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Russia agreed to provide military training for three leftist regimes in Latin America and increase military visits and exercises following a visit last week to the region by Moscow’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, Pentagon officials said. Shoygu met with defense and military leaders in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and signed several agreements on warship visits and military training during the visit, which ran from Feb. 11 to 14. It is not clear whether any new arms deals were completed during the visit. Defense officials said the Russian leader is seeking bases in the region for strategic bomber flights that Shoygu...

<p>KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) - Police in Jamaica say authorities have seized 3,300 missile warheads and a machine to make missiles and bullets.</p> <p>Deputy Police Superintendent Steve Brown said Friday that custom officials discovered the weapons late Thursday aboard a ship at Kingston Wharf.</p>

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — A breed of giant, ravenous snails that first appeared in Barbados five years ago has thrived on the tropical island, destroying crops and prompting calls for the government to eliminate the slimy pests. A nocturnal "snail hunt" last weekend reported finding hundreds of thousands of giant African snails swarming the central parish of St. George, the country's agricultural heartland, where farmers had complained of damage to crops including sugar cane, bananas and papayas. "We saw snails riding on each other's backs and moving in clusters," said David Walrond, chairman of the local emergency response office, which organized...

A major Black group in the United States says it will host the next summit of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission early this year. The New York-based Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) said on Saturday that the summit will take place from April 9-12 in New York. The CARICOM Commission is chaired by Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor designate of the University of the West Indies. Inspired by the creation of the CARICOM Commission, a National African American Reparations Commission is being established as part of an effort to intensify the Reparations movement in the U.S., the...

This is part II of a multipart series about our adventures aboard S.V. Namaste, our 46 foot (length on deck) cutter rigged sloop. Couples aboard a boat are often referred to by their boat's name. Hence, we became "the Namastes." Soon after our arrival in Norfolk, Virginia, Jeanie and I, plus Fiester and Fritz who joined us there, departed soon after a large collection of other cruisers for Road Town on the island of Tortola in the British Virgins. This is an account of our trip. Caribbean 1500 members inspected their own and each others' boats to find any probable glitches. The principal Namaste glitch was that our single side...

This is part I of a multipart series about our adventures aboard S.V. Namaste, our 46 foot (length on deck) cutter rigged sloop. My wife Jeanie, her brother Fiester, our friend Fitz and I left Annapolis, Maryland in October of 1996 aboard Namaste bound for the Caribbean. The others returned home soon after we arrived. Jeanie's and my adventures in the Caribbean continued until mid 2001, when we arrived in the Republic of Panamá. We now live there in a very rural area up in the mountains.PreparationsIn 1995, Jeanie and I agreed that in June of 1996 I would retire from the practice of law on my fifty-fifth birthday....

It’s dreary outside and you find yourself dreaming of an escape to the Caribbean. You long for turquoise water and sugar-sand beaches, with plenty of activities to take your mind off work. Cruises offer the perfect smorgasbord of beaches, shopping, scenery, and fun things that you can’t do at home, all served up with a fruity, umbrella-topped beverage. But not every port lives up to the image in your dreams. To help you choose your next cruise itinerary — or rather, figure out which places to avoid — Yahoo Travel did some digging around and found the Caribbean ports with...

Ebola panic has spread all the way to the United States, even though the possibility of it actually spreading across American shores is dismally low. People might be better off preparing for the chikungunya virus, which has been reported several times throughout the southern United States — including a third case recently reported in the Dallas area, according to CBS. Chikungunya virus has hit the hardest in the Central American and Caribbean countries of El Salvador and the Dominican Republican. Although exact number are unavailable for the Dominican, El Salvadorian officials are reporting that there are currently 30,000 cases...

HOUSTON, Texas -- Several unaccompanied minors who entered the U.S. illegally have been relocated to and released where many U.S. citizens cannot afford to bring their own families on vacation: the Virgin Islands. SNIP a Health and Human Services (HHS) document shows that four were set free in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A spokesman from HHS verified this fact to Breitbart Texas. The picturesque Virgin Islands, located in the Caribbean, are a thriving destination for well-to-do tourists. Many could find irony in the fact that most U.S. taxpayers, who are footing the bill to ship illegal immigrants to the tropical...

A British tourist had the tops of two of his fingers sliced off while riding on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disney World in Florida. The victim lost the tip of his ring and little finger after apparently dangling them outside the log fume ride which inspired the Johnny Depp movies. Disney officials in Orlando, Florida, immediately shut down the ride in the Magic Kingdom park following the incident.

Caribbean immigrants who arrive to the United States are often shell-shocked by the palpable presence of racism. What is all the more surprising is that these tensions are more so perpetuated by African-Americans. Before an immigrant can experience the strife and joys of the States, they are frequently discouraged, or should I say, warned. Warned that success will most certainly be harder for them. Warned that things are different ‘here’ and that the color of your skin has in more ways that one already set them up for failure. Living in the United States as a person of color immediately...

Ratings company Moody's on Tuesday slashed Puerto Rico's debt rating by three notches into even deeper junk status after the US territory passed a debt-restructuring law. Moody's Investors Service cut the rating to "B2" from "Ba2" and said the outlook was negative, indicating further downgrades were possible. Now dubbed the "Greece of the Caribbean," the archipelago is, like Greece, reeling under massive debt. Over the past decade, the commonwealth's debt has doubled to nearly $70 billion and investors are growing increasingly worried the government is running out of cash. In a bid for debt relief, the Puerto Rican authorities recently...

Outbreaks of the virus have long made people miserable in Africa and Asia. But it is new to the Caribbean, with the first locally transmitted case documented in December in French St. Martin, likely brought in by an infected air traveler. Health officials are now working feverishly to educate the public about the illness, knock down the mosquito population, and deal with an onslaught of cases.

One of the leopard moray eels at the Blue Planet Aquarium Intrepid divers have taken to the water to hand-feed a shoal of moray eels at Blue Planet Aquarium, Cheshire Oaks. The aquarium is looking after a group of eight leopard moray eels, each measuring close to a metre in length. At the moment, the eels are in a special holding tank which adjoins the giant Caribbean Reef display and divers are training the tropical eels to feed from their hands. Blue Planet Aquarium’s dive officer Matt Martin said: “We need the morays to get used to the experience of...

It is time for the calls for reparations to the descendants of those who were enslaved by colonial powers via the trans-Atlantic slave trade to bear fruit. The European countries and the United States need to compensate for the injustices suffered by slaves and their families. African-Americans and African-Caribbean intellectuals have been agitating for reparations for many years, but the question as to how the compensation would be calculated and in what form is yet to be answered. Since 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission called for the West to pay trillions of dollars to Africa. In...

During his 2004 Senate run and again during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama stood firm in his opposition to reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans here in the United States. “I have said in the past – and I’ll repeat again – that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed,” he said in 2008 right before his historic election. The radical solutions required to address the needs and long-festering wounds of the African American community of course had to be purged from public discourse. Yet...

Could this be the decade that slavery reparations become a reality? If not, it won't be for a lack of trying. This is the obvious next step for poor countries getting poorer because of bad economics, bad politics, and bad, bad leaders. Former colonial powers are to be milked for all the cash that can be gotten by laying a guilt trip on the good socialists who run these countries now. Any successes enjoyed by the former colonies will no doubt encourage African Americans to try the same ploy here. Jamaica is leading the way in pushing for reparations from...

Britain is being sued, with France and the Netherlands, by 14 Caribbean countries, which are demanding what could be hundreds of billions of pounds in reparations for slavery. Around 175 years after Britain freed its last slaves in the West Indies, an alliance of Caribbean nations is demanding to be repaid for the “awful” lingering legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Caricom, a group of 12 former British colonies together with the former French colony Haiti and the Dutch-held Suriname, believes the European governments should pay—and the UK in particular. It has hired the British law firm Leigh Day, which...

While in New York attending the United National General Assembly of Heads of State, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines came to Harlem to join the New York City-based December 12th Movement International Secretariat on Sept. 24 in their report back to our community on the CARICOM First Regional Reparations Conference, held in St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sept. 14-17. At the forum, held at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, Gonsalves stated, “As to where we are with the reparations issue and where we are going to, for 30, 40 or more years...

There’s another attempt afoot to collect reparations for the appalling effects of the slave trade and slavery. This time it’s certain of the Caribbean countries demanding that Britain, Holland and France should cough up compensation for those horrors. The unfortunate point about such attempts to collect money being that actually, in the British case at least, the money should be flowing the other way. To the British, not from them that is. Even the most basic economic analysis proves this so I’m always amused by the repeated attempts to make us pay rather than collect. Before anyone gets too hot...