ST JOHN’S, Antigua – Students from Haiti who took up hospitality studies here last year under a special scholarship programme say they are making good grades. After four months at the Antigua & Barbuda Hotel Training Institute, the four Haitian students say they have passed all their subjects with flying colours. Associate degree student Nicholas Louis Le Jeune says not only are they making good grades, but they also made friends and overcame the language barrier.
CASTRIES, St. Lucia, CMC- St Lucia’s Prime Minister, Dr. Kenny Anthony believes Haiti’s recovery efforts after the devastating earthquake in 2010 has the potential to create an employment boom in the construction sector. Speaking on the anniversary of the earthquake, he noted that during a recent visit to the country there were signs that the country is on the road to recovery. Earlier this month Anthony attended a meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Bureau in Haiti to pass on the Chairmanship of CARICOM to the President of Haiti.
NEW YORK, CMC – As Haiti marks the third anniversary of the devastating January 12, 2010 earthquake, Caribbean American Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke has renewed calls for heightened action to help the improved, French-speaking Caribbean country recover quickly. “Despite the many years that have since passed, the people of Haiti are still struggling to rebuild their infrastructure,” Clarke, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, who represents the 9th Congressional District in Brooklyn, New York, told the Caribbean Media Corporation.
ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – Prime Minister Tillman Thomas Sunday named February 19 as the date for a general election here, urging supporters of his ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) to return his party to power for another five year term.
Thomas, who led the NDC to an 11-4 victory in the 2008 general election, did not name the date for nomination of candidates.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- President Michel Martelly urged Haitians to recall the tens of thousands of people who lost their lives in a devastating earthquake three years ago, marking the disaster's anniversary Saturday with a simple ceremony. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton joined Martelly later in the day for a similarly quiet wreath-laying commemoration.
GENEVA, Switzerland, CMC – A branch of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has urged Cuba authorities to immediately free jailed US government subcontractor Alan Gross, claiming that the Spanish-speaking Caribbean island’s judicial system is not independent or impartial. The UNHRC’s Task Force on Arbitrary Detention also charged that the national security law under which Gross was charged was vague and violated human rights agreements.
WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable_ Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace. Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez is famous for speeches that last for hours, and Thursday should have been a special day for the loquacious socialist to let loose. But even with a parade of foreign dignitaries in town to laud him and a large, boisterous crowd on the day he was to be sworn in for a triumphal new term, Mr. Chávez’s silence spoke loudest of all. The country had been warned in advance that Mr. Chávez was too sick to slip on the presidential sash and raise his hand to take the presidential oath.
WASHINGTON, CMC – A new study has found that last year the Obama administration spent more on immigration enforcement affecting the Caribbean and other countries than on all the other major federal law enforcement agencies.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, in its 182-report said the US government spent nearly US$18 billion on immigration enforcement.
GEORGETOWN, Guyana - In the movie, The Life of Pi, when the protagonist’s father seeks to reinforce his argument for the family’s move to Canada, he proudly declaims, “We will sail like Columbus!” The teenage Pi wryly reminds him, “But Columbus was looking for India!” And we all know that is why our region is called the West Indies. Almost unremarked, however, a curious inversion of the Genoese sailor’s geographically-challenged quest for the riches of the East has been taking place over the past 15 years.