Articles - News

   Grammy-nominated deejay Buju Banton is being held in a federal detention centre in Miami following his arrest on drug-related charges last Thursday, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has confirmed.

David Melenkevitz, a spokesman for the DEA in Florida, said the Jamaican entertainer was arrested on a case based in Tampa, 205 miles northwest of Miami.

Buju Banton has been in the United States since September promoting his new album “Rasta Got Soul”.

In recent months, he has come under increasing pressure from gay activists over his lyrics that are considered to be homophobic. Two months ago, he rejected demands from gay activists in California that he promote respect for homosexuals via his music and at a town hall meeting.

The gay lobbyists also demanded that he donate the proceeds from his anti-gay anthem “Boom Boom Bye Bye” to local gay group, Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG).

But the singer told local talk show host Mutabaruka in October that he could never endorse the demands and that he would never sell himself out as that would contradict his religion and culture.

Since then, the Rasta Got Soul Tour, which opened on September 12 in Philadelphia and was scheduled to end November 1 in Orlando, Florida, has been fraught with problems, as gay rights advocates have forced a number of cancellations.

For almost two decades Buju Banton has been a target of gay rights groups angered by his music, particularly Boom Boom Bye Bye, which they point to as promoting the murder of homosexuals.

Last week, one gay rights group protested the Grammy nomination of Rasta Got Soul announced two weeks ago.

The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Centre described the nomination as “appalling” and voiced the hope that the recording academy would “not bestow the prestigious honour of a Grammy on someone whose music promotes murder”.

Since his debut single in 1987, Buju Banton has gone on to record nine studio albums and a plethora of hits including Bogle, Love Me Browning, Champion, Not An Easy Road, Wanna Be Loved, Destiny, and more recently, Driver. He has also done several collaborations with acclaimed reggae crooner Beres Hammond.

   New York based St. Lucian born writer Demedrius Charles has released his third book. The publication is a collection of poems called “Dancing with the Imagination”.

Charles says that the piece invites readers to get out of their safety zones by exploring and taking risks through their imaginations. The well written poems in “Dancing with the Imagination”, touches every mood or state of life. Be it, romance, drama, starting over or motivation.

For Charles, the greatest joy in presenting his work, especially this publication is seeing the reactions of others to his writings. He says that he gets a joyous feeling to see that others can relate so closely to his poems.

“Dancing with the Imagination” must be added to your collection of books. In it you will find a poem to attach to any occasion. The book can be purchased at amazonbooks.com or through Charles’ website: demedriuspens.com.

Charles is also involved in other writing projects that are shaping up quite nicely. Come March 2010, we can look forward to seeing the staging of the play “LAIR”, written by Charles. It will be staged in New York City. The play centers around the lives of three women who fully discover their true selves while employed in a brothel.

For updates on the staging of the play, as time draws near, keep in touch with Charles’ website: demedriuspens.com.

In the meantime, find a moment to enjoy “Dancing with the Imagination”.

    National Security Minister Guy Mayers has complained that the country’s regional security obligations are putting a strain on the resources of the police force.

Speaking at the close of this week’s inaugural Tourism Advisory Council meeting, Mayers disclosed that in order to meet some security obligations to the regional grouping, St Lucia is left with fewer police officers to patrol the streets and fight crime.

“With the agreement in CARICOM (the Caribbean Community) and the OECS (Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States) to protect judges, the fact that St Lucia is the headquarters of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court we require an additional 60 police officers to provide protection,” he said.

“What’s even more disconcerting is the fact that there is a specific requirement for high rank of officers to fulfil this duty, so you can’t even send a constable to accompany judges. And there are other security requirements that don’t allow us the use of these more efficient officers for duties for which they were hired,” Mayers lamented, adding that magistrates have been asking for the same level of protection as well.

He also expressed frustration with bureaucratic red tape that holds up the process of justice and that there was a dire need for the speedy allocation of resources for the police to fight crime.

In this regard, the National Security Minister challenged the private sector to provide more financial support to law enforcement.

“You have more to lose if these measures are not implemented than waiting solely on government to implement them and only to hear that it is taking five years to get off the ground because of delays by the people in the Ministry of Finance – people who don’t understand the implications for national security if these arrangements are not put in place.

“As far as the allocation of finance is concerned other departments are usually given priority over these security needs despite the fact that in some cases we are talking about small amounts of money for simple things, which once implemented can have a significant impact on crime prevention, we are unable to get them because of a lack of funding,” Mayers said.

Just recently, the government indicated that National Security would be it main priority, especially in light of the current global economic crisis which could influence an upsurge in anti-social behaviour.

   

Embattled golf star Tiger Woods announced late Friday he is taking an ‘indefinite break’ from golf as he seeks to rebuild his home life.

In his announcement, which came in the form of a posting on his Web site, Woods said he is aware of how much damage his “infidelity” has done to his wife, children and fans.

“I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness. It may not be possible to repair the damage I've done, but I want to do my best to try,” he wrote.

The golf star has been the subject of intense scrutiny for the past two weeks amid reports of extramarital affairs with at least 11 women, some whom have leaked texts and voicemails as proof.

The PGA reportedly supports Woods’s decision.

"His priorities are where they need to be, and we will continue to respect and honor his family's request for privacy," PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem said in a statement, according to the Associated Press.

When Woods took an eight-month leave of absence to recover from knee surgery, television ratings plunged 50%, the Associated Press reported.

   Stem cells and electronics can help restore vision to people who've been blinded by retinal diseases, scientists reported in Chicago at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Diseases of the retina cause blindness by damaging the cells that line the back of the eye, where images of the world are normally transformed into nerve impulses that go to the brain.

"There's very little therapeutic treatment out there right now for people with diseased retinas," says Brian Mech, a vice president of Second Sight Medical Products in Sylmar, Calif.

But Second Sight is hoping to change that. The company has developed an experimental bionic eye that has been tried in more than 30 patients with macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa Building An Artificial Retina

Each patient wears a pair of glasses that incorporates a video camera, Mech says. The video signal from the camera is sent to an implant on the eye itself, which in turns communicates with an array of electrodes attached to the patient's retina.

And those electrodes do what the old retina can't anymore: send electrical signals to the brain that allow sight.

Mech says it usually takes patients' brains a little while to make sense of the new signals.

"They learn to use the device better over time," he says. "Someone that has had the device for a year will do better than they did at three months."

The artificial eye uses just 60 electrodes to replace millions of retinal cells. Mech says that means the restored vision is rudimentary, so people can find doors and follow lines on the floor. But most can't read, and those who can are only able to make out very large letters.

At the neuroscience meeting, Second Sight presented a study showing that patients could use the artificial eye to tell which direction an object was moving.

Despite the limitations of the artificial eye, Mech says patients who have received one tend to get emotional when they realize they can see even a little bit.

"There's a lot of crying, a lot of smiling," he says. "It's a sensory input that they haven't had in a very long time, and so they're excited."

Growing New Retina Cells

A team led by Robert Aramant of the University of California, Irvine, offered a different approach to restoring sight.

Since the 1980s, Aramant has been working to fix retinas damaged by diseases including macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

And for several years now, the team has been treating patients using fetal retinal cells. Their approach is to retrieve an intact sheet of fetal retinal cells and transplant the entire sheet into a damaged eye.

The transplanted cells then mature the same way they would in a developing fetus, creating all the layers of a normal retina, Aramant says.

The team has treated just 10 patients so far, because of funding constraints. But Aramant says seven of those patients got better, including one woman whose vision went from 20-800, which is severely impaired, to 20-200, which is good enough for many daily tasks.

After treatment, Aramant says, the woman was able to play computer games, write emails, and read a large-print version of Reader's Digest.

Also at the meeting in Chicago, scientists presented studies showing ways to create new light-sensitive molecules in the eye, and to use stem cells to grow specific types of retinal cells.