Cyprus bailout hit as privatisation bill fails
International efforts to bail out Cyprus' debt-laden economy have been thrown into doubt after its parliament rejected a key part of the plan.
As part of the 10bn-euro (£8.25bn; $13.7bn) deal with the EU and International Monetary Fund, lawmakers have until 5 March to pass a bill allowing state firms to be privatised.
But on Thursday, they threw it out, jeopardising the next tranche of cash.
The government says it will re-submit the bill with some amendments.
The deal was agreed in March last year in an attempt to stave off the collapse of Cyprus's banking sector and the wider economy.
It included moves to restructure the banks, along with other measures such as tax rises and privatisations.
Late on Thursday, the privatisation bill was narrowly defeated after parliament split 25-25 on the vote, with five abstentions. This meant the legislation failed to pass.
The vote took place as hundreds of people opposed to privatisation staged a protest outside the parliament building.
A government spokesman, Christos Stylanides, said the bill would be amended to reflect concerns over workers' rights after privatisation.
He said the new version would be submitted to the House of Representatives on Friday.
Source-BBC
Chinatown denies unfair competition with Dominicans
A representative of Santo Domingo’s Chinese community on Friday denied that Chinese retailers on the busy Duarte Av. compete unfairly, as Dominican counterparts claim.
Marino Joa said Dominican merchants acquire merchandise from the U.S. through Panama, which he says make garment and footwear soar costs from Customs duties.
He said their gods come directly from China without intermediaries allowing Dominicans to buy them at good prices.
Joa said he expect new Chinese investors to come to the country, because it benefits both nations, adding that major exports of Dominican rum, tobacco and amber will continue to China.
Source-Dominican Today
LIME investing $30 million
To keep up with the speeds that people are requiring, LIME is investing, over this year and next, over $30 million locally to upgrade its system, according to LIME Cayman Islands CEO Bill McCabe in this weeks interview with CNS Business Video. The ability of Cayman to compete with the rest of the world, especially in the high-end industries that thrive here, is highly dependent on the ability to connect and communicate with the rest of the world, and that means that the demands for speed and really good infrastructure is tremendous, he said.Looking to the future, he said that they were very interested in Health City Cayman Islands’ plans for telemedical services, noting that telecommunications would be at the core of that for HCCI to be able to provide diagnostics and medical services.
In the last few months, he noted, the firm has added a tremendous amount of capacity and resilience on both the Maya-1 and the CBUS cables, its two main cables going off the island in order to secure in our off-island capacity.
The move to LTE, which is the latest version of mobile technology, was a very big investment which puts Cayman in the top 20% of mobile networks around the world. “We’ve got 100% population coverage on that and it's a really important step to keep people connected on the move,” McCabe told CNS Business Video.
The third major investment involves moving from a copper-based industry, which has served the world very well for the last 100 years, to a fibre-based industry. This, said McCabe, “is a once in a multi-generation change to the infrastructure on the island.”
“Just in the last six months, the demands that have been made on our data networks has doubled, and that happens every six months,” he said. But their customers “don’t let up. They want it faster, they want greater bandwidth and greater connectivity, and that’s in the business world as well as the (individual) consumer.”
“After every christmas we see an uplift in the data demands because people are getting new ipads, tablets, phablets, smartphones, laptops, X-Boxes and smart TVs, and all of these require connectivity and increase the demand on the networks,” he said.
Cayman is in the top 10% of countries for people’s demands for devices like smartphones, so a very high proportion of customers are demanding connectivity all the time wherever they are, McCabe explained.
“But if you look at the rest of the world … there are over 2 billion customers connected via mobile devices but only 700 million connected via fixed line internet, so having connectivity on the move is incredibly important, not just here but around the world.”
Looking into the future of telecommunications involves “a bit of crystal ball gazing”, he said, “But if we look at where we’ve come from, just ten years ago there was no YouTube, for example, but right now there are over 100 hours of content uploaded every minute of the day.” So the evolution of telecommunications has created incredible demands on data networks by both individual consumers and the business community.
In terms of education, people are getting degrees online, so they are able to hold down jobs and get their education at the same time, and he also noted the government’s stated intention to develop e-government.
“Everyone's heard of Google eye glasses,” he said, “but who knows what’s going to be around the corner.” the possibilities are for everything will be connected all the time, from fridges to TVs to cars to everyday appliances to traffic lights.
“There are some forecasts that by 2020 there will be somewhere between 50 and 75 billion connected devices around the world, which shows incredible growth and ever-increasing demands. The job of telecommunications is to ensure that we have the bandwidth and the connectivity available for these new industries to thrive and develop because it forms a foundation of those new industries,” McCabe said.
Source-CNS Business
Cuban 5 Spy Released from US Prison
A second member of the so-called "Cuban Five" spy ring was released from a United States prison after being jailed for more than 15 years.
Officials say 50-year-old Fernando Gonzalez completed his sentence Thursday at a prison in Safford, Arizona. Gonzalez was turned over immediately to immigration officials to be deported to Cuba.
Gonzalez, who also goes by the name "Ruben Campa," was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998 along with four other Cuban agents. All were convicted in 2001 of 26 counts of spying on behalf of Fidel Castro's government.
Trial testimony showed the five sought to infiltrate military bases, including the U.S. Southern Command's headquarters. They also spied on Cuban exiles opposed to the communist government of then-president Fidel Castro. Havana says the agents did not threaten U.S. sovereignty and were only monitoring militant exiles to prevent terrorist attacks in Cuba.
Another agent, Rene Gonzalez, was released in 2011 and returned to Cuba after serving more than 13 years in a U.S. prison. He renounced his U.S. citizenship to avoid serving the mandatory three-year parole in Florida.
One of the three remaining agents, Gerardo Hernandez, is serving a double life sentence after being convicted of involvement in shooting down two small U.S. planes off the Cuban coast in 1996.
The two other agents are still in jail: Antonio Guerrero is serving 21 years and 10 months and is due for release in September 2017, while Ramon Labanino is serving 30 years and is due for release in October 2024.
Some information for this report was provided by Reuters.
Holiday May Take Heat Out of Venezuela Crisis
Venezuelans began a week-long national holiday on Thursday as some protests still simmer, but President Nicolas Maduro's government is hoping the break will take the heat out of the nation's worst unrest in a decade.
The 51-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez brought forward by two days a long weekend national holiday for Carnival when Venezuelans traditionally abandon cities and head for Caribbean coast beaches to relax and party.
There will be another day off for the March 5 anniversary of Chavez's death from cancer, meaning a week-long break that officials hope will dampen student-led street protests against the government.
In the capital, Caracas, which has seen most of the at least 13 fatalities from this month's unrest, opposition supporters gathered in wealthy eastern neighborhoods.
In familiar scenes from the last two weeks, when one group of demonstrators tried to block a six-lane highway that runs nearby, security forces fired teargas to disperse them.
“How can you enjoy carnival when people are dying?” read one banner waved by students at drivers in eastern Caracas as many people began to hit the highways for the coast.
In the city center, red-clad Maduro supporters rallied in remembrance of deadly price riots 25 years ago, which the president says helped propel Chavez to power a decade later.
The students want Maduro to quit over grievances ranging from high inflation and shocking crime rates to shortages of basic food and alleged repression of political rivals.
Though they have presented the biggest challenge to his 10-month-old administration and the worst unrest since street rallies against Chavez a decade ago, there is no sign Maduro could be ousted.
On the contrary, he seems to be regaining the initiative by offering dialog with foes and consolidating his leadership of the Socialist Party by uniting factions against a common enemy.
About 150 people have been injured during the two-week crisis, and more than 500 people arrested, authorities say.
Top Castro Aide Turned Dissident Huber Matos Dies at 95
Huber Matos, a top Cuban revolutionary who was sent to prison for 20 years for turning against Fidel Castro, died Thursday in Miami.
His family says Matos suffered a heart attack. He was 95.
Matos was a teacher and farmer when he joined the Castro-led rebels plotting to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Matos rode side-by-side with a triumphant Castro as they entered Havana on New Year's Day, 1959.
But Matos wrote in his autobiography that he quickly became disenchanted with Castro. He said it became clear that the new Cuban government was moving away from democracy and heading toward a Marxist dictatorship.
Castro ordered Matos imprisoned when he tried to leave the government.
Matos was freed in 1979, and eventually settled in Miami, where he became a Cuban opposition leader.
Mexican President 'Indignant' at US Deportations
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he is “indignant” at the United States' deportation of Mexican migrants and described U.S. lawmakers as demonstrating a “lack of conscience” in failing to pass immigration reform.
In a television interview aired late on Wednesday Pena Nieto said he and U.S. President Barack Obama discussed the issue during their meeting at a North American leaders' summit held last week in Mexico.
His emboldened comments to Mexico's Univision channel followed days after his administration announced it had captured Mexico's most wanted man, drug lord Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.
Pena Nieto has said any extradition of Guzman to the United States is likely to take time, underscoring the fact the drug lord still has outstanding time to serve in Mexico after a daring 2001 jail break, reportedly in a laundry cart.
“Yes it makes me indignant, and it makes Mexicans indignant,” Pena Nieto said in the interview, when asked whether deportations angered him.
“There's a lack of conscience, something which shouldn't only alert and worry Mexicans, it should also worry the American government and they should take up the issue,” said Pena Nieto.
Pena Nieto added that he sees a willingness on the part of the Obama administration to change immigration laws, and that reform which provides a path to citizenship should “have the backing and aid of the various political forces” in the United States.
A bill that would have provided ways for the approximately 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally to obtain citizenship recently stalled in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives.
Many opponents of comprehensive immigration reform in the United States argue that Obama's position would reward lawbreakers and deportations are warranted since the immigrants entered the country illegally.
Under Obama, deportations have hit record highs.
Mexican government officials last week criticized the U.S. Border Patrol for the use of deadly force in a confrontation in which a Mexican migrant was killed.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent shot the man near San Diego after being pelted with rocks while trying to apprehend a group of suspected illegal border crossers.
No endemic transmission of measles in the Caribbean since 2002 - PAHO
The Pan-American Health Organization ((PAHO) says there has been no endemic transmission of measles in the Americas, including the Caribbean, since 2002.
PAHO said since Venezuela reported the last case in 2001, measles deaths have “disappeared from the region.”
“These successes, achieved by the countries of the Americas with support from the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (WHO), make the Americas the first region in the world to eliminate one of the world’s most contagious diseases and a leading cause of death for young children,” said PAHO in a statement here.
It said key reasons for the success include high rates of vaccination coverage in regional countries and early detection of cases.
However, PAHO said the region continues to face the threat of imported cases from countries outside this hemisphere, where the virus still circulates.
As of 2012, according to WHO estimates released last week, there were 226,722 measles cases and 122,000 deaths in other regions of the world.
These figures represent declines of 77 percent in cases and 78 percent in deaths since 2000.
“For more than a decade, there has been no endemic measles in the Americas, thanks to countries’ efforts to vaccinate children and maintain high coverage rates,” said Dr. Gina Tambini, director of PAHO’s Family, Gender and Life Course Department.
“But until the rest of the world eliminates the disease, we must be on the alert for any reintroduction of cases that could lead to outbreaks and jeopardize the continuity of this public health milestone,” she added.
Before the establishment of PAHO/WHO’s Expanded Immunization Program in 1977, more than 250,000 measles cases and 12,000 deaths were recorded yearly in the Americas.
Starting in the 1990s, PAHO said cases declined, but the most notable drop came after the region launched a major measles elimination initiative in 1994.
The last recorded endemic outbreak of measles was in Venezuela and Colombia in 2001-2002.
PAHO said vaccination campaigns to eliminate rubella have helped to maintain measles elimination by using a combination measles and rubella vaccines for adolescents and young adults.
A study on the cost-effectiveness of measles elimination in Latin America and the Caribbean, which included PAHO/WHO experts, estimated that the cost of preventing one measles case is US$71.75, and preventing one death costs US$15,000, indicating cost-effectiveness.
Ukraine's Parliament Approves Yatsenyuk as New PM
Ukraine's new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is accusing the government of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych of stealing billions from the state treasury.
Parliament approved Mr. Yatsenyuk, a popular opposition leader, as the head of the new interim government Thursday.
Mr. Yatsenyuk said $70 billion in Ukrainian government money had been sent to offshore accounts over the last three years, and that $37 billion of credit it received has disappeared -- leaving Ukraine with severe financial problems.
Yatsenyuk is a pro-Western former foreign minister and economy minister. One of his first major jobs is preventing the Ukrainian economy from collapse.
The International Monetary Fund and European Union are sending teams to Ukraine to assess the country's needs. The United States also is considering $1 billion in loan guarantees.
Earlier Thursday, the Kremlin sent Russian fighter jets to patrol its border with Ukraine -- a day after announcing large-scale military exercises in the area.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who assured him that the exercises were previously scheduled. Lavrov repeated Russia's pledge to respect Ukrainian sovereignty.
But Kerry said "everybody needs to step back and avoid provocation."
Gunmen seized control of government buildings in Crimea -- a Ukrainian region with strong ties to Moscow and home to a Russian naval base in Sevastopol. The gunmen raised the Russian flag.
Acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchyno warned that any movement of Russian forces outside the base would be considered "military aggression."
The Crimean parliament voted Thursday to dismiss the regional government and hold a referendum to determine Crimea's status in Ukraine. The referendum is set for May 25, the same day Ukraine will hold a presidential election.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the seizure of the buildings in Crimea dangerous and irresponsible. He called on Russia to avoid any action that could lead to what he called a "misunderstanding." Fogh Rasmussen also urged Ukraine's new leaders to establish an inclusive political process.
Russian news agencies report that Moscow has approved President Yanukovych's request for personal security "on Russian territory." They give no details. They also report that Mr. Yanukovych will hold a news conference Friday in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Nigerian Witnesses Link Militants to At Least 33 More Killings in Northeast
Witnesses and local authorities in northeastern Nigeria say suspected Boko Haram militants have killed at least 33 people and firebombed a theological college in Adamawa state.
The military, which regularly understates witness death tolls, said six assailants were killed in the attacks, along with one soldier and three civilians in three attacks..
Thursday's attacks near the Cameroon border came just one day after witnesses reported nearly 60 students killed at the Federal Government College in nearby Yobe state. Local reports said students at the federal college were attacked in their sleep and killed as they tried to flee burning dormitories.
The Associated Press quoted what it described as an angry Yobe Governor Murtala Hammanyero Nyako as saying he suspects collusion between government forces and the militant group.
"Either this is controlled by unknown fellows, or unknown Boko Haram strategic commanders in the [government] defense system, or it is being stage-managed," he said. Referring to an attack last year on a nearby government air base, Hammanyero alleged that soldiers in the vicinity did not respond until militants had destroyed all five aircraft at the facility.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Adamawa, Yobe and Borno states in June 2013. But he is facing mounting criticism as the attacks have continued since then.
Fighters from Boko Haram, a name meaning "Western education is a sin," have carried out similar attacks on schools, government facilities and other targets, since launching a 2009 uprising against the government. The group is blamed for thousands of deaths.
Source-VOA