Group items tagged

The airport, essentially a 1,500-meter airstrip with a small customs building, was due to open more than a year ago, and hopes that other regional airlines like Taca and Nature Air would offer service to the island haven’t materialized.

The official cautioned, however, that this should not be considered a first step towards legalization, trade, or importation of marijuana, and pointed to the island of Jamaica as an example.

“We have not banned alcohol or tobacco, even though it has been proven that they are more addictive than marijuana,” she said earlier this year. “My point is that we should stop criminalizing our own youth in order to march to the beat of some other country’s drum.”

drugs

volume

volume

ON MAY 9th American customs and border-protection officials launched an aerostat—a fat, tethered balloon—above the coast of Puerto Rico. Its job is to use radar to detect low-flying aircraft, ships and smaller vessels carrying drugs across the seas to the south.

a territory of the

island

drugs

volume

Planes fly a dogleg path—first north, then west—to avoid Colombian airspace; the drugs then move by land or other means via Central America and Mexico.

Drug flights to Central America dropped by a third and traffickers were pushed east to the Caribbean islands.

Traffickers often work with small packages, moving them in several jumps (see map). Some embark directly from the Venezuelan coast; others go overland through sparsely populated rainforest in Guyana and Suriname, where borders are virtually uncontrolled and small aircraft can land on remote roads or interior airstrips.

There are also well-established trails up the eastern Caribbean island chain and westward via Jamaica.

$1,066,000 and 5.6 kilos of cocaine, which was valued at $197,288.

$1,263,288.

charged with possession of cannabis, possession of cannabis with intent to supply, being concerned in the supply of cannabis and drug trafficking. They were slapped with additional charges of possession of cocaine, and being concerned in the supply of cocaine and drug trafficking

drug bust are ongoing

over 10 years in prison if they are indicted on all the charges

Class A drug and cannabis, which is a Class B drug, under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

pay more than $500,000 to the court for possessing cocaine

The Rama-Kriols hold a communal title not only to the nine settlements where community members live, but also to the 4,843-square-kilometer territory where they fish, hunt, and farm. If current construction plans for the canal go ahead, that territory will be severed in two.

The massive Nicaragua Canal planned by a secretive Chinese billionaire, Wang Jing, and managed by his company, the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Group (HKND), will stretch from the Pacific coast, across Lake Nicaragua, to the Caribbean coast and is destined to wipe at least one Rama village off the map

. The Rama’s fishing grounds will no longer be safe in the path of 400-meter-long megaships approaching the canal.

Aside from the Rama, whose territory will likely be the most impacted, at least four other indigenous groups will face disruption if the canal proceeds. Nicaraguan law explicitly bars indigenous land from being bought or sold; that means the land will be rented, not expropriated, says Kautz. Yet, critics say that because this is not expressly stated in the concession law, the land is vulnerable to seizure.

The following day, McCray and her companions watched in dismay as the law was adopted. “We didn’t get a chance to say anything,” McCray remembers. “They didn’t respect us, they didn’t give us a chance to defend what we were claiming.”

According to both international and Nicaraguan law, indigenous people must give their “free, informed, and prior consent” to any project that will affect the community’s territory or way of life.

According to Manuel Coronel Kautz, the president of Nicaragua’s Canal Authority, the National Assembly had documents from the Rama-Kriol government giving permission for the canal to be constructed prior to the vote that granted the concession

McCray was nervous as she read her remarks in Spanish. She cited three articles in the concession law that explicitly give the Canal Commission the right to expropriate indigenous land, and then she accused the government of violating international norms in the way it conducted community consultations, perhaps most blatantly by paying villagers—many of whom are illiterate—to come to the meetings. (Those villagers, Acosta claims, were then pressured into signing documents that they could not understand.)

Acosta filed a legal challenge to the canal concession law on July 1, 2013, just weeks after it was approved. Like the 31 other legal challenges to the law—based on environmental factors, human rights, and national sovereignty—the Rama’s legal case was dismissed. The Supreme Court said the lawsuits were invalid because the law passed the National Assembly with a wide majority and because the major development project took precedence.

Acosta worries that the Rama will lose their territory—displaced by golf courses and beach resorts—even if the Nicaragua Canal is never built.

The case at the IACHR is probably the Rama’s best chance for meaningful international intervention, but it remains to be seen whether or not this glimmer of hope is enough to protect their territory and keep their culture alive.

“He should have taken responsibility,” said Alexi, who asked that his full name not be used because he was discussing the Cuban leadership. Cubans’ morals had been broken, he said, by the “special period” of severe economic hardship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many people resorted to stealing, scams and, in some cases, prostitution to get by

growing up in an environment where cheating and duplicity were a way of living had bred cynicism. “This cynicism feeds into people’s lack of engagement,” she said. “Individual responsibility toward the collective is very low.”

Still, Havana has avoided the rampant crime and drug violence that plague many Latin American — and American — cities. And in spite of complaints about deteriorating manners, many Cubans maintain a sense of community and remain close to family, sharing food or helping out friends and neighbors.

Standing shirtless outside his small house, Alexi pointed to his 24-year-old son, fixing a hubcap on the sidewalk. “How could I raise him with the same morals, when just to put rice, beans and pork on the table requires all kinds of illegalities?” he said. “I had to teach him the values of survival.”

Cubans complain that sliding professional standards, inexperienced teachers who are barely older than their students and a lack of public facilities have helped corrode people’s civic-mindedness.

Mr. Castro proposed a combination of education, promotion of culture and enforcement to restore the country’s civility. He called on workers’ unions, the authorities, teachers, intellectuals and artists, among others, to hold other Cubans to standards of behavior.

Antigua and Barbuda must therefore continue with its efforts towards universal access to education by promoting free schooling at all levels.

A law on corporal punishments still exists in these islands, and it authorizes physical punishment of children at home as well as in more official locations, such as school.

The United Nations has thus been advising Antigua and Barbuda since 2004 to put an end to laws that authorize any form of violence against children.

Any child 8 years of age can be called before the court and risks the same penalties as an adult. Similarly, a minor (an individual under 16 years of age) may receive the same punishment as an adult if charged with a crime. In this way, it is possible for a person under 18 years of age to be imprisoned for life for a murder.

Once the minors are tried, they do not have any special conditions on retention: they are locked up in the same prisons and sections as adults,

Girls, children born out of wedlock, and those living in poverty experience differences in access to basic services.

Another source of discrimination stems from the absence of physical systems to accommodate handicapped children; t

The report provides statistics about the patterns of drug use among local secondary school students as well as access to drugs and the perception of harm from drugs.

marijuana are the choice drugs among the 851 secondary school students

increases for each category were relatively small.

Fifty-eight per cent of the males reported using marijuana.

Just over half of all the students surveyed, considered marijuana to be quite easy to get and just under a third said they got the illegal substance from a friend.

Only a few blocks up the hill and the shops and banks give way to more dishevelled buildings, run-down stores selling only a handful of items, homes with crumbling front steps. There is no shortage of opportunity to find drugs, as twenty-something men make their friendly approach to tourists.

Antigua's police appear hopelessly out of their depth. The police station on the high street in St John's is crumbling. The new commissioner, brought in from Canada with other former Mounties, has put his energies into solving the lack of funds and infrastructure within the organisation.

It is believed that a vessel arrived from a nearby Caribbean island in the early hours of Tuesday morning with the illegal drugs onboard.

The number of reports of burglary increased 63 percent from 2013 to 2014.

248:

ost frequently reported non-violent crime was thefts from or parts of a motor vehicle, accounting for almost half of all non-violent crime reports.

The most frequent locations where non-violent crimes were reported to occur were restaurants, hotels (60 percent increase), roadways (700 percent increase), and on buses.

9:100,000 inhabitants.

100,000

Areas of Concern

100,000

The U.S. Embassy must pre-approve all travel by U.S. government personnel to the Northern and Southern Caribbean Coast Autonomous Regions due to crime and transportation safety concerns.

anagua, Granada, Masaya, San Juan del Sur, Rivas, Tipitapa, Leon, Diriamba, Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas, and the Corn Islands.

102:100,000

Nicaraguan law requires vehicles to be equipped with a stopped/disabled vehicle indicator (a reflective triangle) and a fire extinguisher.

Nicaraguan law requires drivers to be taken into custody for driving under the influence of alcohol/drugs.

In 2014, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, there were 13 5.0+earthquakes near/in Nicaragua at depths from 8-124 miles

Nicaragua has many active and potentially active volcanoes.

likewise the 5.5 in Antigua may be outrageous somewhere else.

work to make our islands truly great places to live and not get carried away with stats.

At the time of the groundbreaking in December 2014, the Chinese government said it was not involved with the project. This and Mr. Wang’s recent setbacks — he has reportedly lost about 80 percent of his $10 billion fortune — make some experts say the deal is probably dead.

Some question whether the canal would even be commercially viable. Few supertankers and massive container ships now afloat will not be able to pass through the expanded Panama Canal set to open soon. And few ports are big enough to welcome those megaships. In the short term, some experts say, the combination of the Panama and Nicaragua canals would lead to overcapacity and price wars.

That aspect has prompted protests from farmers, some of which have turned violent. Experts say Mr. Wang will have to pay only the assessed value, or about 5 percent of the market value, for any lands he takes. But many farmers would not be entitled to even that. In a country that is short of adequate roads and government offices, many do not have formal title to the fields they have cultivated for generations.

But the plan is much broader than just a canal. Mr. Wang’s vision includes new airports, new ports on both ends of the canal, new lakes in the mountains to make sure the canal has enough water, and new islands in Lake Nicaragua to dispose of excavated sediment and rock. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A 1,100-page study of the project, conducted by the British consulting firm ERM and issued five months ago, reinforced the notion of how much is at stake. It recommended further studies in many areas before going forward and noted that a wide range of mitigation efforts would be needed, like reforestation and job training.Some see hope in those efforts. Jeffrey McCrary, an American fish biologist who lives in Nicaragua and worked on the study, supports the project, saying Mr. Wang’s company will have to provide money to clean up environmental damage already caused by deforestation, poor land management, crop fumigation and general dumping into Lake Nicaragua.

milo Lara, a member of the Nicaragua Canal Commission, a group appointed by the government to oversee the project, said many critics of the project were political opportunists. Mr. Lara said the canal plan had been adjusted to deal with problem issues, like potential earthquakes, tsunamis and environmental concerns. And people who might be displaced by it, he said, could be moved to small cities with new schools and services they never had before.

In the meantime, speculating about the canal has become a national pastime, though polls show that Nicaraguans grow less inclined to believe that it will be built.“We used to talk about it every day,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the editor of Confidencial, an investigative magazine. “Now we only talk about it every two days.”Some still hope it will lift this country out of poverty.But in Brito and the nearby city of Rivas, those who expect to be displaced are angry. Teresa de Jesus Henriquez Delgado, 31, is one of the residents who used a stencil to paint “Go Away Chinese!” on the outside of her house. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I will resist with all of my strength when the bulldozers come to tear down my house,” she said. “I will fight until I die. I have to for my children. They can’t take this land from my family.”

In its description, HKND says it will need more than 2,000 pieces of major construction equipment, four billion liters of diesel fuel, one billion liters of bunker fuel for the dredgers, 400,000 tons of explosives, and untold millions of tons of cement and steel. The company would have to import all of this stuff into Nicaragua and build entirely new ports and roads wide enough to fit the big equipment.

On that, Miranda was much more skeptical the canal could be built in five years for a cost of $50 billion.

The section of the proposed canal that stretches through Lake Nicaragua would pass by Ometepe Island, home to an active volcano, Concepción, that spews out ash every now and again.

Right now, ships that want to pass between the Pacific and the Atlantic use the Panama Canal, which is currently undergoing a major $5.25 billion expansion

The rationale behind the Nicaragua Canal, HKND insists, is that it will be able to accommodate the next generation of super-sized container ships that can hold nearly 23,000 containers at a time.

 One company that operates super-sized ships, Maersk, told CNBC that the canal was "not something we have a demand for, and we're not able, at this point, to tell whether we will use it."*

Jorge Huete-Pérez, a vice president of Nicaragua’s academy of sciences, told me that Lake Nicaragua is a national icon — a source of fisheries and tourism, but also a key freshwater reservoir for much of the nation.

Other biologists have pointed out that the canal’s route will slice through a variety of nature reserves that are homes to some 22 species vulnerable to extinction, from tapirs to jaguars to turtles.

One internal assessment obtained by Scientific American said that HKND’s process for acquiring land for preliminary access roads "did not meet international standards."

 The Sandinista government still promises that the project will create thousands of jobs and promote billions in investment, but skepticism is growing.