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grayton downing

BBC Sport - Jamaica doping scandals tip of iceberg, says senior drug tester - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...24900565

sport jamaica scandals

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Jamaica's most senior drug tester says the country's recent rash of failed tests might be the "tip of an iceberg".
  • Asafa Powell, the former 100m world record holder, was the biggest name to test positive, but four others including Powell's training partner - the Olympic relay gold medallist Sherone Simpson - also failed tests at the country's national trials in June.
  • Wada officials are due to discuss their visit to Jamaica at an executive board meeting in Johannesburg on Tuesday and could make a series of recommendations to improve the country's anti-doping policies.
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  • The problem is these people were tested positive in competition. What that means is months before you know the date of the test and the approximate time of the test.
  • So if you fail an in-competition test you haven't only failed a drugs test, you have failed an IQ test.
  • That funding - with the help of additional money from Wada - would be used to hire more senior executives to run the anti-doping programme and to hire and train additional drug testers.
  • Our athletes, as confirmed by the IAAF, were the most tested in the world of athletics, so to say your athletes weren't tested is not exactly true.
  • There is a problem worldwide with the use of supplements," said Fennell. "The whole world is induced to use supplements for one thing or another.
  • Athletes are no different. This is not with a view to cheating and I would put my head on the block and say our athletes do not set out to cheat.
  • We do have rigorous testing. If you look at the record for this year you will see our testing record is amazing. Those of our top athletes are on the registered international programmes.
  • "I understand why people pay more attention to Jamaica," said Carter, who won an individual bronze medal in the 100m in Moscow in August to add to his sprint relay gold from the London Olympics.
  • "It was the same when the US dominated. People said they were on drugs and should be tested. That's a part of the sport and we have to accept that. It's going to hurt fans and athletes because no-one wants to be associated with what's going on.
manhefnawi

The Long Fight for Liberty | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...long-fight-liberty

Jamaicans Maroon Dominica Slaves Autonomy

shared by manhefnawi on 13 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Runaway Maroons in British Jamaica and Dominica gained dominion over substantial hinterlands on their islands. Both established viable communities in mountainous terrain adverse to British troops, were abetted by kindred plantation slaves and menaced the plantation system, aiding slavery’s ultimate demise
  • Africans who fled Spanish servitude won autonomy after Britain captured Jamaica in 1655
  • African slaves and locally born Creoles joined previous escapees. Maroons fighting colonial militias (1725-38) secured self-rule and land rights
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  • Britain found it near impossible to smother the previously established community with its own
  • Dominican landowners outnumbered whites and gained control of the local Assembly in 1836 – the first colonial legislature dominated by men of African descent
  • Its legacy, along with Maroon autonomy, became a vital local collective memory
oliviaodon

"Germany Is Becoming More Normal" - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546323

germany change

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.
  • pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) party announced that it would no longer take part in coalition talks to form Germany’s next government. Though Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party won the largest share of votes during the country’s general election in September, they failed to win enough seats to govern on their own.
  • With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”
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  • A second option would involve a return of the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s former “grand coalition” partner, to the government. While such a coalition would easily command a parliamentary majority, it’s one the center-left SPD ruled out in September after its poor showing in the country’s general election—which delivered its worst-ever result more than half a century—and one it rejected again Monday, reaffirming that it would rather have new elections altogether.
  • This brings us to the last, and perhaps most drastic, option: new elections. But calling for new elections is hardly easy, nor would it be Merkel’s decision to make (though she said Monday that she would be open to the possibility if a coalition was not possible). Instead, the country’s Basic Law requires that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier first nominate Merkel as chancellor, after which she would be required to earn a majority of votes in the German parliament, or Bundestag, before she could be reinstated. Only if she were to lose three attempts at such a vote would Steinmeier be able to
  • dissolve the Bundestag; then new elections would have to be held within 60 days. Though a recent poll found that 68 percent of Germans would favor of new elections if Jamaica coalition talks fail, it’s an option Steinmeier appears keen on avoiding, noting in a statement Monday that the parties’ responsibility to form a government “cannot be simply given back to the voters.”
  • “Germany is just becoming more normal. It would be a mistake to over-interpret what is happening. This is not Trump, this is not Brexit. Merkel is weakened, but she’s still in power. … Germany … [is] still very far removed from some of the things that we see around us.”
sgardner35

Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llips-in-potsdam-new-york.html

shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
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  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
sgardner35

Justifiable Homicides, Taken Off the Books, Alter a Murder Tally - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ooks-alter-a-murder-tally.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • When the Police Department counts the killings in 2015, a year when the official tally of murder in New York City was only slightly above its historic low, the preliminary figure of 350 homicides will not include the death of Mr. Williams, 26. His shooting was deemed justified by Queens prosecutors and was removed in late December from the official tally of city murders.
  • Mr. Kelly accused the department of underreporting shootings and murders, but provided no examples of when it had done so.
  • Those that are deemed by prosecutors to be justified are not counted in official statistics, nor is gunfire that misses its target.
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  • Homicides are often added to the year-end tally of murders when men or women succumb to earlier violent acts. And occasionally the police and prosecutors determine from the outset that a gunman is justified in shooting an armed assailant, as occurred in March when a retired New York City correction officer fatally shot a construction worker after an altercation on a subway train in Brooklyn.
  • “I don’t recall one like this, with the exception of the bodega owner who shoots a guy who tries to rob him; that’s usually the typical scenario,” Stephen P. Davis, the department’s chief spokesman, said. He noted that the determination that the crime was justified rests with the district attorney.
  • In the case of Mr. Williams, detectives and prosecutors reviewed video showing the shooting in front of 25-76 Steinway Street and determined that the event had been instigated by Mr. Williams.
  • Detectives caught up with Mr. Williams in March when he drove himself to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center after being shot several times in the legs and buttocks while sitting with a friend in a car in front of his home in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
  • It was not clear what spurred the dispute between Mr. Williams and Mr. King early on the morning of Sept. 28 outside the Crystal Lounge in Astoria. Detectives found video showing the shooting, leading prosecutors to rule it a justifiable homicide.“The defendant acted in sel
  • f-defense because at the time he was being shot at he did not have a weapon and he believed he was in imminent danger of being killed or suffering bodily injury,”
ethanshilling

What the 'Invisible' People Cleaning the Subway Want Riders to Know - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-mta-subway-cleaning.html

new york pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Yaneth Ochoa, a Colombian woman who lives in Queens, was glad to find a job cleaning the subway last summer, as demolition jobs had dried up during the pandemic.
  • But as trains rolled into the Jamaica-179 Street Station in Queens, she learned she would not just be wiping down cars to remove traces of the coronavirus.
  • Like workers at end-of-line stations all over New York City, Ms. Ochoa, 30, was expected to scrub away grime, sputum and even human excrement, she said, without adequate training or special equipment.
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  • Cleaning the New York City subway has always been a dirty job. But when the pandemic hit last spring, it became even more challenging.
  • The thousands of workers the contractors hired — largely low-income immigrants from Latin America — were envisioned as a stopgap measure, as M.T.A. workers were falling ill and dying of the virus.
  • Now, as the M.T.A. prepares to welcome more riders, the workers are pushing back, raising concerns about their safety, salaries and working conditions that they say feel like exploitation.
  • The New York Times interviewed a dozen contract cleaners, including three who in late February had met with Patrick J. Foye, the chairman and chief executive of the M.T.A. to describe their job and share a list of “needs” with transit agency leadership.
  • “It’s so scary to be left without work right now that you’ll accept almost anything,” she said.
  • A spokeswoman for the M.T.A., Abbey Collins, said the agency was disinfecting the subway with the help of “licensed and reputable outside companies whose performance is monitored regularly.”
  • Ms. Ochoa, who earned around $15 per hour, New York State’s minimum wage, finally quit after refusing to clean a train smeared with excrement with just a few rags, she said.
  • “If you’ve got workers on the property for a year, it’s a matter of basic equality,” said Zachary Arcidiacono, the chair of the Train Operators Division for the union.
  • The cleaning program, which the M.T.A. plans to continue indefinitely, will cost about $300 million this year.
  • Their accounts paint a picture of dismal working conditions, and highlight their unequal treatment compared with transit cleaners, who are paid up to $30 an hour and enjoy health insurance and other benefits, uniforms and MetroCards to swipe themselves into the system.
  • Transit officials said they had called on City Hall to send more police officers and mental health workers into the subway to ensure that all workers and passengers were safe.
  • “Many people were getting paid minimum wage or just a dollar or two more,” Mr. Tecaxco said. “The conditions were terrible.”
  • Ms. Muñoz, who cleaned the offices of an architecture firm before the pandemic, said the work was taxing and the rules were strict. Workers were let go for arriving minutes late, or for calling in sick, including from Covid-19, she said.
  • Ms. Muñoz said she was fired in November without explanation. As the sole provider for her four children and parents in Puebla, Mexico, she pleaded to keep her job.
  • Since then, she has not found steady work; she cleans someone’s home every two weeks. As for her former co-workers at the end of the Q line, “My compañeros are still there,” Ms. Muñoz said. “Nothing has changed.”
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