Archive for 2011

THE GUYANA rice industry has once again been greeted with good news as yet another export deal has beenclinched with Venezuela worth some US$48M, making it the third such consecutive agreement with our eastern Spanish-speaking neighbour.
Under the agreement Guyana is expected to export 30,000 tonnes of white rice and 50,000 tonnes of paddy at US$800 and US$480 per metric tonne, respectively, while making greater strides in improving its share in the Venezuela market.
This certainly is a big boost for ...

KINGSTON – President of the Jamaica Bar Association (JBA) Ian Wilkinson says he believes it will be a “retrograde step” if the country decides to establish its own final court of appeal rather than seek to join the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).

In an interview with the Jamaica Observer newspaper, Wilkinson said that any contemplation of going that route would amount to a backward step which would be of little benefit to Jamaica.

“I think that it would be a retrograde step ...

PORT-OF-SPAIN – Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar today confirmed that the appointment of Planning, Economic and Social Restructuring and Gender Affairs Minister Mary King has been revoked.

The Prime Minister made the announcement after holding talks with President George Maxwell Richards, a short while ago.

“I have advised his Excellency that I will be sending in a note this evening asking him to revoke her appointment. It is a sad day for us,” she told reporters.

The dismissal follows a story published in the Sunday ...

PORT-AU-PRINCE — As the representative of Haitians living abroad on a commission charged with rebuilding quake-ravaged Haiti, Joseph Bernadel, a retired U.S. army major from Delray Beach, can have an opinion — but he doesn’t get a vote.

That harsh reality is just one of many examples of how Haitians who have accepted citizenship from other countries have been left out when it comes to deciding on the future of their unlucky homeland, Bernadel said.

But he and some other Haitians living outside ...

A minor earthquake struck east Jamaica at 4:29 this morning.

The earthquake had a magnitude of 4.2 on the richter scale, reported the United States Geographical Survey (USGS).

The epicentre was 26 kilometres (16 miles) from Kingston and had a depth of 20.3 km  (12.6 miles).

United Nations (CNN) — The cholera outbreak that killed more than 4,500 people in Haiti last year was linked to peacekeepers from Nepal, a new report says, a conclusion previously resisted by at least some United Nations officials.

The report, released late Wednesday by a United Nations-appointed independent panel of experts, says that the cholera strain did not originate in Haiti. Instead, it was “very similar” to strains of cholera currently circulating in South Asia.

The report does not directly blame the peacekeepers, ...

CHAIRMAN of the Private Sector Association of Barbados, Ben Arrindell, has called on Government to step up to the plate on the monitoring and enforcement of occupational health and safety measures.

He did so at a Press briefing shortly after he and chief executive officer Anne Reid paid a courtesy call on key International Labour Organisations (ILO) officials Dr Assane Diop and Dr Ana Romero at Solidarity House yesterday.

Arrindell acknowledged that the private sector too could have done more.

“Both the employers and labour have ...

THE Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) yesterday called on the Government of Jamaica and all other Caribbean community countries to take action to erase the common law offences of criminal libel, including blasphemous, obscene and seditious libel from their statute books.

“It is a position endorsed by a Joint Select Committee of the Jamaican Parliament in 2008, following submission of the Justice Hugh Small Report that very year,” the ACM, in reference to the situation in Jamaica, said ...

The Government has taken aim at businesses, especially in the retail trade, which it claims are using pieces of paper as customer receipts in order to avoid the general consumption tax (GCT).

Finance Minister Audley Shaw, who made the charge, said the emerging practice where super-markets, haberdasheries and other companies enter into “straight cash” transactions with customers is one of the reasons the GCT revenue is underperforming.

“Receipts are being written on a little piece of paper. No GCT, that sort of ...