UNITED NATIONS, CMC – The United Nations on Wednesday, lauded the commitment Hugo Chávez to the cause of social justice in the Caribbean, as the General Assembly paid tribute to the memory of the late President of Venezuela. Chávez, a socialist firebrand, died on March 5 after struggling with cancer for almost two years. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Chávez ensured that Venezuela provided crucial assistance to Haiti following the devastating earthquake of 2010.
ON, England (AFP) — EU president Herman van Rompuy warned yesterday that Britain will struggle to win support for its plans to renegotiate its membership of the European Union, and said that trying to exit the bloc could prove costly.
In a speech in London, Van Rompuy urged Britain to stay inside the 27-member group, saying it had a role to play in reforming the union and would have a stronger voice in world affairs than if it went it alone.
UNITED NATIONS, CMC – Three Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries are in arrears with payments to the United Nations and have “lost” their vote in the world body. According to a January 15th letter sent by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the President of the General Assembly, Dominica along with Grenada and St Lucia are among 18 countries in arrears. Dominica owes US$7,231, while St. Lucia is in arrears to the tune of US$35,727 and Grenada US$40,100.
LONDON—A pledge by the Group of Seven most powerful economies to not intentionally weaken their currencies pushed stocks higher on yesterday while dragging the dollar lower against the Japanese yen and the euro. The G-7 nations, which include the US, Japan and Germany, said their economic policies should be "oriented towards meeting domestic objectives and not towards setting specific exchange rates." That was meant to ease concerns that major economies were retooling their monetary policies to specifically weaken their national currencies to help domestic exporters.
Switzerland—British Prime Minister David Cameron wants nothing to do with a United States of Europe, an idea that’s gaining currency as the countries that use the euro struggle to fix their debt crisis. A day after he shook up Europe’s political landscape by offering citizens the prospect of a vote on whether to stay in the 27-country European Union, Cameron insisted yesterday he wants Britain to remain an integral part of the bloc but that more unification would not be the answer.
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.
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.
1. The Fifth UK-Caribbean Forum, hosted by the Government of Barbados, took place in Bridgetown on 26-28 April 2006. The Forum was co-chaired on the Caribbean side by the Hon. Elvin Nimrod, MP, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Grenada and current Chair of the CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations, and on the UK side by the Rt. Hon. Jack Straw, MP, Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Members of the CARICOM Ministerial Sub-Committee for Resource Mobilisation for Crime and Security met with a UK Senior Level Team on Security Cooperation at the Hilton Hotel, Kingston Jamaica on 3 March 2004. The aim of the meeting was to follow up the discussions at the Breakfast meeting between UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister PJ Patterson, Chair of CARICOM and other CARICOM Heads of Government in London, December 2003.