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Americans are the majority of tourists in the Caribbean, but the US embargo against Cuba prevents almost all American tourists from visiting Cuba. This study uses mixed methods to examine a group of American tourists’ destination image of Cuba before and after a tour in Cuba. The American tourists in this study described Cuba as a forbidden fruit, a desirable destination that Americans are not allowed to or at least should not visit. On the positive side, travelling to Cuba was seen as a scarce opportunity that has the allure of the prohibited and the attraction of viewing communism from a previous era. Conversely, the image of Cuba was also tainted by the history of political antagonism with America and associated concerns about tourist safety, cost, and a limited market place. However, actual and potential changes in Cuba are likely to heavily impact the destination image in the near future.

Inside \"Paradise Lost\"opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint's comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books ofParadise Lostand to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects ofParadise Lost-its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice. Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam's decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of thisParadise Lostis a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton's masterpiece,Paradise Lostreveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.

It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this lack of balance, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme coordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books ofParadise Lost, which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities. Rosenblatt acknowledges that later inParadise Lost, after the fall, a Pauline hermeneutic reduces the Hebrew Bible to a captive text and Adam and Eve to shadowy types. But Milton's shift to a radically Pauline ethos at that point does not annul the Hebraism of the earlier part of the work. If Milton resembles Paul, it is not least because his thought could attain harmonies only through dialectic. Milton's poetry derives much of its power from deep internal struggles over the value and meaning of law, grace, charity, Christian liberty, and the relationships among natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel.

[...] Chinese people prefer joyful life and the more people [involved] means much more fun, much more activities and a more active life. [...] when we have many more people [on stage], the choreographer can use them in visual patterns to [create] much more stage effects.

Book 1, \"The Rebels\": \"Love in a Time of Hate,\" \"A Love Worth Waiting For,\" \"A Special Delivery Package,\" \"The Man Who Couldn't Grow a Beard,\" \"Even a Blind Horse Knows the Way,\" \"The Slave Who Knew His Name,\" \"Footprints in the Snow,\" \"Chased by Wolves,\" \"The Woman on John Little's Back,\" \"Angeline's Blues.\" Book II, \"Crossing the Color Line\": \"Suspicious Lynchings, Passing for White, Passing for Black and Mixed Marriages in Deadly Times: A Chronology,\" \"Hound Dogs Hate Red Pepper,\" \"The Schoolteacher Had to Duck Dead Cats.\"

James Smith's faith in God wasn't the \"puny, soft-fleshed\" type of those whose belief is the equivalent of a Sunday morning stroll, [Betty DeRamus] writes. Smith's faith was muscular enough to fortify him for two decades after he shambled away from his family in chains. Each night after his labors, the born-again Richmond area slave preached the gospel to fellow slaves, even after his master whipped him for it. Sold away from Fanny and his two children to a slave trader for refusing to stop worshiping with other bondsmen, Smith was purchased by a Georgia cotton grower who ordered his overseer to administer a 100-lash beating to discourage the slave's stubborn prayerfulness. Slavery was the nation's most wide-reaching and seismic tragedy. But our understanding of it often is limited. \"So-called slavery experiences are portrayed only in the bleakest of forms,\" DeRamus explains. \"Slavery was bleak -- but it was also one of the greatest lessons in survival. Escaping slaves and slave couples displayed extraordinary creativity and courage. . . .

[Mark Regnerus] says most parents and churches still don't know how to talk about sex with teenagers. They either refuse to talk about it or try to scare teenagers into abstinence by showing them photos of untreated sexually transmitted diseases. Regnerus' findings are already drawing criticism, especially his conclusions about the effectiveness of abstinence programs. One of the book's critics, Denny Pattyn, founder of the Silver Ring Thing, a national abstinence program founded in 1995, says it's too early to conclude that abstinence programs aren't working. Most have been operating since 2000. Yet other studies show some success for the pledge movement, Regnerus adds. One found that pledgers lose their virginity later, have fewer sexual partners and are more likely to abstain from sex until marriage than non-pledgers.

One of the major challenges in ecology is to understand the relative importance of neutral-and niche-based processes structuring species interactions within communities. The concept of neutral-based processes posits that network structure is a result of interactions between species based on their abundance. On the other hand, niche-based processes presume that network structure is shaped by constraints to interactions. Here, we evaluated the relative importance of neutral-based process, represented by species’ abundance (A) and fruit production (F) models, and niche-based process, represented by spatial overlap (S), temporal overlap (T) and morphological barrier (M) models, in shaping the structure of a bird-seed dispersal network from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We evaluated the ability of each model, singly or in combination, to predict the general structure [represented by connectance, nestedness (NODF), weight nestedness (WNODF), interaction evenness and complementary specialization] and microstructure of the network (i.e., the frequency of pairwise interactions). Only nestedness (both NODF and WNODF) was predicted by at least one model. NODF and WNODF were predicted by a neutral-based process (A), by a combination of niche-based processes (ST and STM) and by both neutral-and niche-based processes (AM). NODF was also predicted by F and FM model. Regarding microstructure, temporal overlap (T) was the most parsimonious model able to predict it. Our findings reveal that a combination of neutral- and niche-based processes is a good predictor of the general structure (NODF and WNODF) of the bird-seed dispersal network and a niche-based process is the best predictor of the network’s microstructure.