Moontown

A deal was struck on Tuesday for the players, who are in a dispute with the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) over contracts and payments, to make themselves available for selection while negotiations take place.

West Indies captain Chris Gayle. AFP PHOTO

It was widely expected that leading players such as Chris Gayle, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Dwayne Bravo would return for Sunday’s first one-dayer against Bangladesh.

A weakened squad had lost both matches in a two-test series against Bangladesh and players drawn largely from that team were named on Sunday for first two one-dayers, before the leading players ended their strike.

The WICB on Wednesday posted a squad list on its official website (www.wicb.com) which featured none of the formerly striking players.

No explanation for the decision was given and the WICB was not immediately available for comment.

“They (are) not picking us for the first two games; so I guess that sums up the situation,” wrote Gayle, the pre-boycott captain of the team, on his twitter feed.

“They are the boss playing hard ball,” he added.

The squad continues to be captained by 36-year-old Barbadian Floyd Reifer with Darren Sammy as his deputy.

The WICB and the players union WIPA met on Tuesday with the head of the regional economic co-operation body CARICOM, Guyana president Bharrat Jagdeo, and reached an agreement to have their dispute mediated.

In a statement issued by Jagdeo’s office, the two parties agreed to have former Commonwealth secretary general Shridath Ramphal handle the talks.

TORONTO, Canada (Bloomberg) — Mention Toronto and steel drums, Carnival and reggae music probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. From July 14 through Aug. 3, however, Canada’s biggest city opens up for Scotiabank Caribana, which promotes itself as North America’s largest celebration of Caribbean culture.

Now in its 42nd year, Caribana gives 1.3 million local residents and tourists the chance to see buttoned-down Toronto letting loose, as this year’s slogan — “Won’t Stop De Vibe” — suggests.

Brightly colored costumes and floats are seen in the Caribana in Toronto. AFP PHOTO

Caribana is best known for its signature parade, set for Aug. 1. Rambunctious crowds line the streets to cheer folks decked out in outlandish, colorful costumes, many featuring headdresses and sparkling fringes, dancing to steel drums and Calypso music. About 25,000 people (including local son and Miami Heat center Jamaal Magloire) are expected to take part in the parade.

Opening Thursday and running through Aug. 3, the Royal Ontario Museum is hosting “Beyond the Rhythm,” an exhibition of works by 25 Caribbean and African-Canadian artists, among others. The king and queen of Caribana will be crowned on July 30; the next day there will be a battle of the steelpan bands at Lamport Stadium.

The festival serves as a crucial boon to tourism, which has been declining from the financial crisis and tighter passport controls at the US-Canadian border. Hotel occupancy in Toronto was down 10 percent at the end of May compared with a year earlier, Tourism Toronto spokesman Andrew Weir said.

Last year’s Caribana had an impact of about C$300 million ($271.4 million) on Toronto’s economy, according to festival organizers.

In addition to a record C$1.3 million in public subsidy, Caribana has received an increase in endorsements from Canadian businesses, said Joe Halstead, the festival’s chief executive officer.

Bank of Nova Scotia, the country’s third-biggest bank in assets, is the event’s title sponsor, while BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. is also a sponsor.

The festival, patterned on Trinidad and Tobago’s famed Carnival, began in 1967, when the federal government asked the Caribbean community to get involved in Canada’s centennial celebrations. (Today, the Caribbean population is about 225,000, or 4.5 percent of Greater Toronto’s 5.5 million people.)

Since then, Caribana has grown from “a kitchen-table operation that can be driven by volunteers after work,” to one of the city’s biggest annual events as measured by attendance, along with June’s Pride parade and September’s Toronto International Film Festival, Halstead said.

“Toronto is a richer place to live because of the contributions made by the people of the Caribbean community,” Scotiabank Chief Executive Officer Richard Waugh wrote in a program. The Toronto-based lender calls itself the largest bank in the Caribbean, and opened a branch in Kingston, Jamaica in 1889 — 10 years before it operated in Toronto.

“Caribana is more than just a great celebration,” Toronto City Manager Joe Pennachetti told reporters July 15. “The city has worked closely with organizers to ensure it moves ahead.” He was referring to a strike by 24,000 municipal workers that began June 22 and has halted garbage pick-up across the city.

“One of Toronto’s strongest cultural expressions is the variety and diversity of cultures,” Halstead, 64, said in an interview. “Caribana is one of those pieces that make up that culture.”

The CARICOM Development Fund was established in 2008 under Article 158 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (2001) “for the purpose of providing financial or technical assistance to disadvantaged countries, regions and sectors”.

The Fund is expected to raise US$250 million with an amount of US$70 million currently available. The first tranche of money for projects is expected to be released by the end of 2009.

The three-person delegation from the CDF are: Ambassador Lorne McDonough; Chief Executive Officer, Lennox Forte, Manager, Corporate Development and Planning and Herman Grant, Specialist in Project Management.

While in Dominica the delegation will meet Members of Cabinet, Permanent Secretaries and Technical Officers, representatives from the Financial community, the Private Sector and Civil Society.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) — Venezuela’s National Assembly moved closer on Wednesday to fix prices on car sales, the latest move to cap sharply rising consumer prices in the oil-rich Caribbean nation.

The retail price tag of cars in Venezuela, where gasoline is cheaper than anywhere else in the world, is up to three times that of the same model in the United States or Europe.

The assembly’s finance committee approved a government-sponsored bill that proposes to set prices on new cars based on production costs, taxes, the foreign exchange rate, and a set profit margin.

It would also slap a tax several times the original price on the sale of cars up to two years old, a move the government hopes will combat what it considers speculation by manufacturers and dealers.

“They are truly outrageous, immoral people, who blatantly assault the Venezuelan people, and we definitely have to regulate this,” said Deputy Elvis Amoroso, chairman of the committee that drafted the bill.

Business leaders criticized the measure, saying that more controls would worsen the auto industry’s troubles. Sales have fallen 50 percent in the first half of the year, after five years of growth ended sharply with the fall in the international price of oil, the engine of Venezuela’s economy.

“They try to iron out market distortions with decrees — and I don’t doubt their good intentions — but this isn’t the way to do it,” said Fernando Morgado, head of Consecomercio, the main trade association of the country.

A shortage of dollars due to the fall in oil income has produced a shortage of parts and caused auto production to fall.

Supply shortages in other sectors of the economy have helped drive up consumer prices this year. Finance Minister Ali Rodrigues earlier this month raised the government’s inflation forecast for the year to 28 percent from 15 percent.

Auto assembly lines in Venezuela include those of General Motors, Ford Toyota and a plant that assembles autos for Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Co and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co.

Since coming to power over a decade ago, President Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper promoting a socialist revolution, has intervened heavily in the market with foreign exchange controls and fixed prices on a number of consumer products from milk and bread to rice and coffee.

The auto industry bill is likely to be approved in coming weeks on the floor of the assembly, which is dominated almost entirely by Chavez supporters. It is part of a package of proposed government interventions in the economy, including price fixing in the housing market as well as a tough anti-trust law.

WASHINGTON, USA — US Virgin Islands Governor John deJongh met with top officials in the Obama Administration on Tuesday, including Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Doug Shulman and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius.

Governor and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

DeJongh also met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Majority Whip James Clyburn as the territory’s Chief Executive continued a week of meetings in the nation’s capitol to advance key policy issues in his Administration, including taxation, strengthening the EDC program, resolution of outstanding tax audit issues with the IRS, and continuing the push for fair and equal treatment of all Virgin Islanders in national healthcare reform.

DeJongh also met with Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico to discuss pending National Park issues and with Rep. Jimmy Duncan, a leading Republican on the House Transportation Committee to lobby for additional funding for the territory’s highways.

The governor held in-depth discussions with IRS National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, in an effort to resolve a long-standing dispute between the local government and the IRS over the continued auditing of EDC beneficiaries.

“The issues of statute of limitations and residency have been hovering over the US Virgin Islands for some time. The lack of taxpayer certainty caused by the arbitrary and unjustified position of the IRS in refusing to recognize a statute of limitations for the US Virgin Islands has eroded an important revenue stream to our treasury and has jeopardized a program that was lawfully sanctioned by Congress to solidify the financial footing of the territory,” deJongh said during a meeting with the IRS Commissioner and the National Taxpayer Advocate.

After the meeting, the governor said “more work lies ahead in this area but we made significant progress towards the resolution of this critical issue.”

Governor De Jongh with IRS ommissioner Doug Shulman

DeJongh’s second day in Washington was also highlighted by a meeting with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. DeJongh spoke to Acting Health Commissioner Julia Sheen about the need to build a strong partnership with the Obama Administration to finally end the discriminatory treatment of American citizens living in the US Virgin Islands.

“Our Medicaid program is grossly under funded and not a full entitlement program. As a result, we are able to provide Medicaid health care coverage to only about seven percent of the US Virgin Islands,” deJongh said.

The territory’s low percentage when compared to the 20% national average is due to the fact that the current limits on federal Medicaid to the US Virgin Islands allow the government to provide Medicaid coverage only to those below 50% of the federal poverty level. Most states are able to provide coverage to up to 100% of the federal poverty level.

“This is a huge and unacceptable disparity,” deJongh said.

The governor explained the need to work together to help make the children and all citizens of the US living in the territory healthier by ensuring that they receive appropriate and needed heath care services. “As you can see, we are transforming our program and working to expend all available federal funding.

Nonetheless, in order for us to develop and run a full Medicaid program that provides necessary services to those in need, especially our children, we need and deserve a state-like full-entitlement program. This means a lifting of the Medicaid cap and a formula-driven federal matching rate based on our relative income levels.

On Wednesday, deJongh was due to meet with the Chief Financial Officer of the Rural Telephone Financing Cooperative Steve Lilly and later with various tax attorneys to further the discussion on resolves federal taxation issues. Meetings were also on the agenda with Representatives Sander Levin, Joseph Crowley and Senator Mark Udall (D-CO).

Rohandra John

Trinidad Express

The prevalence of violence in schools is not only an issue in Trinidad but a problem that many schools have been grappling with across the Caribbean region.

And it has been recommended that a regional study be conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), in order to determine why that is so and what intervention strategies could be devised to tackle this problem, Jorge Sequeira, director of UNESCO Santiago, said yesterday.

Sequeira made the comments while responding to questions at a media conference held to discuss matters discussed at the just-concluded Meeting of the Bureau of the Inter-Governmental Regional Committee for the Regional Education Project for Latin America and the Caribbean (PRELAC), which was hosted at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Port of Spain.

Sequeira said it was a fact that Trinidad and Tobago was not the only country grappling with the upsurge of violence in schools, which is why it was recommended that a study be conducted in order to find out “why it is happening”. He said there could be many reasons for the violence in schools.

“It is sometimes drug related, sometimes it’s gangs, sometimes substance abuse,” he said.

The information produced in the study, Sequeira said, could help governments and educators in the region devise the necessary intervention strategies required to tackle the problem of violence in schools. He said it could also help them understand how they can tailor the curriculum to better cater to the needs of young people.

Education Minister Esther Le Gendre, who also addressed the media, said as it relates to violence and security at schools, “we stressed the need to create a proper learning environment for all our students”. She also noted that “the disengagement of our males from the education system” was perhaps linked to the upsurge of violence in schools.

Le Gendre said other topics discussed at the meeting included male underperformance and the need to structure the curriculum, as well as develop new teaching strategies to deal with it.

“We also looked at curriculum relevance, and we talked about teacher professional development to manage the differently-abled students,” she said.