Caribbean Corner

Authorities in the US northeast are clearly not the only ones concerned with drones operating illegally in the US as the civil aviation authority in Trinidad, Wednesday said the nation could have awakened to a major air disaster if a low flying drone had made actual contact with a commercial airline in local airspace on Dec. 8. Releasing details of the near miss, the authority said in a statement that a commercial jet aircraft on its way to land at the Piarco International Airport had encountered a low flying drone which had come within 20 feet of the left wingtip of the aircraft in an area just south of Port of Spain, the capital. The authority described the incident as “reckless and a very serious threat to the safety of the flight,” reminding everyone, drone operators especially, that such unmanned aircraft should not exceed 400 feet in altitude. “The use of an unmanned aircraft system with the intent to disrupt or endanger civil aviation or any public or private property co...

A recent agreement between a Nigerian oil and gas company and the Global Petroleum Group (GPG) could soon see the Eastern Caribbean nation of Grenada step up exploration activities to discover oil and gas like its regional neighbors. Oceangate Oil and Gas Engineering says it has a production-sharing agreement with GPG covering an area of 7,500 square kilometers of water offshore Grenada. However, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell’s administration says authorities are still trying to find critical exploration information and data about previous agreements made by the Keith Mitchell government, which lost the general elections in 2018. GPG is based in the US but is believed to have links to Russia. Photo by George Alleyne, file GPG had done some exploration work more than five years ago and declared that a single area it had explored could contain more than 10 trillion cubic feet of gas. Grenada is less than 100 miles north of oil and gas-rich Trinidad and Tobago. Successive gover...

The strategy promoted to help reduce gang violence in several CARICOM states, including Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and St. Lucia, was rarely employed to do so, according to a recent report from the United Nations (UN). The release stated that despite the advocating for a public health response, and although several Caribbean country governments had simultaneously stepped up their “tough-on-crime” measures of enacting states of emergency, promulgating anti-gang legislation, and instituting anti-crime units of authorizing heavy-handed policing strategies, there was discontentment with the strategy, the reactions to the police’s heavy-handed tactics were not uniform. “While tough-on-crime policing strategies have resulted in an increase in arrests and drug seizures, an erosion of trust has occurred within the heavily policed communities, and there is also concern regarding extrajudicial violence.” The study revealed that the extrajudicial executions by the police have re...