10:00 AM EST Share The Bravo Network star is one of three new board members for the county’s tourism bureau.
Visit Jacksonville elected three new members Feb. 5 to the tourism bureau for Jacksonville and the Beaches board of directors: Capt. Sandy Yawn, Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams and Alex Alston.
Alex Alston
She is building Maritime 618, a restaurant in LaVilla that will serve yacht-style cuisine.
Yawn donates 50% of sales from her Capt. Sandy merchandise line to the nonprofit Jacksonville School for Autism.
Sheriff Mike Williams
Williams joined the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in 1991 and was elected sheriff in 2015.
Former director of sales and marketing for ASM Global, the company that manages the city’s sports and entertainment facilities, Alston recently joined Jacksonville-based FIS as managing director of corporate markets with a focus in sports and entertainment.
London launches online extempo contest for youths
Brian London -
REIGNING extempo champion Brian London has designed a competition for creative young people who may be feeling frustrated as the country faces a Carnival season with no Carnival.
London has come up with an online extempo competition aimed at primary and secondary school students. The students will compete for cash prizes and trophies in the National Tiger Tanks online Junior Ex-tempo Challenge.
The competition is being done through London’s NGO, Friends of the Youth of TT (FOYTT).
He explained, “We would have been accustomed to having the National Junior Extempo Monarch during the Carnival period. We have been doing that for five years. This would have been our sixth year. With everything that is going on, I realised that while a lot of adults are engaged in one kind of event or another, there is not a lot of opportunity for the creative youths to showcase their talent.
Cortina de Hierro –Castro’s Iron Curtain
In 1946 after the end of the Second World War what Winston Churchill described as an Iron Curtain stretched across Europe separating East and West with all professional sport banned in the East. That brought an end to any fledgling careers and any future hopes of a professional career for boxers on the Eastern side of the Curtain. After just over forty years with the dissolution of the USSR the Curtain is no longer a barrier to professionalism and fighters such as the Klitschko brothers and Vasyl Lomachenko have since graced our sport.
In 1961 after Fidel Castro adopted Communism as Cuba’s creed another Iron Curtain banning professional sport was woven in the West every bit as important for boxing as the one in Europe. Unlike the European Curtain this one is still in place and still denying professional boxing access to the wellspring of talent that has made Cuba the most successful nation in amateur boxing.
Carnival Tempo coming in San Fernando
Nadia Batson -
ONE southern steelband plans to maximise the time slot usually reserved on the Carnival calendar for the Calypso Fiesta show to stage an event targeting local and international audiences.
CAL Skiffle Steel Orchestra will create an alternative event to help ease the Carnival tabanca and reconnect nationals and the diaspora with their favourite artistes via a virtual space.
Calypso Fiesta, the annual calypso picnic where thousands would have gathered to hear and critique the cream of the calypso crop, from among whom finalists would have been chosen for the Calypso Monarch, was scheduled for February 6 at Skinner Park, San Fernando.