(UKPA) – 40 mins ago
Jamaican athletes who failed to attend a preparation camp last week in Germany will be allowed to compete at the World Championships beginning in Berlin on Saturday.
The Jamaican federation withdrew a request for them to be excluded following the personal intervention of IAAF president Lamine Diack.
Diack agreed it was the right of the national body to punish the athletes - which included former world 100m record holder Asafa Powell and Olympic 100m and 400m hurdles champions Shelly-Ann Fraser and Melanie Walker - but he successfully argued that throwing them out of the championships was too strong a punishment.
Diack suggested other action be taken by the Jamaican federation if it is deemed necessary.
The trio are members of the MVP track club, which elected to stay at its base in Italy rather than join the remainder of the team in Nuremberg.
Paul Doyle, who manages Powell, maintains he had been told attending the camp in Germany was not a compulsory requirement.
Meanwhile, the IAAF has still to receive documentation about the five Jamaican athletes who allegedly committed drug offences at the National Trials in June.
The Jamaican Federation has yet to comment publicly on the outcome of their trials, which ended last Friday.
Copyright © 2009 The Press Association. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Lady B - in her own words
LADY BUSTAMANTE... we must all acknowledge the obligation to pay our debt to the past.
JAMAICA OBSERVER | JEAN LOWRIE-CHIN | Monday, August 03, 2009
Lady Bustamante, when urged by writer Ken Jones to say more about herself as he worked on her memoirs, told him, "I seldom speak - I only work." Fortunately, the persistent author was able to garner enough about this national icon that we have a well-drawn portrait of a courageous lady who was that steadfast North Star for her mentor, boss and husband National Hero Sir Alexander Bustamante.
The Memoirs of Lady Bustamante (Kingston Publishers) tells us that Gladys Maud Longbridge was born in the tiny district of Parson Reid near Ashton in Westmoreland where her God-fearing family and solid teachers inspired her enduring faith in God and encouraged her to develop her talents. At the Bustamante Museum, Seragh Lakasingh has in place Lady B's piano, organ, guitar and accordion, "all of which she played well", he says.
It is important that we educate this and coming generations about the incredible sacrifices made by pioneers like Lady Bustamante, to secure our sovereignty. She has given us an eyewitness account of the beginnings of our labour movement and the founding of the Jamaica Labour Party.
She recommended, "We must all acknowledge not only where we are coming from and how much we owe the past, but also the obligation to repay our debt to the past. This is the spirit in which I have lived and I strongly recommend it to my fellow Jamaicans."
It was fortuitous that years after Lady B was born, her birthday March 8, was declared the International Day for Women. Her memoirs reveal that she was very proud of the achievements of her fellow women, and that she worked hard to qualify herself, surpassing the speed for shorthand and typing expected from the graduates of Tutorial College.
Her 150-word-per-minute rapid-fire recording matched the rapid-fire dictation of Bustamante who became her boss on March 9, 1936 and with whom she lived "happily ever after" when they got married in September 1967.
Lady B records the triumphant fight to reinstate our first female Jamaica Scholar of 1912, Oxford graduate Leila James, in the Education Department, the first black woman to have ever held such a post. She recounts Amy Bailey's advocacy for graduates of technical schools to be admitted into the Civil Service, "and so (she) opened the doors of opportunity for thousands of boys and girls whose standard of education had been unjustly regarded as inferior".
Lady Bustamante took these breakthroughs personally, remembering the many months that she stayed unemployed because of her colour. She referred to Gleaner employment advertisements of the 30s that made specific reference to colour and shade. "Because I was not of light complexion I could not hold a job of any kind in a commercial bank," she stated.
No wonder that the young Gladys Longbridge became such a passionate supporter of the labour movement that Busta and St William Grant had started to build. "The folks at home would marvel at the fact that the quiet, Sunday-school organist from Ashton was in the forefront of national upheaval, fighting for the underpaid working class and the hungry unemployed," she said. "Almost all my working days have been spent in this service; even now (1997), so late in life, I am still fully committed to trade unionism and I propose to continue that way until the breath has left my body."
"During the formative years of the union we worked night and day," she recalled, "setting everything else aside, travelling the countryside . I had become the principal day-to-day caretaker of what was the largest single organisation in Jamaica." In March 1939, the BITU had a paying membership of 6,500 efficiently managed by Ms Longbridge without the aid of modern technology.
It is truly fitting that she will first lie in state at the BITU Headquarters tomorrow.
Lady B shied away from active politics. She reluctantly agreed to run for office in Eastern Westmoreland in 1951. She was pleased when she learned she had lost - a Gleaner report described her as "the happiest loser" they had ever seen in an election.
Her memoirs carry photographs that are milestones not only in local, but also in world history: attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and the funeral of John F Kennedy in 1963, welcoming royalty to Jamaica House, including Emperor Haile Selassie in 1962, the building of Jamaica House in 1963.
On the lighter side, Lady B loved cars and there is a pictorial of the vehicles she had driven over the years, through hills and dales of Jamaica with her beloved Bustamante by her side. She was a fierce defender of the Chief as she fondly called him, and recounted a dramatic scene at the Port Maria Tennis Club in the early days of the BITU. A black man named Clifford Clementson had refused to serve Busta a drink, saying, "You are the man organising the niggers around here. You cannot drink in my club." Another member, Colin McGregor (Resident Magistrate, later appointed Chief Justice), insisted that Busta should have his drink but with the atmosphere becoming tense, Ms Longbridge persuaded him to leave.
As they were leaving, she caught sight of a drunk about to strike the Chief with a bottle. "It was then that I summoned the nerve to grab the offender by his tie and pull him to the floor," she related.
Although Sir Alexander's health had been steadily declining, his death came unexpectedly on August 6, 1977 at their home in Irish Town. "I gave way to uncontrollable tears and a feeling of emptiness came over me," recalled Lady B. "He whom I loved with all my heart, was gone, never to return."
But Lady B soldiered on: "I could not leave my work with the BITU. The Union had been a great part of the Chief's life and it was my life too."
My husband's family (the Chins of Victoria Street, Franklin Town) was close to the Bustamantes, and I was privileged to be at several of her birthday celebrations which she enjoyed so much, lovingly arranged by her close friends and caretakers Seragh and Effie Lakasingh. Warm and wise, Lady B would take the time to commend and advise us. We can try to repay her sacrifices by emulating her: as she reminded us, service is not an option, it is an obligation. Rest in Peace, Lady B, enjoy your heavenly reunion with your dear Chief.
lowriechin@aim.com
Saturday, August 1, 2009
NYT -Anger Has Its Place
NY Times - 1 August 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Anger Has Its Place
By BOB HERBERT
Cambridge, Mass.
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn't rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a "teachable moment," but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don't like what you're saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That's a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer's satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true "teachable moment" would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We're never going to have a serious national conversation about race.
So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel
Op-Ed Columnist
Anger Has Its Place
By BOB HERBERT
Cambridge, Mass.
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn't rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a "teachable moment," but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don't like what you're saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That's a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer's satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true "teachable moment" would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We're never going to have a serious national conversation about race.
So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel
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