Free Republic

The twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago would seem to be the last place to raise alarm bells over the threat of radical Islam. Trinidad was briefly catapulted into the spotlight in June 2007 when reports surfaced that one of the suspects linked to an alleged plot to attack New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was a Trinidadian national and that the suspects reached out to Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM, Association of Muslims), for assistance in executing their plan. JAM is an enigmatic Trinidadian Muslim militant group that is implicated in violence,...

Holidaymaker John Anderson has uncovered what is believed to be a 300-year-old rifle – while hunting for lobsters. The 55-year-old, below, was snorkelling off the south coast of St Lucia in the Caribbean when he spotted a large rock with a hole beneath it at a depth of about two metres. Thinking it looked like the ideal hiding place for some juicy lobsters, John dived down and grabbed on to what looked like "a piece of rock" on the seabed to hold him underwater. But to his astonishment, the object began to move and John, who has an interest in...

Trinidad and Tobago elected its first female prime minister on Monday. Kamla Persad-Bissessar took a multiparty coalition to victory over the People's National Movement (PNM) and its leader, Patrick Manning, who had been in power for 13 of the last 17 years. During this campaign, Persad-Bissessar's gender was used by the opposition to appeal to deepseated but, hopefully, bygone fears. Manning repeatedly painted Persad-Bissessar as a pawn in the hands of strong and dangerous men and suggested that "the lady" was not strong enough to rule. Persad-Bissessar, by contrast, bravely appeared on her campaign platforms to the tune of Helen...

Bared teeth are a prominent and eye-catching feature on many historical and archaeological artifacts, and are commonly interpreted as representing death, aggression and the shamanic trance. But a study in the forthcoming issue of Current Anthropology argues that the bared-teeth motif often expresses something a bit less sinister: the smile. Alice V. M. Samson, Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Bridget M. Waller, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, examined the bared-teeth motif (BTM) of the Taíno, who lived in the Greater Antilles (the Caribbean) from AD 1000 to the early decades of European contact (1492-1550). Here...

SNIPPET: "President Chávez also announced during the visit that Venezuela is working on a preliminary plan for the construction of a “nuclear village” in Venezuela with Iranian assistance so that “the Venezuelan people can count in the future on this marvelous resource for peaceful purposes.” The transfer of Iranian nuclear technology from Iran would be a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions - 1737 (2006), 1747 ( 2007), and 1803 (2008) - that imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear technology transfers. In late September 2009, comments by Venezuelan officials offered conflicting information about Iran’s support for Venezuela’s search for uranium deposits....

The US Navy's first "Littoral Combat Ship" (LCS), the USS Freedom (LCS 1), has entered service in the Caribbean, joining the U.S. Navy drug interdiction patrol. Operating out of a base (Mayport) near Jacksonville, Florida, the Freedom headed south on February 15th, and on the 22nd intercepted its first drug smuggling boat off the Colombian coast, recovering a quarter ton of cocaine. The LCS was built for this kind of coastal operations. The USS Freedom completed its sea trials and acceptance inspections during August, 2008. The ship did very well, with far fewer (about 90 percent fewer) problems (or "material...

The devastating magnitude 7.0 quake that ripped through Haiti Tuesday, reportedly killing thousands, did not catch everyone by surprise. In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis and co-author of a June 1989 article for Scientific American "Hidden Earthquakes," said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there. "If they have an earthquake on this fault...

Haiti has received billions of dollars in taxpayer and private aid from the United States and others, yet is so poor that few homes had safe drinking water, sewage disposal or electricity even before the earthquake. With sympathetic donors around the world sending money, making sure that aid is spent properly will be a challenge. Corruption, theft and other crime and Haiti's sheer shortage of fundamentals — reliable roads, telephone and power lines and a sound financial system — add to the difficulty as foreign governments and charities try not only to help Haiti recover from the disaster but pull...

Haiti has been ranked as the most corrupt country in the World by Transparency International (TI), followed by Burma and Iraq. The Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog said that for the first time, Haiti topped the table. The survey relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption in different countries, as seen by business people, academics and risk analysts. Bangladesh had headed the rankings for the previous five years. The chair of TI, Hugette Labelle, said that there was a strong correlation between corruption and poverty "Corruption traps millions in poverty," she said. "Despite a decade of progress in establishing anti-corruption laws...

HH: I begin this Thursday with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com. Very few people have traveled as far around the globe as Mark. Mark, have you ever seen anything remotely approaching this Haiti thing? MS: No, because I think Haiti is, certainly in the Western Hemisphere, as near as you can get to an entirely non-functioning state. By the standards of the Caribbean, it’s a failure and a disaster before the earthquake strikes. If an earthquake had happened to strike the Bahamas, or even the Turks And Caicos, it would not have looked like this. And that’s why...

For 200 years the Caribbean nation has suffered from natural disasters and violent rulers By any standards, Haiti represents a very great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. In January 1804 – a key date in the history of a bedevilled country – the African slaves overthrew their French masters and declared the world’s first black republic. Haiti became an emblem of slavery’s longed-for abolition. And the slave leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, was hailed by William Wordsworth, among other Romantics, as a “morning star” of the Americas. Since independence, however, emperors, kings and presidents-for-life have misruled the Caribbean nation through violence...

Australia pledged $10 million in aid to Haiti today as US officials said the death toll from yesterday's huge earthquake could rival the loss of life from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As aftershocks continued to shake the devastated capital Port-au-Prince, residents tried to rescue people trapped under rubble, clawing at chunks of concrete with bare hands. Tens of thousands wandered dazed and sobbing in the chaotic, broken streets, hoping desperately for assistance. One young man yelled at reporters in English: "Too many people are dying. We need international help ... no emergency, no food, no phone, no water, no...

Once again, natural disaster has brought its wrath to Planet Earth; this time it is Haiti that must bear the brunt of nature’s fury. An earthquake registering 7.0+ on the Richter scale has devastated the tiny Caribbean country. Once again, America’s heart opens to the victims. We will respond as we always do: with compassion and utter disregard for politics. We can discuss Haiti’s political upheaval, the environmental nightmare created by a clueless officials another time. These are people who are suffering now. Children, babies. Parents, the elderly. Hospitals and clinics where they might seek medical treatment have vanished into...

(AP) — SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Caribbean islands battling drug-fueled crime had one of their bloodiest years on record in 2009, with Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico hitting or coming close to all-time highs for homicides. The violence reflects the drug trade's deep entrenchment in the region, with high murder rates becoming a fact of life at tourist havens that traffickers use as transit points for South American drugs bound for Europe and the United States. In countries including the Bahamas, which set a record with more than 82 slayings, officials say they are contending with turf battles...

Six Democratic members of Congress enjoyed a Caribbean junket sponsored by Citigroup after Congress had approved the $700 billion bailout of financial services firms in October. The National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group, has asked Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for a formal review of the Citigroup’s sponsorship of the trip by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel and five others. The NLPC says the trip violated House rules. The purported purpose of the Nov. 6-9 junket was to attend the Caribbean Multi-Cultural Business Conference on the island of...

Sunday, August 16, 2009 The Government of the United Kingdom has assumed direct rule over the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, after an enquiry discovered what it alleges to be corruption and "serious dishonesty" at the highest levels. The islands' administration and Premier have been suspended for up to two years and their powers transferred to the UK-appointed Governor. The British Government has taken the unusual step because it alleges that former Premier Michael Misick and members of his cabinet have enriched themselves through the selling of crown land and other corrupt practices, and that the limits to...

On July 27, 2009 Trinidadians marked the nineteenth anniversary of the failed attempt by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM - Muslim Association, known colloquially as “the Jamaat)” to overthrow the government in Trinidad and Tobago in a violent coup. Although JAM made international headlines in June 2007 when one of the suspects in an alleged plot to attack New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was reported to have ties to the group, the enigmatic Caribbean militant group, composed mostly of Afro-Trinidadian converts to Islam, has received scant attention outside of Trinidad in recent years (see Terrorism Monitor, June 21,...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary _______________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 2, 2009 NATIONAL CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH, 2009 - - - - - - - BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION Caribbean Americans have made lasting contributions to our Nation's culture and history, and the month of June has been set aside to honor their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and social diversity. Generations of immigrants have preserved the traditions of their homelands, and these traditions have defined our Nation's identity. Caribbean Americans bring a...

MOSCOW, May 6 (RIA Novosti) - A Russian MP has proposed responding to NATO military exercises in Georgia by inviting Cuba and Venezuela to take part in full-scale drills in the Caribbean Sea. The Cooperative Longbow/Cooperative Lancer 2009 command-and-staff exercise, which Moscow has criticized as unhelpful in the wake of last summer's armed conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, starts on Wednesday and runs until June 1. Sergei Abeltsev from the Liberal Democratic Party proposed holding "large-scale drills" with the participation of the armed forces of Russia, Cuba and Venezuela in the Caribbean on July 2. "So that...

Britons flee French island of Guadeloupe as rioters turn on white families By Mail Foreign Service Last updated at 3:17 PM on 19th February 2009 Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island. Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages. But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy. The troubles come at the height of the holiday season, with thousands...