Yahoo! May 4, 2000
Leisure Canada Appoints New V-P to Cuba
Wednesday May 3, 8:13 pm Eastern Time. Company Press Release
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 3, 2000-- Leisure Canada Inc. (``LCI'')(CDNX:LCN. - news) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Guillermo (Mito) Martis as Senior Vice-President Development and Construction. Mr. Martis is working out of the offices of LCI's wholly-owned
subsidiary Wilton Properties Limited, located in Havana, Cuba, assuming the duties and responsibilities previously carried out by Peter MacLeod during his tenure in Cuba. Mr. MacLeod returned from Cuba earlier this year to assume his new role as President and Chief Operating Officer of LCI, and Mr.
Martis will work closely with Mr. MacLeod as the development and construction continues in Cuba.
Mr. Martis has over 20 years of experience in design and construction, including 12 years within the resort industry, and considerable knowledge and experience with the establishment of timeshare resorts. Since 1987, Mr. Martis was the Vice President Development and Construction for Sun
Development Company N.V. in Aruba, where he was actively involved in the design, development and construction of the Tierra del Sol, a master planned community with a Robert Trent Jones II designed championship golf course, the Casa del Mar Beach Resorts, Playa Linda and Costa Linda Beach Resort, of
which the last two resorts were each winners of an ARDA Silver Award for Architecture and Design. During that time, while he was researching the need for time-share properties in the Caribbean, he also became familiar with the Cuban business culture.
Prior to his involvement in the resort industry, Mr. Martis held the position of Technical Advisor and Acting National Authorizing Officer of the European Community with the Department for Development Cooperation in Curacao Netherlands Antilles, from 1975 to 1980 and, subsequently, the position
of Acting Director and Director of Government Land Administration with the Government of Aruba from 1980 to 1987. In addition, Mr. Martis is fluent in four languages, including English and Spanish.
``The company is about to commence construction of its first Hotel in Jibacoa and Mito's Caribbean experience makes him an excellent candidate for the job,'' Mr. MacLeod commented. ``He will also lend his expertise to the implementation of our time-share project. I am extremely pleased to have
him working for us in Cuba.''
The 2000 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders will be held at 2:00 p.m., Vancouver time, on Wednesday, May 31, 2000 at the Lonsdale Quay Hotel, 123 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Social Worker Chosen To Watch Elian
By Michael J. Sniffen, Associated Press Writer.
WASHINGTON, 4 (AP) - A Spanish-speaking social worker with 23 years experience has been chosen to help monitor Elian Gonzalez while an appeals court weighs the 6-year-old Cuban boy's fate.
The government chose Susan M. Ley of Silver Spring, Md., who is in private practice and administers a mental health program in 16 urban parochial schools for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.
Ley and Paulina F. Kernberg, a child psychiatrist from Cornell University Medical College, will report on Elian every other week to the government and to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
Ley was making her first visit to Elian on Thursday, accompanied by Kernberg, Justice Department spokeswoman Carole Florman said. In the future, they will visit separately, Florman said.
Kernberg has told the court that Elian displays a ``sense of well-being and happiness with his father'' and appears unlikely to suffer any lasting trauma from the raid by heavily armed Border Patrol agents that removed him from the home of his Miami relatives.
Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that letting the boy see his Miami relatives again ``is an issue than should be considered'' when the time is right for him.
``INS and the Justice Department are not in the businesses of family reunification, but we are in the business of trying to figure out what is in the interest of the person who is in our custody,'' she told her weekly news conference.
``And so we have suggested to the Miami lawyers that we would be happy to pursue this.''
Last week, the 11th Circuit Court accepted the government's offer of regular reports from Kernberg and a social worker when it rejected requests by Elian's Miami relatives that they and doctors of their choosing be granted access to Elian and that an outside guardian be appointed to represent
him.
Elian is staying at the secluded Wye River Plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore with his father, Juan Miguel, step mother and 6-month-old half brother, Hianny.
The court and the government have ordered, and Juan Miguel Gonzalez has agreed, that Elian will not leave the United States until the 11th Circuit rules on an appeal by the Miami relatives. A hearing is set for May 11.
The Miami relatives are asking the 11th Circuit to reverse a U.S. District Court ruling that threw out a political asylum request they filed on Elian's behalf. Juan Miguel Gonzalez has asked the court to let him take his child home to Cuba, and the U.S. government has supported Juan Miguel's
right to speak for the child.
Meanwhile, an attorney complained that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was allowing Cuban government officials to ``parade through the facility where (Elian) is being maintained,'' while denying access to the boy to the Miami relatives who had cared for him in the United States.
In a letter to the INS, Kendall Coffey, attorney for the Miami relatives, accused immigration officials of helping with a ``pre-indoctrination phase for Elian that is currently underway in anticipation of returning Elian to Cuba.''
The government removed Elian from the Miami home of his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez on April 22 after the family defied orders to turn him over to his father, who came from Cuba to retrieve him.
The Miami relatives had cared for Elian since Thanksgiving when he was found in the Atlantic off Florida after his mother drowned in the sinking of the boat that carried them from Cuba.
Ley has bachelor of arts and masters degrees in social work from Catholic University and has taught at Georgetown University and Smith College.
In addition to extensive work with Catholic schools in this area, she also has served as a social worker in District of Columbia public schools, including work on a special education team for Hispanic students.
Board certified in clinical social work, she began work as a bilingual social worker at the Rosemont Center here in 1977 serving children in the infant and pre-school program and their families.
UIC Investigates Public's Response to Controversy, Elian
SOURCE: UIC; InterSurvey. Company Press Release. May 3, 3:28 pm Eastern Time
Finds Americans More Disgusted With Elian's Relatives Than Government
CHICAGO and MENLO PARK, Calif., May 3 /PRNewswire/ -- More Americans were disgusted with the behavior of Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives (44.3%) than by the actions of the U.S. government (31.2%), according to a survey conducted April 28, immediately after Elian's removal from his relatives'
home.
Linda Skitka, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of psychology, received funding from the National Science Foundation to research the general public's response to controversial issues -- specifically, people's assessment of procedural fairness and their level of moral
conviction surrounding outcomes of controversial issues.
Preliminary findings show that the best predictor of people's opinions about what should happen with Elian is not their ethnic identity, gender, parental status or age, but the relative weight they attach to the right to live in a free country versus parental rights.
The goal of Skitka's project is to use pre-outcome judgments of moral mandate and procedural fairness to predict people's reactions to political and social controversy -- in this case, people's opinions regarding what happens to Elian Gonzalez as measured through national surveys conducted by
InterSurvey.
``People who feel Elian should be allowed to return to Cuba feel that way because they have a high investment in parental rights. Interestingly, though, most of these people do not see Elian's return to his father or to Cuba as very personally important or as a moral imperative. In contrast,
people who feel that Elian should stay in the United States definitely see the issue in terms of the value they place on freedom -- they see Elian's case as very personally important and view it as a moral imperative,'' Skitka said.
According to the data, support for the use of force was best predicted by the value people placed on parental rights, and secondarily by the extent to which people felt that the legal procedures had been fair up until that point, and finally by age. Older Americans were more supportive of the
use of force than younger Americans.
Even though 63.5 percent of Americans thought it was a good or a very good idea to remove Elian from his Miami relatives' home, and 51.8 percent felt it was ``about time,'' 47.8 percent nonetheless felt that it was a bad or very bad idea to use force, and that doing so was the wrong choice from
a moral point of view.
Table 1. Americans' Reactions to Forced Return of Elian to His Father
(Percentage of Americans +/- 4 %)
Concern 36.4%
Outrage 16.4%
"About Time" 51.8%
Relief 29%
Disgust with Miami Relatives 44.3%
Disgust With Government 31.2%
Although Americans were relatively supportive of people's peaceful protest against taking Elian from his Miami relatives' home (40.6%), Americans were highly disapproving of lighting fires in the streets (93.5%) or more violent protests against this action (92.4%).
Table 2. Americans' Reactions to Elian's Removal from His Miami Relatives'
Home
(Percentage of Americans +/- 4 %)
Would Not Understand if Protests Turned More Violent 92.4%
Disapprove of Fires Lit in Streets 93.5%
Approve of peaceful protest 40.6%
Support for political protest was best predicted by the extent to which people valued freedom, level of education, and whether the respondent was a parent. The more people valued freedom, the more supportive they were of protest; more highly educated people were less supportive of protest and,
interestingly, parents were more supportive of protest than nonparents. Cuban Americans were no more likely to support peaceful protest than other Americans, but were slightly more likely to support more violent protest.
``This is a unique opportunity to study public reaction to an issue of clear importance,'' said Skitka. ``What will predict whether people see the resolution of the Elian Gonzalez situation as fair? Is it how fair they perceive the legal procedures to be, or how strongly they feel about whether
he should return to Cuba or stay in the United States? It's a classic question -- which is more important: the means or the ends?''
Results are based on a national random sample of 897 adults. The data were collected using an innovative methodology developed by InterSurvey of Menlo Park, Calif. InterSurvey has provided a random sample of more than 50,000 households with a free WebTV and Internet access, establishing the
first representative Web sample for use in public opinion and marketing research.
The national survey is the second in a series of three that are asking Americans their opinions about the Elian situation. The first was conducted before federal marshals acted to remove the boy and the second one was conducted immediately following the seizure. The survey participants will next
be asked their opinions following the resolution of the controversy.
The final survey will provide outcome fairness assessments and judgments of procedural fairness, as well as answers to a number of questions relating to decision acceptance versus anger and support for political protest and activism.
``There has been very little research that explicitly explores the precursors of what leads to an extreme response to perceived injustice,'' said Skitka. ``When people have a strong, pre-existing moral mandate in a given context, new procedural information may do little to influence how they
perceive the fairness of the outcome of a given situation. The Elian Gonzalez situation provides for an excellent opportunity to study a very controversial event as it unfolds.''
About the National Science Foundation:
The National Science Foundation funds research and education in science and engineering. It does this through grants, contracts and cooperative agreements to more than 2,000 colleges, universities and other research and/or education institutions in all parts of the United States. The National
Science Foundation accounts for about 20 percent of federal support to academic institutions for basic research. For more information, visit www.nsf.gov
About InterSurvey:
InterSurvey provides Web-based research that collects data from a scientifically representative sample of the entire U.S. population, including those who do not own computers and those who have never before been on the Internet. InterSurvey's methodology blends the statistical reliability of
probability sampling with the power of Web interviewing to solve the current problems associated with survey research conducted on the Web, in person, by mail or on the telephone. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.intersurvey.com
About UIC:
With 25,000 students, the University of Illinois at Chicago is the largest and most diverse university in the Chicago area. UIC is home to the largest medical school in the United States and is one of only 88 national Research I universities. Located just west of Chicago's Loop, UIC is a vital
part of the educational, technological and cultural fabric of the area.
SOURCE: UIC; InterSurvey
Copyright © 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 Yahoo! All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2000 Business Wire. All rights reserved. |