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About Us ...
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Atlantic Free Press was founded in September 2006 by Richard Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands and Chris Floyd of Oxford, UK.
The mission of AF Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. AF Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
One of the chief pipelines we intend to use to spread these dissident truths is Google News. Google News has become on of the most popular news sites in the world with over ten million monthly visitors. Being chosen as a Google News source has given Atlantic Free Press a much larger voice in the world; it's not just one of a billion blogs floating around out there. On any given day, on any given story, Atlantic Free Press is grouped with the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and other international media covering the same topic.
Richard Kastelein is Empire Burlesque's technical guru (CMS architect), special research and project manager.
Kastelein's company, Expathos, specialises in Open Source Content Management Systems for bloggers, online social groups and communities. His choices for open source solutions are more commonly used in Europe, therefore unique in the US market, giving his work a unique stamp in the American digital landscape. He prefers staying away from cookie cutter, proprietary software solutions such as Moveable Type and blog hosting services such as Xanga, blogger.com and Live Journal. By using Open Source Content Management System software such as Joomla, Drupal and Postnuke, not very common in the blogging world, his work is unique.
He also helps authors layout, design and publish their works using on-demand printing solutions such as Cafe Press and Lulu. Bucking the traditional publishing paradigm (writer-agent-publisher triage) by using new developments in technology and distribution, Kastelein's company works with expatriate and 'dissident' writers such as Chris Floyd and Manuel Valenzuela.
Hailing from the Canadian Pacific Southwest - Richard grew up on the fringes of Vancouver, a liberal and progressive city often noted as one of the best places to live in the world by such publications as the Economist and the UN.
Packing his bag at 19, he left the city in 1986 and has lived overseas most of his adult life, choosing the life of a sailing vagabond over immediate college. After sailing the Atlantic with a clan of Viking Norwegians, hailing boats in Thailand and Malaysia and sailing the Pacific, he published his first series of articles called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas" in 1991 in the UK in an array of international adventure travel magazines.
He then went on to Art College in Victoria B.C. where he studied Photography and Journalism at the Western Academy of Photography to hone his writing and visual skills. Kastelein's first job out of college was reporting for a weekly newspaper in a small enclave of 3000 people, Fort Smith, in the Canadian Northwest Territories.
After two years in Fort Smith, Kastelein went back to sea and ended up in St. Maarten in the Dutch Caribbean where he spent almost ten years, on and off, working as an editor and reporting for the local media as well as serving stints in the marine industry as a sailboat skipper and marketing director for two multinational marine chandleries.
In 1994-95 Kastelein sailed from Crete, Greece to the Caribbean with his wife and two friends on a 38 foot Morgan sailboat. He also sailed the Pacific, Indian Ocean and Red Sea in his twenties.
He has created two print publications from conceptualisation, design, content production, layout, distribution and solicitation of advertising in the Caribbean - What's ON St. Martin and The Limin' Times as well as provided hard news for St. Martin's Week as English Editor and Today St. Martin as an investigative reporter.
Kastelein returned to Europe in 2002 to start life anew with additions to the family along with the desire to live in the First World once again.
He now develops websites, manages a boatbuilding operation in Brazil and writes. Richard can be reached by email at expatforums@gmail.com
Chris Floyd is an American journalist now based in Great Britain. He is the UK correspondent for Truthout.org. For 10 years, he wrote the weekly Global Eye political column for The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times. His writings also appear in The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, The Baltimore Chronicle, The Bergen Record and elsewhere around the world. His book, Empire Burlesque, is published by Expathos Books.
His report, Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism, was chosen as one of ProjectCensored's Top 25 Stories of 2002/2003. His pieces have been anthologized in Media Democracy in Action: Censored 2004 and his work attracts a wide international audience, particularly in Europe, North America, and Australia. His columns are regularly featured on many other sites on the internet at sites including ICH, Lewrockwell.com, Bradblog, Salon, Counterpunch, Democratic Underground, The Smirking Chimp, Booman Tribune, William Bowles, Political Cortex and many more.
His career began in the hills and valleys of Tennessee and down in the piney swamps of southern Mississippi, covering moonshine raids, shotgun murders, drug-running evangelists, racial conflicts, the economic ravages of the Reagan Administration, and the relentless, turbulent campaign of the Religious Right to gain political power and cultural dominance throughout the "heartland." He returned to his home ground in the late 1990s, where he won awards for his coverage of a deadly hostage shootout and a bloody melee between county officials – swapping charges of corruption and adultery – at a school board meeting.
Floyd spent several years in the depths of the military-industrial complex, working for a security-restricted federal research laboratory on projects dealing with energy conservation, global warming, space travel, transportation, robotics, artificial intelligence and military logistics. On the side, he published fiction and poetry in various now-forgotten journals and taught Russian literature at the University of Tennessee. Later, he annotated Shakespeare, 19th century British poetry and American literature for a start-up company producing multi-media CD editions of literary works for colleges and schools.
In 1994, he made his way to Russia, where he joined the Moscow Times, an English-language daily and one of the first independent newspapers of the post-Soviet era. There he spent two years – the high casino of the tumultuous Yeltsin era – and began writing the "Global Eye" column, which he continued after returning to the United States in 1996. He was also the Times' movie reviewer from 1996 to 2000.
From 1998 to 2000, Floyd, a writer for over 20 years, was the editor of Science & Spirit, an Oxford quarterly journal dealing with the contentious relationship between science and religion. His work there included interviews with such thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Frans de Waal, V.S. Ramachandran and other contributors from around the world including Islamic scientists, Jewish theologians, militant atheists, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, as well as authors such as Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Lisa Jardine, A.N. Wilson, John Polkinghorne.
Chris can be reached by email here.
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