Sixteen-year-old Saint International model Tami Williams is French Elle’s December cover girl. The feat is historic on many levels, as Jamaica’s Gleaner reports. 

Williams is the first Caribbean/Jamaican model, and the youngest black model to grace the prestigious publication’s cover page. This accolade, earned only nine months after first setting foot on the international stage, places the leggy Jamaican teen among the fastest-rising black supermodels in history.

Williams joins a legion of top cover stars, including Lupita Nyong’o, Rihanna, Jasmine Tookes (Victoria Secrets supermodel), and Estée Lauder spokesperson (supermodel) Liya Kibede. In the age of actors asfashion magazine-cover models, many industry insiders see William’s cover as a refreshing departure.

It is also extremely rare that such a new model (working for less than a year) would grace such a cover. “This is a watershed moment in global fashion for Saint International and Jamaica,” says Saint boss…

Invitation to the “Forum for the Defense of the Land and against Displacement” with San Sebastián Bachajón and Movement for Justice in El Barrio from New York, Adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle

To the national and international Sixth

To the Indigenous National Congress

To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

To the peoples and communities in resistance

To the media

Compañeros and compañeras, our community struggle remains organized for the defense of our lands and against neoliberal displacement; the bad government wants to dispossess us of our lands purely to serve the capitalist interests of the rich and discriminates as always against the people from below who care for our mother earth.

Our struggles continue walking, organized by political and legal means to defend our human rights and reclaim our culture and traditions, to raise our voice and listen to each other and walk and…

The latest ABTA Travel Trends 2015 Report revealed a list of destinations to watch, which are likely to prove popular in 2015; Cuba and the Dominican Republic stand in third and fourth place after Austria and Botswana.

At number five is Japan, and then Latvia, La Gomera, Norway, Pacific Coast of the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and in twelfth place, the Peloponnese in Greece, where Abta will hold its 2015 Travel Convention.

According to Abta, as consumer confidence is slowly returning to the holiday market with 20% of consumers planning to spend more on their holidays in 2015, affluent customers were breaking away from the cautious optimism that had dominated the market for the last couple of years.

For full article, see http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/tourism/2014/12/27/53751/DR-among-top-popular-destinations-for-2015

See the original report at http://abta.com/news-and-views/press-zone/abtas-travel-trends-report-2015-reveals-destinations-to-watch

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 160,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

(Activist Sanaa Seif, and rights activist and lawyer Yara Sallam (Photo: Courtesy of Free Sanaa Facebook page)

Main Headlines

 Monday

• Al-Jazeera shuts down its Egypt channel
• Egypt extends opening of Rafah border crossing
• Appeals court adjourns FGM victim case to January 26
• Egyptian FM reaffirms trilateral cooperation between Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus
• Cairo University allows 38 suspended student to return
• Five ‘State of Sinai’ militants killed in a raid in Sharqeya
• Renowned satirist Bassem Youssef has been fined LE50 million for breaking his contract with the privately owned CBC channel

Tuesday

• US State Department: ‎Egypt received Apache helicopters in November not December.
• Al-Sisi congratulates new Tunisian president and hopes for “a new era of solidarity”
• Egypt’s top prosecutor referred a man to criminal court “for threatening employees at embassies and consulates”
• Militants bomb Sinai gas pipeline for the 27th time
• Al-Sisi ratifies electoral districts law
• Morsi-era Egypt parliamentarians ‘resume’…