Nevis Sun Tours, a new tour operator and destination management company (DMC), has launched to “make it easier for agents and consumers” to book and sell trips to Saint Kitts and Nevis.
The new organisation said it aims to ‘help agents and consumers’ arrange travel to and within the Caribbean islands.
The organisation has created unique one-day and multi-week holiday packages for the islands which include pre-arranged airport transfers, hotel choices and dining and activity options.
Greg Phillip, former chief executive of the Nevis Tourism Authority, will lead the new team alongside his wife Moreen, who will manage the operations.
Phillip said he was “proud to have a team of such knowledgeable and experienced individuals” at Nevis Sun Tours.
“It is an excellent feeling to deliver travel industry innovation in service to travellers, travel advisors and other travel professionals,” he added.
“Our local hotel partners in Saint Kitts and Nevis are among the best in the Caribbean, and they, along with our other service providers, make it possible for us to deliver on our promise to serve travellers and travel professionals by making it easier to sell and book Caribbean vacations to Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Miami-Dade County, home to many Caribbean nationals, will soon issue immigrant IDs to migrants living in the country illegally and others who don’t have identification.
When she was a Miami-Dade commissioner, Levine Cava unsuccessfully proposed community IDs modeled on other North Carolina and Virginia municipalities. In 2021, a year after becoming Mayor, she placed the item back on the agenda. Levine Cava and others who supported the proposal noted that immigrants struggle to access COVID-19 tests and vaccines because of the ID requirement.
They also noted that the IDs would enable immigrants to use library resources, local recreation facilities, and storm shelters and provide them with the necessary identification to return to their homes after evacuating during hurricanes or fires.
Miami-Dade not the first to pass this program
Other South Florida counties, namely Broward and Palm Beach, have also passed similar programs. These counties are also home to a large percentage of Florida’s immigrant community. According to the American Immigration Council, one in five residents in Florida is an immigrant.
Broward County’s community ID program was proposed last year by then-Commissioner Dale Holness – a Jamaican immigrant. He stated that news of an immigrant resident in his district being turned away from a vaccination site after attempting to use a passport as an ID triggered the proposal.
“In an email that I received, someone gave the story of an elderly immigrant Haitian woman who was in line to get the vaccination. She presented her passport to get the vaccination, and she was told she couldn’t use that form of identification to get the vaccine. Police officers told her they only accept Florida ID. She was turned away,” he told the Broward Commission.
Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony also showed his support for the program in a letter to the Commissioners.
“Broward County has thousands of residents who lack identification for various reasons. With the homeless, undocumented, formerly incarcerated, to elderly, these and other bureaucratically challenged residents do not have access to many basic and vital services. The community ID will provide these residents with a way to access those services,” Sheriff Tony stated.
Program starts this month
Starting this month, Broward residents can apply for the community ID card through the Legal Aid Service of Broward County, a non-profit agency.
Individuals must first register for an orientation session to apply for a community identification card. A session scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 5, in Miramar is already fully booked. The next session is Saturday, March 5, in Pompano Beach.
The first in-person event (by appointment only) will occur at the Miramar Multi-Service Complex, 6700 Miramar Parkway, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. To register, visit BrowardLegalAid.org/CommunityID. Both events are by appointment only.
The ID card includes a photo, date of birth, and address and costs $20. It is also not exclusively for immigrants. Formerly incarcerated people, foster youth, homeless people, refugees, or anyone in Broward who has difficulty getting a government-issued ID may apply.
HAVANA (NBC News) — Nestled in his bedroom studio under vinyl records and a cluster of microphones, DJ Milano makes electronic music that combines traditional Cuban sounds with modern beats. It is a tortuous process.
“We can’t use certain applications because they are blocked,” said DJ Milano, 33, who hasn’t been able to update Rekordbox,the platform he needs to mix samples, as he can’t get a protected virtual network for his Mac computer. “I have no way of buying it — I have the money in my bank, but you can’t use Cuban bank cards to buy online.”
Sixty years ago Thursday, President John F. Kennedy signed the “embargo on all trade with Cuba” into law. Despite some changes through the decades, the embargo has endured so long that it has become the longest sanctions regime in modern history.
Throughout the island today, the effects are clear.
Log in to PayPal in Cuba and you’re greeted with this message: “Access Denied.” On Amazon: “Unable to process this order.” Try downloading an app on the Apple App Store: “unavailable in the country or region you are in.”
Software developer Eduardo Perez, 27, lost all the programming he had done for his university thesis a few years ago when the source code repository GitLab suddenly restricted access from Cuba. He spent months rewriting the code before access was restored.
“It’s so trivial,” he said. “They take away access and then they give it back.”
Leonardo Milanes, aka DJ Milano, 33, an electronic music producer, in his home studio.Roberto León / NBC News
Unable to bid for freelance contracts on upwork.com, he loses out on jobs. “I understand that there are sanctions,” he said, “but they are supposed to be against the government, not the people.”
Those who visit the island today can see the impact of the sanctions and 60 years of a highly inefficient centrally planned communist economy: Crumbling buildings dot Havana’s post-apocalyptic skyline, 1950s Chevrolets and Cadillacs rumble on, yellow street lamps flicker at night.
For many tourists, Cuba’s “frozen in time” feel is part of the island’s allure. For its residents, it has meant living with chronic shortages and deteriorating economic conditions, aggravated by the Covid-19 lockdown, which shut down tourism. Last summer’s historic protests against the government reflected the frustration and anger with the current situation.
By the time Kennedy signed the total embargo into law in 1962, Cuba’s government had nationalized billions of dollars in U.S. property — the largest expropriation ever of U.S. assets — and moved into the Soviet Union’s orbit. The Bay of Pigs invasion had failed dramatically, and Fidel Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state.
But even before the Soviets got involved in 1962, the Eisenhower administration had decided to use sanctions as part of the toolkit to overthrow Castro, according to declassified documents.
“Every possible means should be undertaken to promptly weaken the economic life of Cuba,” Lester D. Mallory, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in April 1960, arguing that U.S. policy should aim “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Although the U.S. can export food and medicine to Cuba under the embargo, the laws significantly limit the amount of goods that can be sent, even from third countries.
Critics of the embargo, including human rights groups, such as Oxfam, have called for the sanctions to be lifted, saying they “hamper access to inputs, medical technologies, medical equipment, and other essential basic items” for everyday Cubans.
The sanctions amount to “collective punishment” that is incompatible with human rights, said Alfred de Zayas, a professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and a retired senior lawyer with the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“It is a fundamental principle of law that each person has the right to be treated individually and fairly and not punished for crimes or offenses he or she has not committed,” he said.
But critics of the Cuban government see the embargo as the gift that keeps on giving — for the Cuban leadership.
“It’s allowed them to blame other countries, in this case the U.S., for its own inability to create wealth and well-being,” said Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a vice president of the Cuban Democratic Transition, an opposition group outlawed on the island.
“The government has used [the sanctions] to stall the internal reforms the country needs,” Morúa said.
Making do with what’s possible
Together with a stagnant economy, the sanctions have propelled Cubans to come up with gutsy, creative and often bizarre ways to make do with what they can get.
“Everybody knows about their cars,” said Emily Morris, an economist at the Institute of the Americas at University College London. “And that’s symbolic: If you look at the cars, you realize how the economy’s kept going. There’s a whole capacity to adapt existing machinery to give it a longer life or to make it do things it wasn’t designed for.”
For want of traditional glass airlocks, some Cubans use condoms to monitor fermentation when they make wine. Because they lack ball bearings, athletes use old medicine pots for grips on skipping ropes that allow the cords to rotate. Priced out of ventilators and vaccines on the international market during the pandemic, the island manufactured its own.
A functionary said in an interview on condition of anonymity for security reasons that because of the difficulty of making wire transfers from the island, he has flown many times to Canada, his suitcase flush with millions of dollars, to purchase oncological medical equipment.
After former President Barack Obama softened the embargo and re-established diplomatic relations, Trump restored and strengthened the restrictions, issuing over 240 economic measures against the island: Cruise ships were prevented from docking, flights were cut back, U.S. firms were authorized to sue multinational companies making money from their former property, and tankers carrying petroleum from Venezuela were fined for docking in Cuba.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., widely seen as the architect of the Trump-era sanctions, said in an emailed statement that the changes were necessary to hold the regime accountable. Ending the embargo, he argued, is up to the ruling Communist Party.
“The U.S. embargo is now codified in law and clearly lays out what the regime must do to end it,” Rubio said, citing “free, fair and multiparty elections,” the release of “all political prisoners,” freedom of the press and a return of property “expropriated by the Cuban regime to American citizens.”
Rubio has previously argued that “there is no embargo on Cuba” as such, but rather “an embargo on the Cuban regime.”
But U.S.-Cuba policy, including the embargo, isn’t strictly along partisan lines, with Democrats recently divided around the country’s recent protests.
President Joe Biden hasn’t lifted any of the current restrictions; Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said the government is “looking at the whole policy” on Cuba. He said Biden is focused on human rights following the Cuban government’s crackdown and arrests after the July 11 protests.
Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols told lawmakers Thursday that the administration had received recommendations for easing remittances and would send temporary officers to the embassy in Havana to ease visa processing, Reuters reported.
Easing remittances would be welcome news for Armando Collazo, 72, a retired sewing machine repairman. He used to walk around the block to his local Western Union every month to pick up the equivalent of $100 that his daughter sent him from Florida. Since remittances were banned two years ago, things have gotten dicey.
“Now she has to find someone traveling here to bring me the money — they rip her off,” Collazo said, adding that his daughter has “miraculously” managed to remit him money every month. But with U.S. flights to all cities but Havana no longer running, this economic lifeline has run dry for many Cubans.
Collazo, who battles stomach ulcers and heart disease, said that a few years ago he could get the medicine he and his wife needed for a few cents. Now they are short and must stand in “huge lines” outside his local pharmacy when the drugs they need occasionally come in.
Perhaps because of the rise of social media, perhaps because many have become so fed up with the government’s failure to improve the economy, a tendency to simply deny the embargo’s existence has grown in recent years in Cuba. A fringe belief before, it is now held by a small but significant minority. “No hay bloqueo” (“There is no blockade”) has become a common rebuttal, especially among young people, of the government’s claim that the sanctions constitute a “blockade.”
New technology, enforcement boost sanctions
Technology has made the sanctions easier to enforce.
While Cuba has long been forbidden to use U.S. dollars, in the past customers and suppliers could find workarounds. But the advances in computing and a tightening of anti-money-laundering efforts over the last 15 years have put an end to Cuba’s ability to use dollars, as well as euros.
“We are at an all-time high,” said a Western businessman operating on the island. “Banks all over the world have upped their game on money laundering. This means it’s far harder to conceal the Cuban relationship behind the payment.”
Sources say that following stiff fines in U.S. courts over the last decade, the pool of banks in Europe prepared to receive wire transfers from Cuban banks has shrunk. That in turn has raised costs and reduced the range of clients and suppliers the island can do business with.
The Trump administration’s decision to put the island back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism has only increased the risk of doing business with Cuba. Cuban banks last year took the unprecedented step of suspending cash bank deposits in dollars.
Politics vs. intelligence findings
Over the years, a chasm has opened between U.S. politicians and intelligence agencies about the embargo. A secret CIA 1982 case study, published by the National Security Archive, a public interest research center in Washington, D.C., concluded that two decades from their imposition, the sanctions had “not met any of their objectives.” The embargo, the study found, “did little to weaken” the government’s position but did provide the Cuban government with a “scapegoat.”
“The intelligence community has long said — analytically — that the embargo wasn’t working and wouldn’t work,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former national intelligence officer for Latin America who is now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. “Analysts correctly identified the embargo as enhancing government nationalist credibility, even though most Cubans also don’t exonerate the Communist Party for its failed economic policies.”
For Hal Klepak, a professor emeritus of history and strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada, “there is no occasion in modern history where one sees a great power sanctioning a small power for a period of time similar to that of the present U.S.-Cuban situation.”
“The stakes are high,” he said. “If you install a government in a region which takes as a given that its first needs are health, education, free funerals, access to the arts and sports and only afterwards democracy, if you bring that into play in a region where those are the aspirations of the vast majority of the population, you are ipso facto a threat to the whole structure of the post-colonial world in Latin America.”
But if it hasn’t rocked the Cuban government, why does the embargo endure?
CARTAGENA, Colombia Feb 3 (Reuters) – Colombia has launched a new strategy to fight drug trafficking, aiming to control cyberspace to tackle criminal groups involved in the cocaine trade, as well as block their financial transactions, Defense Minister Diego Molano said on Thursday.
The “Esmeralda” initiative, unveiled in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, will see support from 36 countries including the United States, Colombia’s main ally in the war on drugs.
“We hope to develop new and innovative tactics in the coming years in the fight against the global scourge of drugs,” Molano said at the III International Anti-Drugs Congress.
Crime-fighting agencies around the world will increase their cyber presence, including with undercover agents, to tackle the growing distribution of drugs online, Molano said.
Artificial intelligence will also be used to monitor the selling and trafficking of chemical ingredients used in drug making, to protect legal sales but prevent use in narcotics, he added.
Colombia is considered the world’s top cocaine producer. Illegal armed groups including leftist guerrillas and criminal gangs descended from right-wing paramilitaries are deeply involved in production and trafficking.
The South American country cut the size of coca crops, cocaine’s chief ingredient, by 7% in 2020, but potential production rose 8% to 1,228 tonnes a year, according to the United Nations.
Colombian authorities seized a record 672 tonnes of cocaine last year.
Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta Writing by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Richard Chang
LIMA, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Peru’s new prime minister, Hector Valer, denied on Thursday that he had beat his daughter and late wife – the subject of two police complaints – as the country’s third Cabinet in six months appeared to be on increasingly shaky ground.
“I am not an abuser, I am not someone who hits (others), I am not what the complaint at the police station says,” Valer said at a news conference on his third day on the job.
The allegations put Peru’s Cabinet at fresh risk of failing to earn a confidence vote from Congress, with some parties saying they would vote against him.
Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was in Brazil on Thursday and has yet to comment on the allegations. Castillo, a member of a Marxist-Leninist party, named Valer to the job earlier this week after his former prime minister resigned over disagreements with him.
The allegations, which first surfaced in local media, include a police report from 2016 in which Valer’s daughter alleges Valer slapped, punched and kicked her “in the face and other parts of the body.”
Valer’s wife died three months ago, he said.
Valer denied the alleged violence toward his wife and said he had merely “reprimanded” his daughter. He showed photos of the two together that he said were on his daughter’s Facebook page, saying they offered proof that the two are on good terms.
“I reprimanded my daughter like any parent does inside their own home, not once but many times,” Valer said. “Those reprimands I think have helped my daughter today be a surgeon doctor.”
If Valer cannot earn Congress’ green light, Castillo will have to name a new Cabinet. But if Congress rejects that Cabinet as well, Peru’s constitution allows the president to shut down Congress and call for new legislative elections.
Valer said his Cabinet’s failure in Congress could perhaps strengthen Castillo’s position, because it would put the president closer to having a “gold bullet, which is the dissolution of Congress.”
Peru’s prime minister is a powerful figure. The PM is the chief adviser to the president and also presides and helps appoint the rest of the Cabinet.
Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun in Lima Editing by Matthew Lewis
BRASILIA, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro met with Peru’s President Pedro Castillo on Thursday and pressed him on a project to build a cross-border road that would allow Brazil access to the Pacific.
Peru has so far shown little interest in the plan, which would link Cruzeiro do Sul in the western Brazilian state of Acre to the Peruvian city of Pucallpa, across an area of virgin rainforest.
Bolsonaro reiterated the interest of the Brazilian government in building the road, creating “great potential to increase economic integration,” said a joint statement issued after the meeting in the Acre capital of Porto Velho.
Brazil’s far-right leader donned a Peruvian cowboy hat and gave a thumbs-up sign as he posed for photos with Castillo, a member of a Marxist-Leninist party who has moved progressively to the right.
The two men agreed to facilitate trade between their countries, streamline customs red-tape and step up security on their borders to fight drug trafficking and arms smuggling, the joint statement said.
But the cross-border road, which has a cost estimate of some 500 million reais ($94 million) on the Brazilian side, has encountered resistance.
Environmentalists and federal prosecutors in Brazil oppose the project because it would cut through untouched rainforest for 110 kilometers (68 miles) in the Serra do Divisor National Park, one of the most untouched areas of Brazil.
But the Brazilian government’s department of transportation has already authorized a tender to contract a company to build the road.
“We are interested in an exit to the Pacific. Here it just depends on us and Peru, and no other country,” Bolsonaro told reporters before the meeting.
Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Carolina Pulice and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien
The director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Europe office said on Thursday that the region is entering a “plausible endgame” as COVID-19 deaths start to slow down.
Hans Kluge said during a news briefing that European countries have a “singular opportunity” to take control of COVID-19 transmission because of several factors, according to The Associated Press:
1. High levels of immunization from the vaccines and natural infection
2. The virus’ tendency to spread less in warmer weather
3. The lower severity of the omicron variant
“This period of higher protection should be seen as a cease-fire that could bring us enduring peace,” Kluge added at the briefing.
Looking ahead: Kluge said health authorities should be able to control any new variant that may emerge, noting that spring “leaves us with the possibility for a long period of tranquility and a much higher level of population defense against any resurgence in transmission,” the AP reported.
However, Kluge urged everyone in the region to get vaccinated and called for “a drastic and uncompromising increase in vaccine-sharing across borders.”
The context: Countries in Europe, including Denmark, Norway and Britain, have slowly been lifting coronavirus restrictions in recent weeks, with Sweden being the latest, according to the AP.
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World faces ‘bumpy, difficult’ Covid transition, says senior scientist
Tensions in societies around the world over the current Covid situation are going to be very difficult to handle, one of Britain’s most senior scientific figures has warned.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, who stepped down as a government scientific adviser in November last year, warned the idea of simply “exiting” a pandemic is not realistic.
“I just don’t think you wake up on Tuesday and it’s finished. It’s not going to happen like that,” he said in an online meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine.
“The transition from [the] acute phase of the pandemic to something new, not yet defined, it’s really difficult – bumpy, different around the world, different within a single country, with the degree of inequity that’s happened globally, but also nationally,” he said.
Farrar noted one problem is that while some people may argue the pandemic is now in the past, and the situation in the middle of the pandemic was exaggerated, others believe it’s far from over.
US to donate an additional 500m Covid vaccines to poorer countries, says Biden
“And so the tensions, I think, within societies are going to be very difficult to handle,” he said.
Farrar added that while he has sympathy with the disruption of education and the health and economic impacts of Covid he is concerned about the speed at which some want to move on.
“My concern is that there will be too fast a shift to saying it’s all over and we will lose the humility of accepting that we’re only two years into a novel human pathogen, that is still a huge amount of uncertainty,” he said, adding it is also crucial to resolve the problem of vaccine inequality.
While Farrar said the most likely scenario is that there will be a transition to Omicron becoming endemic, as the variant is less severe than others, it is not the only possibility.
“My worry in the push to try and move on from this [is that] we ignore those other scenarios, which are less rosy but we should be absolutely prepared for,” he said.
Boris Johnson tells schools in England to end mask-wearing policy
Read more
Farrar added that while he agreed it is time to begin easing Covid restrictions in the UK, he is in favour of keeping some measures.
“I would be in favour of continuing for instance, mask wearing on public transport, in enclosed spaces, etc,” he said. “And I would be pushing ever harder on trying to encourage people to be vaccinated, get their boosting doses, and make sure that everybody has access to the vaccines from a UK perspective.”
Farrar also warned that he has deep concerns about the global Covid situation, warning that the pandemic has been made worse “by a catastrophic failure of global diplomacy”.
“The ongoing geopolitics of east /west but increasingly, understandably, north/south, because of vaccine inequity is going to lead to really troubling years ahead and will have ramifications beyond pandemics to our ability to come together to solve issues of inequality, of issues of climate change, of issues of drug resistance, of issues of migration and conflict,” he said.
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India’s death toll exceeds 500,000
India’s death toll from Covid-19 has crossed 500,000, Reuters reports, a level many health experts say was breached last year but obscured by inaccurate surveys and unaccounted dead in the hinterlands, where millions remain vulnerable to the disease.
The country, which has the fourth-highest tally of deaths globally, recorded 400,000 deaths by July last year after the devastating outbreak from the Delta variant of the coronavirus, according to official data. Some experts believe the figures were much higher.
“Our study published in the journal Science estimates 3 million Covic deaths in India until mid-2021 using three different databases,” Chinmay Tumbe, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad who co-authored the study, told Reuters.
Last month, the Indian government dismissed the study as baseless in a notification saying there is a robust system of birth and death reporting.
A makeshift Covid-19 care facility at Chennai Trade Centre. Photograph: Idrees Mohammed/EPA
India’s states record deaths from Covid-19 after collating data from their districts. In the last few months, several states have updated the number of deaths, some under pressure from the country’s top court. In most instances, authorities said there were lapses due to delayed registrations and other administrative errors.
India is currently in the midst of a third wave of the coronavirus led by the Omicron variant, which some top experts say is already in community transmission although federal officials say most cases are mild.
Last month, the government eased testing norms and told states to drop mandatory testing for contacts of confirmed cases unless they were old or battling other conditions. But, with the number of tests falling, the government issued a revised circular warning states they would miss the spread of the virus.
But, as many infected people took the option of not testing at all, total infection numbers may not reflect the extent and severity of cases, said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University near the capital who has been tracking the spread of the virus.
According to official figures, India’s overall number of Covid-19 infections has reached 41.95 million, the second-highest globally behind the United States.
India’s cumulative tally of 500,055 deaths on Friday included 1,072 fatalities reported over the last 24 hours, according to the federal health ministry. Out of this, 335 deaths were reported from the southern state of Kerala that has, for weeks, been updating data with deaths from last year.
Russia hurdles daily Covid record again – to almost 170,000 infections
Russia broke its daily Covid record again on Friday with infections surging to 168,201, Reuters reports.
That’s a 242% jump on the 49,127 cases detected on Friday two weeks ago, which was itself a record-breaker.
Russia, gripped by Omicron, has smashed its daily Covid record practially every day for the past two weeks. Thursday saw 155,768 cases.
The labour ministry has recommended working from home. But the Kremlin has ruled out a national lockdown. Meanwhile, at the local level some cities have imposed restrictions to crimp the virus’s spread.
A further 682 deaths from Covid-related causes were reported in the past 24 hours. Russia has the world’s 2nd highest Covid death toll of over 700,000, behind only the US. (Russia has the 9th highest populaiton worldwide.)
NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS – Keeping the culinary heritage of Nevis alive as much as it possibly can, is the key reason behind the Nevis Agro Processing Centre’s move to preserve the island’s traditional foods.
Mr. Huey Sargeant, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture says they are committed to documenting and producing some of Nevis’ traditional recipes when he spoke to the Department of Information on January 31, 2022.
“They continue to produce confectionary like tamarind balls and jams and so on, and one of the things as well at the Agro Processing Unit, is that we’ve committed to preserving a lot of our traditional foods. We have a situation where a lot of our traditional agro processors are transitioning to the great beyond and we’ve lost a few – notably we have Mrs. Alison Cornelius and Mrs. Olvis Dyer and they were some of the major agro processors.
“We have Mrs. Stapleton as well who is not producing as much as she used to, and what we are seeking to do from the agro processing unit is to be able to get some of these recipes at least and document them, so that we can preserve part of our culinary culture on the island. So it is not only just producing but we are seeking to be able to document and have for display when we have activities like our Open Day or Fruit Festival or even World Food Day,” he said.
Mr. Sargeant noted that while there are semblances of the widely sought-after cultural delights available, they do not follow the same recipes as that of yesteryear.
“These traditional items like traditional coconut cake… I see we have coconut drops in some of the bakeries, not knocking any of the bakeries, but they might be a little bit deficient in coconut.
“We have sugar cake, that traditional sugar cake had some ginger in it and so on, some of these unique recipes that my parents grew up on and to a lesser extent I grew up on. So that is another part of the work that we are doing at agro processing,” he said.
The St Kitts-Nevis Football Association (SKNFA) has received and reviewed an online article
published today in The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom titled “Fifa investigates after St. Kitts appoint coach accused of sexual abuse.”
The SKNFA wishes its stakeholders and the general public to know that FIFA has not contacted the SKNFA to investigate any of the allegations contained in the said article.
Prior to hiring Mr. Ahmed Mohamed as the SKNFA’s Director of Football the SKNFA conducted a serious and fulsome due diligence exercise involving consultations with members of the BarbadosFootball Association, CONCACAF and other persons who knew Mr. Mohamed personally. The SKNFA was, and remains, fully satisfied that Mr. Mohamed is of good character – the allegations made against him being false – and he has the requisite technical ability to perform his functions to take SKNFA football to higher levels.
The SKNFA acknowledges the seriousness of the allegations referenced in the article, but we are of the firm belief that the article was maliciously contrived by a certain faction of persons who wish to tarnish the good name of the SKNFA and our recently appointed Director of Football.
The SKNFA will continue to create an environment, where our players, male and female, can achieve their maximum potential in a safe, fun and professional environment.
Washington — U.S. special operations forces conducted a large-scale counterterrorism raid in northwest Syria overnight Thursday, and President Joe Biden said the operation had left the ISIS terror group once again without a leader.Mr. Biden’s brief statement early on Thursday came after residents, rescuers and a monitoring group reported multiple deaths from the raid, including among civilians.
The White House released a statement from President Biden, who described the raid as a “counterterrorism operation to protect the American people and our Allies, and make the world a safer place.”
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the current leader of ISIS, was “taken off the battlefield” in the operation, Mr. Biden said, confirming that all U.S. forces who took part had returned safely. The president said he would address the American people later on Thursday about the raid. His statement made no mention of the reported civilian casualties.
A senior Biden administration official told CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe on Thursday that al-Qurayshi “exploded a bomb that killed him and members of his own family” as the raid got underway.”
Speaking later Thursday morning at the White House, Mr. Biden said the choice was made to go after the ISIS leader with a special forces raid, rather than a missile strike, in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. He said al-Qurayshi “chose to blow up” both himself and the entire third floor of the home he was holed up in, which led to the death of his own family members.
The president lauded the U.S. forces who carried out the raid, and called it “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorists anywhere they hide in the world.”
“We will come after you and find you,” Mr. Biden warned other terror leaders.
An undated photo shows Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, who became the leader of ISIS in 2019 until he was “taken off the battlefield” in a U.S. military raid in northwest Syria on February 3, 2022.
Several residents told The Associated Press they saw body parts scattered around a house in the village of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals following the raid, which they say involved helicopters, explosions and machine-gun fire.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria and has been a largely reliable source of information during the grinding civil war in the country, said the strike left at least 13 people dead, including four children and three women. The “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue agency, said four women and six children were killed.
The senior administration official who spoke to O’Keefe on Thursday also said al-Qurayshi’s own bomb had killed women and children in his family.
“While we are still assessing the results of this operation, this appears to be the same cowardly terrorist tactic we saw in the 2019 operation that eliminated” al-Qurayshi’s predecessor, the official said.
People inspect a heavily damaged house following an operation by the U.S. military in the Syrian village of Atmeh, in Idlib province, Syria, February 3, 2022, during which ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was “taken off the battlefield,” according to President Joe Biden. AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed
Images purported from the aftermath of the raid quickly appeared on social media showing the bodies of victims, including small children.
Charles Lister, senior fellow with the Washington-based Middle East Institute, remarked to Reuters that the U.S. forces “clearly … wanted whoever it was alive.”
Syrian civil defence evacaute a body on February 3, 2022 following an overnight raid by U.S. special operations forces against suspected jihadists in northwestern Syria. ABDULAZIZ KETAZ/AFP via Getty Images
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said troops from the U.S.-led coalition using helicopters landed in the area and attacked a house. It said the forces clashed with fighters on the ground.
Taher al-Omar, an Idlib-based activist, also said clashes broke out between the fighters in the area and special ops forces.
The residents and activists in the area described seeing a large ground assault, with U.S. forces using loudspeakers asking women and children to leave the area.
There was at least one major explosion. A U.S. official said one of the helicopters in the raid suffered a mechanical problem and had to be blown up on the ground. The U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the military operation.
The military operation got attention on social media, with tweets from the region describing helicopters firing around a building near Atmeh. Flight-tracking data also suggested that multiple drones were circling the city of Sarmada and the village of Salwah, just north of there in Idlib province.
The clandestine operation came with ISIS apparently trying to stage a comeback after its effort to establish a caliphate failed in 2019, following several years of fighting in Syria and Iraq. In recent weeks and months, the group has launched a series of attacks in the region, including a 10-day assault late last month to seize a prison in northeastern Syria.
A U.S.-backed Kurdish-led force said Monday that the Gweiran prison, also known as al-Sinaa prison, is now fully under its control. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said more than 120 of their fighters and prison workers died in the effort to thwart the ISIS plot. The prison houses at least 3,000 ISIS detainees.
The attempted prison break was the biggest military operation by the extremist group since ISIS was defeated and members scattered to havens in 2019. The U.S.-led coalition carried out airstrikes and deployed American personnel in Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the prison area to help the Kurdish forces.
The U.S.-led coalition has targeted high-profile militants on several occasions in recent years, aiming to disrupt what U.S. officials say is a secretive cell known as the Khorasan group that is planning external attacks. A U.S. airstrike killed al Qaeda’s second in command, former Osama bin Laden aide Abu al-Kheir al-Masri, in Syria earlier this year.
