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61
General Discussion / Anybody liming in Belfast or Dublin?
« on: June 21, 2014, 04:39:12 AM »
... leh me know.

62
General Discussion / Air Transat: anyone with experience flying dem?
« on: June 02, 2014, 07:17:45 AM »
What's de scene with them? Good, bad, indifferent?

63
Football / Soccer coach charged with killing 12-year-old boy
« on: May 23, 2014, 05:37:50 PM »
Soccer coach charged with killing 12-year-old boy

POTSDAM, N.Y. — Nearly three years after a 12-year-old boy’s slaying shocked this small northern New York village, a college soccer coach was charged with suffocating and strangling the child, who was his ex-girlfriend’s son, authorities said Friday.

Oral “Nick” Hillary, the men’s soccer coach at Clarkson University, was arrested Thursday at his home in Potsdam and charged with second-degree murder in Garrett Phillips’ killing, police said.

The boy was found unconscious inside his home after neighbors heard screams and cries for help on Oct. 24, 2011. He had been strangled and suffocated with a pillow, authorities said.

Hillary was being held without bail Friday in the St. Lawrence County Jail. A message left with his lawyer, Christopher Renfroe of Queens, wasn’t returned.

District Attorney Mary Rain said details of the case weren’t being disclosed, including the evidence presented to a grand jury. She said Hillary and his teenage daughter had lived with Tandy Collins, Garrett’s mother, and her two sons, but she broke off the relationship in August 2011. By the time Garrett was killed, Hillary was living elsewhere in Potsdam, Rain said.

Officials at Clarkson University, a Division III school, said Hillary is on administrative leave.

The killing shocked Potsdam, a college town of about 9,400 residents 20 miles from the Canadian border. Rain said she made the case a priority when she took office Jan. 1.

“Garrett was such an outgoing young man and he had so many friends,” Rain said. “He was just one of those kids that everybody loved.”

Hillary was a soccer star at rival St. Lawrence University in nearby Canton. According to the Clarkson athletic department’s website, Hillary was four-year starter and two-year captain at St. Lawrence, leading the Saints to a 22-0-0 record and the Division III national championship in 1999. A 2000 St. Lawrence graduate, he was an assistant coach at his alma mater before being named Clarkson’s head coach six years ago.

A native of Jamaica, Hillary coached high school and club soccer teams in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida, area before moving back north. He’s is a 1993 graduate of Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, New York.

He has four other children, including 1-year-old twins, with another woman, Rain said.

Video

Hillary Pleads Not Guilty

64
General Discussion / Rwanda
« on: April 06, 2014, 07:31:37 PM »
Them bastards didn't even go into Rwanda 20 years ago until it was far too late and what resulted was a major genocide on an embarrassingly large scale.

In recent comments, Kagame has blamed the French for complicity in the outcome. (Deeks alluded to Kagame's distance from the French in another post).

Well people, it's the 20th anniversary and there have been all sorts of consequences and implications. A lil while ago I stumbled upon the video below. Distant victims.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/8pfpo_BjFRo&amp;feature=related" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/8pfpo_BjFRo&amp;feature=related</a>


The NYT has a lil something running called "Portraits of Reconciliation".

Lots of food for thought.

65
Football / Clay Glasgow named Head Coach at Dakota Wesleyan
« on: February 21, 2014, 06:03:05 AM »
Glasgow named DWU women's soccer coach

Posted: Jan 29, 2014 6:28 PM EST
Updated: Jan 29, 2014 6:28 PM EST
By Erik Thorstenson - email

http://www.ksfy.com/story/24583051/glascow-named-dwu?clienttype=generic&smartdevicecgbypass

http://www.dwuathletics.com/2014/01/glasgow-hired-as-dwu-womens-soccer-coach/
 

MITCHELL, S.D. – Clay Glasgow has been hired to take over as the head women's soccer coach at Dakota Wesleyan University, athletic director Curt Hart announced Monday morning.

 Glasgow comes to Dakota Wesleyan with a resume full of soccer experience as a coach at all levels as well as a player. Most recently, Glasgow, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, was an assistant coach for the Augustana College women's soccer team, as well as the varsity girls' soccer coach at Sioux Falls Roosevelt High School.

 "Clay's soccer resume speaks for itself," Hart said. "He was a part of two very successful teams at both the college and high school level in Sioux Falls, and he also has coaching experience at the club level. That coaching experience gives him connections around the state necessary for bringing the best soccer players to continue their careers at DWU and, combined with his passion for the game, made him the ideal candidate for the job."

 Glasgow wrapped up his sixth year as an assistant at Augie in 2013, and helped the Vikings to a 10-8-1 record. He helped with recruiting and game analysis, as well as the organization of indoor tournaments and summer camps. Augustana went 54-40-11 in the regular season in his tenure.

 At Roosevelt, Glasgow has been the head coach since the 2008 season. In his seven seasons with the Rough Riders, including one as the junior varsity coach, Roosevelt is 66-22-9 and won the 2012 and 2013 Class AA state titles. In those two seasons, Roosevelt went undefeated for 25 games. Glasgow has coached many Class AA All-State selections, and his team overall GPA is better than 3.5.

 Glasgow also coaches the Dakota Alliance U13 girls' team. He played soccer collegiately at Brewton Parker College in Mount Vernon, Ga., before transferring to Mount Marty College for his final two seasons from 2002-04. He earned All-GPAC First Team honors and was named the team's MVP. He also played for the Sioux Falls Spitfire Premier Developmental team from 2004-06. He is B-license certified through the United State Soccer Federation.

 "I'm really excited about being the next head coach at Dakota Wesleyan," Glasgow said. "I want to especially thank Curt Hart, Jon Hart and the rest of the staff for hiring me. The Tigers have been conference champions in the past, and my goal is to take them back to the top."

 Glasgow is the third head coach in Tiger women's soccer history. He inherits a program that went 4-12-2 overall and 1-8-1 in the Great Plains Athletic Conference in 2013. DWU loses four seniors to graduation in May.

 He and his wife, Andrea, currently live in Sioux Falls, but he will begin working with the team and recruiting immediately.

66
Football / CHAN 2014 Final: Libya v Ghana Full Match
« on: February 10, 2014, 06:19:39 PM »
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/9H4sb-QWWSE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/9H4sb-QWWSE</a>

We really eh big this tournament up too much.

67
General Discussion / Atlanta Snow
« on: January 29, 2014, 09:14:18 AM »
How allyuh making out? Predictably, de mayor taking licks.

68
General Discussion / R.I.P Komla Dumor
« on: January 19, 2014, 05:41:21 PM »
BBC World TV's Komla Dumor dies

18 January 2014

Mike Wooldridge pays tribute to Komla Dumor's ''infectious sense of humour''
BBC TV presenter Komla Dumor has died suddenly at his home in London at the age of 41, it has been announced.

Ghana-born Dumor was a presenter for BBC World News and its Focus on Africa programme.

One of Ghana's best-known journalists, he joined the BBC as a radio broadcaster in 2007 after a decade of journalism in Ghana.

Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama said on Twitter that his country had lost one of its finest ambassadors.

BBC Global News Director Peter Horrocks called Dumor a leading light of African journalism who would be deeply missed.

He was "committed to telling the story of Africa as it really is," Mr Horrocks said in a statement.

"Africa's energy and enthusiasm seemed to shine through every story Komla told".

"Komla's many friends and colleagues across Africa and the world will be as devastated as we are by this shocking news."

The BBC understands he had suffered a heart attack.

Komla Dumor featured in New African magazine's November 2013 list of 100 most influential Africans. It said he had "established himself as one of the emerging African faces of global broadcasting", who had "considerable influence on how the continent is covered".

James Harding, BBC Director of News and Current Affairs, spoke of Komla Dumor's "singular role in transforming the coverage of Africa". "He brought a depth of understanding, a great deal of courage, a joyous charm and boundless charisma to his work," Mr Harding said.

Komla Dumor was born on 3 October 1972 in Accra, Ghana.

He graduated with a BA in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Ghana, and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University.

He won the Ghana Journalist of the Year award in 2003 and joined the BBC four years later.

From then until 2009 he hosted Network Africa for BBC World Service radio, before joining The World Today programme.

In 2009 Komla Dumor became the first host of Africa Business Report on BBC World News. He was a regular presenter of Focus on Africa and had fronted the programme the day before he died.

He travelled across Africa, meeting the continent's top entrepreneurs and reporting on the latest business trends around the continent.

He interviewed a number of high-profile guests including Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.

Last month, he covered the funeral of former South African President, Nelson Mandela, whom he described as "one of the greatest figures of modern history".

He anchored live coverage of major events including the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the funeral of Kim Jong-il, the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Norway shootings and the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

In his review of 2013, published last month, Dumor said the passing of Mandela was "one of the moments that will stay with me".

"Covering the funeral for me will always be a special moment. I will look back on it with a sense of sadness. But also with gratitude. I feel lucky to have been a witness to that part of the Mandela story."

'Never flinched'

Meeting Komla Dumor for the first time in Ghana in 2007, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet said she had noticed how young Ghanaian journalists looked up to him.

He never flinched from asking tough questions, but also loved to share a laugh, she says.

She adds that Komla Dumor had many loves including football, his faith, his family: "He always said 'I just love talking with people'."


69
General Discussion / R.I.P. NELSON MANDELA!!!!!!!!!
« on: December 05, 2013, 04:03:29 PM »
...

70
Football / 2013 U-17 WC UAE
« on: October 17, 2013, 02:09:56 PM »
Opening day results

Group A

Brazil 6 Slovakia 1

Honduras 2 UAE 1
 

Group B

Uruguay 7  New Zealand 0

Italy 1 Ivory Coast 0


71
Football / Danone Nations Cup
« on: September 09, 2013, 08:17:51 AM »
This is a U12 tournament. Maybe not fashionable to discuss, but definitely should be part of our aspirations. The final took place this past weekend.

http://www.danonenationscup.com/en/results

http://www.youtube.com/danonecup

https://www.facebook.com/danonenationscup

Enjoy!

72
General Discussion / Montreal
« on: August 19, 2013, 02:41:27 PM »
Visited for the first time recently and came away having enjoyed the experience. Managed to take in a variety of perspectives of the city ... Even sampled some poutine at one of these locations: www.poutineville.com  ... cyah really complain atallatall bout de overall vibe.

maxg, if yuh hear a knock on yuh door, iz me  :devil:

73
May 11, 2013
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered

FRANCES ROBLES and N. R. KLEINFIELD
The New York Times

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.

The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.

The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.

“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”

Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.

Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.

“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.

He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.

“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”

He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”

Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.

“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”

The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.

Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.

The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.

Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”

A Common Eyewitness

Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”

In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.

In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.

Mr. Hill was acquitted.

In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.

Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.

Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.

“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.

Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.

They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.

Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.


Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.

As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”

The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.

Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.

“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.
???

Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.

George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.

A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.

In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”

Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”

His Own Way

Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.

His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.

Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.

“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”

He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”

The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.

Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.

In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”

“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”

Questionable Tactics

When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.

But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.

Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.

Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”

Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.

Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.

He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.

“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”

At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.

“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”

In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”

He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”

Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.

Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.

Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”

Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”

Accusations of Intimidation

Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.

In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.

Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.

Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.


The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.

The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.

The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.

“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”

Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.

Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.

“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.

He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.

“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”

He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”

Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.

“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”

The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.

Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.

The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.

Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”

A Common Eyewitness

Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”

In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.

In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.

Mr. Hill was acquitted.

In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.

Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.

Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.

“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.

Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.

They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.

Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.

Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.

As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”

The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.

Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.

“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.

Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.

George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.

A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.

In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”

Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”

His Own Way

Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.

His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.

Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.

“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”

He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”

The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.

Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.

In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”

“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”

Questionable Tactics

When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.

But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.

Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.

Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”

Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.

Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.

He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.

“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”

At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.

“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”

In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”

He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”

Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.

Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.

Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”

Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”

Accusations of Intimidation

Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.

In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.

Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.

Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.

During the trial, Michael Baum, Mr. Pondexter’s defense lawyer, said the daughter told him that she had lied because Mr. Scarcella had threatened her.

The judge did not allow her to take the stand again or strike her testimony. Mr. Pondexter was convicted. In 1996, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The girl did not appear, and Mr. Pondexter was acquitted.

Mr. Scarcella called it “ridiculous” that he would intimidate a person to testify.

“I have no recollection of that whatsoever,” he said.

74
Football / Opportunities
« on: March 12, 2013, 03:12:22 PM »
Most of our players go through a secondary school education locally and then look into being picked up for a scholarship subsequent to that. I want to use this thread to bring a few opportunities to the attention of parents of youngsters, youngsters themselves etc.

To start ... there's a school in Florida named Montverde Academy ... some of you may know it as one of the highest ranked prep programs in the U.S. for basketball ... but I want to talk football here.

http://montverde.org
http://mvasports.com/

http://mvasports.com/team/montverde-academy-soccer/  (for boys)

Quote
The Eagles were recognized as the Preseason #1 high school team in the nation by ESPN Rise Magazine for the 2011-12 winter season and finished the year with an overall record of 23 wins, 0 losses, and 4 draws.  The Boys Varsity Soccer Program was recognized as the #1 high school program in the country for 2011-12 by MaxPreps.com and finished #2 in the final ESPN Rise Magazine rankings.  For the second consecutive year under Head Coach Mike Potempa, the entire Senior class of 2012 signed athletic specific scholarships at NCAA and NAIA institutions and currently holds the nation's longest unbeaten streak at 54 matches.

http://mvasports.com/team/montverde-academy-girls-varsity-soccer/  (for girls)

Some months back, I had a conversation with former Canadian international, Robbie Aristodemo, the girls' coach @ Montverde, and one of the things he mentioned is that Montverde offers the prospect of scholarships and grants to kids from all over the world, who would otherwise find the cost of attendance prohibitive. Yuh hadda submit paperwork etc, but small thing if yuh serious.

I've provided several links, check it out ... this isn't an ad for them (I wasn't asked to bring this to anyone's attention), but if one of the forum family or national family could benefit from this, why not? Bless.

Get past the sticker shock @ the cost of tuition there. Believe me when I tell you it's possible. Dreams start somewhere.

75
General Discussion / "I am not [David] Cameron's Black Man"
« on: February 20, 2013, 01:42:11 PM »
'I'm not Cameron's black man'
 
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/-I-m-not-Cameron-s-black-man-_13670041#ixzz2LTFCF0M4

A third-generation Jamaican, who is a prominent member of Britain's Conservative Party, is agonising over the ease at which many blacks, particularly in the United Kingdom, embrace the view that they are marginalised, and as a result do very little to lift themselves out of poverty and dependence.
 
Shaun Bailey, Prime Minister David Cameron's special advisor on youth and crime, believes too many blacks have allowed themselves to be misled by the liberal agenda that does not place sufficient emphasis on the importance of individual responsibility and accountability.

Addressing journalists at this week's Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange, Bailey, who described himself as being from "dirt poor conditions", emphasised that blacks need to play a leading role in addressing the challenges that confront them.
 
"In the context of Britain we have a lot of apologists, so people say you come from a poor background, it's fine, continue to be poor. I think our greatest forward step is in us, and if we don't take a stance to correct some of what's wrong for us, we are not going anywhere," said Bailey in a comment rooted in Marcus Garvey's teaching that "none but ourselves can free our minds", and which was made even more popular by reggae icon Bob Marley in his classic, Redemption Song.
 
"The change for poor communities is responsibility and work, and if you don't have those then you are in trouble," Bailey added as he defended his decision to join the Conservative party, which traditionally does not attract a large number of blacks, particularly because of significant race relation issues.
 
For him, the Conservative party articulates certain values that he learnt from his Jamaican grandmother and mother, who both played a critical role in his development and in his appreciation of himself.
 
"We are church-going, believe in the family, looking after our children, desperate to educate, those are core Tory values and that's why it's very simple for me to become a Tory," said Bailey in reference to the moniker used to describe the Conservative party, which was once led by the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister.
 
Bailey, who is in Jamaica as part of efforts to know the country, contends that too many blacks allow themselves to wallow in situations that sometimes result from their own actions. "We have chosen victim and we are great victims because you can see us from across the streets. Poor white communities have exactly the same problems. I grew up among a bunch of white boys, none of them doing any better than us, and that's why for me in the context of Britain, it's not actually a colour thing," Bailey said as he identified some of the practices that continue to affect the progress of black people in the UK.
 
"The kind of conversations we have in our community is how our fathers have been replaced by welfare. People have made it all right to be single and be a parent without asking how tough that's going to be. In every way that you can measure social pain, we are leading. Fifty-eight per cent of black children in Britain grow up in a single-parent family, unemployment rate is more than double in our community, our failure in school is legendary.

"For me, it's not about being black, the fact that I am black just makes things clear for me," said Bailey even as he made an appeal for Jamaicans to rise above the fray and become associated with success.
 
Bailey says he has seen many examples of successful blacks and made reference to his observation of their political clout and status in Jamaica as well as in sections of the United States. "What's so beautiful is for a young black boy like myself to come to Jamaica and see the establishment and see many more black people in it. I spent some time in DC (Washington), and a lot of the establishment is black as well, and for me that was an emotional experience. I want that to happen for all black boys, especially in Britain, and that means joining the establishment, taking over, changing it, making it more relevant, and I relish the role.
 
"I am not Cameron's black man, and he is aware of that, and to his credit and to the party's credit they have never asked me to be their black man, and I won't do it. In my opinion, that's what happens if you join the British Labour party. I am a man who just happens to be black and I hope I have some qualities to offer and my Jamaican heritage gives me a unique look and a unique power to bring to the game," Bailey asserted.
 
"I am so confident in the ability of the black community to offer things of merit. We are good enough to be there on merit, and I accept that these things don't happen by Osmosis and you may need to push it along. At this point in my life I personally think if you looked for politicians in the correct places you would find black people of merit who are willing to do the job," said Bailey as he spoke of the tremendous potential among many black youth, some of whom are capitalising on educational opportunities.
 
Regarding the possibility of a black person becoming the British prime minister, the young politician said while it might not happen in the near future, it remains a distinct possibility.
 
"We won't deliver a Barack Obama, we will deliver a much more British look. In America it's easier to have conversations about race; British people are less publicly racist. So will we get to a black prime minister? Absolutely! When, it's anybody's guess. Am I going to try to help? Definitely! said Bailey, who lost his bid to represent Hammersmith in the 2010 general, election, but acknowledged that he is on the hunt for a good winnable constituency that will land him a seat inside the British Parliament.

76
General Discussion / What is de DEAL?
« on: February 20, 2013, 01:32:36 PM »
Kwame Kilpatrick
Monica Conyers

Enter Jesse Jackson, Jr. and wife Sandra

The charges brought against Jesse Jackson, Jr.

The charge laid against Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s wife

77
Football / CONCACAF U-20 Championship 2013 edition
« on: February 18, 2013, 06:45:25 PM »
Haitians appear have given the game away on the back of an early penalty kick and an insurance item. Scoreline was 2-0 at the half.

See the schedule of matches here

78
General Discussion / Strap on yuh seatbelt!
« on: February 03, 2013, 08:58:22 PM »
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/592m69FPtjA" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/592m69FPtjA</a>

79
Entertainment & Culture Discussion / Squeeze Interview with Supercat
« on: January 04, 2013, 02:58:28 PM »
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/-COvXVDl2_Q" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/-COvXVDl2_Q</a>

Speaks extensively about the courts, the music business, reputed attempts on his life, unclaimed property ... nuff things. Form your own conclusions. Ends @ 47'.

80
As with any year, there's typically a period of reflection around this time. Who deserves a big up? Who deserve de fire? During the course of a year, in the course of national life, plenty ting does pass.

Ah coming back with more, but just to start it off with an example.

Sugar: To Keshorn Walcott for not only bringing home the gold medal from London, but for doing so with humility. :beermug:  ... and to the public who turned up to welcome the Olympians home.


Salt:To de imps that didn't think about recognizing the other Olympians right off de bat.

81
Entertainment & Culture Discussion / Musical Youth
« on: December 15, 2012, 01:33:27 AM »
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/CSIHV8zIwjE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/CSIHV8zIwjE</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SVFAj-mOzcw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/SVFAj-mOzcw</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/X2oWm62hjzc" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/X2oWm62hjzc</a>

82
General Discussion / Black Friday Shopping Thread
« on: November 23, 2012, 10:01:28 PM »
Well, I had my first Black Friday experience today ... I have to say it was somewhat a window on America.

Some observations:

America is indeed quite a "brown" nation ... most of the consumers I observed were of that ilk ... and there was a reasonably numbered contingent of foreigners (Canadians incl. Quebecois travelling with Truetrini's permission; plenty Brits ... more than a couple Germans ... and a good portion of Russian $$$ was in the mix too).

But the "browning of America" were actually the majority of consumers.

I was curious to see whether some of the deals were illusory, buh ah hadda say some genuine bargains were available.

I din head out into the commercial yonder at midnight, but I should have ... I made it there at 7am ... this meant I got to geh in on the tail end of the extra deals that were reserved for the midnight shoppers ... some stores cut off their extra discounts at 8am ... others a lil later (I was in a Levis store when I heard them announce a 10am cut off ...)

Highlight of the day ... a 15 year old employee in the Nike store who knew his product intimately!!! ... ah hadda say, buying running shoes eh what it used to be ... small man was speaking an entirely different language ...

Which brings me to this ... it's interesting how the retail sector is directed by fairly young people.

Every time i went to the car fuh a lil breather (aka putting purchases in the trunk) ... the late arrivals were losing considerable time trying to get a parking space ... dat had tuh be frustrating ... when I arrived the place was semi-full, buh a couldn't see well due to a fog that hovered over the area ... so ah doh know exactly but there were cars all over the lot ... later people would be parked up on the medians and anywhere they could find a spot ... my guess is the vehicle I saw being towed while I was in the food court was that of someone who didn't park responsibly ... no PA system to broadcast across the stores to leh dem know dey blocking somebody ...

Public restrooms ... hmmm ... cleaning staff were vigorously on top of things ... them ppl could consult abroad ... they on top ah dey game ... on a question of etiquette: when the restroom says "family restroom" ... do you actually expect to see the whole family pouring out of the restroom when the door opens? Hmmm.

There remains a taint of mutual suspicion in the shopping transaction between black males and seemingly proficient employees: "Sir, may I help you?" ... Yuh kinda jes wanted to say ... "Nah I good!!!" ... buh then yuh realize their enthusiastic intervention is really about feeling yuh going and tief deys things ... there are several ways of brokering that and sending them back into dey corner ...

I had a manager come up to me today and boldly announce that I had been in the store for 20 minutes .... lol ... as opposed to who else??? ... Jah Know. Neutralized that quick.

I was at one ah dem huge outlet places ... around 9:30a.m. ah  went to the food court to geh a bite ... it had ppl with dey heads down on tables like dey was wiped out from running from store to store at 3am ... one girl had a few bags clutched around her arms as she slept ... when her sister or whoever came up sometime later to prank her by attempting to pull the bags away ... de gyul start tugging the bags but kept her head down as if she was pulling de bags in her sleep ... when she did raise her head drooling she was lost.

Anyway... quite the experience.


83
Everybody (except ...) wah go to heaven buh nobody want tuh dead.

I read this article and was intrigued. How about we use this space to discuss long life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?pagewanted=all

The Island Where People Forget to Die
By DAN BUETTNER
 

In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.
 
Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

I met Moraitis on Ikaria this past July during one of my visits to explore the extraordinary longevity of the island’s residents. For a decade, with support from the National Geographic Society, I’ve been organizing a study of the places where people live longest. The project grew out of studies by my partners, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer. In 2000, they identified a region of Sardinia’s Nuoro province as the place with the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world. As they zeroed in on a cluster of villages high in Nuoro’s mountains, they drew a boundary in blue ink on a map and began referring to the area inside as the “blue zone.” Starting in 2002, we identified three other populations around the world where people live measurably longer lives than everyone else. The world’s longest-lived women are found on the island of Okinawa. On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we discovered a population of 100,000 mestizos with a lower-than-normal rate of middle-age mortality. And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade.

In 2003, I started a consulting firm to see if it was possible to take what we were learning in the field and apply it to American communities. We also continued to do research and look for other pockets of longevity, and in 2008, following a lead from a Greek researcher, we began investigating Ikaria. Poulain’s plan there was to track down survivors born between 1900 and 1920 and determine when and where individuals died. The approach was complicated by the fact that people often moved around. That meant that not only were birth and death records required, but also information on immigration and emigration.

The data collection had to be rigorous. Earlier claims about long-lived people in places like Ecuador’s Vilcabamba Valley, Pakistan’s Hunza Valley or the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia had all been debunked after researchers discovered that many residents didn’t actually know their ages. For villagers born without birth certificates, it was easy to lose track. One year they were 80; a few months later they were 82. Pretty soon they claimed to be 100. And when a town discovers that a reputation for centenarians draws tourists, who’s going to question it? Even in Ikaria, the truth has been sometimes difficult to nail down. Stories like the one about Moraitis’s miraculous recovery become instant folklore, told and retold and changed and misattributed. (Stories about Moraitis have appeared on Greek TV.) In fact, when I was doing research there in 2009, I met a different man who told me virtually the exact same story about himself.

The study would try to cut through the stories and establish the facts about Ikaria’s longevity. Before including subjects, Poulain cross-referenced birth records against baptism or military documentation. After gathering all the data, he and his colleagues at the University of Athens concluded that people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end.

Ikaria, an island of 99 square miles and home to almost 10,000 Greek nationals, lies about 30 miles off the western coast of Turkey. Its jagged ridge of scrub-covered mountains rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea. Before the Christian era, the island was home to thick oak forests and productive vineyards. Its reputation as a health destination dates back 25 centuries, when Greeks traveled to the island to soak in the hot springs near Therma. In the 17th century, Joseph Georgirenes, the bishop of Ikaria, described its residents as proud people who slept on the ground. “The most commendable thing on this island,” he wrote, “is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

Seeking to learn more about the island’s reputation for long-lived residents, I called on Dr. Ilias Leriadis, one of Ikaria’s few physicians, in 2009. On an outdoor patio at his weekend house, he set a table with Kalamata olives, hummus, heavy Ikarian bread and wine. “People stay up late here,” Leriadis said. “We wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”
 
Pointing across the Aegean toward the neighboring island of Samos, he said: “Just 15 kilometers over there is a completely different world. There they are much more developed. There are high-rises and resorts and homes worth a million euros. In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”

Ikaria’s unusual past may explain its communal inclinations. The strong winds that buffet the island — mentioned in the “Iliad” — and the lack of natural harbors kept it outside the main shipping lanes for most of its history. This forced Ikaria to be self-sufficient. Then in the late 1940s, after the Greek Civil War, the government exiled thousands of Communists and radicals to the island. Nearly 40 percent of adults, many of them disillusioned with the high unemployment rate and the dwindling trickle of resources from Athens, still vote for the local Communist Party. About 75 percent of the population on Ikaria is under 65. The youngest adults, many of whom come home after college, often live in their parents’ home. They typically have to cobble together a living through small jobs and family support.

Leriadis also talked about local “mountain tea,” made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-the-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves and adding a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey, too, is treated as a panacea. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating wounds to curing hangovers, or for treating influenza. Old people here will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.”
 
Over the span of the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’s patients. In the area known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekend.

On a trip the year before, I visited a slate-roofed house built into the slope at the top of a hill. I had come here after hearing of a couple who had been married for more than 75 years. Thanasis and Eirini Karimalis both came to the door, clapped their hands at the thrill of having a visitor and waved me in. They each stood maybe five feet tall. He wore a shapeless cotton shirt and a battered baseball cap, and she wore a housedress with her hair in a bun. Inside, there was a table, a medieval-looking fireplace heating a blackened pot, a nook of a closet that held one woolen suit coat, and fading black-and-white photographs of forebears on a soot-stained wall. The place was warm and cozy. “Sit down,” Eirini commanded. She hadn’t even asked my name or business but was already setting out teacups and a plate of cookies. Meanwhile, Thanasis scooted back and forth across the house with nervous energy, tidying up.

The couple were born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early 20s and raised five children on Thanasis’s pay as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all of Ikaria’s traditional folk, their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months.

During a tour of their property, Thanasis and Eirini introduced their pigs to me by name. Just after sunset, after we returned to their home to have some tea, another old couple walked in, carrying a glass amphora of homemade wine. The four nonagenarians cheek-kissed one another heartily and settled in around the table. They gossiped, drank wine and occasionally erupted into laughter.

Dr. Ioanna Chinou, a professor at the University of Athens School of Pharmacy, is one of Europe’s top experts on the bioactive properties of herbs and natural products. When I consulted her about Ikarians’ longevity, she told me that many of the teas they consume are traditional Greek remedies. Wild mint fights gingivitis and gastrointestinal disorders; rosemary is used as a remedy for gout; artemisia is thought to improve blood circulation. She invited me to give her samples and later tested seven of the most commonly used herbs on Ikaria. As rich sources of polyphenols, they showed strong antioxidant properties, she reported. Most of these herbs also contained mild diuretics. Doctors often use diuretics to treat hypertension — perhaps by drinking tea nightly, Ikarians have gently lowered their blood pressure throughout their lives.

Meanwhile, my colleagues Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain set out to track down the island’s 164 residents who were over 90 as of 1999, starting in the municipality of Raches. They found that 75 nonagenarians were still alive. Then, along with additional researchers, they fanned out across the island and asked 35 elderly subjects a battery of lifestyle questions to assess physical and cognitive functioning: How much do you sleep? Did you ever smoke? They asked them to get up and down from a chair five times and recorded how long it took them to walk 13 feet. To test mental agility, the researchers had subjects recall a series of items and reproduce geometric shapes.

Pes and Poulain were joined in the field by Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens, an expert on the Mediterranean diet. She helped administer surveys, often sitting in village kitchens to ask subjects to reconstruct their childhood eating habits. She noted that the Ikarians’ diet, like that of others around the Mediterranean, was rich in olive oil and vegetables, low in dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and also included moderate amounts of alcohol. It emphasized homegrown potatoes, beans (garbanzo, black-eyed peas and lentils), wild greens and locally produced goat milk and honey.

As I knew from my studies in other places with high numbers of very old people, every one of the Ikarians’ dietary tendencies had been linked to increased life spans: low intake of saturated fats from meat and dairy was associated with lower risk of heart disease; olive oil — especially unheated — reduced bad cholesterol and raised good cholesterol. Goat’s milk contained serotonin-boosting tryptophan and was easily digestible for older people. Some wild greens had 10 times as many antioxidants as red wine. Wine — in moderation — had been shown to be good for you if consumed as part of a Mediterranean diet, because it prompts the body to absorb more flavonoids, a type of antioxidant. And coffee, once said to stunt growth, was now associated with lower rates of diabetes, heart disease and, for some, Parkinson’s. Local sourdough bread might actually reduce a meal’s glycemic load. You could even argue that potatoes contributed heart-healthy potassium, vitamin B6 and fiber to the Ikarian diet. Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four additional years of life expectancy.

Of course, it may not be only what they’re eating; it may also be what they’re not eating. “Are they doing something positive, or is it the absence of something negative?” Gary Taubes asked when I described to him the Ikarians’ longevity and their diet. Taubes is a founder of the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative and the author of “Why We Get Fat” (and has written several articles for this magazine). “One explanation why they live so long is they eat a plant-based diet. Or it could be the absence of sugar and white flour. From what I know of the Greek diet, they eat very little refined sugar, and their breads have been traditionally made with stone-ground wheat.”

Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life.
She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping — at least three days weekly — was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with “good duration” and “achievement.”

During our time on Ikaria, my colleagues and I stayed at Thea Parikos’s guesthouse, the social hub of western Ikaria. Local women gathered in the dining room at midmorning to gossip over tea. Late at night, after the dinner rush, tables were pushed aside and the dining room became a dance floor, with people locking arms and kick-dancing to Greek music.

Parikos cooked the way her ancestors had for centuries, giving us a chance to consume the diet we were studying. For breakfast, she served local yogurt and honey from the 90-year-old beekeeper next door. For dinner, she walked out into the fields and returned with handfuls of weedlike greens, combined them with pumpkin and baked them into savory pies. My favorite was a dish made with black-eyed peas, tomatoes, fennel tops and garlic and finished with olive oil that we dubbed Ikarian stew.

Despite her consummately Ikarian air, Parikos was actually born in Detroit to an American father and an Ikarian mother. She had attended high school, worked as a real estate agent and married in the United States. After she and her husband had their first child, she felt a “genetic craving” for Ikaria. “I was not unhappy in America,” she said. “We had good friends, we went out to dinner on the weekends, I drove a Chevrolet. But I was always in a hurry.”

When she and her family moved to Ikaria and opened the guesthouse, everything changed. She stopped shopping for most groceries, instead planting a huge garden that provided most of their fruits and vegetables. She lost weight without trying to. I asked her if she thought her simple diet was going to make her family live longer. “Yes,” she said. “But we don’t think about it that way. It’s bigger than that.”

Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me. People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism, for example, might also be a painter or an electrician or have a store. “People are fine here because we are very self-sufficient,” she said. “We may not have money for luxuries, but we will have food on the table and still have fun with family and friends. We may not be in a hurry to get work done during the day, so we work into the night. At the end of the day, we don’t go home to sit on the couch.”

Parikos was nursing a mug of coffee. Sunlight sifted in through the window shades; the waves of the nearby Aegean could be barely heard over the din of breakfast. “Do you know there’s no word in Greek for privacy?” she declared. “When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because it puts a check on people who don’t want to be caught or who do something to embarrass their family. If your kids misbehave, your neighbor has no problem disciplining them. There is less crime, not because of good policing, but because of the risk of shaming the family. You asked me about food, and yes, we do eat better here than in America. But it’s more about how we eat. Even if it’s your lunch break from work, you relax and enjoy your meal. You enjoy the company of whoever you are with. Food here is always enjoyed in combination with conversation.”

In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

Social structure might turn out to be more important.
In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term plan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.

The healthful plant-based diet that Seventh-day Adventists eat has been associated with an extra decade of life expectancy. It has also been linked to reduced rates of diabetes and heart disease. Adventists’ diet is inspired by the Bible — Genesis 1:29. (“And God said: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed . . . and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.’ ”) But again, the key insight might be more about social structure than about the diet itself. While for most people, diets eventually fail, the Adventists eat the way they do for decades. How? Adventists hang out with other Adventists. When you go to an Adventist picnic, there’s no steak grilling on the barbecue; it’s a vegetarian potluck. No one is drinking alcohol or smoking. As Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard, found when examining data from a long-term study of the residents of Framingham, Mass., health habits can be as contagious as a cold virus. By his calculation, a Framingham individual’s chances of becoming obese shot up by 57 percent if a friend became obese. Among the Adventists we looked at, it was mostly positive social contagions that were in circulation.

Ask the very old on Ikaria how they managed to live past 90, and they’ll usually talk about the clean air and the wine. Or, as one 101-year-old woman put it to me with a shrug, “We just forget to die.” The reality is they have no idea how they got to be so old. And neither do we. To answer that question would require carefully tracking the lifestyles of a study group and a control group for an entire human lifetime (and then some). We do know from reliable data that people on Ikaria are outliving those on surrounding islands (a control group, of sorts). Samos, for instance, is just eight miles away. People there with the same genetic background eat yogurt, drink wine, breathe the same air, fish from the same sea as their neighbors on Ikaria. But people on Samos tend to live no longer than average Greeks. This is what makes the Ikarian formula so tantalizing.

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity.
That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

As our access to calories has increased, we’ve decreased the amount of physical activity in our lives. In 1970, about 40 percent of all children in the U.S. walked to school; now fewer than 12 percent do. Our grandparents, without exercising, burned up about five times as many calories a day in physical activity as we do. At the same time, access to food has exploded.

Despite the island’s relative isolation, its tortuous roads and the fierce independence of its inhabitants, the American food culture, among other forces, is beginning to take root in Ikaria. Village markets are now selling potato chips and soda, which in my experience is replacing tea as the drink of choice among younger Ikarians. As the island’s ancient traditions give way before globalization, the gap between Ikarian life spans and those of the rest of the world seems to be gradually disappearing, as the next generations of old people become less likely to live quite so long.
 
The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot.

I called Moraitis a few weeks ago from my home in Minneapolis. Elpiniki died in the spring at age 85, and now he lives alone. He picked up the phone in the same whitewashed house that he’d moved into 35 years ago. It was late afternoon in Ikaria. He had worked in his vineyard that morning and just awakened from a nap. We chatted for a few minutes, but then he warned me that some of his neighbors were coming over for a drink in a few minutes and he’d have to go. I had one last question for him. How does he think he recovered from lung cancer?

“It just went away,” he said. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”

I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, “What happened?”

“My doctors were all dead.”


This article is adapted from new material being published in the second edition of “Blue Zones,” by Dan Buettner, out next month from National Geographic.
 
Editor: Dean Robinson
 

84
General Discussion / The Wife-Carrying Championships
« on: October 08, 2012, 09:52:04 PM »

85
Football / How did you end up playing US college ball?
« on: September 10, 2012, 01:54:07 PM »
I'm interested in getting feedback on people's experiences with being recruited to play collegiate soccer. Although iz mostly men on here, it would be insightful to get feedback from women also.

How were you recruited? Were you recruited? Unpleasant vibes? Things that made a difference etc.

I would also like to hear from people who were recruited in the US or Canada or elsewhere.

Yeah!

86
General Discussion / Stories of Asylum
« on: August 26, 2012, 04:37:50 PM »
August 25, 2012
In New York, With 6 Weeks to Adapt to America
 
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
 
TWENTY-FOUR days after he arrived in the United States, Mamadou Fadja Diallo, 13, showed up for summer school in Manhattan looking wary and confused. The building itself was disorienting: big and imposing, with polished floors, nothing like his school back home in Guinea. He was surrounded by students from all over the world. He could not understand a word anyone was saying.

In June, he had left his home in the West African nation with his mother and 12 siblings. The family drove to the airport and flew to New York. None of the children had been on a plane before, and only one could speak any English. They were met by their father, Abdoulaye Diallo, a Muslim imam who had fled Guinea in 2007 and sought asylum in the United States after becoming entangled in his nation’s volatile and violent politics.

That first day of summer school, July 9, began early in the morning, with Mr. Diallo bustling Mamadou and 11 of his siblings, ages 5 to 22, out of their apartment in the Bronx and onto a subway train downtown to Murry Bergtraum High School by the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan.

It was a difficult morning. “I was confused because everybody else was understanding what was being said and I wasn’t understanding,” Mamadou recalled, his father translating.

The Diallos were far from alone in their bewilderment. Their classmates were other young immigrants who, to varying degrees, were feeling the same sense of dislocation.

The Refugee Youth Summer Academy, as the program is called, was created for recently arrived refugees and asylum recipients. The academy, started in 1999 by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency based in New York City, tries to help its students find a footing in their new country and prepare them for school.

This year, more than 100 students enrolled in the six-week program, which offered an academic curriculum supplemented by creative-arts classes, field trips and other activities. They hailed from at least 13 countries, including Nepal, Burkina Faso, Iran, Iraq and Cameroon. Some had been in the country for a couple of years; others, like the Diallos, had just arrived. They spoke at least 17 native languages. Some could speak and read English fluently; others could not write their own name in any language. Some had attended school in their home countries; others had never been in a classroom.

If there was any commonality in their experience, it was that their families had been driven from their homelands and were seeking a better life in the United States.

The mixed-race father of two Russian boys was compelled to leave his country after suffering brutal racially motivated attacks.

A Bhutanese family, granted refugee status by the United States, left a Nepalese refugee camp that they had called home for 22 years.

The mother of an Afghan boy had suffered unspeakable treatment by his father and fled with her son to New York, where they live in a shelter for women and children.

THE Diallos arrived late on that first morning. The other students sat at long tables in the cafeteria, mostly silent, nervousness and fear on their faces. They made no eye contact with one another and answered questions from enthusiastic staff members with mumbles or gestures — if they answered at all. One small Tibetan child, a SpongeBob SquarePants knapsack strapped to his back and a fedora on his head, put his chin on the table and seemed to disappear under the hat’s brim.

The students were separated into six classes, grouped by age, school experience and English proficiency. Academic courses were held in the morning, with arts and recreation classes in the afternoon. The lead teachers came from the public school system, assisted by volunteer teachers and counselors, many of whom were college and graduate students in education, and some of whom were alumni of the academy.

Bassirou Kaba, 18, one those alumni volunteers, spoke about the importance of such an environment.

“When I came, I didn’t even know how to introduce myself,” he said. Mr. Kaba, who is now a high school senior, recalled his first few days at the academy two years ago, shortly after he arrived from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where his father had been murdered in the country’s political violence. “I felt really good here because nobody laughed at me,” he said.

One of the main goals of the academy is to acculturate the students to the American school system. All intend to enroll at schools in New York City next month; but the administrators and teachers tried to set realistic goals.

“I wasn’t going to send them out speaking fluent English,” explained Matthew Tully, the upper school English teacher. “I was going to get them to a place where they could have the confidence to talk.”

The Diallos were spread across five of the six classes, and the faculty initially could not tell how much schooling they had received in Guinea. Most of them spoke at least some French in addition to their native tongue of Fulani, but the two youngest children — Ramatoulaye, 5, and Aissata, 6 — spoke no French and did not know how to hold a pencil or a crayon properly. Ramatoulaye, in a pink frilly dress and gold-colored sandals, spent much of the first day in tears. A few days into the program, the faculty deduced that one of the Diallo brothers in high school was partly deaf.

Mamadou, placed in the junior high class, seemed particularly withdrawn and adrift. He said almost nothing, never raised his hand to answer a question and participated in collective activities only reluctantly. His face was perpetually cast in sternness.

In an English class on the second day, Mr. Tully had all the students stand in front of their desks. “Take a step forward if you like drawing!” he beckoned. The students leapt forward enthusiastically, even those who didn’t speak English. Mamadou, however, did not move and made no attempt to catch up with the others.

The staff at the International Rescue Committee, which provided services to about 1,200 New Yorkers last year, was familiar with most of the families in the program. Many had resettled in the United States with help from the organization. But the Diallos had come to the organization’s attention so recently that staff members had not had time to get to know them. The academy’s teachers were learning on the fly who was sitting in their classrooms.

Mr. Diallo refused to discuss his difficulties in Guinea except to say that the horrors he suffered were sufficient to drive him out of the country, separating him for years from his children. But family members offered a picture of their life back home. They had lived in a large house in Conakry, where, in addition to his religious duties, Mr. Diallo ran a clothing-import business. He had his 13 children with five women.

He settled in New York City in 2007 and petitioned for visas for his children and wife under a law that allows those who have received asylum to bring close family members to the United States. While he waited, Mr. Diallo supported himself and his family in Guinea by working as a dishwasher at an upscale restaurant in SoHo.

On June 15, his children, accompanied by his wife, Oumou, arrived in New York. Several of the children were essentially meeting a stranger: Ramatoulaye was only 2 months old when Mr. Diallo left West Africa. The family moved into a subsidized three-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walk-up building in the Norwood section of the Bronx, near Van Cortlandt Park.

In an interview, Tiguidanke, 22, Mr. Diallo’s eldest daughter and the only one of his children who did not attend the summer academy, said the transition had been dizzying for many of her younger siblings. It was a little easier for her: She had grown up with her mother and grandmother, away from her siblings, in Sierra Leone, where she learned English and attended college.

“I don’t think most of them know where they are right now,” she said early this month, while sitting on a small couch in the family’s living room. The apartment was otherwise bare, except for a small wooden table with no chairs and several sets of bunk beds. “But they look like they’re coping,” she continued. “They’re getting acquainted.”

AS the summer unfolded, students settled quickly into their routines and the academy’s classroom scenes came to resemble those at a more typical school. Children formed friendships and alliances, sometimes brokered along language and cultural lines. French-speaking Guineans found comfort in the company of French-speaking Cameroonians and Ivorians. Refugees of Tibetan and Bhutanese descent spoke to each other in Nepali.

But teachers also sought to shake up those cultural cliques.

“New class rule: You must sit with someone from a different country,” said a sign posted in one classroom. The sign was later amended to discourage students who spoke the same language from sitting together.

The Diallos adjusted slowly but steadily; their teachers celebrated each breakthrough.

Ramatoulaye, the youngest Diallo, remained mostly quiet for the next few days. But at the end of the first week, she stood up during lunch in the cafeteria and spontaneously started to dance in front of her classmates, said Xuefei Han, an assistant teacher in the lower school.

By the fifth week, she and Aissata, her sister and classmate, had learned their colors and shapes, were talkative and active, and were putting their hands up in class in response to questions — even if they did not know the answer.

Ramatoulaye also started to bicker with another classmate, a Pakistani girl. But Ms. Han said she did not view that development as entirely negative. “Where before they might conceal their emotions,” Ms. Han said, “they now feel more comfortable showing them.”

An older sister, Fatoumata, 10, was also seized by shyness during the first couple of weeks of the academy. But a pivotal moment came during the third week, when she mustered the courage to raise her hand and ask the teacher, in English, if she could use the bathroom.

“It almost made me cry,” recalled Barbara Cvenic, the assistant teacher of Fatoumata’s junior high school class. “This was a victory, having that confidence to ask for something you really need instead of being uncomfortable all day.”

Mamadou remained among the most withdrawn of the academy’s students. But in a soccer match during a field trip to Central Park at the end of the first week, he briefly came alive, aggressively playing both ends of the field and demonstrating deft ball-handling skills. He played without uttering a sound, however — until about 15 minutes into the game, when he burst through a scrum of defenders and blasted a shot past a bewildered goalie.

Mamadou yelled in celebration and sprinted in a victorious semicircle across the field, smiling for the first time all day as his teammates swarmed him in congratulations. “He’s from my country!” another Guinean student, Djely Bacar Kouyate, exclaimed.

Just as suddenly, however, Mamadou’s smile disappeared and he sank into himself, crossing his arms tightly around his body, as if embarrassed by his outburst.


Ms. Cvenic, his assistant teacher, said a particularly significant moment for Mamadou came during the fifth week.

He had been especially reluctant that week to participate in the creative-arts classes, she said. But one day, while the others were taking a dance class, he approached Ms. Cvenic with a book “and gestured for us to read together,” she recalled. This was a boy, she pointed out, who had avoided eye contact with her for the first three weeks.

“I was floored,” she said.

The two sat outside the classroom, and Ms. Cvenic read aloud with him. These sessions became a regular feature of their remaining afternoons.

Sailesh Naidu, the academy’s principal, said these seemingly small steps were “big victories” for the students.

“What they’ve had to battle in order to raise their hand in class, in order to sing a song with their classmates, in order to get up and dance on stage, in order to take an exam, these are huge things that they have to face, and they’re by no means small battles,” Mr. Naidu said. “Every day these victories are meaningful to them in ways that are immeasurable.”

THE academy drew to a close on Aug. 17 with a graduation ceremony. “There will be some tears,” Eleanor Oxholm, the academy’s program coordinator, had predicted several days earlier. Indeed, as the students braced for their transition into other schools, it was also a time of reflection for the teachers.

“Look, they’re going to have a very tough time, but at least they had a soft landing,” said Livia Rurarz-Huygens, an assistant teacher in the upper school, quickly adding: “And it’s not even a soft landing.” The children have had to contend with a new country and with classmates from different cultures speaking different languages, she pointed out. “But at least it’s a more gentle entry,” she said.

All of the academy’s students were planning to attend schools in the city next month. High school students who spoke limited English would probably attend specialized schools for English-language learners. And the International Rescue Committee would work to place primary and junior high school students with limited English in schools with strong programs in English as a second language, Mr. Naidu said.


The organization would also assign academic coaches to more than 70 students and help serve as intermediaries between the students, their schools and their parents.

With “Pomp and Circumstance” playing, and with parents and donors to the program in attendance, the students, hopped up on excitement and graduation-day candy, filed in.

“Coming to a new country, learning a new language, making new friends: That’s really scary,” Mr. Naidu said in a speech to the students. “But you did it.”

Student dance, music and drama performances followed, each punctuated by wild clapping and euphoric hooting by classmates.

The eldest of the Diallos, Thierno, 22, read a poem in French that he had written and presented to Ms. Oxholm. (“He just came up to me one day and said, ‘Miss Eleanor, I wrote this,’ ” she recalled.) Called “Prayer Poem,” it was a paean to the International Rescue Committee and to the enduring hope of the refugee.“The sun is calling its children/To work! To work! To work!” he wrote. “Tomorrow’s rainbow is not unwell./Bless you!”

As the ceremony ended, the students and faculty members clustered in the aisles in a knot of embraces and tears. Even Mamadou shed his usual stoicism and broke down. “When I leave here,” he murmured sadly in French, “I’ll no longer be able to see my friends.” The friends he named were teachers. He tried to hide behind a pair of sunglasses, but he could not stop weeping, digging his fingers behind the frames to drag away the tears.




87
For Asian-American Couples, a Tie That Binds

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-americans-marrying-within-their-race.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago, Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it was simply the way of the world.

But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,” said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”

Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul mates from among their own expanding community.

From 2008 to 2010, the percentage of Asian-American newlyweds who were born in the United States and who married someone of a different race dipped by nearly 10 percent, according to a recent analysis of census data conducted by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, Asians are increasingly marrying other Asians, a separate study shows, with matches between the American-born and foreign-born jumping to 21 percent in 2008, up from 7 percent in 1980.

Asian-Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates in the country, with 28 percent of newlyweds choosing a non-Asian spouse in 2010, according to census data. But a surge in immigration from Asia over the last three decades has greatly increased the number of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, giving young people many more options among Asian-Americans. It has also inspired a resurgence of interest in language and ancestral traditions among some newlyweds.

In 2010, 10.2 million Asian immigrants were living in the United States, up from 2.2 million in 1980. Today, foreign-born Asians account for about 60 percent of the Asian-American population here, census data shows.

“Immigration creates a ready pool of marriage partners,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a demographer at Cornell University who, along with Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State University, conducted the study on marriages between American-born and foreign-born Asians. “They bring their language, their culture and reinforce that culture here in the United States for the second and third generations.”

Before she met Mr. Gao, Ms. Young had dated only white men, with the exception of a biracial boyfriend in college. She said she probably wouldn’t be planning to teach her children Cantonese and Mandarin if her husband had not been fluent in Mandarin. “It would be really hard,” said Ms. Young, who is most comfortable speaking in English.

Ed Lin, 36, a marketing director in Los Angeles who was married in October, said that his wife, Lily Lin, had given him a deeper understanding of many Chinese traditions. Mrs. Lin, 32, who was born in Taiwan and grew up in New Orleans, has taught him the terms in Mandarin for his maternal and paternal grandparents, familiarized him with the red egg celebrations for newborns and elaborated on other cultural customs, like the proper way to exchange red envelopes on Chinese New Year.

“She brings to the table a lot of small nuances that are embedded culturally,” Mr. Lin said of his wife, who has also encouraged him to serve tea to his elders and refer to older people as aunty and uncle.

Of course, race is only one of many factors that can come to bear in the complicated calculus of romance. And marriage trends vary among Asians of different nationalities, according to C. N. Le, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Dr. Le found that in 2010 Japanese-American men and women had the highest rates of intermarriage to whites while Vietnamese-American men and Indian women had the lowest rates.

The term Asian, as defined by the Census Bureau, encompasses a broad group of people who trace their origins to the Far East, Southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent, including countries like Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine Islands and Vietnam. (The Pew Research Center also included Pacific Islanders in its study.)

Wendy Wang, the author of the Pew report, said that demographers have yet to conduct detailed surveys or interviews of newlyweds to help explain the recent dip in interracial marriages among native-born Asians. (Statistics show that the rate of interracial marriage among Asians has been declining since 1980.) But in interviews, several couples said that sharing their lives with someone who had a similar background played a significant role in their decision to marry.

It is a feeling that has come as something of a surprise to some young Asian-American women who had grown so comfortable with interracial dating that they began to assume that they would end up with white husbands. (Intermarriage rates are significantly higher among Asian women than among men. About 36 percent of Asian-American women married someone of another race in 2010, compared with about 17 percent of Asian-American men.)

Chau Le, 33, a Vietnamese-American lawyer who lives in Boston, said that by the time she received her master’s degree at Oxford University in 2004, her parents had given up hope that she would marry a Vietnamese man. It wasn’t that she was turning down Asian-American suitors; those dates simply never led to anything more serious.

Ms. Le said she was a bit wary of Asian-American men who wanted their wives to handle all the cooking, child rearing and household chores. “At some point in time, I guess I thought it was unlikely,” she said. “My dating statistics didn’t look like I would end up marrying an Asian guy.”

But somewhere along the way, Ms. Le began thinking that she needed to meet someone slightly more attuned to her cultural sensibilities. That moment might have occurred on the weekend she brought a white boyfriend home to meet her parents.

Ms. Le is a gregarious, ambitious corporate lawyer, but in her parents’ home, she said, “There’s a switch that you flip.” In their presence, she is demure. She looks down when she speaks, to demonstrate her respect for her mother and father. She pours their tea, slices their fruit and serves their meals, handing them dishes with both hands. Her white boyfriend, she said, was “weirded out” by it all.

“I didn’t like that he thought that was weird,” she said. “That’s my role in the family. As I grew older, I realized a white guy was much less likely to understand that.”

In fall 2010, she became engaged to Neil Vaishnav, an Indian-American lawyer who was born in the United States to immigrant parents, just as she was. They agreed that husbands and wives should be equal partners in the home, and they share a sense of humor that veers toward wackiness. (He encourages her out-of-tune singing and high kicks in karaoke bars.) But they also revere their family traditions of cherishing their elders.

Mr. Vaishnav, 30, knew instinctively that he should not kiss her in front of her parents or address them by their first names. “He has the same amount of respect and deference towards my family that I do,” said Ms. Le, who is planning a September wedding that is to combine Indian and Vietnamese traditions. “I didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, this is how I am in my family.’ ”

Ann Liu, 33, a Taiwanese-American human resources coordinator in San Francisco, had a similar experience. She never imagined that an Asian-American husband was in the cards. Because she had never dated an Asian man before, her friends tried to discourage Stephen Arboleda, a Filipino-American engineer, when he asked whether she was single. “She only dates white guys,” they warned.

But Mr. Arboleda, 33, was undeterred. “I’m going to change that,” he told them.

By then, Ms. Liu was ready for a change. She said she had grown increasingly uncomfortable with dating white men who dated only Asian-American women. “It’s like they have an Asian fetish,” she said. “I felt like I was more like this ‘concept.’ They couldn’t really understand me as a person completely.”

Mr. Arboleda was different. He has a sprawling extended family — and calls his older relatives aunty and uncle — just as she does. And he didn’t blink when she mentioned that she thought that her parents might live with her someday, a tradition among some Asian-American families.

At their October wedding in San Francisco, Ms. Liu changed from a sleek, sleeveless white wedding gown into the red, silk Chinese dress called the qipao. Several of Mr. Arboleda’s older relatives wore the white, Filipino dress shirts known as the barong.

“There was this bond that I had never experienced before in my dating world,” she said. “It instantly worked. And that’s part of the reason I married him.”

88
Football / Ketch yuh kicks
« on: February 21, 2012, 07:08:51 PM »























89
General Discussion / Guyanese PM's daughter-in-law seeks asylum in the US
« on: November 08, 2011, 11:57:00 AM »
PM Hinds' wife returns to Guyana with US-born grandson; battle with mother likely continues
 
Mrs. Yvonne Hinds-the wife of Guyana’s Prime Minister-Samuel Hinds- and her son Nikolai were at the centre of a custody battle with her her Pennsylvania-based daughter-in-law over her four-year old American-born grandson.

In court papers filed by her lawyer, Nikolai’s wife, Elizabeth Hinds, said has sought political asylum because her legal stay on account of her husband’s student visa status will be up later this month, having expired on September 13. The couple has 60 days to leave the US.Pennsylvania-based daughter-in-law over her four-year old American-born grandson.

Allegedly working illegally at a home where she is caring for an elderly man; the younger Mrs. Hinds fears returning to Guyana because of the undue influence of her father-in-law who is the Prime Minister.

“Appellant also testified regarding her fears of returning to Guyana given the fact that her father-in-law is the Prime Minister of that country and satisfied the court that she had already applied for political asylum in the United States due to her fear of returning,” her lawyer, Marcia Binder Ibrahim said in court document.

The case has reached the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.

Ibrahim on Monday told Demerara Waves Online News that the prime minister’s wife, son, and grandson are back in Guyana although she had secured orders to stay a shared custody ruling that was granted earlier. The lawyer said she had also made efforts to have the matter registered in the National Crime Information System but Pennsylvania police were not quite helpful.

Ibrahim said she had also contacted authorities at the John F. Kennedy International Airport to bar them from leaving the United States but she was advised that Hinds and Nikolai were traveling on diplomatic passports. Given the fact that the child is an American, she intends to contact the US State Department for any advice. Guyana is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on International Abduction. Asked whether she thought Mrs. Yvonne Hinds, her son and their lawyer knew about the Stay, the lawyer told demwaves.com that “I frankly don’t know.”

But in a statement issued late Monday through the Government Information Agency (GINA), the Prime Minister;s wife threatened legal action against anyone tarnishing her image through misleading media reports. She confirmed that the Judge made the order final after her daughter-in-law could not substantiate claims that Guyana was a corrupt country, feared for her life and that she was in the process of seeking efugee status.

"When asked by the judge for documents to verify her processing of refugee status, she had none. At the end of the 31st October 2011 hearing, the judge did not find the testimony of my daughter- in- law credible, so the judge’s order of October 11, 2011 was reaffirmed," said the Prime Minister's wife.

She highlighted that she returned home to Guyana un-hindered by the American authorities.

"This account of the custody hearing is factual and faithfully reflects what took place in the court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.Any attempt to distort the ruling of the court in this matter, to paint the judge’s orders otherwise, or to discredit my family will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law," she said.

Judge Jonathan Mark made an oral decision that the child be handed over to his father, Nikolai, and his paternal grandmother. That transfer was done in the courtroom. But Elizabeth Hinds’ lawyer says the judge made no ruling, indicating how he had jurisdiction to make such an order. The lawyer has acknowledged that the Court of Common Pleas does not have actual jurisdiction but may in an emergency situation exercise limited jurisdiction.

Ibrahim immediately moved to the court on November 2 to secure a stay and appeal the judge’s order, fearing that the child would have been almost immediately removed from the United States and permanently separated from his mother.

The boy, born on February 19, 2008 on Lehigh County, Pennsylvania had been living in Monroe County since August 18, 2011 when his grandmother, Yvonne Hinds, took him there for a one-month vacation. Before going there, he had been living with grandparents for about 18 months.

Court documents filed on behalf of the child’s mother state that he was sent to his parents in Guyana on December 2009 because the petition was concerned about the conduct of his natural father which put the child in jeopardy.

Around September 27, 2011,  Yvonne Hinds and Nikolai moved to the courts, marking the beginning of what could have been a complicated international custody battle. They had also wanted the matter to be heard expeditiously and wanted to leave the United States immediately due to his father’s immigration status.

A conciliator later recommended joint legal custody but primary legal custody to the father and that it should take effect in Guyana where it was expected both parties would reside.

That recommendation, which was made an order by Judge JMark in October 2011, was the subject of an appeal on October 19, 2011. The judge, however, dismissed the objection but he did not rule on the appellant’s motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

Mrs. Elizabeth Hinds’ lawyer also advised the court that there was no basis for emergency jurisdiction because there was no abuse or neglect of the child.

Elizabeth Hinds, on among other grounds, is challenging Judge Mark’s order because he failed to inquire into the suitability of the Prime Minister’s son and so did not have sufficient evidence to render a decision in the best interest of the child. “She also described other actions that raise doubts about the father’s fitness as a parent and that would compel further inquiry in order for the judge to make a decision regarding the best interest of the child. However, the father did not testify in support of his petition for custody nor did the judge ask that he do so,” said Binder Ibrahim.
 
http://www.demerarawaves.com/index.php/Latest/2011/11/07/pm-hinds-wife-returns-to-guyana-with-us-born-grandson-battle-with-mother-likely-continues.html

90
Cricket Anyone / Pakistani cricketers off to prison
« on: November 03, 2011, 05:30:27 AM »
Verdict reverberating across the world and Pakistan.

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