Brazil: On 16 May a Brazilian federal judge, Murilo Mendes, handed two US pilots, Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Palomino, a prison sentence of four years and four months each. The pilots were found guilty of negligence in a case involving the mid-air collision of their Legacy executive jet and a commercial Boeing 737-800 over Mato Grosso state in the Amazon region in 2006, which resulted in the death of 154 passengers. The pilots were absolved from the charges by a Brazilian court in 2008. However, the case was re-opened in 2010 at the request of victims' families. The unprecedented re-trial took place via video-link, as the US nationals were allowed to attend their court date at a Long Island courtroom, from where they were examined by judges in Sao Paulo. Judge Mendes found that there was negligence on the part of the pilots, who did not check that their aircraft's flight control transponder equipment was functional. According to Mendes, "for an hour they were mere passengers. [This] time in which a plane can travel the distance of a country, it [sic] is too much. If only a period of 10 minutes had passed in which the transmission equipment was not checked, then maybe their conduct would not have been reprehensible. But no, an hour in aviation is an eternity". Despite the sentence, the defendants will not serve any jail time as the sentence was commuted to community service to be carried out in Brazilian organizations in the US. However, their pilot licenses have been revoked.
Cuba: On 13 May in an interview with the Spanish-language TV channel Univisión, President Barack Obama said that he still did not see the kind of "significant changes" in Cuba that would allow the US government to normalise ties with Havana. "For us to have the kind of normal relations we have with other countries, we've got to see significant changes from the Cuban government and we just have not seen that yet," he stated. Obama was dismissive of the recent tentative economic opening overseen by President Raúl Castro, suggesting it did not go far enough. "The economic system there is still far too constrained," he said. With regard to the recent death of a dissident in police custody, Obama noted that "he shouldn't have been arrested in the first place… The bottom line is political prisoners are still there who should have been released a long time ago who never should have been arrested in the first place; political dissent is still not tolerated," he said, adding, "the Cuban people deserve greater freedoms and have suffered as a consequence of oppressive actions by the Cuban regime". "If you think about it, [Fidel] Castro came into power before I was born - he's still there and he basically has the same system, when the rest of the world has recognized that the system doesn't work," declared Obama.
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