NUFF DANCEHALL MADA ALLOW DIS SAME TING

From honey to Mustard……-Rihanna’s color change

In late 2005 when Rihanna rose to stardom with her song ‘’Pon de Replay’’ , with her distinct Afrocentric  features looked amazing covered in a dark caramel that looked kissed by the Barbadian sun.

          We could relate, even though being from different islands, we still felt a sense of pride at her escalating level of stardom.

     Lately, it seems with every hit song, the hue of her skin has gotten lighter and lighter, while her wonderful, charismatic Caribbean accent has also disappeared. The accent that gave her songs their distinct sound. I took up a bottle of mustard this weekend at the supermarket and was thoroughly amazed at how similar Rihanna’s color was to the bottle and its contents. Could it be the change in climate? If it is, please put Vybz Kartel in a jail near there.

          Digital cameras are good but they had good cameras back in ’05, so the change in color surely has nothing to do with film. With each change in hue, Rihanna’s behavior has become gradually more like Hollywood with no evidence of ‘’Caribbean values’’ in sight. Each video, each song, pushes an extra button, with a lighter hue in close proximity.

  Before, there was hardly anything to learn from her songs, hearing them made you sing without thinking, should young women bleach without thinking as well?

It’s a boy! And he’s five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha.

“I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?”

Laxton, a UK-based web editor, and her partner, Cooper, decided to keep Sasha’s sex a secret when he was still in the womb. The birth announcement stated the gender-neutral name of their child, but skipped the big reveal. Up until recently, the couple only told a few close friends and family members that Sasha was a boy and managed to keep the rest of the world in the dark. But now that he’s starting school the secret’s out.

For years, Becks has been referring to her child, the youngest of three, as “the infant” on her personal blog. But guarding the public from her son’s gender was only part of her quest to let her kid just be a kid.

Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no’s are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha’s dressed in a shiny pink girl’s swimsuit. “Children like sparkly things,” says Beck. “And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have? ”

Sasha’s also not short on dolls, though Barbie is also off limits. “She’s banned because she’s horrible,” Laxton says in the Cambridge interview.

On a macro level she hopes her son sets an example for other parents and makes them reconsider buying their own sons trucks or forcing their daughters into tights. She’s seen how those consumer trappings affect how and who kids play with in the sandbox.

But the sandbox is just a precursor to the classroom. When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son’s sex public. That meant Sasha would have to get used to being a boy in the eyes of his peers. Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl’s blouse with his pants.

“I don’t think I’d do it if I thought it was going to make him unhappy, but at the moment he’s not really bothered either way. We haven’t had any difficult scenarios yet.”

But as parents well know, bullying is hard for any child to avoid. It’s more important to raise someone who’s confident enough in himself to overcome peer pressure. It’s also important to have his parents have his back (remember the mom who defended her son’s choice in a Halloween costume?) Maybe Sasha’s early years will be character building, maybe he’ll have a higher emotional quotient being raised with dual perspectives on gender. Or the reverse could be true: Sasha may have less of a formed identity because of his upbringing, and feel angry at his mom for dressing him in flowery shirts and telling the world about it. Then again, maybe he’ll get over it.

As for Laxton, she says she’s open to her son pursing any career or sexual preference he chooses as he matures. “As long as he has good relationships and good friends,” she says, “then nothing else matters, does it?”

CAIRO — Hosni Mubarak’s defense attorney argued in court Sunday that his client is still the president of Egypt and that his trial in criminal court violates the nation’s suspended constitution.

The attorney, Farid el Deeb, made the statements during his closing argument in the trial, which began Aug. 3. Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years, his security chief Habib el Adly and six of his deputies are charged with complicity in the killing of protesters during the 18-day uprising last winter that forced Mubarak’s ouster last February. If Mubarak is convicted of those charges, he could face the death penalty. In a separate case, Mubarak, his two sons and a family friend have been charged with graft.

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The new defense argument was met with derision from revolutionaries and lawyers for the families of nearly 1,000 slain protesters who rose up a year ago this week to force aside the autocrat.

Legal experts also rejected the argument as legally unsound and said it is likely to be dismissed by Judge Ahmed Refaat, who is presiding over the case. When Egypt’s military rulers pushed Mubarak aside, he became a regular citizen, subject to the same laws as ordinary Egyptians, the experts said.

“Mubarak left his position, not by resigning, but because the January 25 revolution forced him out,” said Judge Mohamed Hamed el-Gamal, the former head of Egypt’s State Council which oversees administrative courts. “He will be judged by Egyptian law like any other Egyptian because he is not president.”

Also Sunday, a temporary power-sharing agreement between major parliamentary parties, both liberal and Islamist, was already fragmenting, just one day before the first post-Mubarak parliament was scheduled to meet.

The leftist Egyptian Social Democratic Party pulled out of the agreement with other parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, on how to divide the top parliamentary positions. A statement from the Social Democratic party said negotiations failed because officials could not agree on how to fill all the positions in a representative way.

When the agreement was announced last week, the parties pledged to back a member of the Freedom and Justice Party, which will fill nearly half the seats in the lower house of parliament, as speaker of the parliament. The party’s strong showing means it could still secure the speaker’s job even without the support of the Social Democratic party.

In the courtroom, Deeb called Mubarak “Egypt’s wounded eagle, leader of the eagles in the battle to restore dignity,” casting the dictator as a victim of last year’s revolt, according to state news reports.

Deeb argued that the ailing 83-year-old never officially resigned as president and only stepped aside in a phone conversation with his then-vice president, Omar Suleiman. All executive decisions made since, including the dissolution of Mubarak’s parliament and the suspension of the 1971 constitution, are violations of that same constitution, because Mubarak did not make the pronouncements, he said.

“This court is not qualified to try him and he must be acquitted,” Deeb told the court as lawyers for the victims chanted for his execution, according to local news reports.

Adly’s defense team is expected to begin presenting its case on Monday. So far witnesses have failed to link Mubarak to orders to kill protesters, lawyers involved on both sides of the case say.

Egyptians have paid close attention to the case since Mubarak first appeared inside a Cairo courtroom on a hospital bed, behind a prosecution cage. If he is acquitted, analysts say, the decision will likely be met with major dissent in the streets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/mubaraks-attorney-says-his-client-is-still-president/2012/01/22/gIQAkereJQ_story.html

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