video evidence. President Michel Martelly has been under fire for failing to overcome a standstill over the implementation of his national education plans, while proudly calling for the re-establishment of the notorious Haitian army. Hopefully 2012 will be the year of lessons learned, starting with a concerted and coordinated effort to invest in sustainable and publically accessible partnerships and investment.

In Jamaica, Portia Simpson Miller’s return to power has come with the promises of shaking up the country by tossing out the monarchy and finally making Jamaica an independent republic. While perhaps more symbolic than substance, it offers to deliver important political capital, which will be much needed, especially when facing the more daunting issues of managing and reducing debt, corruption, and crime. Miller was partly elected on her promise of using state funding to reduce the unemployment rate. For the United States, Miller’s election confirms their worst fears of a diversion from the IMF’s prescription. As WikiLeaks revealed, “In such a scenario [the election of Miller], Jamaica could go the way of Haiti: fatally driven by crime, poverty, drugs, gangs, social disintegration, and emigration – all more reasons for strong US support for Golding’s ongoing reforms.” Whether or not Miller will be able to run Jamaica in the interests of the Jamaican people will be a story to watch throughout 2012.

In St. Lucia, Prime Minster Kenny Anthony swept back into power after a five year absence, defeating Stephenson King of the United Workers Party. Facing extensive infrastructure and housing damage due to Hurricane Tomas in 2010, increasing crime, and a volatile tourist market, the Prime Minster is currently looking east in a risky effort to play China and Taiwan against each other in order to secure the largest promises of aid and development for St. Lucia.

Finally, the emergence of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) signals an important shift away from the traditional U.S. influence in the Caribbean. It is too early to determine whether or not a competing organization like CELAC will be able to deliver on the promises of sustainable development and strengthen South-South cooperation in the Caribbean, or if the Caribbean will fare as a forgotten partner in this predominately Latin American venture. Several Caribbean countries (Dominica, St. Vincent, and Antigua) have already joined ALBA, revealing that the interest in new forums of cooperation and partnership are not based on motives of political opportunism, but rather due to the overwhelmingly negative experience the Caribbean has had with neoliberal globalization. Looking at the history of the lack of benefits the Caribbean has had in adopting initiatives like the Caribbean Basin Initiative, it is hardly surprising.

For the original report go to http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/19/caribbean-2012-looking-forward

Painting by Jean-Pierre Frey from http://jeanpierrefrey.blogspot.com/2010/05/jean-pierre-frey-cuadros-y-muebles.html

The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2012 was conceptualized five years ago by New Delhi-based literary tag team William Dalrymple and Namita Ghokale, bringing together an appealing mix of mainstream and fringe Indian and international writers to present their ideas on Indian thought, culture and its global context in relation to their own works, Himali Singh Soin reports for CNN.

This festival is not your average overdose of book readings and panel discussions, brooding authors and a drowsy audience.

For one, it is a free festival.

The informal, celebratory and interdisciplinary atmosphere in the gardens of an old and intimate Rajasthani palace, attracts a diverse crowd of 60,000-odd readers. Actors, directors, fashion designers, economists, travelers, politicians, scientists, students, bloggers and all manner of urban hipsters congregate in the sunny on-site cafe to spend three days “in conversation.”

The Jaipur Lit Fest has expanded in collaboration with producers Teamwork, extending literature into the areas of music, dance, art, philosophy, history — with one or two tense political debates featuring each year.

This year’s highlights include high-profile writers such as Salman Rushdie, Mohamad Hanif, Gurcharan Das, Annie Proulx and Jamaica Kincaid.

At night, the wine flows and the stage bursts with the Dionysian revelry that has historically followed a literary salon.

This year’s world music and dance performances focus on the tradition of Sufi and Bhakti poetry and songs spanning from traditional Rajasthani fire eaters to DJ Cheb I Sabbah and Dub Colussus.

January 20-24, 2012

Diggi House, Shivaji Marg, C-Scheme, Jaipur – 302004, Rajasthan; +91 (0)141 237 3091/236 6120; New Delhi office +91 (0)11 2601 1430; www.jaipurliteraturefestival.org

For the original report go to http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/life/best-of-the-jaipur-literature-festival-977139

On New Year’s Eve in 1972, a plane carrying baseball star Roberto Clemente crashed about a mile off the shore of Puerto Rico. The right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates was en route to Nicaragua to deliver aid to earthquake victims. He was 38 years old. The story of his life and his humanitarian efforts are told in the “Beyond Baseball: The Life of Roberto Clemente” exhibit, which opens Saturday at the Orange County Regional History Center.

Clemente “was a Hall of Fame baseball player, but everything he did off the field that made him that special person is what this exhibition takes a good look at,” says Michael Perkins, the history center’s curator of exhibits.
Clemente, who played his entire 18-year Major League Baseball career with the Pirates, kept his native Puerto Rico in mind.

“He went back every winter, played baseball in a league or various leagues for teams much of the winter, along with opening a variety of different camps and teaching clinics for children to learn to play baseball, help them out all the time,” Perkins says. “He was truly a person who gave of himself well above and beyond the ordinary.”
One of his Caribbean projects was the creation of Sports City, an athletic complex in Carolina, Puerto Rico, which develops skills in underprivileged youth and discourages drug use. He also worked for recognition for his fellow Latin American players. After his death, he was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
After the crash, the New York Times reported that Clemente had heard that earlier supplies had fallen into the wrong hands, and he was going to Nicaragua to try to keep that from happening again.
The Times quoted a TV producer as saying that Clemente didn’t just lend his name to the earthquake-relief effort.
“He took over the entire thing, arranging for collection points, publicity and the transportation to Nicaragua,” he said.
The “Beyond Baseball” exhibit has relevance in Orlando for reasons beyond Clemente’s caring nature. Central Florida’s large Puerto Rican population gives the exhibit extra resonance.
“Roberto Clemente is a key person to the Puerto Rican community and for good reason because he was an amazing man,” Perkins says. “It’s great to share that story with people who are not necessarily familiar with it.”
The exhibit is bilingual, something “we’re very excited” about, Perkins says. “It has Spanish text along with the English, word for word.”
Central Florida’s history with spring training gives the exhibit another tie to the community.
“We used to host a variety of spring training teams all around, even here in Orlando,” Perkins says. “It gives everyone a nice reminder of all the baseball that used to be played in Florida in the spring, particularly locally.”
The story is told primarily through large visuals and several stories. Among the images is a photo of Clemente with New York Mets manager Yogi Berra before a spring training game in St. Petersburg.
“Beyond Baseball” is a Smithsonian traveling exhibition. The history center has supplemented it with items from the Baseball Hall of Fame and the city of Pittsburgh. But mostly, it’s the story of Clemente.
“We hear a lot about guys today who may get their own and check out. He was absolutely the opposite of that,” Perkins says. “He was completely committed to Puerto Rico and humanity and making the world a better place.”
‘Beyond Baseball: The Life of Roberto Clemente’
Where: Orange County Regional History Center, 65 E. Central Blvd., Orlando
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday, through March 18
Admission: $9 general, $6 ages 5-12
Phone: 407-836-8500
Online: thehistorycenter.org
Activities tied to the history center’s Roberto Clemente exhibit:
•Steve Blass, a Clemente teammate and broadcaster for the Pittsburgh Pirates, will be at the history center Saturday for a screening of the 1975 film “Roberto Clemente: A Touch of Royalty.” An autograph session will follow. Admission: $20 for nonmembers, $10 for members. Reception starts at 6 p.m., program at 6:30. Reservations: 407-836-7010.
•Graffiti artist Hector “Nicer” Nazario will paint a mural of Clemente in Heritage Park in front of the history center from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Jan. 28. Children will be selected to paint three sections of the work, which will be added to the exhibit.
•”Touch of Royalty” also will screen at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., Feb. 19. It’s included in admission.

For the original report go to http://www.orlandosentinel.com/travel/attractions/os-cal-bevil-roberto-clement-history-center-20120119,0,7653642.column

In a history making moment, the promotion of Guyana’s first female Colonel was today announced. Leading the Guyana Defence Force’s promotions list is Substantive Colonel, Windee Algernon, who has been elevated in rank from Substantive Lieutenant Colonel. Demerara Waves reports. She is the region’s first serving female colonel (unless there are any in Cuba, which I have not been able to verify).

The army said in a statement that her promotion was in accordance with Part III Section 16 of the Defence Act Chapter 15:01, of 1977.

Demerara Waves Online News (www.demwaves.com ) was told that Colonel Algernon goes into retirement shortly.

Guyana Defence Force Chief-of-Staff Gary Best announced that, Commander-in-Chief President Donald Ramotar has approved Colonel Algernon’s promotion along with that of 68 other Officers of the Force. Colonel Algernon’s elevation to her new rank is also quite significant since she is the first full-serving member of any of the Caribbean’s armed forces to hold such an appointment.

Colonel Kemraj Persaud who was elevated to that rank on January 1, 2011, has been confirmed in his rank while Substantive Lieutenant Colonels Enoc Gaskin and Frances Abraham have been elevated in rank to Acting Colonel.

Acting Lieutenants Colonel Lawrence Fraser and Ronald Hercules have been confirmed in their rank while Substantive Major Fitzroy Warde has been elevated in rank to Substantive Lieutenant Colonel.

Substantive Majors Ramkarran Doodnauth, Gary Baird, Godfrey Bess, Julius Skeete, Sherwin Anderson and Omar Khan have been elevated in rank to Acting Lieutenant Colonel while Acting Major Raul Jerrick has been confirmed in his rank.

Meanwhile, 13 Substantive Captains have been elevated in rank to Acting Major and seven Acting Captains have been confirmed in their rank.

Eight Substantive Lieutenants have been elevated in rank to Acting Captains while Substantive Lieutenant Kevin Moore has been promoted to Local Captain.

Eight Acting Lieutenants have been confirmed in their rank while eight Second Lieutenants have been elevated in rank to Acting Lieutenant.

In the Coast Guard, Substantive Sub Lieutenant Adrian McLean has been elevated in rank to Acting Lieutenant (CG) while three Acting Sub Lieutenants including one female have been elevated in rank to Substantive Sub Lieutenant.

In the GDF Reserve, Substantive Major Clifton Innis has been elevated in rank to Acting Lieutenant Colonel while Acting Major Irshad Alli has been confirmed in his rank.

Three Acting Captains have been confirmed in their rank and Acting Lieutenant Dwayne Mitchell has been elevated to the rank of Substantive Lieutenant.

The newly-promoted Senior Officers received their new badges of Rank at a simple yet significant Badging Ceremony at the Officers Club at Base Camp Ayanganna this The Commander-in-Chief and Chief-of-Staff have extended congratulations to all the promoted Officers.

For the original report go to http://www.demerarawaves.com/index.php/201201193151/Latest/guyana-gets-first-female-colonel-in-the-caribbean.html

Symeon Brown examines the consequences of declaring a Jamaica Republic in this article in The Huffington Post.

It has been 10 days since newly-elected Jamaican PM, Portia Simpson-Miller, called last order on Queen Elizabeth’s reign as Jamaica’s head of state. In the 50th anniversary year since Jamaica gained independence, the 66-year-old declared “time a come” using the Anglo-Jamaican patois of my grandmother.

Her complete quote: “I love the queen, she is a beautiful lady, a wise lady but time a come” was typical of the Jamaican middle class – defiant yet polite and betrayed Jamaica’s desire for republicanism by revealing a deep-rooted identification with British monarchy and pageantry.

Jamaica is a powerhouse whose cultural product – sport, music, literature, food and style – far exceeds its population of just 2.7 million.

There are few places where Jamaica’s influence has been felt greater than England where the Jamaican diaspora has defined the local spaces it settled in from Notting Hill, in London, to Handsworth, Birmingham. According to a 2007 Runnymede Research Paper forecasting the population’s demographic till 2051 – the small island of Jamaica is the fifth most common country of birth for people outside of the UK in Britain’s two largest cities.

Although the Jamaican diaspora in the UK appears to be declining, Jamaican migrants alongside their counterparts from Britain’s former colonies in the Commonwealth including India, Pakistan, Ghana et al, have not only defined their local spaces but also the very essence of British identity.

In annexing large regions of the world and forging new nation-states into existence through imperial force Britain created a British identity that although unequal was multilingual, multicultural and multiracial.

The 1948 British Nationality Act consolidated that the British identity was not qualified by a single race, ethnicity or language but by the citizenship that came from being a colonial subject. The act gave full British citizenship rights to those in the Commonwealth.

By definition British citizenship has always been diverse – however, British society has not always been the tolerant space for diversity it now praises itself for. The inclusive 1948 act was effectively repealed by the 1962 commonwealth immigrants act, 1971 immigration act and 1981 British Nationality Act after calls that to be British was to be white.

In response to the attempt to rewrite Britishness as being organically mono-ethnic and mono-lingual – anti-racism campaigns in various forms from the Notting Hill Carnival, Rock Against Racism to the Stephen Lawrence Campaign fighting for racial tolerance and equality, fairness and a multicultural agenda.

Tolerance, fairness and multiculturalism are now often considered quintessential British attributes, migrant communities with and as equality campaigners have been central to realising these. The pioneers have been numerous – Ansel Wong, Doreen Lawrence, Lord Herman Ousely are only a few.

This process of widening the franchise of Britishness to celebrate and recognise its racial diversity creates a dilemma for European citizenship. We celebrate Britain for its diversity but in Europe does this celebration or even recognition exist?

EU countries now have the full citizenship rights that Commonwealth countries once shared and are now envious of – between 2010-2011 there was a drop in non-EU migration to the UK of 18% according to the Office for National Statistics(ONS). Prior to this, in 2007/08, 97% of all UK citizenship applications from Nigeria were rejected.

The EU mission is more than a political union – 2012 is the penultimate year of the EU’s ‘Europe for citizens’ programme and this years work programmes aim to “develop a sense of European identity based on history and culture.”

A central part of this is given to historical remembrance in Europe particularly of forced migration, movement and rightfully created a €2,414, 000 pot of operating grants for “preserving the main sites and archives associated with deportations and at commemorating the victims of Nazism and Stalinism”.

In Britain we pride ourselves on being years ahead of our European neighbours on race relations and inclusion, however the 2012 EU work programme for citizenship aims of “enhancing tolerance and mutual understanding between European citizens” – must also qualify the story of African, Caribbean and Asian’s in Europe as equally European.

In 2012, the new Black Cultural Archives that also holds the papers of leading equality think-tank, Runnymede Trust -preserving the Black-British experience in Britain opens in London, according to criteria it is unclear and unlikely that the BCA would be eligible to one of the operating grants of £100k for archives preserving stories of European forced migration and movement – despite doing just that.

Surely remembrance of the slave trade, European colonialism, the expelling of Asians from Uganda are also huge defining narratives of forced migration and understanding movement in Europe?

Racism in Europe is far worst into the continent and rising. Far right groups are growing particularly amongst young men according to a Demos study last year – in which far-right activist, Anders Brieivik shot dead 69 due to a conviction Europe was being contaminated by multiculturalism and Islam.

The response of European leaders including David Cameron and Angela Murkel was to declare that ‘multi-culturalism had failed’ – isolating multi-cutural agenda in Europe rather than highlighting how Europe had been built by it to ‘enhance tolerance and understanding between European citizens’. Where does this leave British identity?

Even if Jamaica realised their republican ambitions the queen would still be sovereign in 15 countries with the Commonwealth despite this Jamaica’s declaration is a reminder of how far the Commonwealth is part of Britain’s past.

It is Europe that represents Britain’s present and future but Europe has a long way to go to ensure that European citizenship represents and is inclusive of the racial diversity that is wholly part of Britishness.

For the original report go to http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/symeon-brown/jamaican-republic-marks-a-dilema_b_1212804.html

“Into the Mix” features a variety of artists from the Caribbean, including Janine Antoni, Christopher Cozier, Blue Curry, Carlos Gamez de Francisco, Marlon Griffith, Sofia Maldonado, Wendy Nanan, Ebony G. Patterson, Sheena Rose, and Heino Schmid, with text by Nicholas Laughlin. The show opens on February 4 and will be on view through April 14, 2012. The opening reception will be held on February 3 from 5:00pm until 10:00pm at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. The Museum is located at 715 West Main Street in Louisville, Kentucky.

Nicholas Laughlin will be the moderator of a discussion with Blue Curry, Marlon Griffith, and Sofia Maldonado on Saturday, February 4 at the 4:00pm at the Chao Theater in the University of Louisville in Kentucky. (A discussion with Christopher Cozier, Ebony G. Patterson, and Courtney Martin is to be announced.)

Description: Furthering the conversation of what is culturally authentic, this exhibition reveals how disparate artists from the Caribbean connect with each other in a virtual world that has no boundaries. Through E-Catalogues, by Draconian Switch and Richard Rawlins, the show will develop written texts with the artists, blog comments and include pictures from reviews, interventions, happenings, and discussions that happen in Louisville and other regions of the world during the 10 weeks.

During the opening week from January 30 to February 4, several artists in the exhibition will be in Louisville creating their works, interacting with students and museum visitors, doing artist talks, and making performances. In collaboration with this exhibition, Carlos Gamez de Francisco will be in the Steve Wilson gallery as artist-in-residence, working on his newest series of paintings.

[Many thanks to Holly Bynoe for bringing this item to our attention.]

For full post, see http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2012/01/new-exhibition-into-the-mix/ and http://www.kentuckyarts.org/upcoming-events/

Image: “The Ambassador of Sutan Fateh Ali Khan Shahab or…” by Carlos Gamez De Francisco

French investigative magistrate Sophie Clément has asked US authorities for access to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to probe claims of torture by three French nationals. The magistrate is looking to shed light on possible acts of torture during the detention at Guantanamo of defendants Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi and Khaled Ben Mustapha, and would potentially include questioning of US military personnel.

A French judge has requested access to the US-run Guantanamo Bay prison camp to investigate allegations of torture made by three French nationals. The three men were former detainees at the US military facility in Cuba but returned to France in 2004 and 2005.

Sophie Clément, an investigative magistrate, has submitted a request to US authorities to see “all documents relating to the justification and modalities of (US) armed operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to the treatment of persons arrested during these operations,” in a document signed Jan. 2. Investigative magistrates in France act as independent legal detectives, probing possible crimes in certain sensitive cases. Magistrate Clément is known in France for her previous investigation of crimes committed by the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

[. . .] “This [request] is unprecedented,” said Philippe Meilhac, the lawyer for former prisoner Khaled Ben Mustapha. “But it’s normal that the judge leading the investigation approach those concerned at Guantanamo to verify these claims.”

Arrested in late 2001 on the Afghan-Pakistani border, the three men were sent to the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison. They were detained there for periods of between 11 and 17 months, before returning to France. Benchellali has reported that before being taken to Cuba he was taken to Afghanistan where he states he was beaten and forced to strip, and then made to lie on top of other naked men while US soldiers took photos. Ben Mustapha reports that after his arrest he was also taken to Afghanistan where he was subjected to sexual abuse, which judge Clément said in the legal documents could lead to rape charges. All three former inmates told of being beaten during interrogations. They were sentenced by a French court to one year in prison on terrorism charges in 2011 but have said they will appeal that decision.

According to the French lawyer, the legal request was especially sensitive because it included the possibility of questioning US soldiers.

Nevertheless, Meilhac hoped magistrate Clément’s move would set a precedent and spur other European countries to look into the torture claims made by other former Guantanamo inmates who hold European passports. Meilhac even invoked the possibility of a trial of Guantanamo personnel charged with torture in absentia, a possibility under French law. In 2010 a court in Paris tried 15 Chileans linked to the Pinochet dictatorship in absentia, eventually convicting 14 of the accused.

The Guantanamo prison was opened in January 2002, under the administration of former US president George W. Bush, to jail suspected terrorists. A decade on, 171 prisoners remain there, despite President Barack Obama’s promises to close the camp.

For full article, see http://www.france24.com/en/20120118-france-judge-guantanamo-bay-prison-investigation-torture-rape-clement-usa-afghanistan

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has now included Haitian nationals as eligible for federal guest worker programs (H-2A and H-2B visas) to employ low-wage laborers to work in the United States. Haitian President Michel Martelly thanked the United States for its decision. Other new countries on the list are Iceland, Montenegro, Spain and Switzerland.

Haitian advocates, including U.S. lawmakers and immigration supporters, have long lobbied for the U.S. government to allow Haitian nationals to participate in the visa programs. Under both, U.S. companies can now temporarily import low-wage laborers. H-2A visas are given to agricultural workers, while H-2B typically are given to those in industries with short, seasonal spikes such as hotels, construction and food service.

“This is great news for the people of Haiti who are rebuilding their lives while their homeland recovers from the devastating earthquake that struck their nation two years ago last week,’’ U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami. “It’s a win-win for thousands of Haitian families who remain displaced and the businesses here that employ them.”

[. . . ] The guest worker program is not without its critics especially in Florida. Growers have long complained about the paperwork and expenses associated with the program. Some growers say the legally imported workers are more expensive than undocumented migrants because guest workers must be paid more than the state’s minimum wage. Also, housing and transportation for guest workers’ to and from their country must be provided.

For more information, see http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/18/2596312/haiti-workers-can-now-apply-for.html

Robin Denselow reviews Sparrows retrospective collection for The Guardian.

Sub-titled “wit, wisdom and soul from the King of Calypso 1962-74″, this two-album set provides a reminder of the varied skills of the singer-songwriter who dominated Caribbean music in the pre-reggae era, but fails to provide quite the tribute he deserves. Mighty Sparrow was celebrated for his powerful vocals, his fusion of calypso with jazz and soul, and for his brave, often controversial lyrics. This curiously constructed set starts with a batch of his lesser songs such as “Calypso Boogaloo,” but improves with the outrageous, decidedly non-PC “Congo Man.” His famed songs of sexual bragging include the cheerfully witty “Big Bamboo” and “Bois Bande,” the autobiographical pieces include the gloriously upbeat “Sparrow Come Back Home,” but there are surprisingly few of his political songs. “Kennedy and Khrushchev” is a pro-American reaction to the Cuban missile crisis, while “Ah Diggin’ Horrors” is an angry, brass-backed story of bad news and hard times. Best of all, there’s the powerful and thoughtful lament “Slave,” providing further proof that Sparrow was no mere novelty singer.

For the original report go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/19/mighty-sparrow-sparromania-review?newsfeed=true

After a bout of pneumonia in Puerto Rico, the flamboyant prognosticator, 79, will be transferred to a medical center specializing in cardiovascular treatment, Sarah Moreno reports in The Miami Herald.

Popular Spanish-language astrologer Walter Mercado, currently known as Shanti Ananda, will be transferred from a hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he has been hospitalized since last week, to a medical institution on the mainland United States that specializes in cardiovascular treatment.

After passing out in the city of Ponce on Saturday, Mercado, 79, was hospitalized with complications from pneumonia.

“Although he had gotten better from the pneumonia, Shanti Ananda’s blood pressure had been fluctuating during his hospitalization,” a spokesperson with his publicist’s office told El Nuevo Herald.

“They have taken him more as a precaution than as a necessity. Doctors feel more comfortable with him in the Cleveland hospital, which specializes in heart disease.”

The transfer to the Cleveland hospital, which was not identified, was expected Wednesday night or Thursday morning. It was not immediately clear whether Mercado would be flown by air ambulance or on a commercial airliner.

The flamboyant astrologer, wildly popular in Latin America and whose daily horoscopes appear in El Nuevo Herald, will undergo a series of medical exams to determine how serious his blood pressure problem is.

The astrologer’s niece, Ivonne Benet Mercado, in a statement to Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día newspaper, said her uncle was responding positively to the treatment.

“He is healthy and takes good care of himself. His positivity and good mood help him,” said Benet.

A statement from Mercado’s office said he was in good spirits, communicative and “wishes everybody blessings and prosperity in 2012.”

Mercado appeared for years on Spanish-language television delivering his prognostications for his viewers.

Three years ago in federal court during a trademark dispute over his own name, he toned down his flamboyant look, arriving in a jacket instead of the colorful, flowing robes he typically wears in his public appearances. But his pockets were stuffed with amulets.

“I had a Ganesh. I had a Virgin. A rosary. The red cords of Kabbalah,” he said. “And a few other little things.”

For the original report go to http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/18/2596331/astrologer-walter-mercado-to-be.html