With some of the djs unable to travel because of visa restrictions, the organisers called on veteran dj and dancehall Icon Shabba to spearhead the attack for the artists. Shabba, who is pumped and excited to play this year will be joined by Elephant Man, Spragga Benz, Baby Cham, Wayne Marshall, Red Rat, Mr. Lex and Romaine Virgo.

Among the Reggae Boys who will lace up for the big showdown are former national striker and current Jamaica National coach Theodore Witmore, Warren Barrett, Onandi Lowe, Walter Boyd, Paul tega Davis and Gregory Messam. The winning team will take home the Irie Jam Media/Asylum Nite Club/Western Union trophy and bragging rights for the next year. The event also featured track & field events by the Team Jamaica Bickle sponsored Awesome Power Track Club of Queens, NY.

At half-time the crowd which is expected to number over 10,000 strong will be entertained with performances by some of the reggae acts confirmed for the soccerfest. The event will be hosted by the broadcast team of Aubrey Campbell, Chris Dub Master, DJ Roy of Irie Jam Radio and Ron Muchette of Irie FM and Kingsley ‘Ragashanti’ Stewart of Radio Mona.

Johnny Gourzong, Executive producer of the Festival cites reduced sponsor support and increased production and artiste fees as some of the challenges being faced. He said, “Reggae Sumfest is important to Jamaica’s tourism and impacts positively on the economy and despite reduced sponsorship, we decided it was important to beat the odds and host the Festival this year.” Traditionally Reggae Sumfest has hosted a mixture of local and international acts that has distinguished the event as an eclectic mix of good music and performers. In light of the fiscal challenges organizers gave great consideration to omitting International Acts for this year’s Festival.

Stakeholders agreed that International Acts should be included on this year’s lineup as the Mix of genre and cultures is the essence of the event and such a cut back would adversely affect the marketability of the show. Reggae Sumfest is an Annual event that provides an avenue for new and established local talent to demonstrate their prowess to an international audience as well as a wide cross section of the Jamaican society. The brainchild of several Montego Bay businessmen, Reggae Sumfest was first held in 1993. The show has traditionally featured top reggae and dancehall performers, but Hip-Hop and Rhythm and Blues acts like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Ja Rule, Boyz II Men and Lionel Richie have also made appearances on the Sumfest stage.

Being a virgin at sixteen, seventeen was a no no in the prime of my puberty; whether you were a girl or a boy. For the seventeen year old boys that went to an all boy school, it was a sin. For girls, there are a bevy of beautiful reasons – and whatever the combination - it was never usually frowned upon…generally. Virginity by the age of eighteen (on a growing boy) was like a bad body odor or like halitosis - in that it made you think twice before approaching or back up all together after getting a whiff of it. You got branded as a nerd, a bait (i.e. someone with little to no peer respect), shady (i.e. weird/questionable), “un-cool”, and most importantly... inexperienced.

When you’re a teenager, your most important tools are ‘experience’ and ‘the pretense of experience’. With it, you’re perceived as a woman or a man – when literally, you are really still a child. Without it – you’re like an emotional or hormone drunk, living on welfare [driven by your appetite with barely enough to satisfy your grave]. Or you’re a guided missile with more than one guide. As a young man, it was necessary to at least convey the cloak of sexual experience to any girl you wished to court. I have rarely heard a virgin girl express her desire for a virgin male. No matter which school you were from, the same rule applied... if you were to be seen as an all round senior, you had to have done the horizontal Soca...I mean dance.

Unfortunately for me, I was tainted by my school at an early age (as most boys are) with the notion of experience being a necessity which meant that sex and virginity were hot topics by the time I was fourteen/fifteen. By that age I had grasped a simple concept – 'virginity is bad...sex is good'; but not for the pleasures which could be derived. I foolishly gave little thought to the social warnings of STIs (which were called STDs back then) or the possibility of pregnancy, but instead favored the act for all the ratings I could garnish. It was considered a badge, a stripe, a feather in the proverbial hat; it was ‘believed’ to be liberating confidence.

At fifteen, it was somewhat the norm to tell tales about your sexual experience. In fact, at that age, many men develop their storytelling abilities. You heard embellished stories that were fictionalized, brightened, adjusted, animated, colored or all. I heard both horror stories and funny stories, about which pill made you yawn or how much of the brush you should use, to just needing only one spray to make you a 'stud' (If you are lost, don’t worry, so was I). In the end the bravado of it all and other factors kept me away from sex until later.

‘Later’ was really until seventeen when too many opportunites just kept passing me by (but let us pause for sec…) Women are groomed by everyone, including poor representations of men, that a woman's virginity is not something to be taken lightly. This is grounded not only biology, but within social norms and our psyche. If we were all logical thinkers, we would all agree that the possibility of pregnancy (which is not only physically demanding but life altering) should place greater enormity on the concept for a woman.

From a strictly ego driven perspective, across the passage of time, the patriarchal world has seen it fit to advocate that honor, fertility, virtue, cures and other ill conceived outcomes can be attained from the virginity of a woman, or in many cases, a girl’s virginity. Women were not expected to have the same experiences or the same mind set as men – it became disposal versus retention, pleasure versus pain and grading versus degrading with it being only fit for the gander.

In an article titled ‘*Virginity around the world – A Brief Article – Statistical Data Included*’ by Marie Claire, the journey of gaining sexual experience was described as important mainly for men, to the point where mothers – around the world – made it their duty to have their sons ‘experienced’. Mothers in India made sure that their sons got the experience even if it meant older aunts, cousins or even your older brother’s wives had to get it out of the way. As told to me by Richard Anderson

I was really torn between typing an article regarding yesterday's activities, and focusing on the speech giving by Bruce Golding last night in his address to the nation. Then I realized I could simply type two different articles, so you consider this part 1 of a two part series on what was easily one of the most interesting days in Jamaica for the year 2010. A day that will be remembered for many years as one which (or ... I hope it did) opened the eyes of most Jamaicans to the fact that Politicians are simply good at what they do... and that is politics, which is essentially doing all that is necessary to get elected and not being any sort of a serviceman to the public - or should I say this is what Jamaican politicians are about.

However I will get more on that in part 2, right now I am going to focus on Part one. Now over the past many months the regular readers will realize that this journal has had alot of posts which were directly related to extradition of a Jamaican gang  strongman. Now yesterday at about 2 pm my phone started blowing up, I was getting messages left right and center people were concerned and asking me where I am and if I was safe. Upon further investigation I found out that apparently what had happened is that a rumour had began spreading that the government had signed the extradtition request and were preparing to ship out that said gang strongman.

**Jamaica Gleaner

The busy commercial centre of downtown Kingston yesterday afternoon emptied faster than you could say 'Dudus', as word spread that the Government had signed the extradition request from the United States.

Just to give you an idea of how yesterday seemed.

**Taken from jamaicagleaner

Most major stores downtown closed early and sent all their workers home. Parents went to schools to pickup their children, people rushed to get to the bus stations to go home early and there was general pandemonium on the streets... all because of a rumour.

You see a simple rumour about one man literally scared the pants off of basically every working Jamaican enough to close their businesses and run home. Reason being... we all expected a shootout to start at any second, no wait shootout isnt a strong enough word, we expected to hear an all out war begin almost instantaneously because if the police really wanted to get their hands on this man, its almost sure that it will be a long battle as he does have a really strong gang following.

And this is why I had to name this first part of the 2 part post, the power of one. Because it really shows just how much one person, and a threat to that same one person could literally lock down Jamaica - I say Jamaica because all over Jamaica people started to get nervous as well, Montego Bay, Kingston, Spanish Town all the major commercial areas basically. Because of one man... Scary isn't it.

The children who were previously housed at the Mustard Seed Communities home on North Street, Kingston, were displaced after fire engulfed the premises in March of 2009. Since then, they were moved to another Mustard Seed location in Spanish Town, where, with the help of a number of charities, corporate companies and aggrieved persons, new housing has been provided for them.

Mr. Vegas whose correct name is Clifford Smith and is known for numerous hits including the inspirational, I Am Blessed, said, "I went to the first home a few years ago and I was so disheartened and touched by the living situation there and the cheerful spirit of these kids amidst all their trials, that I had to come back and follow up with them and donate money to assist."

"These are kids who are affected by HIV/Aids and though the new home is almost complete, there are other things that they need and supplies always cost money. Sometimes when we go about our daily lives we forget how blessed we are and complain about the smallest of things and there are others out there in more unfortunate circumstances. Let's not continue to turn a blind eye to our neighbor, but help them in any way we can," he said.

The singer was also given US$50 by someone who heard of the children's needs and wished to assist. The money was handed over to those at the home in addition to Mr. Vegas' donation.

When last have you been to a major sporting event at the national stadium. Say a football match or maybe champs, or any athletic event, well if you have been you will realize one thing... Traffic is horrible! The worst part about this immence traffic is not that it exists or that its annoying, but that it is completely and utterly unnecessary. Its unnecessary not because there is a parking problem or that there are too much cars or that there is some town planning issue that could easily be solved by the widening of the road, but it is unnecessary because the police wont do the simple act of changing traffic conditions on days when there will be events of this magnitude. That is all. Its a simple solution that I have seen used only once and with quite the dramatic effect.

Now of course a solution like this would be very easy to implement as there is literally a perfect circle of roads that surround the stadium that could easily be transformed into single directional traffic without disturbing much, this is doubled when one looks at the fact that its not as if we have major sporting events every week at the stadium so its only a minor change. However it would seem to me that the police try not to think of logical solutions to a problem, and instead focus solutions that must come from a 2 year old.

I have also seen policemen that believe that the only way to speak to people is with aggression and shouting, and then they wonder why so many people also show aggression towards them and are afraid to talk to them. It makes no sense really and truly, and is a simple showing of just how illogical the police are.

Another example is with the speed guns and giving out tickets, I have to ask myself sometimes if these policemen really do understand what they are doing, or if they were even trained or taught on how these things work. The first thing is that policemen only have a set number locations where they set their "speed traps", most regular drivers have a decent mental map as to where it is more likely that a policeman will be standing, and are correct 95% of the time, I know this because I have used this mental map myself on countless occasions, its one of those things that keep me from getting too many tickets. Wouldn't it be smarter to mix up where you put speed traps so that you capture more people? A policeman even went as far as to attempt to give me a ticket even though I was behind another car, stating that I because I was travelling behind him must have been going the same speed, this is clearly illogical especially when one looks at how these radar guns work.

The next situation is with random spot checks, they aren't so random because policemen only target cars that are either old, or taxi-men. I laugh at this because it seems to me that policemen believe that drug runners and gunmen, those same people who make millions of dollars daily, cant afford to buy themselves a good looking car. I wont even bother going into just how silly  a thought process is.

However the point of this post is not just to rant about how policement seem to try to out-dumb themselves on a daily basis, but is instead to ask this question... How can a policeman who can not work out a simple solution to a problem such as directing traffic, be given the task of fighting crime? That in itself is a really illogical situation to be in in the first place, but sadly it is the situation that we are currently in.

Dont believe me, go spend a day looking at the decisions of the average policeman/woman and tell me just how many of them inspired your confidence in the police.

The annual CANA Netball Summer League presented by LIME, which promises to be an action-packed competition, will kick off with a street parade on Utica Avenue on Saturday, June 5. Each club will parade in their respective colours and will be judged for best dressed and best marching display. “We are thrilled to partner with LIME for 2010. Our Tournaments have always been of the highest standard, and 2010 is expected to be even better,” says CANA’s President Cheryl Howell.

The two sponsoring organizations have come together to celebrate Caribbean communities through the sport of netball. LIME, this year’s Platinum sponsor of the Tournament, has operated in the Caribbean for over 100 years formerly as Cable & Wireless. The company is no stranger to Netball and has supported the sport at various levels across the thirteen Caribbean territories in which it currently operates. Most recently, LIME Grenada announced its Title Sponsorship of the annual Grenada Netball Association Tournament for 2010, an event it has supported for the past 20 years.

LIME’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jamaican Chris Dehring, expressed, “It feels natural for us to reach out to the Caribbean communities in Brooklyn. We have been a part of the fabric of life in the Caribbean for many years and so by extension, we must also recognize the important contribution made to our business and to life in the Caribbean in general by our Diaspora communities.”

LIME’s sponsorship of the CANA 2010 Netball Summer League and Caribbean Cup will go towards assisting in the production of the tournament, uniforms and prizes. LIME will also provide telecommunications services for the tournament and will have its products and services available at the various games scheduled over the summer. This sponsorship comes on the heels of the company’s very successful hosting of the 39th CARIFTA Games in Grand Cayman over the Easter Weekend. The meet was televised across 26 countries in the Caribbean for the first time in its history.

LIME’s Head of Diaspora Sales, Antiguan Colin Benjamin, promises a compelling offer from the company that will excite patrons and allow them to purchase the company’s products and services for themselves or for their friends and families residing in the Caribbean.

They claimed that the Caribbean region will also benefit from the prestige of hosting this event. 2.2 billion people would be watching the Cricket World Cup 2007 on television. No amount of investment in advertising and marketing and sales can capture such an audience for this tourist driven region, or a so dem seh. The football World Cup which will be hosted in South Africa in 2010, after a FIFA decision that it should be located once in turn on the African continent, is expecting a revenue of 6.6 million rands (nearly US$1 million). This should be derived from tourism, building and transport expenditures, an additional inflow of foreign tourists (an income of 16 billion rands, close to 2% of GDP), and 130,000 temporary jobs linked to the event.

Impressive, right? Not really if you take into account that these are very very optimistic projections, you will see that often times the people of developing are sold on a dream. Developing countries are currently struggling with providing adequate security, transport and infrastructure for their citizens. Attempts to host these large sporting events will only emphasize these problems. The local police force would be spread thin across the country thus limiting their capability in providing safety for both fans of the respective games and citizens alike. The renovation and/or construction of new facilities will leave the countries with 'white elephants' after the events are finished(for all Jamaicans see the Greenfield Stadium in Trelawney). From an economic point of view, the cost of building a new stadium is not best described by the amount of money needed to build the facility but rather the value to society from the same amount of capital spent on the next best public project. The fact that the Jamaican government could spend US$105 million on a event, while nation building sectors such as education and health continue to be under funded shows that certain public officials have misplaced the priority of its people.

In conclusion, while hosting sporting events like the World Cup in either cricket or football has benefits such as instant publicity and revenue for the host country or region, only countries who can afford it should be allowed to do so. There should be measures implemented by sporting governing bodies that test the feasibility of hsting certain events in a particular country or region. These measures should be determined by the cost of putting the event against the proposed revenue to be earned. The overall problem is not what happens before or during these high profile events, but in fact the aftermath of such on a developing conutry's society. Unfortunately, the final cost of staging these events may become a weight under which developing countries will ultimately crumble.

So earlier this week I was receiving messages non stop that popular dancehall artist Oneil Edwards of the group Voicemail was shot and was in the hospital recovering from his injuries. The message also called for a word of prayer for a speedy recovery. One day later I got a message from my friend telling me that he had heard rumours that another dancehall artist Mad Cobra, real name Ewart Everton was also shot. I nearly disregarded this as a rumor (as I haven't even heard it on the radio) but then I thought back on recent trend of news media falling way behind word of mouth. Needless to say, the next morning the news had finally caught up and had confirmed that Cobra was in fact shot.

The entertainment fraternity and the public were all surprised... I was not.

Now I am not trying to beat down on Dancehall artists and follow the crowd and say that the artists deserve this because they were always glorifying the gun through their music and their lyrics. While I have stated that music has immense power over the masses I still do hold some amount of belief that good parenting is also an important factor and so will not completely agree with this school of thought... though there are some merits to the argument. After all it seems that most of the dancehall artists do sing about the gangster life, and I guess getting shot and having near death experiences is a part of it. However this is not necessarily the intention of dancehall artists and they only aim to be a form of entertainment.

However thats not the reason why I am not surprised, I am simply not surprised because of the high rate of murder that is taking place in Jamaica currently. In case everybody has forgotten since the gleaner stopped publishing the murder numbers last week (or maybe about 2 weeks ago, I am not that sure), there are nearly 6 people being murdered everyday, we arent that big a country, its bound to reach all levels of society, artists are no exception.

**Taken from Jamaica Observer

I do find myself greatly disappointed that suddenly because a dancehall artist has been shot the following happened:

1) Artists suddenly see a good reason to stop glorifying the gangster life and gun violence:

It has been said for years now, that dancehall artists are doing too much to make violence look good and nobody wanted to heed the call - Or I should say none of the popular artists saw the need to heed the call.  However all of a sudden because two artists were attacked I can guarantee that within the next month or two there will be alot of songs preaching a positive message, and then Jamaican artists will return to the status quo of gun lyrics.

**Taken from Jamaica Observer

2) People are suddenly realizing that the crime rate in Jamaica is too high:

Despite all that the Gleaner has been doing to publicise just how sickening crime and violence has become to Jamaica, it seems that all of a sudden people are realizing that its gotten out of hand. Not because you cant turn on the news on any media without hearing that somebody has been killed, or because the statistics are showing that, or even because its now scary to be out in the early hours of the morning. But because a popular personality was shot. This. Is. Rubbish! What kind of mindset do Jamaicans currently have?

3) Suddenly I'm being asked to say a prayer for two people out of 600 victims

Ok this may sound a little harsh, after all this is somebody's life we are talking about here, this is somebody's brother, somebody's father, somebody's uncle, somebody's cousin, and somebody's friend. An attack on anybody is something that should be something that shocks and appalls all people. However I refuse to believe that because a popular person was attacked, I must now pay special attention to that person instead of the great many number of persons. Instead of praying for just two people I instead say we should pray for everybody. Pray for Jamaica, Pray that all the other people who have been attacked will also recover, Pray that the people who have passed before us are in a better place... and not only pray but also start doing some action. After all it has been stated that God helps those that help themselves, and we do need to become active in stopping crime, by whatever way we can.

I'm sorry if I sound cold, I believe that every life is precious and every person has a possibility to be productive in some way and help the human race to strive and survive... However I do also believe that many Jamaicans are simply being stupid, and if this is what it requires to get people to realize the kind of society that we live in, then I believe that we really need to wake up and stop being stupid. Instead of saying get will soon to only Oneil Edwards, say get well soon to every Oneil that is also in the hospital, and every Andre, and every Susan and, to everybody.

Ok I think the topic is pretty much self explanatory, I simply believe that right now there is no other choice. All of the months of news gathering and speculation and frustration in parliament has finally come to a halt and Prime Minister Bruce Golding has admitted that the entire extradition and Manatt Phelps and Phillips Saga was sanctioned by none other than him... acting under his "party hat". Now when I saw party hat of course I dont mean a literal hat that you wear at or get at parties, no I am simply paraphrasing what Bruce stated in parliament, as he said that he did not sanction the help under the name of the government of Jamaica, but under the Jamaica Labour Party.

**Taken from Jamaica Gleaner

I'm sure all my intelligent readers are now sporting a confused look on their face, similar to what one would hold if I simply typed a bunch of jumbled letters and called it a sentence. There is an obvious paradox in what he is saying and we all seem to know it except him. How can one simply wash hisself of responsibility for his actions, by stating that it wasn't done on behalf of his position, but on behalf of what gave him his position? Imagine a policeman stating that when he arrested somebody (even though he is on duty and in uniform), he wasn't acting as a police officer at the time and was instead making a citizen's arrest. One must then ask, how exactly am I to know when you are acting as party leader, and as country leader?

The extremely funny thing about this entire debacle is that just a few years ago, Bruce when accusing the PNP of illegally signing a lucrative contract with trafigura, stated so eloquently that there is no way to differentiate between your party hat and your government hat while you are in power. TVJ made sure to highlight this statement of his at the beginning of the news on Wednesday further cementing the fact that our current prime minister is really only describable by one word.

Now the reason why I state that Bruce's only current available action is to resign is this. How can I now put my trust in a leader who is simple going to bend the rules whenever he feels that it is necessary to do so? How can I trust a leader who currently clearly has no moral authority to fight against crime? He has none, because he himself has done a criminal act by trying to protect somebody accused of being nothing less than Jamaica's number one criminal. Jamaica's current and previous government extradited people by the bucketfuls until this one person was requested and then all of a sudden, something changed and extradition is out of the question... why? The only reason why he is being requested is to put him on trial, it is not as if the US government has a trained firing squad at the ready to kill him as soon as he lands, they're going to give him a full criminal trial.

**Taken from Jamaica Observer

All in all the implications of this admission by the prime minister stretch far beyond what I can put in a discussion here. Of course the next major question is what else has Bruce lied about? How are we to know that anything he has done in parliament was actually done and wasn't just his idea of an April Fools joke to Jamaica? Currently the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica (and also the Jamaica Exporters Association and Jamaica Manufacturers association and others) have had to stop their discussion on creating a "Partnership for Transformation", this is because this partnership was to create a social contract with the government for ways to agree on ways to look at the rule of law, fiscal performance and employment strategies. However like the rest of Jamaica, I am sure that the PSOJ and company are finding it hard to agree with Bruce on anything at the moment.

The entire country has now lost its entire confidence in Bruce golding, he is not worthy of leading Jamaica in any aspect internationally and there is only one way for him to fully atone for what he has done, and that way is to tender his resignation. Nobody who willfully protects criminals can state to me that he really wants to fight crime in Jamaica, no one who lies in parliament can try to tell me what is right and wrong and can never gain my trust. I now have no qualms against calling Bruce a Lier of massive proportions - I would call him some other things but I do not think it would be appropriate.

Bruce Golding and your corrupt party, please resign not just from your current posts but from the life of politics.