Grenada wants UN help
Grenada has called on the United Nations to assist developing countries strengthen their institutional capacity to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
Speaking at the UN summit to review progress on the goals, Prime Minister Tillman Thomas said Grenada and other developing states needed that kind of help to enhance their own efforts to achieve the MDGs by 2015.
The former British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has said that he is angry that not enough has been done to meet these goals. Brown said rich countries were not doing enough to honour the promises made 10 years ago.
But he said poor countries also had a responsibility to put more resources into education and health, and not waste them on corruption or prestige projects.
TCI elections postponed
The people of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) have been told that elections in the British territory will not go ahead next year as had been planned.
The UK Minister for Overseas Territories, Henry Bellingham, who made the announcement while on a visit to the TCI, said more time was needed to put necessary reforms in place to get the territory back on a solid financial footing.
The Turks and Caicos Islands are under direct British rule at the moment. The decision to postpone the elections is likely to further infuriate, islanders who just days ago protested the existing situation by torching piles of constitution reform recommendations made by a Foreign and Commonwealth Office-appointed expert.
Haiti makes list
A new report says Haiti and Somalia are the two worst countries in which to be a school-age child.
The report says nearly 70 million children around the world are not getting an education despite much progress in the last 10 years. It says the global financial crisis has forced poor countries to cut their education budgets by $4.6 billion a year, when intensified efforts are needed to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal of ensuring primary education for every child in the world by 2015.
The 10 countries put at the bottom of the education list are all in Africa, with the exception of Haiti.
The report was produced by Education International, Plan International, Oxfam, Save the Children and VSO.
Justice minister under fire
Trinidad and Tobago’s Justice Minister Herbert Volney has said that he would apologise to Chief Justice Ivor Archie if called on to do so by the prime minister.
In his presentation during the budget debate in parliament Volney accused the chief justice and the former attorney general of corruptly cooperating to facilitate the chief justice getting an exclusive home.
Several senior attorneys in Port of Spain have called for the former high court judge to apologise to the judiciary.
