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May 17, 2012

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thumbnail Immigration decision could make it easier for foreign 'fusion' bands to play in US
May 17th 2012, 14:33

Skirball Cultural Center

Orchesta Kef, a band from Argentina, was denied a visa in November 2009 to perform in Los Angeles.

The next time Orquesta Kef gets invited to play in the United States, it may actually be able to get into the country.

The band of young musicians from Buenos Aires, who blend Klezmer music – traditional instrumental music of Eastern European Jews – with Argentine tango and folk, were denied entry in November 2009 by U.S. immigration officials. A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director recommended against issuing the group a so-called P-3 a visa to perform at a “Fiesta Hanukkah” concert in Los Angeles, saying there was no proof the group’s act was “culturally unique.”

After public blowback, an appeals board re-examined the case and reversed the decision – but by then Hanukkah had passed and Orquesta Kef never got to play in L.A.


This week, Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it was officially clarifying its definition of “culturally unique” to specify that it “is not limited to traditional art forms, but may include artistic expression that is deemed to be a hybrid or fusion of more than one culture or region.”

The new definition will apply to reviews of future applications for P-3 visas from foreign performing artists and entertainers.

“It was something that needed to have a more fine-tuned definition,” said immigration services spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. “It’s going to make it easier for us to adjudicate cases like these in the future."

People who want to perform in the U.S. typically need one of the following: a P-1 visa, issued to internationally recognized athletes, artists and entertainers; a P-2, for artists or entertainers in a reciprocal exchange program; a P-3 visa, issued to entertainers participating in a culturally unique program; or an O-1, known as the “genius” visa, for individuals with extraordinary ability in the arts, athletics, education or sciences (NBA star Dirk Nowitski of Germany, for example, has an O-1).

In its original P-3 denial, an immigration official concluded of Orquesta Kef:

“The evidence repeatedly suggests that the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music, incorporating musical styles from other cultures and regions. A hybrid or fusion style of music cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe, or other group of persons.”

The band had been booked by the Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish cultural institution in Los Angeles, to perform at its annual Hanukkah holiday concert. In the visa application, Skirball included a short biography of the band, describing the ensemble’s  “unique musical style” as “based on the millenary force of tradition and the powerful emotion of the Jewish culture, mixed in with Latin American sounds.”

Skirball also provided letters from music experts who testified to the group’s unique sound.

 “How more culturally specific can you get than Jewish music of Latin America?" Jordan Peimer, Skirball’s vice president and director of programs, thought at the time.

The visa denial was the topic of several scathing columns, including a blog post on Foreign Policy magazine’s website sarcastically titled “Keeping America safe from Latin Klezmer bands.”

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Peimer, who said the initial denial was “a huge missed opportunity,” called the latest decision “a vindication for the band … and also a vindication for the American people.” 

“It says our government works,” he told msnbc.com on Wednesday.

Alejandro Filippa, a New York immigration attorney who specializes in artist visa applications, said the immigration agency’s clarification of the definition of “culturally unique” was a positive step in a world of increasingly diverse and interdependent cultures.

“The door is now more open for an entire new wave of artists to perform in the United States,” Filippa said in an email to msnbc.com. “Unfortunately, the fact this application was initially denied is indicative of the cultural ignorance of some USCIS officers in adjudicating cases that are more reflective of the modern, diverse international community we now live in.”

As for when Orquesta Kef might finally play in the U.S., Peimer says he hopes to book the band for a future Hanukkah concert.

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120516-skirball-band.photoblog400.jpg (image/jpeg)
L.A. suspends 7 cops for 'Jump Out Boys' clique
May 17th 2012, 14:15

By NbcLosAngeles.com

Seven deputies from the Los Angeles County sheriff’s gang unit are on paid leave during an investigation into their suspected involvement in a secret clique that promoted aggressive policing and celebrated officer shootings, sources confirmed to The Los Angeles Times Wednesday.

The newspaper broke the news about the suspected “Jump Out Boys” clique several weeks ago when a supervisor discovered a pamphlet describing the group’s tenets.


For more, visit NBCLosAngeles.com

Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore confirmed to NBC4 that seven deputies have been placed on leave, but, citing an internal affairs investigation, would not comment further.

Whitmore told NBC4 that his department was aware of the clique and investigating the suspected gang before the paper broke the story.

Days after the news broke, the captain of the division told his deputies in a private briefing that they “shamed the department by forming the group and urged those responsible to identify themselves,” the Times reported.

One deputy came forward and named six others, a source told the paper. All seven were placed on paid leave this week.

Sources with knowledge of the inner workings of the division told the newspaper that current and former Gang Enforcement Team members comprise the clique that used gang-like three-finger hand signs and branded themselves with matching tattoos, modified after a shooting.

The tattoo's design is believed to include a grinning skull with red eyes, wrapped in a bandana imprinted with the letters “OSS” – allegedly representing Operation Safe Streets, the name of the larger unit the Gang Enforcement Team is part of, the Times reported.

The Gang Enforcement Team is divided into two platoons of relatively autonomous deputies who target neighborhoods where gang violence is high, locate armed gang members and take their guns away, the Times reported.

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thumbnail Chicago braces for major protests as NATO summit looms
May 17th 2012, 13:23

Jim Young/Reuters

Chicago police prevent protesters from placing furniture in front of a bank Thursday, ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago.

By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

As world leaders gather for the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend, they will be welcomed by thousands of protesters with a litany of complaints. Chief among them: Stop spending money on war and use it to rebuild recession-hit communities instead.

Protesters already have taken to the streets over a number of causes in the week leading up to the summit, including the shuttering of local schools and the loss of homes through foreclosures, and they stormed the building that houses the headquarters of President Obama’s campaign.

But they’re planning larger rallies and marches in the days to come, one to call for a “Robin Hood” tax on certain Wall Street transactions and another led by anti-war activists where a group of 9/11-era veterans plan to return their service medals to protest the "war on terror."

“We’re seeking to show how the policies and the money that goes to NATO trickles down to hurt people in every community in America and especially in Chicago,” said Rachael Perrotta, a 32-year-old receptionist and a member of the press team for Occupy Chicago, one of the two main groups organizing the protests. “Over 800 million in U.S. tax dollars goes to fund NATO each year and our country is crumbling. Here in Chicago, they’re closing schools, they’re closing health clinics and we’re saying that we need our money to stay here to fund services in this country, not to go overseas to kill people on the other side of the world.”

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, consists of 28 member nations, including the United States. NATO members have deployed alongside the United States in the Afghan war and NATO led last year’s military action in Libya.

Chicago has assigned 3,100 officers to NATO's two-day summit to guard against the kind of violence that broke out in the streets of Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. They will be assisted by hundreds of officers from other cities such as Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., NBCChicago.com reported, and the city has warned of massive travel disruptions.

The city also has imposed limits on how close the protesters, which include dozens of unions and anti-war, environmental, education, healthcare and civil liberties’ groups, can get to the convention center where the summit is being held -- within “sight and sound” of it, according to the Chicago Tribune -- raising the ire of the demonstrators.

“We’ve had an 11-month fight with the city and with the federal authorities for our right to protest against war and greed, and it’s come down to these days of protests,” which will give people an “opportunity to express their voices as part of this movement,” said Joe Iosbaker, an organizer with the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda (CANG8), the other main group organizing the protest.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released guidelines for protesters to consider under a new federal law that it said has “expanded the ability of the Secret Service to suppress protests” near people under its protection. But a spokesman for the group also said Wednesday that McCormick Place had agreed to let protesters put literature and multimedia materials in the center during the meetings, the Tribune reported.

Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history and an expert in social movements at Vanderbilt University, said the protests were reminiscent of those against corporate power in the late 1990s, including the ones targeting the WTO meeting in Seattle.

“This had quite a lot of momentum in the late ‘90s,” he said. “And then the intervention of Sept. 11 just killed that movement -- not permanently -- but it made its goals seem secondary in relationship to what most people in the world were worrying about, which was terrorism, not forms of international corporate exploitation.”

“But it would be foolish to think that that stuff just died,” he added. “And I think we’re beginning to see some of it come back.”

Todd Gitlin, a former leader of the 1960s-era group Students for a Democratic Society and a sociology and journalism professor, noted the high degree of organization and advance planning that had gone into the NATO summit protests. But he cautioned that Occupy and its satellite groups need to come up with “tangible results” rather than demonstrations that will play “as more of the same.”

“What it (Occupy) already has done is big, but diminishing returns will set in if what materializes now is simply one demonstration after another,” he said. “They’ve already accomplished the bulk of what they can accomplish by way of changing the atmosphere. The atmosphere has changed. Now they have to produce tangible results in order to evolve.”

US veterans to return war medals in protest

But Iosbaker said protesting was the only thing that worked to create change, citing the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements as well as Occupy.

“We are just another link in that chain but we’ve already won specific things,” he said, citing the decision to move the G8 meeting, planned for earlier in the week, out of Chicago to Camp David in Maryland. “We have made NATO and war a topic of dinner table conversation in the city of Chicago and I believe to a considerable extent nationally. The anti-war movement had been re-emerging around Afghanistan as more and more people turned against that war and now there is a major sense of momentum for all the peace groups in the country.”

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