Puerto Rico Win Optimist Team Racing Worlds

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The team from Puerto Rico were jubilant after winning the Optimist Team event at the 46th Optimist World Championship in Cesme on the west coast of Turkey.
A new record 255 sailors from 54 countries are for the 46th Optimist Worlds, where 16 teams, selected on the first five races of the fleet Worlds, participated in the battle for the Team Racing World title. The event, held over a single day, uses a ‘direct elimination with repechage’ format familiar in other sports. It may look complicated but is based on the simple principle that two defeats eliminate a team.

Top seeds New Zealand had two victories over hosts Turkey and then Uruguay but lost out to Singapore and then Denmark. Puerto Rico, seeded second, overcame Japan but then had much harder matches against Denmark and the US Virgin Islands and in the fourth race lost to Singapore.

But in a repechage system you get a second chance and a victories over Bermuda and again the US Virgin Islands put Puerto Rico into the final. Their opponents Singapore had had a more direct route with successive wins over Italy, Sweden, New Zealand and, as noted, Puerto Rico.

In the ‘best of three’ final Puerto Rico started well in race 1 and went on to win by 13 points to 23. Singapore fought back: the second race was team racing at its most exciting with the young sailors demonstrating superb sailing skills and tactics as the points advantage changed time after time in the last 100 metres before the finish. Finally a jubilant Singapore was declared the winners, 15 points to 21.

As the boats manoeuvred on the line for the start of the final race, the wind increased slightly to a steady 15 knots. The slightly heavier Puerto Rican team seemed to have an advantage upwind and had a winning 1,2,3,7 combination as they rounded mark 1. They maintained their lead although Singapore challenged the third Puerto Rico boat without success. As the boats approached the finish line with Puerto Rico still ahead, they bunched and Puerto Rico was penalized by the umpires. As the boat took its turns penalty, it looked like Singapore might just surge ahead but Puerto Rico had done enough and crossed the line as well deserved World Champions.

The final ranking, with the US Virgin Islands taking bronze, shows the advantage held by small countries which can concentrate their talent in one or two clubs for training in this exciting discipline.

Detailed account and score-sheet at www.optiworld.org/08worldnews.html

Optimist World Championship - www.optiworld2008.com
Robert Wilkes

Happiest countries in the world

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Denmark is the world's most content nation, according to a new study on global wellbeing, but the good news is, despite the credit crunch and rising fuel and food prices, all of us are getting happier.

Researchers at the University of Michigan said Denmark's prosperity, stability and democratic government placed the country at the top of the rankings, with Colombia, Canada, Puerto Rico and Iceland all in the top 10.

The United States -- the world's richest nation -- ranked 16th among 97 countries, while Britain was placed 21st.

Zimbabwe, with its soaring inflation and continuing political crisis, unsurprisingly ranked 97th.

I strongly suspect there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness," said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

"There is also a correlation between democracy and peace. Democracies are less likely to fight each other than non-democracies."

Almost all the countries at the bottom of the list struggle with legacies of authoritarian rule and widespread poverty, the survey found.

Moldova and Armenia -- with long histories of repressive government -- trumped Iraq for misery, which placed seven in the U.S.-funded research.

Respondents were asked two questions to gauge their happiness:

Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?

All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

Researchers say that compared to a similar survey 20 years ago, everyone is a lot happier.

"Ultimately, the most important determinant of happiness is the extent to which people have free choice in how to live their lives," Inglehart adds.

Salsa and the city

Daniel Nasaw talks with new Tony-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda about his Broadway show, In the Heights.

Daniel Nasaw in New York
Tuesday July 1, 2008

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In the Heights, written by 28-year-old Broadway newcomer Lin-Manuel Miranda, tells the story of a tight-knit block in the largely Hispanic Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan. The characters are coming to grips with the financial pressures of living in New York and learning to appreciate their Hispanic identity.

And, this being Broadway, they sing, dance and fall loudly in love. Oh, and they rap.

The show, which won Tony awards for best musical and best original score this spring, boasts b-boy-inspired choreography and excursions through hip-hop and Latin musical styles.

It tells the story of Usnavi, owner of a bodega, a Hispanic grocery store, who longs to return to his native Dominican Republic. Usnavi, played by Miranda, who was nominated for a Tony for the role, has his eye on Vanessa. She is a neighbourhood beauty who wants to move to a trendy neighbourhood downtown.

Meanwhile, Nina, the block's estrella, returns from her first year at Stanford university. She is ashamed to tell her friends and family she had to drop out because could not maintain her grades while working long hours to pay tuition.

The neighbourhood is changing: Rents are going up, and a company wants to buy Nina's father, Rosario, out of his taxi cab business.

I knew Miranda growing up – we attended rival high schools - and recently sat down with him in his dressing room backstage at Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre. We talked about New York City, its singular Hispanic culture, British hip-hop theatre and how a middle-class New Yorker learned to write salsa music.

Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Is In the Heights nostalgic? Is it looking backward?
In a sense it is. In a sense, it's a time capsule of a Washington Heights that's not going to exist in 10, 15 years. One of the things we tried to do with the show is not make gentrification just the bad guy. It's way more complex than that. You can't just have a moustache-twirling guy saying, "I'm going to turn your taxi into a parking lot." When you think about it, the original West Side Story, the scene that that was filmed on, is where Lincoln Centre exists now. And in our show there are people who give into it. There are people who sell their business so their kids can do better. There are people who say fuck it, I'm staying, so that some part of the neighbourhood is the same, and some people who really find that their destiny is to leave.

You mentioned West Side Story. Walk two blocks west and you see what has become of Hell's Kitchen. And Rent: The East Village is unrecognisable from 10 years ago. So, is In the Heights in that same vein? Taking a slice of New York that may not be around?
One of the ways the show changed drastically from the college version to now is it was really just a love story set in this neighbourhood. [But] I got back home and there was a Starbucks on 181st and Fort Washington, and there's a Pilates centre! I used to take piano lessons on 181st and Cabrini, and the candy store where I used to go and my grandmother used to play the numbers, there's a very fancy liquor store and restaurant there.

It's funny, a lot of reporters say let's go on a walking tour of the Washington Heights that you grew up in. It's not there anymore! It's still a Dominican-American stronghold and it's still an immigrant community. Even before it was Dominican it was an immigrant community. It was an Irish neighbourhood, and Jewish neighbourhood and Russian neighbourhood. It's always been an immigrant neighbourhood, at least for the past century, and I would hate to see that change.

Hate to see what change?
The small businesses leave, and the fact that it's an immigrant neighbourhood. It's where people go to start their lives in this country.

New York – Manhattan especially, but also Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Montrose Avenue and places east - are losing that character. How do you feel about that?
Well, it's a mixture of resignation and regret, to be honest. I saw it happen more drastically in Puerto Rico, where I would get sent every summer. My grandparents lived there. I remember when the mall came in, and that was the end of the town. You go there? Vega Alta, that town is dying! There's the small businesses that the elderly go to, and then there's the strip mall just outside where everyone goes to. And it's sucked a lot of the lifeblood out of the town. And that's the story of small-town America.

Closer to St. Nicholas Avenue and Broadway in upper Manhattan, it's very, very Latino.
Absolutely, and that's always been true. There's pockets everywhere. If you go even further east and you get to Yeshiva University, it's very strongly Jewish. That's great. That's the fun of it. The different pockets, and the different ways these groups intersect with each other.

So for all of the bad stories, all the "My candy store's not there anymore," there's little pockets of hope, too.

But Usnavi says in the show: "In five years when this whole city's rich folks and hipsters/who's gonna miss this raggedy little business." What's the future of St Nick and 181st?
I don't know. All I know is I wanted to write a little show that captures what it was like, as I remember it. And so that will exist. My little memory of the neighbourhood, through the show.

You acknowledge in the show that Washington Heights started out Jewish, then Irish then Hispanic. Same thing with the Lower East Side.
Which was also a huge Puerto Rican neighbourhood, Loisaida.

In your opinion, how is the current transformation of New York City different from, say, going from a Jewish neighbourhood to a Latino neighbourhood?
I think, frankly, the cost of living is astronomically high here. Most immigrants, when they get off the boat, they're not coming to Manhattan, they're going to Queens, to south Bronx, north Bronx, New Jersey, Newark, to Hartford, Connecticut, to Albany, New York. The problem with that is, I think that one of the great strengths of New York City is that it's not only ethnically diverse but socio-economically diverse. That's one of the great strengths of the city, and I would hate to see that go away. The more less priority we give affordable housing, the less priority we give affordable anything, the harder it's going to be for people of all income levels to live in the five boroughs.

Any plans to take the show to London?
Hopefully. I think the first step is probably a national tour. The story of local businesses being pushed out is such a, I think it's a very American story right now, particularly with the economic times we're headed towards. But yeah, I think London will be certainly in the works.

With American actors?
I don't know. I did see a hip-hop musical in London though. It was called Daddy Cool. It came out two years ago, and I was with my freestyle group, Freestyle Love Supreme, and we did a gig out there. And I went and saw it. They said this was a hip-hop musical, and I was like, "Well, let me go and see that." It was a crazy mess! But it was interesting, in that it was a songbook musical. It was like the people who wrote it, they wrote bad disco tunes then made a musical out of this. But they had these freestyle battles that were like out of Fame.

Were they any good?
No, but they were certainly heartfelt in their attempts to capture … They'd be like, "and now, the rapping starts". And then they'd break into dance. And I was like, "I've never seen a freestyle battle like this in my life."

No, it's mostly guys standing around on a corner or in a park.
Exactly. But this was highly choreographed. It was like Step it Up-meets-Eight Mile. But it was certainly an interesting attempt to use hip-hop on stage. I wouldn't say it succeeded, but it was certainly fun to watch.

Do you think you could do In the Heights with English actors? Could an Englishman play Usnavi?
I think anyone could play Usnavi. It's funny, my understudy who plays Usnavi had never rapped before. But he's a tremendous actor. The hardest thing about Usnavi is the language. It's a lot. Just the volume of language. It's a lot of language at very high speeds. But if you can get your mouth around it and feel it, sure. I'd be down to hear an Usnavi with a British accent.

In the show, Benny is trying to dispatch the cabs, and says, "It's like two different languages. Dominican Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish." And you've got Carla, played by Janet Dacal, at the salon who says she's part Cuban, part Dominican, part Chilean and part Puerto Rican. Is there an authentically New York Hispanic culture?
I think there is. It's funny, every time a parade comes around, everyone comes up with these bumper stickers that say, "100% Boricua [ethnic Puerto Rican]," "100% Dominican," and I promise you there's no such thing. I'm 3/4 Puerto Rican and a quarter Mexican. I have a cousin who's half Puerto Rican, half Dominican. We're all mutts. I would have gotten creamed if I had tried to write a purely Dominican musical. And I would have cheated myself out of being able to draw from all different types and styles of music. And so, my goal was to try to write as many different kinds of music as you'd find in Northern Manhattan as possible, and at the same time, acknowledge that while Dominicans are very proud of Washington Heights, and it's overwhelmingly Dominican, there's also lots of Mexicans, a lot of Hondurans, a lot of Puerto Ricans and Cubans from older generations. It's very easy to talk about the differences between us, and I thought it would be harder and ultimately more rewarding to write about the commonalities.

If there is a unique New York Hispanic culture, where there's the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, and the Cuban sandwich shop, and the botanicas, is that threatened by gentrification, by what's going on in New York?
It all is. Whenever you have a street that's full of chain stores, that's a store that's less likely for you to hang out in. That doesn't happen if you've got a Gap with a pre-approved play-list. But that's a reality.

Where'd you learn to write salsa music?
I didn't. I learned to write music in high school just from music theory classes and piano lessons. And then I sort of came at salsa with a sense of inheritance about it. I was a little bit intimidated by it because it's incredibly complex music. But I also said if I can't write it, then I haven't been fucking paying attention all my life. So I just sort of attacked it, and did my best, and then when we got [music director] Alex Lacamoire and [arranger] Bill Sherman on board, we really went and dissected all my favourite Latin artists. We really deconstructed it and learned it ourselves. We learned to drive the car by building the car.

In Pittsburgh, Posada Takes in All Things Clemente

By Tyler Kepner

Published: June 26, 2008
Click here for original article by New York times.

PITTSBURGH — Jorge Posada is a five-time All-Star, but this week he is an awestruck fan. The Yankees are playing in Pittsburgh, where Roberto Clemente starred for the Pirates, and Clemente is a hero to Posada.

Posada grew up in Puerto Rico, as did Clemente, and he was a year old when Clemente died in a plane crash in 1972. Clemente is revered in his country, and Posada was eager to take a tour of the Clemente museum in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.

He went with another catcher from Puerto Rico, José Molina, and took cellphone pictures of classic Clemente photographs. One is a posed shot of a young Clemente leaping to make a catch, with clouds in the background seeming to form wings on his shoulders. Posada ordered an enlargement of the picture for his home.

Posada said he knows Clemente’s widow, Vera, and he owns a copy of David Maraniss’s acclaimed 2006 biography. But he learned a lot at his tour of the museum.

“Little things, not only baseball stuff,” Posada said. “They wanted him to be in ‘The Odd Couple,’ but he was going to have to hit into a triple play. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘I’m never going to hit into a triple play.’ ”

Posada has a sticker in his home locker supporting the movement to retire Clemente’s No. 21 throughout the majors. He would surely approve of the Clemente quotation that every Pirates player sees on his way from the clubhouse to the dugout at PNC Park: “Whenever I put on my uniform,” it says, “I am the proudest man on Earth.”

Family pool of talent

By Tom Keegan
June 25, 2008

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When a mother goes into labor, a father has one job.

He hurries.

The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t track the quickest trips to the maternity ward, but a Lawrence father of three has iron-clad proof of just how swiftly he hurried when the time arrived.

Twenty-one years and 26 days ago, Tony Portela was on the block, ready to dive into the pool for the 50-meter freestyle at the Pan-American Games trials in Salinas, Puerto Rico, when a meet official stopped the race before it started to inform Portela that his wife, Dorie, had gone into labor.

Portela asked his parents to take Dorie to the hospital and told them he would be right behind them, just as soon as he finished the race. He hurried as no swimmer from Puerto Rico ever had hurried.

“Broke the Puerto Rican record,” Portela remembered like it was yesterday.

The ultra-motivated swimmer then headed to the hospital in Santurce. How long a drive?

“Probably a half hour, 45 minutes,” he said. “My wife will tell you two hours and that the car took every single bump in the road.”

As so often seems the case with the first born, it was a case of hurry up and wait.

“It ended up being a really long labor for my poor wife,” Portela said. “Our son was born the next day.”

Born to swim. Anthony Portela, 21 and a citizen of the United States and Puerto Rico, will spend his Fourth of July trying to swim his way into the Olympics. He qualified to swim at the U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha, Neb., in the 100-meter butterfly.

“Right now I’m seeded about 40th and it’s a goal of mine to make it to the finals, the top 16,” said Anthony, who swims for the University of Minnesota.

His father, who swam for Puerto Rico in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and his mother, who swam in the U.S. Olympic trials the same year, will be watching. So will his sister Chloe, 15, who starred for the Free State High team that took second in the state this past spring. Anthony also swam for Annette McDonald while at Free State, leading his team to the 2004 state title. Jordan, 9, who swims for the Lawrence Aquahawks, also will be at Qwest Center, cheering on his brother.

For more than a week, Anthony thought he would be following in his father’s wake and swimming for Puerto Rico in the Olympics. Shortly before the qualifying deadline — Puerto Rico uses time standards, rather than having swimmers compete at Olympic trials — Doug Lennox, who swims for Princeton, logged a faster time.

Anthony is spending the summer in Minneapolis. His typical day: Swim from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., work an internship for Target’s dotcom distribution center from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. He saves all his bragging for his sister Chloe’s feats.

“She’s doing great,” he said.

That she is. Chloe qualified to represent Puerto Rico in the FINA World Championships in Monterrey, Mexico, where the family will fly one day after Anthony competes in Omaha.

“I’m sure genes have a little to do with it,” Tony said of the swimming success of their children. “At the same time, they’re very competitive, dedicated. They work very hard.”

It seems as if every member of this friendly Lawrence family was born to swim.

Arecibo Observatory becomes part of 6,800-mile global telescope

From ANI. Click HERE for original article.

Washington, June 11: The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico became a part of the global network of telescopes in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa when all of them simultaneously observed the same targets recently, simulating a telescope more than 6,800 miles in diameter.

The telescopes joined by the observatory managed by Cornell's National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center were all members of the Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service (EXPReS) project.

They all marked a live demonstration of their first four-continent, real-time, electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) observations on May 22.

The results were immediately transmitted to Belgium, and shown as part of the 2008 Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association Conference.

According to a report, VLBI uses multiple radio telescopes to simultaneously observe the same region of sky, and thereby creates a giant instrument as big as the separation of the dishes.

It can produce images of cosmic radio sources with up to 100 times better resolution than images from the best optical telescopes, says the report.

The team that operated the Arecibo Observatory said that the demonstration was a major milstone in the telescope's e-VLBI participation.

They revealed that the data-streaming rate to the central signal processor at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in the Netherlands was four times higher than Arecibo had previously achieved.

"These results are very significant for the advance of radio astronomy. It shows not only that telescopes of the future can be developed in worldwide collaboration, but that they can also be operated as truly global instruments," said JIVE director Huib Jan van Langevelde.

Funded by the European Commission, the EXPReS project's objective is to connect up to 16 of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes to the JIVE processor to correlate VLBI data in real time.

This development replaces the traditional VLBI method of shipping data on disk, provides astronomers with observational data in a matter of hours rather than weeks, and thereby allows them to respond rapidly to transient events with follow-up observations.


Copyright Asian News International

Democrats adopt boisterous Puerto Rican style

By DANICA COTO, Associated Press Writer Thu May 22, 4:12 AM ET

Original article here.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Forget placards, stoic bodyguards and formal rallies. To win Puerto Rico's presidential primary, both the Clinton and Obama camps are campaigning in the boisterous, face-to-face "boricua style" favored on this Caribbean island.

The June 1 vote will allocate 55 delegates and might finally give Illinois Sen. Barack Obama the number he needs to claim the Democratic nomination if he picks up enough superdelegates in the meantime. But rival Hillary Rodham Clinton is favored to win here, partly because she's done better among Hispanics in previous primaries and partly because the New York senator already represents a lot of Puerto Ricans, many with relatives on the island.

Among Puerto Rico's seven superdelegates, not bound by the primary, Clinton has a 4-2 edge over Obama, with one uncommitted.

"There's a cultural clash in how campaigning is done" in Puerto Rico versus the mainland, said Roberto Prats, the island's Democratic Party chairman and a Clinton campaign spokesman. "We suggested they build a campaign 'boricua style.'"

"Boricua," derived from the Taino Indian word for the island's people, is the term Puerto Ricans use to refer to themselves.

Large, billowing flags are replacing modest placards, staffers for both candidates have summoned their rusty Spanish, and Bill Clinton's bodyguards were asked to relax during his visit to a sprawling public housing complex.

Obama himself visited briefly last November for a private fundraiser and a meeting with Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila, who later endorsed him. Clinton's last visit was after Hurricane Georges in 1998. But the Obama campaign says he will return before the primary, and a local party official says Clinton also will campaign on the island before the vote.

So far, both campaigns have relied mainly on high-profile surrogates. The former first lady has been represented by her husband, the former president, and daughter, Chelsea. Obama has sent his wife, Michelle, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

These surrogate appearances have been steeped in boricua style.

Clinton's campaign hired a Puerto Rican "reggaetonero" to draw crowds with jingles infused with the heavy BOOM-da-BOOM-BOOM bass rhythm of the popular hybrid Latin rap music.

During her second visit to Puerto Rico, Chelsea Clinton was accompanied by a "batucada," or percussion ensemble, of a dozen young musicians armed with drums, maracas and whistles as she greeted shoppers at a San Juan mall.

It is a warmer, more intimate way to campaign, said Clinton spokesman Angel Urena.

Apparently, it works.

Michael Ayala, the 19-year-old batucada leader, said all 50 musicians he oversees are pledging to vote for Clinton and recruit at least two friends each to do likewise.

Not to be outdone, Obama flew his Spanish-speaking staff to the U.S. Caribbean territory, where they met recently with university students. And Michelle Obama offered some Spanish — "Se puede!" (We can!) — during her visit.

Obama supporters also are organizing "marquesina," or garage meetings, a decades-old tradition in which politicians meet community leaders for informal Q&A sessions. And they're considering launching "caravana" voter drives, which involve raucous caravans of hundreds of cars that meander through the streets with megaphones and pulsating speakers.

"It's the grand finale," said Obama's local co-chairman, Pedro Pierluisi. "That's something very folkloric of Puerto Rico."

Obama, who has far more money than Clinton, launched his television ads last Saturday. They use a Spanish voiceover and show Obama speaking English with Spanish subtitles. The ad says Obama grew up on an island and in a family with few resources so he understands the concerns of Puerto Rican families. With the Iraq war distinctly unpopular in Puerto Rico, Obama closes by saying he will end the war and bring the troops home.

Clinton has run radio ads and began running TV ads on Wednesday. The ad shows Clinton meeting with voters while a woman says in Spanish that Clinton will create more jobs and economic incentives to boost the local economy. The narrator urges viewers to vote for Clinton if they want the island's voice to be heard.

The island switched from a caucus to a primary after Super Tuesday's inconclusive outcome prolonged the Democratic contest. The hope was that a full-scale vote would prompt candidates to make commitments on local issues.

Smart move: Puerto Rico hasn't received this much attention since the 1980 face-off between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.

Clinton wrote a column reminding Puerto Ricans how she helped after Hurricane Georges. Obama countered with a column saying he understands island challenges because he lived in Hawaii. Both pledged to improve the island's economy and public education.

And on the island's foremost issue, both say only Puerto Ricans can decide whether to maintain their commonwealth status, become a U.S. state or opt for independence. Clinton has promised to resolve the issue in her first term. Michelle Obama countered that her husband will devote more resources to resolving the question.

But to many islanders, style is as important as these issues.

In a culture that likes to rub shoulders and shake hands with its politicians, Angel Sanchez was undecided until Bill Clinton appeared standoffish during his visit last month. "He barely allowed himself to be seen," Sanchez said.

Sanchez, the father of two mentally disabled boys, said Obama earned his vote when his staffers sought his ideas for improving education.

Others said Chelsea Clinton's humility and interest in island culture won them over.

"It's been great being able to show the Americans and Clinton staffers that here the campaigning is different," said batucada leader Ayala. "There can be joy, fun and dancing."