In Turkey, where meetings of the IMF and the World Bank were held during the week of October 4th, Caribbean Finance Ministers raised with the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, John Lipsky, their concerns about “the need for better representation and participation of small, developing countries in key meetings and fora such as the G20, where decisions that can significantly impact these small economies are frequently made”.

But, Caribbean representation in the already overcrowded G20 will not happen without a strong case being made and accepted by governments currently at the table.
Similarly, much needed reform of the IMF and World Bank to benefit the Caribbean appears remote.

At the Bank/Fund meetings, the President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, as current Chairman of CARICOM, led a team of Prime Ministers from the Bahamas, Barbados and St Lucia to make a case to the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, that special attention should be paid to relieving and restructuring the debt of the highly indebted, vulnerable, middle income countries of the region.

And, Barbados Prime Minister, David Thompson, speaking at the formal meeting was emphatic that “limited access to World Bank funding has forced many middle income Caribbean countries to borrow in the private capital markets at substantially higher rates and shorter repayment terms”. Mr. Thompson recommended that “further consideration be given to this issue of access by middle income countries to financing from the multilateral financial institutions.”

All of this is right. The entire Caribbean region is facing a serious reversal of its economic and social progress arising from a number of factors. It is true that one of the significant factors is poor economic management and decision-making by some of their governments, and this is a concern that Caribbean countries must themselves address.
The external factors are also real. Not least among them is the point raised by both Jagdeo and Thompson that the classification of Caribbean states as middle-income countries disqualifies them from concessionary financing from the international financial institutions and forces them into the commercial market for borrowing.

But, is anyone really listening? The moment for effective reform of international institutions is fast receding. Those industrialised nations that pledged themselves to reform in the wake of last year’s financial crisis are quickly retreating from their pledges as their economies begin to pick-up. The creation of the G20 and the provision of some additional resources to the IMF appear now to be the most they will do.

The new resources for the IMF are insufficient and, in any case, are not targeted to middle income countries such as those in the Caribbean; they are focused on low income countries and on bigger countries such as those in Europe and Mexico.

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In 2005 my wife (Dr. Lora Little) and I were exploring Andros with Bahamas guides Krista and Eslie Brown. At that time we were not particularly interested in crashed planes, but we had noticed several crashed planes on the ground and in shallow water around Andros.

Exploring the island itself from a small truck, the Browns took us to the tail section of a small plane located by the shore at Red Bays, a small settlement at extreme NW Andros. According to locals, the tail piece had drifted to the shore a few years earlier. They dragged it to the shore, and simply ignored it. In 2007, after finding numerous other planes in various underwater spots, we decided to revisit the tail and try to identify it. After publishing a brief article about the tail section wherein we tentatively identified it as a plane reportedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle, we received confirmation from several plane mechanics and pilots that the tail was of a Cessna 172-H, and of the correct vintage¡ªcirca 1966.

The Story - N1483F - Cessna 172-H
On May 29, 1968, a 30-year old pilot and a female passenger took off from Grand Turk Island at 6:00 pm in a single engine 1966 Cessna 172-H. Within minutes after takeoff, at 6:10 pm, the pilot radioed that he was out of fuel and that his engine had stopped. He stated he was ditching into the water not far from the island. National Transportation Safety Board and other accident reports are extremely sketchy and provide no information whatsoever on a subsequent search. However, we have been present on Andros (2008) when a plane with several passengers crashed, and the search consisted of a phone call from Nassau to a private pilot at Andros asking him to fly in the area. He took a 30-minute flight and was mainly interested in watching us as we were using a remote video on a small boat. Oddly, not a trace of the 2008 plane or its passengers have ever been reported and the plane is now on some lists of planes that disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. The same can be said of the 1966 disappearance. Nothing was ever found or reported. As a side note, the pilot in the 2008 incident flew directly into a storm (despite having weather radar aboard) and he presumably crashed into the abyss of the Tongue of the Ocean.

The N number of the ¡°disappeared¡± 1966 Cessna 172-H was N-1483F. The tail section of the plane at Red Bays showed four visible numbers/letters: Nx48xF (the x means that that specific number was destroyed, however, a ¡°3¡å was partially present after the 8). While we were reasonably certain that this was the tail section of the disappeared Cessna, what remained was a final identification that the tail was, in fact, from a Cessna 172 and also of the right age. With that now verified, we are now certain that the tail section is that of the mysterious 1966 Cessna 172-H. Red Bays is 400 miles from Grand Turk, however, what seems to have happened is this. When the plane crashed into the water, the light tail section was torn off. Over time, the northwesterly movement of water from Grand Turk through the Old Bahama Channel, to the Santaren Channel, to the Gulf Stream gradually drifted the tail section north to western Andros.

During our several visits to the tail section, we took 50 or more photos and several long video clips of it from many angles. That was a wise decision because just before January 2009, locals at Red Bays took the tail wreckage and dumped it into water at a fishing spot to attract more fish.

The Bermuda Triangle area does, no doubt, have a number of mysterious disappearances. Our belief is that all the planes are there, somewhere, lying underwater or crashed onto a remote spot. To date, we have now found 22 crashed planes in the Bahamas, located from Bimini to Andros and on the Great Bahama Bank off western Andros. However, finding the planes does not really solve the mystery of why such events happen there. As a final note, some people argue that since the area is so heavily traveled it would be expected to have many accidents. These same people go on to argue that there are statistically no more accidents in that area than anywhere else. While that might¡ªor might not¡ªbe true, it must be pointed out that no such statistical anaylsis has ever been done. What we do know is that a great number of planes (well over 100) have simply vanished under unusual circumstances. At least one of them, or at least a part of it, has now been found, and we believe the rest are also there, waiting.

Source: Get X News

Today is Monday, October 12, the 285th day of 2009. There are 80 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1492 - Christopher Columbus makes his first landfall in the New World, in present-day Bahamas.

1822 - Brazil becomes independent of Portugal.

1908 - South Africa Constitutional Convention meets in Durban.

1915 - English nurse Edith Cavell is executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium during World War I.

1933 - Bank robber John Dillinger escapes from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang.

1934 - Peter II becomes King of Yugoslavia following the assassination of his father, King Alexander.

1938 - Japanese troops seize Canton, severing the railway to the temporary Chinese capital in Wuhan.

1942 - American forces defeat the Japanese in Battle of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal in World War II.

1945 - Allied Control Council in Germany orders dissolution of Nazi Party after World War II.

1951 - Under attack by French planes, the Viet Minh rebels suffer one of their worst defeats of the civil war with 1 200 dead and 5 000 captured, in an attempt to take Nghialo.

1956 - Britain tells Israel the English will assist Jordan if Israel attacks that country.

1960 - Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev upsets the decorum of UN General Assembly by pounding the desk with his shoe during a dispute.

1962 - India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru says Indian army has been ordered to oust Chinese forces from Indian territory near Tibetan border.

1964 - US forces take control in South Vietnam, ousting government of Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh.

1969 - Soviet Union launches Soyuz VII spacecraft with three men aboard to join two men in orbit in Soyuz VI.

1973 - US President Richard Nixon nominates House Minority Leader Gerald R Ford to succeed Spiro T Agnew as vice president. Agnew resigned after the Justice Department revealed he had taken kickbacks.

1975 - Pope Paul VI canonises an Irish archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, who was executed by the British in 1681.

1977 - Sweden agrees to cancel over $200m in debts owed by eight Third World nations.

1984 - An Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was attending a conference, killing five people.

1989 - Rejecting democratic reforms, a high-ranking East German official says socialism will continue to dominate society.

1991 - Pope John Paul II makes his second visit to Brazil in an effort to renew interest in the Roman Catholic Church at a time when it is losing many Brazilian adherents to Protestant groups and African mystical cults.

1992 - A strong earthquake near Cairo kills 450 people and injures 4 000.

1993 - German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pledges to move most of nation's government to Berlin from Bonn, the current capital, by the end of the year 2000.

1994 - The US spacecraft Magellan, launched in 1989 on a mission to study the planet Venus, concludes its mission with a final experiment, to make a suicidal descent toward Venus's surface, where temperatures reach 482 degrees Celsius.

1995 - Panama grants asylum to Haiti's Raoul Cedras, who had taken power in a 1991 coup.

1996 - Commander Ramona of the Zapatista rebel movement marches into Mexico City at the head of a demonstration by indigenous people on the 504th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in America.

1997 - Cuban President Fidel Castro appoints his brother Raul as successor and urges the party to be unified in maintaining communism.

1998 - Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, initiate peace negotiations with ethnic Albanians and allow international observers to ensure UN demands are met.

1999 - A military coup throws Pakistan into political disarray as conflict with India continues over the disputed Kashmir territory. Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf becomes the new leader and promises to hold elections.

2000 - Seventeen sailors are killed in a suicide bomb attack on the US destroyer Cole in Yemen.

2001 - The United Nations and its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, win the Nobel Peace Prize.

2002 - A bomb explodes in a resort area on the Indonesian island of Bali, destroying two nightclubs, killing more than 180 people and wounding nearly 300 others.

2004 - Nine bodies in Tokyo are found in two parked cars with charcoal stoves at their feet and the windows sealed from inside in what is believed to be Japan's largest group suicide pact.

2005 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatens to kick some Christian missionaries out of the country, as he presents property titles to indigenous groups who had been robbed of their ancient homelands.

2006 - Britain and Ireland announce they will present a plan to Northern Ireland's rival leaders spelling out how to resurrect a Catholic-Protestant administration as the province's peace deal intended.

2007 - Former Vice President Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

2008 - A Soyuz spacecraft with two Americans and a Russian on board lifts off from Kazakhstan for the international space station.

Today's Birthdays:
England's King Edward VI (1537-1553);
Pedro I, first emperor of Brazil (1798-1834);
James Ramsey MacDonald, British prime minister (1865-1937);
Edith Stein, German Roman Catholic saint (Saint Teresa Benedicta Of The Cross) (1891-1942);
Ralph Vaughan Williams, English composer (1872-1958);
Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor (1935-2007),
Kirk Cameron, US actor (1970--).

Thought For Today:
The wise man is astonished by anything - Andre Gide, French author and critic (1869-1951).

Shakira is determined to continue making raunchy videos - because she has a new found confidence since hitting her thirties.

The stunning singer donned a flesh-coloured leotard to writhe around in a cage in the video for latest single 'She Wolf'.
The 32 year old is convinced her confidence to film the sexy scenes are down to her age.

She says, “We all have our own insecurities but I used to have more of those days in my twenties.
“I found nothing satisfied me and I just wanted to hide from the world. You should always make the most of what you’ve got and I think I’ve tried my entire life to figure that out. Now I feel a lot more comfortable in my own body.
“I wouldn’t have made a video like She Wolf when I was younger, that’s for sure. Now you never know what could happen with them.”

Source: Entertainment Daily

The Coast Guard says radio communications for a routine training exercise in Washington were overheard by the public, leading to news reports and confusion amid Friday’s commemorations of the Sept. 11 anniversary.

Coast Guard Chief of Staff John Currier told reporters no shots were fired and there was no suspect vessel on the river, as had been reported by cable news networks.

Currier also said President Barack Obama was not in the area at the time. Obama’s motorcade had crossed the river on the way to a memorial at the Pentagon earlier Friday morning.

Currier said the Coast Guard will review the incident. He added that the Coast Guard trains every day to maintain an around-the-clock security presence.

Here's the original item:
Boaters traveling to the Bahamas reported missing

Coast Guard officials in South Florida say a boat carrying three people went missing during a trip from Lake Worth to the Bahamas.
According to a news release, a friend of the boat’s 65-year-old owner called emergency officials when he stopped getting satellite location messages from the boat, which is called the Flying Pig. The vessel’s last message placed the Flying Pig about 20 miles north of Grand Bahama Island.
The boat’s owner, Skip Gondlach, left Lake Worth on Florida’s eastern coast with his two passengers Sunday. They were headed to Spanish Cay, Bahamas.
Coast Guard crews used a jet to search for the 46-foot vessel Monday.

Source: Breaking News 24/7