LONDON, CMC – Challenges facing Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries in exporting their goods to the European Union were among matters discussed Tuesday during a meeting of the sub-committee of the Joint United Kingdom-CARICOM Committee on Trade and Investment.
The meeting, chaired by Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner to London, Garvin Nicholas, was also attended by diplomats from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada and Dominica.
WASHINGTON, CMC – A major human rights group here has urged the Venezuelan government to end censorship and intimidation of media that challenge the official line regarding President Hugo Chávez’s health and inauguration. Human Rights Watch said on Saturday that, in recent days, the Venezuelan government has ordered a television station to cease transmission of spots that question its interpretation of the constitutional requirements for the re-elected president’s inauguration.
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's government says President Hugo Chavez is conscious and responding to treatment for a respiratory infection at a Cuban hospital. Information Minister Ernesto Villegas says the infection has been controlled, but Chavez is still suffering from respiratory deficiency. Chavez has been fighting the infection after undergoing a fourth round of surgery Dec. 11 for a cancer in the pelvic area.
KINGSTON, Jamaica - The prognosis for the recovery from cancer of President Hugo Chavez is uncertain. If he is not able or does not assume the Venezuelan presidency, then it brings into question the continuation of PetroCaribe on which Caribbean countries are heavily dependent. The termination, phasing out, or revision of the terms of PetroCaribe would have devastating repercussions for the region already struggling to survive the global economic crisis.
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.
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s supporters have not ruled out swearing him in from his hospital in Havana. His detractors are calling for government investigators to go check his pulse themselves. The justices whom Mr. Chávez’s allies have named to the Supreme Court have decided that he can continue to govern in absentia.
NEW YORK, CMC – The Grenada-born American legislator, who was arrested during the West Indian American Day Carnival Parade two years ago, is hailing the decision of a court to strike down part of the New York Police Department (NYPD) “stop-and-frisk” policy.
“I thank Judge Scheindlin for standing up to the abuses of the stop, question and frisk tactic and standing up for the residents of the Bronx who have been unfairly targeted and unjustly arrested,” Brooklyn Councilman Jumaane Williams told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) on Wednesday.