Tag Archives: caribbean

‘Crazy Turtle Woman’ transforms graveyard into maternity ward

With its white sand and clear, blue water, Trinidad’s Matura Beach looks like a postcard. It’s a far cry from its recent past, when leatherback sea turtle carcasses littered the ground and kept tourists away. “Twenty years ago, this was a graveyard,” Suzan Lakhan Baptiste said of the six-mile stretch of beach near her home

Vacation Blues as Tourists Stay at Home

On a typical weekend afternoon, Beijing’s Silk Street Market buzzes with the sound of tens of thousands of tourists haggling over antiques, jewelry and knock-off Gucci handbags. Rickshaw drivers normally scoop up these marketgoers, pedal them to their hotels and return with pockets full of foreign currency — a lucrative cycle drivers can repeat dozens of times a day. In recent months, though, the Silk Street Market’s once reliable bustle has thinned dramatically

Stanford denies fraud, threatens interviewer

Allen Stanford, the Texan billionaire accused of a $9.2 billion fraud by U.S. regulators has denied any wrongdoing in a tearful interview in which he threatened to punch his questioner in the mouth. “I would die and go to hell if it’s a Ponzi scheme,” Stanford, ranked at no

Loving My Time in Cartagena

“Why are you risking your life for a vacation?” a close friend gasped, aghast when I told her I planned to spend my post-election holiday in Cartagena, Colombia. In fact, few of my friends seemed to think it was a good idea: I couldn’t convince any of them to share my rental house in the city’s walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing the Stone, a place of corrupt juntas and bodice-ripper-reading drug dealers — a parody turned deadly serious by four decades of civil war, Pablo Escobar and the cocaine cartels

Stanford saga prompts run on banks

Politicians and banking regulators across Latin American and the Caribbean called for calm Wednesday after panicked investors pulled their money from banks owned by the Stanford Group, whose owner is accused in a multibillion dollar investment and sales fraud scheme.