Four Bermuda Blogs Shut Down – The Case For Anonymous Blogging Gets Stronger

We at Barbados Free Press have been hunted for over 2 years now. Threats from the previous government and their supporters were a daily occurrence – and still are.

Threats of murder, rape, arson and violence against our families are made via emails and the comments section.

In a small place like Barbados, the entrenched elites have far more power to ruin your life than in a large country like America or Britain where the press is active and courageous. Here, in Barbados, I would be fired tomorrow if my employer ever suspected what I do on night shift!

So we understand why four blogs in Bermuda have shut down due to “pressure”.

Our friend Don Mitchell at Corruption-free Anguilla blog has the story (link here)

Barbados Blogs In Danger? Global Voices’ Janine Mendes-Franco Collects The Evidence…

Global Voices Helps The World Watch Barbados

“Barbadian blogs are some of the most outspoken in the Caribbean, regularly taking politicians and mainstream media to task for issues such as transparency and public accountability. The landslide opposition victory in the country’s recently held general elections has raised the issue of the power of the blogosphere and whether popular political blogs like Barbados Free Press and Barbados Underground had a role to play in influencing the vote.”

Janine Mendes-Franco looks at blogs and the recent Barbados election (link here)

Bringing Small Voices To World Prominence – Using Blogs

You really should take a look at Global Voices’ fabulous website. Through it, you can link to almost any country in the world and through the local blogs find truths and stories that are not seen in the old news media.Each day millions of folks use Global Voices to keep track of what is happening around the world through the voices of ordinary people.

We’ll let Harvard Law School’s Global Voices Project explain more about who they are and what they do.

Excerpts from the Global Voices “About Us” page…

How Global Voices Works:

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

Our international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your guides to the global blogosphere…

…In addition to this website, Global Voices has an Advocacy program to help people speak out in places where powerful forces would prevent them from doing so. We also have an Outreach program called Rising Voices to enable more people whose voices and views are not heard to speak out online…

Our Primary Goals:

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies – weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats – to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following:

1) Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world

2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves

3) Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution

The idea for the project grew out of an international bloggers’ meeting held at Harvard in December 2004. (Here’s a written account of the meeting. To listen to an audio report, click here). Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries…

The Nation’s Albert Brandford Makes A Backhanded Racial Comment Against Barbados’ New Prime Minister

BLP Government’s Use Of Racial Slurs As A Strategy

Let’s get one thing straight so that Mr. Brandford knows where we at Barbados Free Press stand: we are sensitive to comments about race because some of us and our children are of mixed race.

If Mr. Brandford were to use a racial comment against my son, I would immediately see to it that he apologised. And Brandford would apologise very quickly – I can assure him of that.

For too long we listened to the last government’s use of race and colour to divide our people. We saw how Owen Arthur, Liz Thompson and other members of that government did not hesitate to call out racial slurs against their opponents. If Thompson couldn’t argue on the facts, even on national television she dismissed her opponent as being “Caucasian“. Former Prime Minister Arthur called blacks who disagreed with him “negrocrats” and “oreos“.

It was, and remains, an evil practice – made more evil still when it was adopted as a BLP party strategy against then Leader of the Opposition, David Thompson. Mr. Thompson is of mixed black and white parentage, so he was called a “redman”, “white”, “englishman”, “great white hope” and even that favourite racial slur of Liz Thompson “Caucasian”. (BFP article here)

The BLP operatives who were hired to run the disgusting “Exposed” blog constantly use skin colour and race against non-blacks. Bajans of Indian heritage are called “curry boy” while persons of lighter skin colours are disparaged at every opportunity.

Taking a lesson from a racist whites-only political party in Switzerland, the “Exposed” blog featured an article about kicking non-blacks off the island and used a modified version of the Swiss nazi-like poster to illustrate it. They attacked blogger Ian Bourne for having lighter skin and threatened to murder Ian and his wife.

They also attacked citizen journalist Adrian Loveridge as being “white” and threatened to murder Adrian and his wife. They threatened to rape his wife and burn down their hotel – and bragged that nothing would be done about these threats they were making on the internet because, they said, they worked for Cable and Wireless and had the support of government.

BLP Blog Supports Threats Of Violence And The Use Of Racial Slurs

And knowing all the racial slurs and threats of violence by the “exposed” blog, the reaction of the BLP government was to link to the “exposed” blog from the official BLP blog and to feature their articles! And the BLP blog still remains linked to “exposed” even though the BLP government, the police and Cable and Wireless were formally notified of the murder threats over seven weeks ago.

The Barbados police, Cable & Wireless and the BLP government were all in a position to know the identity of the person(s) threatening murder, arson and rape within 5 minutes of looking at Cable and Wireless customer records – but they have done nothing just as “exposed” bragged.

Albert Brandford & Nation News Use Negative Imagery Of Our Prime Minister’s Parentage

It can be seen that for the past 14 years the BLP endorsed the use of racial slurs as a strategy to maintain power and attack opponents – so I guess it is natural that a BLP lapdog writer at the Nation News like Albert Brandford would continue to use race against our new Prime Minister…

“DAVID THOMPSON has finally achieved his life-long ambition: to be the Prime Minister of Barbados.

Newspaper photographs of his swearing-in ceremony last Wednesday portray a smugness that reflects his inbred sense of entitlement.”

… from Albert Brandford in the Nation News article “The Money Factor”

The Nation News & Albert Brandford Should Apologise To Prime Minister Thompson – And To The People Of Barbados

We have come to expect very little professionalism and quality from The Nation News. God knows that the paper and most of the staff left behind any sense of public duty years ago.

Brandford’s article is nothing more than a biased political hit-piece – and that’s ok. It is not like we haven’t seen one before at The Nation News. That’s life. That’s politics. At least you can clearly see where their bias is.

But this business of negative racial comments and racial slurs from the writers at The Nation News must stop.

Barbados deserves better than this evil and divisive practice by the largest printed daily.

As for all of us at Barbados Free Press – we’ll make do with the online edition of the Nation News until Brandford and the paper apologise to David Thompson. Not one more coin will go from our pockets for a paper edition of The Nation News.

Did Ezra Alleyne Ever Repay The Money That He … ah… “Failed To Repay” To A Client?

As our friend Amit at Push! Pull! blog would say… “IANAL” – I am not a lawyer – so maybe there’s a lawyer out there that can help us figure out if Ezra Alleyne repaid the money to a client.

Apparently, Mr. Alleyne had some sort of trouble finding the money to give it back to the client – even though the money was supposed to be safe and sound in his (ahem) “Trust” account.

According to the online law library, at one point Mr. Alleyne gave his undertaking to repay the money but then failed to do so… for which the Disciplinary Committee of the Bar Association found him guilty of misconduct and recommended that he repay the money and that he be suspended from practicing as a lawyer for 3 years.

This was apparently overturned on some technical grounds, but we can’t find any indication as to whether Mr. Alleyne ever returned the money that was not his.

The case can be found online here.

We’ll also print the entire case for the convenience of our readers – and, you know – just in case it gets lost with all the new attention…

😉