Ramón Calderón detained in a New York airport due to mistaken identity

Real Madrid President Ramón Calderón was accidentally detained for several hours in a New York airport after an immigration officer saw that one of the President's surnames was blacklisted.

This coincidence activated the typical security measures which have been stepped up in recent days due to the U.N. summit and President George Bush's visit to New York.

As soon as the incident was known, the Club contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior.

Once the matter had been resolved, the President of Real Madrid, who is in New York for personal reasons, received an apology and continued about his business.

Real Madrid C. F.

Ms. Ghuman, a professor at Mills College in Oakland, California had her H-1B visa was revoked last year upon her returning the country to participate in New York in the Bard Music Festival featuring Elgar's work.

The case is interesting because there is no known reason for the trouble and attempts to get to the bottom of it have proven fruitless. The only thing known is that her visa was revoked by the State Department:

After a year of letters and inquiries, Ms. Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake.

Bard College president Leon Bottstein expressed his institution's frustration:

This is an example of the xenophobia, incompetence, stupidity and then bureaucratic intransigence that we are up against. What is at stake is America’s pre-eminence as a place of scholarship.

Ms. Ghuman's lawyer released to the NY Times an account of her experience with CBP:

In a written account of the next eight hours that she prepared for her lawyer, Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”

Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention center in Santa Clara, Calif., unless she left on a flight to London that night.

Outside, Mr. Flight [Ms. Ghuman's American fiance] made frantic calls for help. He said the British Consulate tried to get through to the immigration officials in charge, to no avail. And Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.

“They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights,” she said. “For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means.”

Vladislav Tretyak, president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation (RIHF), said the proposed agreement was not in the best interest of Russian clubs.

"We have been in constant negotiation with the NHL, trying to reach a fair deal, but unfortunately we were unable to fully take into account the interests of Russian clubs," said Tretyak.

Russia remained the only major hockey power not to sign the deal, which was approved by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) last year.

The Russians were expected to put pen to paper after RIHF's executive board voted unanimously to approve the deal in June.

Tretyak has pushed hard for his country to join a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the NHL since being elected RIHF president in April.

But many top Russian clubs want to negotiate their own deals directly with their North American counterparts.

IIHF president Rene Fasel has warned Russia that if they continued the stand-off they would risk participation of their NHL players in world championship or Olympic competition.