RICE AND PEAS; MACARONI PIE
CREAMED POTATO; STEAMED VEGETABLES
BBQ CHICKEN; BAKED PORK
BBQ PIG TAILS; FRIED KING FISH
GRILLED KING FISH; LAMB STEW
PLAIN GRAVY; TOSSED SALAD
COLE SLAW
The incident involving the cruise ship visitors to Antigua and Barbuda has exposed the burning issue of moonlighting taxi operators and now the Antigua and Barbuda Cruise Tourism Association (ABCTA) is calling on the government to implement laws to deal with the situation.
This comes as the St. John’s Taxi Association is distancing itself from the incident and the taxi driver, Joey “Hungry Bird” Medica, who was once a member of the association.
The association, whose members were part of an emergency meeting of stakeholders held in St. John’s early yesterday afternoon, has called the incident embarrassing and stressed that the conduct of its members is governed by a constitution and by-laws, which are aimed at avoiding such situations.
“The association recognises the value of the tourism product to the economic and social development of Antigua and Barbuda and is, therefore, deeply saddened and embarrassed about this occurrence,” a release from the association stated.
Meanwhile, the ABCTA wants the Ministry of Tourism to implement the legislation to deal with unauthorised taxis that insist on operating at the cruise terminals.
President of the ABCTA, Nathan Dundas, said the issue is now more important than ever, considering the incident which occurred last Friday with a taxi driver, six passengers from the Carnival Cruise Lines and officers from the Royal Police Force of Antigua and Barbuda.
The ABCTA considers this unfortunate and strongly believes that the episode could have been avoided if the legislation was in place.
“The legislation, which has been at the Ministry of Tourism for almost one year, needs to be implemented immediately as it is now overdue,” a press release from the ABCTA stated.
The association strongly feels that the legislation will assist the police, who are located at the Heritage Quay cruise terminal, to perform their duties effectively to the satisfaction of not only the cruise line passengers but local stakeholders too.
Coming out of the association’s emergency meeting, two signs will be placed in Heritage Quay at the cruise ship terminal stating “Restricted Area Authorised Personnel Only on Cruise Ship Days.”
The ABCTA upbraided the Ministry of Tourism for keeping them out of a tourism meeting held at the Jolly Beach Resort on Wednesday, since it pertained to crucial issues facing the industry.
“There is no single most important negative issue facing the tourism industry in Antigua and Barbuda than the present case, which has taken on worldwide media coverage of international proportions.
“Yet, the Ministry of Tourism did not see it relevant to have the cruise tourism sector present at this meeting,” a statement from the cruise association stated.
“The failure of the ministry to engage one of the principal partners – the ABCTA – of tourism does not afford the industry to effectively respond to situations of this kind.”
The association is desirous of a better partnership with the Ministry of Tourism, especially with respect to issues relating to cruise tourism.
Minister of Tourism John Maginley was in a meeting with tourism stakeholders up to late yesterday at the Jolly Beach Hotel and so was unavailable for comment.
The ABCTA is calling for an investigation into this incident after the judicial process is completed to avoid any recurrence.
The six US tourists were reportedly involved in a fight with the police at the St John’s Police Station on 4 Sept. The tourists are, however, disputing the police’s version of the matter. They are claiming police brutality and abuse.
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Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday will give his first Budget reply in three years in the House of Representatives at the Red House, Port of Spain, today at 10 a.m. when the Budget debate continues. Before this, however, Attorney General John Jeremie is expected to give a statement on the UdeCOTT Commission of Enquiry debacle. He is likely to announce that the Validation Act would be brought to the Parliament to validate all that has been done by the Prof John Uff Commission of Enquiry. Panday, who last gave such a presentation in 2005, was out of the Parliament when the last three budgets were presented. He was out in 2006 and 2007 because of the two-year jail sentence imposed by former chief magistrate Sherman McNicolls for his failure to declare a London bank account to the Integrity Commission. By the time the McNicolls judgment was overturned by the Appeal Court, Panday’s seat had been declared vacant after his MPs failed to apply for an extension of his period of absence as required by the Constitution. The House Speaker, therefore, declared his seat vacant. Panday went to the High Court to contest the issue, but the court upheld the declaration. Panday indicated that he planned to appeal, but by then, the Parliament was dissolved for elections and the matter became academic. Panday returned to Parliament following the 2007 General Election but was suspended in February 2008 by the House for gross disrespect to the Chair. Under those circumstances, his suspension lasted for the entire session of Parliament, which ended in December 2008. On all three occasions, Kamla Persad-Bissessar-who was appointed opposition leader by the president during the period of Panday’s absence from the Parliament, following his conviction in 2006-gave the budget reply. She was again selected by the United National Congress MPs last year, during the period of Panday’s suspension, to lead off the Opposition’s reply. So today is a big day for Panday. Particularly, having regard to the current leadership dispute within the UNC, Panday has to demonstrate that he is capable of providing the leadership the Opposition desperately needs if it is to be regarded as a credible alternative. Panday has the right to speak for three hours and ten minutes, the same amount of time Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira took to deliver the Budget on Monday. But Panday, who has a cold, may find his voice may be under some pressure to sustain a three-hour, ten-minute presentation. In any event, the opposition leader will be judged not by the length but by the quality of his presentation. The Opposition is entering this budget with at least one beef-that one of the main documents used to analyse Government’s performance-the Review of the Economy, is yet to be tabled. “We would have needed that information in the preparation of our budget response, and it is extremely distressing to know that the document is not ready,” Opposition chief economic spokesman, Vasant Bharath, stated yesterday. “We need the Review of the Economy to do a detailed analysis of Government’s performance,” he added, noting that Nunez-Tesheira had stated very little about what Government had done, and that the population was in “complete darkness” as to how the money has been spent over the past year. |
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Seven hundred international business people will come to Port of Spain in November to explore investment opportunities days before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Additionally, businessmen who were part of the Summit of the Americas conference in April will be returning to Trinidad and Tobago shortly. Prime Minister Patrick Manning made the announcements on Tuesday night during the Prime Minister’s Exporter of the Year Awards ceremony at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann’s. Of the conferences, he said: “These provide the opportunity for increased investment flows into our country and region. We must capitalise on this unprecedented situation which brings business leaders and investors from all over the globe. “For the Commonwealth Business Forum alone, for example, some 700 delegates will attend and use the opportunity to build business partnerships, create trade linkages and set up commercial ventures. “Additionally, we have also invited the business community from the Summit of the Americas to be present for the Commonwealth Meeting.” Manning said Trinidad and Tobago continued to be affected by the effects of the global downturn. “National revenue has dropped and we are unwillingly back to the point when we must employ deficit financing to keep that adequate degree of momentum to maintain both our global competitiveness as well as domestic social and economic equilibrium,” he said. He added: “However, we are confident that, with the wisdom that influenced the degree of our country’s insertion into the international economy, we will rise with the global tide, whether slow or surging. We also know that, in the interim, there is the absolute need for the reordering of domestic priorities and the management of expenditure to take into account the present and future prospects of Trinidad and Tobago. “We must look to our creators of wealth more than ever before. We count our manufacturing sector as pre-eminent among this group,” Unicell Paper Mills Caribbean received the Prime Minister’s Exporter of the Year award on Tuesday night. |
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Patricia Robinson, wife of former president and prime minister Arthur NR Robinson, has died. Robinson, who had been ailing with Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes for several years, passed away peacefully in her sleep early yesterday morning at the family’s residence in Ellerslie Park, Maraval. She was 79 years old. Prime Minister Patrick Manning and wife Hazel Manning visited the Robinson’s home yesterday to offer their sympathies to the bereaved family. During the course of the day, a number of other close friends and relatives visited the family’s residence in the seemingly quiet gated community to offer their condolences and words of comfort. Napier Pillai, who has been a close friend of ANR Robinson for over 40 years, said the former president and prime minister has been “coping” with the sad news. He told the Express that he spent some time with Robinson, now 82, yesterday morning and he seemed to be “holding up well”. “He was in good health although he was still slightly in a state of dismay. But he was not uncomfortable. He was very quiet but he smiled. He had a lot of good friends around him this morning. His doctor had been in to see him as well,” Pillai said. Pillai said the couple’s daughter, Ann Margaret, was also at the residence yesterday, but he said their son, David, lives in Toronto, Canada, “and Mr Robinson was trying to reach him”. Robinson had also led a successful career as a senior economist during her heyday and functioned in a number of capacities in public office. She was once a senior economist in the Ministry of Finance, and served on the board of directors at the Central Bank, a biographical summary prepared by the ministry of public administration and information in 1997 stated. She also worked on a number of other special assignments as executive secretary T&T Committee on Banking and Currency and Head of the Secretariat Committee on Banking and Currency. Robinson was also honoured with a special award for her contribution to both the establishment of the Institute of Banking and the Development of Banking in Trinidad and Tobago in November 1989. Funeral arrangements are to be announced at a later date, an official statement issued on behalf of the family said yesterday evening. |
Telecoms rivals Digicel and LIME may be poles apart on most issues, but in a rare moment of agreement, the fierce commercial adversaries have both thrown their support behind Government’s plan for a single regulator to police the information and communication technology (ICT) sector.
Digicel’s support for the proposed move, voiced by its legal representative, is hinged on the hope that the single regulator will be more focused on ICT as opposed to broader utilities regulation duties. However, LIME’s backing, coming from its Jamaica boss, is tied to the company’s long-standing beef over perceived unfair practices in the mobile market.
“I think a new regulator should be used to regulate the competitive markets of ICT which encompass telcos, the Spectrum Management Authority (SMA) and the Broad-casting Commission, (but) the regulator should concentrate on handling ICT issues only, rather than a combination of utilities issues,” Richard Fraser, Digicel Jamaica’s legal and regulatory manager, said.
Telcos and telecoms are industry speak for ICT firms.
Fraser contends that bringing the regulation of telecommunications, spectrum management and broad-casting into one unit should provide clear benefits to the entire ICT sector.
He did not elaborate on these expected benefits.
But mobile rival LIME is placing upfront, long-held concerns about mobile market tactics, including pricing and connectivity issues, over which it has taken Digicel to court.
“LIME’s main concern now is that whoever takes responsibility will deal with the significant market imbalances that exist and create the level playing field the industry and customers require,” LIME’s Jamaica Country Manager, Geoff Houston, told the Finan-cial Gleaner.
“LIME will always work within the guidelines established by any entity which the government sets up to be the regulators of our industry. All we ask for is a level playing field and the required vigilance.”
Oversight of the ICT sector is split among the SMA, the Broadcasting Commission and the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR).
The Broadcasting Commission monitors and regulates the electronic media, broadcast radio and television, as well as subscriber television; the OUR’s mandate includes providing an avenue of appeal for consumers who have grievances with utility companies; while the SMA is responsible for the licensing of operators using any radio frequency in the conduct of its business.
Earlier this month the Office of the Prime Minister announced that a draft ICT policy was being prepared for submission to cabinet with a central provision being a single regulator empowered to treat with select competition issues specific to the sector.
The draft, now being considered by government and opposition parliamentarians, addresses matters including creating a modern, cohesive and responsive legal and administrative framework; efficient spectrum planning, allocation and assignment; facilitating the accelerated deployment of affordable and accessible high capacity networks islandwide; as well as building human capacity to support ICT investments.
Dionne Rose, Business Reporter 
Rohan Miller, vice-president of investments at Sagicor Life Jamaica. - File
Sagicor Life Jamaica has put on hold five projects that would have delivered new homes to the market and offer relief to motorists hungry for parking space in the capital’s congested business and financial district.
The projects, which amounted to about $4 billion at announcement, would mostly have been rolled out in Kingston - one was in St Ann - said Rohan Miller, Sagicor vice-president of investment.
The multi-storey parking garage which was to be built in New Kingston would have cost $1 billion. The idea mooted by Sagicor some two years ago, according to reports at the time, would offer companies and individuals the parking space to buy.
The parking facility was to have been built across from Sagicor headquarters at 28-48 Barbados Avenue.
High-end segments
Miller said the company, were it to go ahead with the residential real estate developments, would not be able to entice buyers. Two of the properties would have been priced at the middle to high-end segments, where the market is showing the steepest decline in demand.
The Seymour Lands development in Kingston for which Sagicor fought so hard to win approval of both the authorities and homeowners, was to be the most expensive of the five projects.
It would have been a $1.6-billion investment for Sagicor, which planned to build 32 two-bedroom apartments and 23 three-bedroom townhouses on the 4.25 acre property acquired by the insurance group back in 2007.
The estimated sale price on the units would have been $25 million to $40 million.
“The market is going through some amount of adjustment now at that price range. The expectation is that when the economy rebounds, the market should rebound and at that time we will look at the project to make a determination to go forward with it,” Miller said.
For now, the company is wary of adding inventory to the housing stock at a time when no one is buying top-end properties.
“It is our intention to revisit it and see whether or not the market conditions would allow for us to develop the property at the proposed level,” said Miller.
“At that proposed level, we were really into the mid to high segment of the market and for that part of the market, you have to be careful as to when you develop and what you develop.”
A smaller development of 30 apartments for $250 million has been shelved too, though at 12 million per unit, the apartments are in a lower price range and the project approved by the planning authorities. The property is located on Strathairn Avenue, just behind the Winchester Business Centre, which is also owned by Sagicor.
Another 30-apartment development for Shortwood Road is still awaiting approval, but that, too, is on hold.
The development in St Ann would also have been a $1-billion project, providing for 120 homes on the tranquil coastline of Llandovery in St Ann. That project has faltered with the economy, Miller said, though it, too, had hurdled regulatory approval, including environmental permits for the ecologically sensitive property.
“It is one of those developments where people would have determined what they do there,” Miller said of the seaside residential apartments.
Miller said there would have been 120 units, suggesting that the plan may have been scaled back even before it was shelved, as the environmental impact assessment that Sagicor commissioned to satisfy the National Environment and Planning Agency and planning regulations made mention of 300 units, including town houses, apartments and studios, and complementary facilities such as a spa - on four hectares of the Llandovery coast.
“There is some amount of downturn in economic activity,” said Miller.
“It is best for us to wait, review the project, the market conditions and determine when exactly we do go to full development on this project,” he said.
Glenroy Sinclair 
Firemen search through rubble at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center in New York in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. - FILE
EIGHT YEARS after her daughter perished in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Lelith Burgen is still living in denial.
She does not believe her little girl, Venesha Rodgers-Richards, is dead.
“Some people might say I am crazy, but I still believe that one day she is going to walk through my front door because I have seen nothing, nothing at all to convince me that she is gone,” said Burgen.
Speaking with The Gleaner yesterday from her New Jersey home, Burgen, who has been living in the United States for the past 30 years, stressed that for the first five years after the 2001 tragedy, she would group up with thousands of people in the US to commemorate the deaths of the victims.
“I don’t do that anymore. Like tomorrow (today), I am just going to lock away myself. Sometimes I cry, read my Bible and beg God to give me strength. It has been an uphill task for me. My daughter and I were very close, she was like my best friend,” said Burgen.
Last words
She still remembers vividly the last conversation she had with her 26-year-old daughter, who was employed as a claims representative at Marsh and McLennon Insurance Company, which was located in one of the twin towers at the time.
“The last we spoke was the evening before the incident. She came to my house to pick up her daughter. Just before she left, she jokingly said to me, ‘Woman, mi have a life, so mi going home’. She blew a kiss to me and I blew her back one. I then walked her to the porch and watched her car drive up the road until it vanished out of sight. I never saw her again,” said Burgen, who is the mother of four other children.
Her daughter was among nearly 3,000 people who died on the morning of September 11, 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jets and intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. More than 20 of the victims were Jamaicans.
The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected towards Washington, DC. There were no survivors from any of the flights.
| ST JOHN’S, Antigua — The Ministry of Finance, the Economy and Public Administration in Antigua and Barbuda said that, contrary to media reports, US$50 million in financial assistance from Venezuela has been received.
The Ministry has therefore demanded that the Antigua Sun retract its front page story of September 10. According to the Ministry, the money was placed in Antigua and Barbuda’s call account at the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank on 21 August, 2009. It is already being used for part of the intended purpose of allowing government to meet basic financial obligations, even as the terms of the agreement are being finalised. |
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