Catholic Bishop: Children Want to Be Sexually Abused

The Bishop of Tenerife provided an interesting explanation for the vast numbers of children raped by Catholic priests: They asked for it. In 2007, when the American Catholic Church was reeling from sex abuse scandals but not so much Europe, the Bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez, made some interesting Christmas holiday comments.
In a Christmas Eve interview with La Opinión de Tenerife, Bishop Alvarez said that there are children who want to be abused:

There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you.

That’s right, the rapists aren’t the priests. It’s those seductive tempters and temptresses, fresh-faced whores all, bending over in front of priests, flaunting their taut, young, moist flesh, just begging to be used as the sexual playthings of perverted pedophiles (and hebephiles) who have sworn to their imaginary friend that they will be celibate for life.
It’s probably their plan to sue later and retire on the Catholic Cult’s ill-gotten loot. After all, so many seem to be doing it!
Bishop Alvarez got some bad press shortly thereafter:

The controversial comments drew immediate criticism, including from the Spanish government, which hinted that it might review its relations with the Church unless action was taken against the Tenerife Bishop. Gay rights groups and child welfare associations called on the authorities to prosecute the Bishop for inciting and defending abuse of minors, while left-wing political parties demanded that the Pope sack Alvarez immediately.

In 2008, the Spanish Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals (FELGT) filed a criminal complaint against him for “identifying homosexuality with the sexual abuse of minors” and for “promoting an attitude of violence and discrimination” against homosexuals:

“It seems that he is justifying the abuse of minors, coming from an institution that has been condemned the most times in the world for sexual abuse,” said [FELGT president Antonio] Poveda. “It is necessary for the hierarchy to be respectful and to know that as citizens they have freedom of expression, but they also have to respect the standards that are set by the laws in this country and in this case they have passed that boundary, therefore we hope that the Attorney General will intervene to prevent such lamentable declarations from being made again.”

Despite the outcry at the time, it appears to have been a flash in the pan. The most recent story on Bishop Alvarez? The 2009 reopening of the Bishop’s Palace in La Laguna, damaged by fire in 2006.

La Laguna – 11.07.2009 – Before blessing the building, the Bishop of Ten­erife, Bernardo Álvarez, summed up his feelings in just two words, “satisfaction and thanks”. Satisfac­tion with the work done, and thanks to the thou­sands of people, institu­tions, companies, parishes and many more, “without whose support and soli­darity it would not have been possible to complete the work”.

Seems Alvarez is still Bishop, and likely still blaming children for being raped. Perhaps the Vatican will hire him as Benedict’s new PR agent!

Jenny Donati @'Paliban Daily'

(Thanx Michael!)

I do NOT freebase cocaine

(Thanx SJX!)

The Bias of Veteran Journalists

The Aliens@home!

Look, ma: no oxygen! (The image is a distant cousin, not the newly discovered sea critters.)

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

@'ScienceBlogs'

Update:

Here is a pic of the anaerobic organism

Dad!!!

17300

Congratulations...

...It's a boy!

Pictures of Banksy in Jamaica by Peter Dean Rickards from 'Afflicted Yard'

Sites that publish these photos are usually handed a cease and desist take down notice by Banksy's solicitors at the same time that they deny it is him.

Rickards was responsible for selling the wall that Banksy painted on in Jamaica through ebay....
(Thanx Stan!)

Swans to play Supersonic

Photograph by Carlos Melgoza  

Michael Gira's Swans are set to perform at the forthcoming Supersonic Festival in Birmingham. The latest incarnation of the post-punk, New York No Wave group consists of original members Norman Westberg and Cristoph Hahn along with Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica and Thor Harris (though original and long-running member, Jarboe, will not be appearing). The group are currently recording a new full length album to be released on Gira's Young God label later this year.

Supersonic Festival takes place at Birmingham's Custard Factory, 22-24 October. Tickets are on sale now, click here for more information.

@'The Wire'

HA!

jupitusphillip You will not be allowed to cast your vote inside Connie Booth, Tony Booth or Tim Booth out of James. #electionfacts

US-Afghan relations sink further as Hamid Karzai accused of drug abuse

Cabaret Voltaire - Just Fascination

HA!

Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory

The clock struck 3 a.m. Julian Assange slept soundly inside a guarded private compound in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly, six men with guns emerged from the darkness. A day earlier, they had disabled the alarm system on the electric fence and buried weapons by the pool. Catching a guard by surprise, they commanded him to hit the ground. He obliged, momentarily, then jumped up and began shouting. As the rest of the compound's security team rushed outside, the intruders fled into the night.

Assange, a thirty-something Australian with a shock of snow-white hair, is sure the armed men were after him. "There was not anyone else worth visiting in the compound," he says, speaking on the phone from an undisclosed location in Africa.

The self-centeredness and shadowy details of Assange's tale—and his insistence that he must be taken at his word—are typical. They're part of his persona as the elusive yet single-minded public face of WikiLeaks, the website that dubs itself the "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." Designed as a digital drop box, the site is a place where anyone can anonymously post sensitive or secret information to be disseminated and downloaded around the globe. Earlier this week, it posted its most explosive leak yet, a video shot by an American attack helicopter in July 2007 as it opened fire upon a group of a men on a Baghdad street, killing 12, including two unarmed Reuters employees. (Two children were also seriously wounded in a subsequent attack.) WikiLeaks said it had obtained the classified footage from whistleblowers inside the US military...

Continue reading

David Krushner @'Mother Jones'

Military can't find its copy of Iraq killing video

Wikileaks Better at Finding Classified Pentagon Videos Than Pentagon

Tales From the Slush Pile

(Click to enlarge)

Facebook

James Williamson on The Stooges

Photo: Robert Matheu 2009

It's been more than 35 years since the Stooges unleashed their seminal album, Raw Power, on an unsuspecting, and largely unimpressed public. It has since been lauded as a classic in its own right, not to mention one of punk's most important precursors. To celebrate the latest reissue of the album, as well as the band's latest live incarnation, MOG's Ethan Stanislawski caught up with the band's guitarist, James Williamson.

An essential part of the Raw Power sound, Williamson retired from music a few years after the Stooges broke up, spending most of the intervening time as the Vice President of Technology Standards for Sony Electronics. Now that he's back with the band, Williamson was ready to talk about the group's original era, overcoming beefs with his bandmates, Raw Power's legacy, and how Iggy Pop's stage persona has actually gotten more intense.

MOG: How much have you been in contact with Iggy and the other band members while you've been at Sony in the past 30 years?

James Williamson: Very, very little. I saw a couple of gigs... one with Iggy solo and one with the band when they first got back together, but other than that I haven't even seen them. The only time I'd talk to Iggy was involving publishing and things like that. I did visit Ron Asheton once when I was visiting my sister in Ann Arbor. Other than that, there was nothing really at all.

MOG: In an interview a couple of years ago, you said you had no real interest in rejoining the band. What was the biggest factor in the change?

JW: Ron died, so Iggy and I started talking to each other again, just about catching up. When people die, there's sort of a time where all those little things really don't matter that much anymore. There wasn't going to be much of an opportunity to rejoin the band because I had my job with Sony. But then Sony was handing out early retirement packages, so I took mine... The question was whether I wanted to do it again. Essentially, it all boiled down to the fact that these guys needed me to do it.

MOG: You played with Ron on bass in the original run, and now Mike Watt's been playing bass with the band for years. What was it like rejoining the guys now that they've been playing together for a while?

JW: The band dynamic has been fine... Three of the five band guys are guys I'm very familiar with. We're old buddies.

MOG: How was playing with Mike different from Ron?

JW: Mike Watt is a sweetheart kind of a guy, and a really, really good musician. So he just does his job. Playing with Ron was a different style of bass playing, and a different time. Mike and I are really clicking right now.

MOG: He probably grew up playing all the songs from Raw Power.

JW: Yeah, as a matter of fact, he had played all of them, actually.

MOG: There's been talk of you guys are working on a new album with this lineup. What's the status of that?

JW: There are about three songs we're working out now that are new. There's a fourth we may never release... we're thinking we'll try to record something this year for people so they can hear us. Maybe it will just be a single or two to start out with... we're pretty busy. But we do want to release something... that's our intention.

MOG: How consistently have you been playing guitar over the past 30 years, and what was it like to pick it up live?

JW: 35 years, actually, but who's counting? I hadn't been playing at all, period... When I took this on, I had some serious woodshedding to do.

MOG: In a lot of recent reunions, some musicians have picked up instruments after not playing for decades. Is it kind of like picking up a bike?

JW: A little bit. If you're a musician who's played for a while, those synapses are still there. They're not firing too well when you start, but once you get going you get back into it. Luckily it's my music and it's my style, so it's kind of natural for me. If I had to play somebody else's stuff, who knows.

MOG: The band now is much less wild now than in the '70s... Iggy is still very intense, but how have things changed now?

JW: I think he's more intense now than he was then. It's pretty amazing how much he puts into the show now. Back then he was also intense, but very unpredictable. You never knew which Iggy you were going to get. There were times when we didn't even know if we were going to get through a show, and sometimes we shouldn't have, then we did.

MOG: Mike Watt's talked about how he can't believe how aware Iggy is of what's going on in the band while he's still performing like that.

JW: He's an experienced pro at this point. He's a perfectionist now, which is one big difference from the old days. He demands a lot, but that's a good thing.

MOG: Do you feel good where you left things with Ron before he passed?

JW: I guess when I met with him at his house, things seemed to be okay. That was before the band reformed. After the band reformed, they got very busy.

MOG: They just remastered Raw Power for the third time... What's your thought on the new mix?

JW: I think they did a first rate job on it and the whole package. I like that they brought the Bowie mix back on the market; despite all the criticisms of it I think it deserves to be on the market, for historical reasons if nothing else.

MOG: I grew up in the CD era, so I never heard the original Bowie mix.

JW: That's the important part of the Iggy mix, because with the Bowie mix, people like yourself hadn't even heard of it. But he [Iggy] had a big enough name eventually where he rereleased it, and people got to hear it, which was a big help for the album.

MOG: One of the things I think people lose perspective of is how much you guys stuck out back in that era... What do you think is different about how the Stooges were seen then vs. now?

JW: The Stooges were not about whatever was fashionable or acceptable or maybe even successful in that time... We really played music for ourselves and not for other people. As a result of that, the music wasn't very popular in the day, because no one could relate to it. But I think the success of the music came later when so many people imitated it. So it was something people were more in tune with, and it sounds strangely contemporary now.

Ethan Stanislawski @'MOG'

Girlz With Gunz # 96: Polski plakat 'Bladerunner'

This one is for you Spacebubs!

Is This the Future of Journalism? Why Wikileaks Matters

This week marked the international coming-out party for a new media organization that could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007.  "There was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm [caliber gunfire] from above," says Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has watched thousands of hours of aerial footage of Iraq. COMMENTS (0) SHARE: Digg   Facebook   Reddit   Bookmark and Share More...  The video, seen through the perspective of the Apache gun camera, captures a dark moment in the Iraq war. As the American airmen chuckle over the body count, it also amounts to a damning indictment of war culture. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response.  True to its promise to release complete source material, Wikileaks has posted the full 38-minute gun camera video on YouTube. But the focus of its Monday press conference was an annotated, 19-minute edited version, published on the site collateralmurder.com. It opens with a quote from British provocateur-cum-journalist George Orwell:  Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.  The video proceeds to transcribe the radio chatter and break down the action with highlights and arrows. A group of men gather in the street; one reporter talks on the phone and another shoulders a camera bag. Seconds later, the pilots, mistaking a camera lens peeking around a corner for an RPG, strafe a cluster of civilians. That is almost forgivable. But events turn from queasy to horrifying when the crew open fire on an unarmed van that has stopped to pick up the journalist left alive. As Wikileaks shows in a closeup, two children sitting in the front seat of the van were struck by the barrage of gunfire.  The video was sensational, and it exploded online Monday -- it's since gotten more than 2 million views on YouTube and prompting a follow-up story by the New York Times.  Many viewers were undoubtedly encountering Wikileaks for the first time, though the organization was launched in December 2006. The site, which is funded by private donors and does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary.  This is not to imply that Wikileaks' editors are merely passive distributors of their sources' information. They cultivate and protect anonymous sources, verifying submitted materials, adding context, and promoting important leaks. In the case of the Iraq gun camera footage, the process began with using volunteers to help decrypt the submitted file. Then they worked with Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson to verify the video on the ground in Baghdad. Wikileaks says Hrafnsson found the two children who were injured in the attack, and has posted recent pictures and other documents. The whole story cost the organization about US $50,000, according to Julian Assange, the site's co-founder. 

Jonathan Stray @'FP'

Kids Today!!!

What Does Palinspeak Mean?

Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? Just what is this sort of thing below?
We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?
Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.
It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)
Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).
The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal...

Continue reading

John McWhorter @'The New Republic'

Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) - A question for you...

You say you will be "rooting for the tories"...how DO you feel about this?

Joan Jett - 'Dressed To Kilt' NY 5-04-10

*swoon*

Revelation 3,14159...

@'alulamecontou'

The music industry is sucking the blood of its main assets: the musicians. Gang Of Four does something about this.

They'll let you, the potential listener, do it instead. Or whatever sick perverted thing you'd feel like doing with your favorite band's blood!

Gang Of Four are set to give away bottles of their own blood in exchange for money contributions to aid the recording of their new album 'Content'.

The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.

@'NME'

Twat!

AIannucci
Just seen Cameron describe 'the great Ignored' as 'hard working, fair minded, hard working people who work hard.' No wonder they're ignored.

Smoking # 56

Nas Jumps on Gil Scott-Heron Remix

In February, spoken word poet and rap ancestor Gil Scott-Heron released the grizzled return-to-form lament "New York Is Killing Me", off of his Best New Music album I'm New Here.

Now Nas, one of Scott-Heron's greatest descendants, has jumped on the track to add some of his own dizzy, apocalyptic imagery. All in all, Nas uses the track to make a pretty good case for not living in New York.

Gil Scott-Heron: "New York Is Killing Me" [ft. Nas]

@'Pitchfork'

Soviet Bus Stops

Photos by Christopher Herwig

Tom Waits on Fernwood Tonight

U.N. Secretary General calls Aral Sea 'shocking disaster'

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.
"On the pier, I wasn't seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships," Ban told reporters after arriving in Nukus, the nearest sizable city and capital of the autonomous Karakalpak region.
"It is clearly one of the worst disasters, environmental disasters of the world. I was so shocked," he said.
The Aral Sea catastrophe is one of Ban's top concerns on his six-day trip through the region and he is calling on the countries' leaders to set aside rivalries to cooperate on repairing some of the damage.
"I urge all the leaders ... to sit down together and try to find the solutions," he said, promising United Nations support.
However, cooperation is hampered by disagreements over who has rights to scarce water and how it should be used.

@'Yahoo News'

(Thanx to Rosa from 'Newsy' for the video!)

James Murphy says:

(NME/April 7 2010)

"I'd love to see the record labels crash and burn"

Iraq: Reactions to the “Collateral Murder” Video

The US military’s Central Command has posted a set of documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, on the deaths in Iraq in 2007 of Reuters journalists, who were among killed in the “collateral murder” video released yesterday by Wikileaks.
James Fallows of The Atlantic, who has covered Iraq extensively over the last decade, reacts:

I can’t pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.

US Military & Iraq’s Civilians: The “Collateral Murder” Video

Bill Roggio of The Weekly Standard has a different view:

There is nothing in that video that is inconsistent with the military’s report. What you see is the air weapons team engaging armed men.
Second, note how empty the streets are in the video. The only people visible on the streets are the armed men and the accompanying Reuters cameramen. This is a very good indicator that there was a battle going on in the vicinity. Civilians smartly clear the streets during a gunfight.
Third, several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG. Wikileaks purposely chooses not to identify them, but instead focuses on the Reuters cameraman. Why?

Glenn Greenwald of Salon challenges this by putting the video in the context of the Pentagon’s fight against Wikileaks and other cover-ups of civilian deaths:

WikiLeaks released a video of the U.S. military, from an Apache helicopter, slaughtering civilians in Iraq in 2007 — including a Reuters photojournalist and his driver — and then killing and wounding several Iraqis who, minutes later, showed up at the scene to carry away the dead and wounded (including two of their children).  The video (posted below) is truly gruesome and difficult even for the most hardened person to watch, but it should be viewed by everyone with responsibility for what the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e., every American citizen).
Reuters has been attempting for two years to obtain this video through a FOIA request, but has been met with stonewalling by the U.S. military.  As Dan Froomkin documents, the videotape demonstrates that military officials made outright false statements about what happened here and were clearly engaged in a cover-up:  exactly as is true for the Afghanistan incident I wrote about earlier today, which should be read in conjunction with this post.

Scott Lucas @'Enduring America'

The Rules of Engagement 

New Thom Yorke song at Atoms For Peace gig in New York

SamCam and her Parliamentary member ready to fight the erection

David Cameron's MP candidate's list has 21 Eton old boys on it

REpost: Meanwhile not so long ago...

The Tories were today forced to deny that a video clip purporting to show a long-haired party-goer at a 1988 outdoor rave was the party leader David Cameron.

The purple-tinted video, set to a hypnotic acid house rave track, shows a man bearing a striking similarity to Cameron with shoulder-length hair and wearing dungarees. The video, called 'Acid House Sunrise 1988 Part 4', has surfaced on YouTube and has been picked up by political blogger Guido Fawkes.Held during the so-called second Summer of Love in 1988, the long-haired man appears to be joining in the fun at the outdoor event. Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines,  was Head of PR for the 1988-89 rave party planners, Sunrise. It was Fawkes who received the emails sent by Brown's special advisor Damian McBride about slurs on top Tories which led to McBride's sacking. Posting on his blog, Guido asks his readers to decide for themselves whether the man in the clip really is the Tory leader and Old Etonian. Alongside stills from the video, he says: 'This has been building up for a few weeks and now Guido is getting calls from Dead Tree Press diarists, it is probably time to bring it out into the open.   'Is this a picture of a long-haired 22 year-old David Cameron? 'The pictures are taken from a video of a Sunrise Party held in the summer of 1988. You decide… ' However a Tory press spokesperson 'categorically' denied that the man in the clip was Cameron. Raves, fuelled by dance music, boomed during the late 1980s and were infamous for the widespread use Ecstasy. The all-night parties, frequently illegal, were held at secret locations in warehouses or in fields. In 2007, it was revealed that Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton after being named by a fellow pupil as a cannabis user. Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his successful Tory leadership campaign on whether or not he had taken drugs.  And he has stuck by his insistence that all politicians are entitled to a 'private past' and should not be required to reveal everything of their lives before they enter politics.

@'Daily Mail'
(NB: April 24 2009)

HYPOCRITE!

Let the battle begin...

(Thanx Drew!)

...don't forget what the Toties did to the country last time and don't kid yourself that they won't do it all over again!

Regretsy - Where DIY meets WTF!

Golden poo small

Description

Here are the poos that you wish you took; Soft, Gold and Shiny,

plus, they don't smell, unlike your poo.
These georgeous poo are made from gold metallic fabric and filled with cotton.
you can use them as cushion on couch or bed,
as a cocktail hat on you and you loved one's head for some party, as a knee cap warmer on your knee cap or your loved one's thigh when you are chatting with friends.
pretty much you can put anywhere they need attention, or put on anybody who needs attention.

HERE

Elián González: Now

He is grown up now, almost an adult, but there is no mistaking the face of Elián González. The 16-year-old youth in an olive-green military school uniform has not changed so much from the boy who a decade ago was the subject of a diplomatic battle between Cuba and the US.

Cuba's rulers have released photos of González attending a Young Communist Union congress at a convention centre in west Havana last weekend. The images were posted on government websites yesterday, then widely transmitted by state-controlled media.

His hair is still cropped short, his expression remains solemn, except this time González presumably knows that, like it or not, he is still a political symbol.

"Young Elián González defends his revolution in the youth congress," read the headline over the photo posted on Cuba Debate, the same site where Fidel Castro posts columns.

State media did not elaborate on the adolescent's role but the green uniform with red shoulder patches appears to be from a military academy. There is a military school near his hometown of Cárdenas.

In November 1999, aged five, he was found floating off the coast of Florida in an inner tube after a vessel sank and his mother, Elizabeth Broton, died with other Cubans who tried to flee the island.

US immigration officials ruled the boy should return to his father in Cuba but Cuban exiles in Miami demanded he stay, prompting an uproar that galvanised mass protests on both sides of the Florida straits.

When Miami-based relatives refused to give him up, federal agents stormed the house 10 years ago this month and returned him to Havana.

Elián was celebrated as a hero and his father, restaurant employee Juan Miguel González, was elected to parliament. Cuba has marked González's 7 December birthday with parades but kept the boy away from foreign media.

Rory Carroll @'The Guardian'