KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Finance Minister, Dr. Peter Phillips says the period of difficulty for the country may be over as Jamaica has passed the worst as far as the effects of the structural adjustments are concerned.
However, Phillips who was a guest on a television current affairs programme late Wednesday cautioned that the country is not yet out of the woods.
“There’s definitely pain before gain in the sense that we will have tight budgets for some time to come.”

WASHINGTON, CMC – A new World Bank report states that with the exception of young men, most people in the Caribbean and Latin America are living much longer than they did 40 years ago.
The report, “The Global Burden of Disease: Generating Evidence, Guiding Policy,” released here on Wednesday by the World Bank and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), also says the mortality rate in the region has dropped by at least 80 percent for children 4 years old or younger and by more than 50 percent for women between the ages of 20 and 44.

WASHINGTON/BEIRUT, (Reuters) - President Barack Obama won the backing of key figures in the U.S. Congress, including Republi-cans, in his call for limited U.S. strikes on Syria to punish President Bashar al-Assad for his suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians. Speaking after the United Nations said two million Syrians had fled a conflict that posed the greatest threat to world peace since the Vietnam war, Obama said the United States also has a broader plan to help rebels defeat Assad’s forces. In remarks that appeared to question the legality of U.S.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Advocate - The civil war in Syria has been raging for about two years, with over 100 000 people killed and nobody seemed to care. A few weeks ago it was alleged that sarin nerve gas was used by the Syrian regime, killing about 1 500 people, and all hell breaks loose. We are not at all advocating that it is okay to use chemical weapons in contravention of international law, but are more concerned about the lack of a concerted international response when so many were dying and the physical infrastructure of Syria was being reduced to rubble.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Advocate - GOVERNMENT continues to look into ways to facilitate foreign investment into the country.

So says Prime Minister Freundel Stuart who was speaking to the media following a tour of the Limegrove Lifestyle Centre on Monday.

According to the Prime Minister, “the past few months we have been having consultations with people in the private sector to get a sense of where they see the bottlenecks occurring in our investment architecture.”