PORT OF SPAIN, Jul 22 (IPS) - Prime Minister Patrick Manning expected the flack.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 18 (Tierramérica) - This year marks four decades of international recognition of people's right to decide how many children they want to have and when, and for that reason there is a great deal to celebrate, says Brazilian expert Carmen Barroso, of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

GEORGETOWN, Jul 16 (IPS) - The U.S. government has again snubbed Guyanese authorities, with whom it has long had a strained relationship, this time over a request for expert help in solving the latest of three mass murders this year.

CARACAS, Jul 14 (IPS) - Seventeen countries in Central America and the Caribbean are to make down payments of only 40 percent on Venezuelan oil, while cooperating to expand their food supply, and calling on the North to take measures to curb speculation on futures markets, which is resulting in surging crude prices.

ST GEORGE'S, Jul 9 (IPS) - Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell apparently got his numbers all wrong, and the former professor of mathematics at Howard University in the United States is joining a number of his political colleagues who have been brushed aside by the winds of change sweeping the Caribbean over the past 18 months.

ST JOHN'S, Antigua, Jul 7 (IPS) - Caribbean leaders appear to be no closer to a consensus position on the controversial Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) that was initialed last December following negotiations between the European Union and the Caribbean Forum countries.

ST JOHN'S, Antigua, Jun 30 (IPS) - Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders are gearing up for their annual summit in Antigua early next month amid worrying signs that after 35 years, the regional integration movement has not progressed beyond a "community of sovereign states".

HAVANA, Jun 26 (IPS) - Months have gone by and he still receives suspicious calls on his cell-phone. Memories of a woman who became obsessed with him are triggered every time Chucho sees a popular prime time Brazilian TV "telenovela".

HAVANA, Jun 25 (IPS) - Cuba’s biotech industry plans to launch on the international market, in the short or medium term, a vaccine for treating lung cancer, which causes the deaths of over one million people a year worldwide.

HAVANA, Jun 20 (IPS) - Cuba is paradoxically the same, yet not the same, under President Raúl Castro, who said he would change "everything that should be changed" to perfect the socialist path taken by the revolution nearly half a century ago.

HAVANA, Jun 20 (IPS) - Cuba reacted cautiously to the announcement that the European Union would lift the diplomatic sanctions adopted after 75 dissidents received lengthy jail terms on charges of conspiring with Washington to destabilise the Cuban state, and three men convicted of hijacking a passenger ferry were executed, in 2003.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Jun 20 (IPS) - For the first time in living memory, Caribbean governments invested time and large sums of money to organise an emergency food summit at their trade bloc's headquarters in Guyana aimed specifically at dealing with the global food crisis and the region's spiraling import bill.

HAVANA, Jun 17 (IPS) - Cuba has decided not to make public announcements of the overall outlook for the coming hurricane season, because it makes little practical difference to people’s lives and tends to create false apprehensions, said José Rubiera, regarded as this Caribbean country’s top expert on hurricanes.

MEXICO CITY, Jun 17 (IPS) - The number of Cuban migrants intercepted in Mexico climbed from 254 in 2002 to 1,359 in 2007. And nearly 1,000 were detained in the first four months of this year alone -- the visible face of a people smuggling business that apparently operates in collusion with the police and other corrupt authorities.

HAVANA, Jun 13 (IPS) - The Cuban government deported a U.S. citizen accused of sexually abusing a young girl in Costa Rica, less than two weeks after Washington included the Caribbean island on a list of countries that it says are not doing enough to combat child trafficking.