Killer whale: the clue’s in the name

Perhaps the oddest explanation for a killer whale trainer’s death this week is that the animal was enacting a mating behaviour, says Rowan Hooper

Gaddafi: Jihad on Switzerland and Zionists

There have been tensions between the nations since 2008, when one of Mr Gaddafi’s sons was arrested in Geneva, accused of assaulting two servants.

 

A Swiss foreign ministry spokesman declined to comment on the jihad call.

 

The Libyan leader made his comments while speaking at a meeting to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

 

“Let us wage jihad against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression,” he said.

 

“Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against Muhammad, God and the Koran.”

 

In a referendum last November, 57.5% of Swiss voters approved a constitutional ban on the building of minarets. An appeal against the ban has been submitted to the European Court of Human Rights.

 

Charges dropped

 

Earlier this month, Libya stopped issuing visas to citizens from many European nations, prompting condemnation from the European Commission.

 

Libya’s move came after Switzerland allegedly blacklisted 188 high-ranking Libyans, denying them entry permits. The Swiss ban is said to include Mr Gaddafi and his family.

 

The row began after the arrest of Mr Gaddafi’s son Hannibal and his wife, Aline Skaf, in Geneva in July 2008.

 

They were accused of assaulting two servants while staying at a luxury hotel in the Swiss city, though the charges were later dropped.

 

Libya retaliated by cancelling oil supplies, withdrawing billions of dollars from Swiss banks, refusing visas to Swiss citizens and recalling some of its diplomats.

 

In the same month that the Gaddafis were arrested, Libyan authorities detained two Swiss businessmen, in what analysts believe was a retaliatory move.

 

One was finally allowed to leave the country earlier this week but the second was transferred to jail, where he faces a four-month term on immigration offences.

 

Story from BBC NEWS:

International cooperation saving Siberian crane: UN

The threat of extinction for the majestic Siberian crane is receding thanks to cooperation among countries including China, Russia and Iran, the UN said Wednesday.

The bird, which has pure white plumage and stands about 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) tall, is considered to be in serious danger of extinction with an estimated population of just 3,000 to 3,500 left.

“The future of the Siberian crane is looking brighter thanks to the international effort by China, Iran, Kazakhstan and Russia, four countries along the bird’s migratory routes,” said Claire Mirande, director of the .

The Siberian crane migrates about 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) every year from its breeding grounds in northern Siberia to Iran or southern China. Large parts of the wetlands on its route are being drained for farming.

Mirande was speaking at the annual meeting of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) on the Indonesian island of Bali.

She said UNEP’s crane project in the countries involved has played a key role in boosting the conservation and rehabilitation of 16 critical wetlands over the two main routes flown by the birds.

Source:
AFP, “International cooperation saving Siberian crane: UN“, accessed February 25, 2010

Nehanda Abiodun: Rap on the Run, A Political and Cultural Biography

Rap On The Run

Written by Ron Sharp, 2008

Wanted by the FBI for black activism in the States, Nehanda Abiodun fled to Havana, where she became the “godmother of Cuban hip-hop”

Outside a run-down apartment block in the eastern suburbs of Havana, a group of teenagers plays football in the street. They meet and greet each other like long-lost friends with hugs and slapped handshakes, and gesture to the top of a nearby building. If you follow their instructions to climb four flights of stairs, you can hear the sounds of local rhythms echoing down a corridor where a party is in full swing. Inside a tiny flat, a dozen people sit around a sitting room where the conversation and white rum flow freely.

The occasion is the 58th birthday party of the apartment’s owner, Nehanda Abiodun. She cuts a fine figure, a black woman who looks younger than her age, and she’s in celebration mode today, but her happiness belies the intensity of her life’s struggle. Abiodun, who was born Cheri Dalton, is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in connection with a string of robberies, including a 1981 hold-up of an armoured car near Nyack, in upstate New York. An exile in Havana for the past 20 years, she is now known as the “godmother” of Cuban hip-hop and founder of a Havana chapter of Black August, a seminal group that promotes hip-hop culture at the grass roots. Since the chapter’s formation it has held charitable concerts in New York and Havana featuring high-profile artists such as Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Common and Dead Prez, and until 24 August its work will be one of the highlights of this year’s Havana Hip-Hop Meeting and Festival.

Abiodun’s life has been inextricably linked with protest, and the music of protest, since her youth. Born in 1950, graduating from Columbia University in 1972, she formed her extreme political beliefs - those of “New Afrikans”, political idealists who believed in the foundation of a black-only state within US borders - while working at an experimental drug detox programme in the South Bronx, New York. The programme operated under the banner of a militant black rights group that viewed the political radicalisation of its patients as essential.

“I came of age during the 1960s, a time of unrest, sit-ins, student strikes, mass protests and urban rebellions,” explains Abiodun as various friends, and their relatives, sit on her knee. “The music that was being composed at that time reflected what was happening across the nation. Songs like [James Brown’s] “I’m Black and I’m Proud”, [Marvin Gaye’s] “What’s Going On” and [McFadden and Whitehead’s] “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” were tunes not only to dance to, but which had lyrics that made you think and want to be involved in positive social and political change.

“Hip-hop for me was a continuation of that tradition. At the beginning it was a very important contributor to community debate regarding the conditions that existed, and still persist, in US cities,” she says.

It is alleged by the US authorities that the group Abiodun was involved with went on to form the core of “the Family”, a politically motivated, New York-based underground crime organisation. They began robbing banks, and by late 1979 were hitting armoured cars. In the 1981 attempted robbery, a guard was killed. Then, in the shoot-out that followed, two police officers were killed and a third was wounded. The FBI believes Abiodun was driving a getaway car with several Family members, all of whom escaped.

By 1990, Abiodun had settled in Havana. “People like me are here for a reason,” she says. “I believe there is solidarity from the Cuban government with the struggles we are involved in. So even though the US might consider us criminals, it depends who you are talking to or where you are in the world. Are you a criminal or a freedom fighter? Mandela was considered a terrorist but in reality was and is still a hero.”

She began working with Cuban rappers when she was first introduced to local hip-hop artists such as Primera Base, Doble Filo and Amenaza. “In the late Nineties a delegation of young people from the hip-hop generation [New York-based writers and “socially responsible” creatives such as Danny Hoch, Cristina Verán and Clyde Valentin] came to Cuba to participate as journalists in the island’s hip-hop festival,” she explains. “And some of the individuals were friends with people in the US who are members of the organisation I belong to [Black August]. Some of these people in Cuba asked me along to the festival and I was like, ‘I’m not going to any hip-hop concert.’ I was really disillusioned with hip-hop at that time.”

It was the time when east coast v west coast friction was at its apotheosis, manifesting itself in the 1996 shooting of the west coast rapper Tupac Shakur and death of the east coast hip-hopper Notorious BIG the following year. Shakur’s godmother and Abiodun’s close friend, the former Black Panther Assata Shakur, is another high-profile Havana exile (in 2005 the FBI placed a $1m reward on her head for the alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973).

“Part of it was the kindness of young people, inviting an old lady like me,” Abiodun continues. “It was the last night of the festival and I am sitting there, and there was this song performed by Primera Base about Malcolm X and I was like, ‘Whoah!’ It kind of overwhelmed me, and all of us in that stadium. The chorus was not to my liking.” She goes on to explain that it included “the N-word”. “As a person who has struggled for the dignity of African people, I found the usage of the word offensive.” But she says she saw enough “positivity” from among the new-wave Cuban rappers to inspire her to become more involved.

“The Cuban hip-hop community had earned my respect. To put on the festival like that, they had worked miracles with the very few material resources available. So I said I would make a commitment to the young people; that it would be nice if those of us in touch with hip-hop communities in the US would give material support to the Cuban rappers. Young people from the Havana hip-hop community started coming to me and asking about Malcolm X and various issues regarding progressive struggles in the US and other parts of the world. So we just talk all the time. It is very rewarding to me.”

The history of Cuba’s hip-hop scene is defined by two phases. Up until the mid-1990s, it generally consisted of imports of American material, but the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trading partner, crippled its economy, forcing more home-grown alternatives to prosper. One record epitomised this transition: Amenaza’s 1996 release “Ochavón Cruzao” - the title plays upon antiquated categories of racial classification, and the song addresses racism and Cuba’s mixed-race population. Members of Amenaza later emigrated to Europe and formed the nucleus of Orishas, a Grammy-winning group that has released four critically acclaimed albums and now has a worldwide following.

Having initially tested the Cuban government’s tolerance for freedom of expression, the genre is now backed officially, through the Agencia Cubana de Rap (Cuban Rap Agency), which provides a state-run record label and hip-hop magazine.

Racism is a topic still hugely relevant to the Cuban hip-hop scene. “It manifests itself as the retaining of certain ideas and language within people of a certain generation,” says Abiodun. “I am a lighter-skinned black woman. If I were to marry someone darker-skinned some people would describe me as ‘taking the race back’. If I were to marry someone who has European features I would be seen as ‘taking the race forward’. And if you do something worthwhile people might say, ‘Oh, that’s a very white thing to do.’

“In Cuban hip-hop, most of the lyrics speak to what the artist feels she or he is confronted with daily,” she says. “I of course cannot speak for them, but I can safely say that they have been responsible for bringing to the stage topics that in the past were discussed or debated only in small intellectual circles and not made available to the public at large.”

Now, Abiodun’s focus is back on the US, where exciting political change could spell a sea change in the lives of young black Americans. “I really hope that [the Democratic presidential hopeful] Barack Obama wins,” she says. “I’m not sure what I feel about this, because if it’s generally known that people like me support him it will be used against him. One day I hope I will go home. One never loses faith. He could bring that about if he was president. He would have the power to do that . . . though I doubt that he would.” A broad smile settles across her face, and the party continues well into the night.

Pages From History: A Biography of Sissieretta Jones (1869-1933)

Sissieretta Jones (1869-1933)

Born Matilda Joyner in Portsmouth, Virginia, Jones moved to Providence, Rhode Island at an early age. Her father was the pastor and choir director of the Portsmouth, Virginia African Methodist Episcopal Church and her mother was a soprano in the choir. It is believed that Sissieretta Jones inherited her voice from her mother. She showed her talent as a singer as early as five years old.

Married at age 14, she started voice training in Providence. Although it is a matter of conjecture, most sources state that she continued her studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. She made her professional debut in Providence, which led to a tour of Europe, South America, and the West Indies with the famous Tennessee Jubilee Singers.

James Weldon Johnson observed that she possessed “the natural voice, the physical figure, the grand air and the engaging personality,” characteristic of a great singer. The Washington Post described her voice as: “A phenomenal attraction … the upper notes of her voice are clear and bell-like…and her low notes are rich and sensuous with a tropical contralto quality…In fact, the compass and quality of her registers surpass the usual limitations and seem to combine the height and depth of both soprano and contralto.” Critics concurred that Sissieretta coerced the “musical and theatrical worlds in the United States to accept the Negro in a new image.”

Compared to the Italian soprano at the time, Adelina Patti, Jones was pejoratively dubbed the “Black Patti”. She vehemently disapproved of the name, yet it stuck and it was used in the name of her vaudeville act. Black Patti’s Troubadours was composed of singers and dancers, featuring Sissieretta, which toured the United States and abroad for 20 years. The company’s repertoire included minstrel performances. Although Patti considered this aspect of the show demeaning, she sought to improve its overall quality and simultaneously extend her repertoire by including spirituals and arias in her finale.

She performed for several presidents of the United States, the Prince of Wales and the Kaiser and at places like the Chicago World’s Fair and Madison Square Garden. She was barred from performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Despite this, she had many successes, some of which qualify as breakthroughs. (It was not until 1955 that the color bar was lifted at the Metropolitan Opera with a performance by the contralto Marian Anderson.)

Performing for totally white audiences who viewed her as an anomaly, she was heralded as the premier African-American singer of her time. Despite the inequities and indignities she experienced, she forced whites to see blacks as capable, dignified, and talented. She paved the way for black opera singers such as Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.

Symptomatic of black performers in the past, she had to deal with mismanagement and died penniless in 1933.

She sang her way into history

SISSIERETTA JONES

Journal-Bulletin file photo

More than a century ago, the walls of the Congdon Street Baptist Church reverberated with the “sweet, clear” voice of a young woman who went on to become a music legend.

Madame Sissieretta Jones, who grew up in Providence, toured the world to share her “soprano voice of great richness,” considerable range and “impeccable enunciation,” one critic said. Critics credited Sissieretta with forcing the “musical and theatrical worlds in the United States to accept the Negro in a new image.”

Jones was the first black woman to sing at Carnegie Hall, she sang for the Prince of Wales, and was invited to the White House to sing before three different presidents, including Benjamin Harrison in 1882.

“She had most of the qualities essential in a great singer: the natural voice, the physical figure, the grand air and the engaging personality,” said James Weldon Johnson, a contemporary lyricist of the time.

Jones was born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner in Portsmouth, Va., in 1869. She was the daughter of a Baptist minister, Jeremiah Joyner, and Henrietta Joyner, from whom Jones apparently inherited her enchanting soprano voice.

When Jones was 7, the family moved to Providence, in search of better educational and economic opportunities.

At 14, she began her first formal music training at the Providence Academy of Music and at music schools in Boston. The same year, she married David Richard Jones, “a gambling man” who went on to manage his wife’s career and lavishly spend their money until the couple divorced, in 1900.

In 1892, at the age of 23, Jones sang in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

A newspaper review of the performance compared her to famous Italian opera singer Adelina Patti, and it condescendingly tagged Jones as “the Black Patti,” a nickname she disliked but was unable to shake.

Shortly afterward, Jones was considered to be cast in the lead role of a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which would have fulfilled her dreams. Racial prejudice kept her from appearing on stage. The Met’s color barrier stayed in place for another 60 years, until Marian Anderson became the first black person to sing a lead role there, in 1955.

From 1895 to 1916, Jones led a troupe of singers and musicians on a tour through the United States and abroad. Called the Black Patti Troubadours, the group performed minstrel shows and musical skits.

While Jones initially considered the minstrel performances demeaning, she was able to expand her repertoire by singing spirituals and opera arias for the show’s finale. The show served as a training ground for hundreds of black entertainers.

Jones was given many gifts from admirers, among them, a medal from President Hippolyte of Haiti, a bar of diamonds and emeralds from the citizens of St. Thomas, an emerald shamrock from the Irish people of Providence and a diamond tiara from the governor general of a West Indies island. She often wore her 17 medals across her chest during performances.

After touring for about 20 years, the Troubadours disbanded, and Jones returned to her home in Providence to care for her ailing mother and grandmother.

She lived the next 18 years at her home on Wheaton Street, taking in homeless children and selling mementos from her days of glory to pay her living expenses.

Jones died of cancer in June 1933 in Rhode Island Hospital. She was buried in Grace Church Cemetery, Providence.

Story by KAREN A. DAVIS

Sources: Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston; Puritans, Pioneers and Pacesetters; eight people who shaped Rhode Island, by Marie Fontaine and Janice O’Donnell, and Providence Journal-Bulletin articles.