ROSEAU, Dominica, CMC – The Dominica government Wednesday described as “mischievous and ill informed” reports that the island cannot make payments to Venezuela for petroleum products received under the existing PetroCaribe initiative. Acting Prime Minister Reginald Austrie, speaking on the state-owned DBS radio, said the arrangement with Caracas “is alive, it’s transparent and we continue to enjoy the very excellent relationship with the government of Venezuela”.

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago, Guardian - More than US$2 billion is spent on the annual food import bill by Caricom countries, which have a combined population of only six million people. Dr Richard Cox, capacity building officer of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, shared the statistic yesterday. “It is worth noting that Caricom itself produced the figures to show that our import food bill runs over US$2 billion every year,” he said. His comments were part of a capacity-building workshop on the NAP/IFS Alignment Process in the Caricom subregion.

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Guardian - There are close to 100 gangs operating in the country, according to data from the Police Service. Most of the members are young men between the ages of 14 and 25 and they look up to their gang leaders, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said yesterday. “They love the culture. They feel they are not wanted by their parents or teachers. They feel no one cares too much for them,” Persad-Bissessar said in her message on International Youth Day.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Stabroek News - Once US President Barack Obama had announced that the planned September one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin had been removed from his itinerary, the announcement was bound to become the subject of immediate and intense interest among foreign policy analysts, keen to contemplate the implications of the announcement for longer-term relations between Washington and Moscow. The cancellation of the summit was predictable.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Nation News - This bit of advice was issued to small and medium sized enterprise owners last Thursday by Dalton Medford, president of the Small Business Association (SBA), as he gave comments at the Entrepreneurship Training Programme graduation ceremony at the Savannah Beach Hotel. He advised the more than 200 entrepreneurs gathered that the payment of taxes should not depend on which political party was in office and that they should see paying taxes as a moral obligation. “There are issues of [non-payment of] taxes.