News stories by Bert Wilkinson

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Nov 29 (IPS) - Caribbean governments have begun a quiet lobbying effort to convince Washington to rethink the subsidies it grants to the rum industry in U.S. territories, or face a formal complaint in the World Trade Organisation.

, Nov 26 (IPS) - As regional delegates meet to discuss a legally binding ban on the use of mercury this week, Guyanese officials are arguing that an exception should be made for the South American country's lucrative gold mining sector until an acceptable alternative is found.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Jul 19 (IPS) - Pedro Melville, 62, a father of nine from Guyana's northwestern gold and manganese mining district of Matthew’s Ridge, sees the impacts of unchecked prospecting on the local environment every day.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Jul 05 (IPS) - As Caribbean leaders meet in St. Lucia this week, they are focusing on a series of routine issues affecting the region, including problems with the smooth operation of the single trading market.

Over the past six months, governments in two influential Caribbean trade bloc member states — Jamaica and Guyana - have floated political test balloons on the question of whether colonial-era laws criminalising homosexuality should be amended in keeping with trends in most Western states.

Fabian George drank and generally used water from jungle rivers near his mountainside home for decades until world market prices for gold began climbing in recent years.

For much of late October, Caribbean ministers of agriculture, journalists, farmers and academics gathered in this tiny but picturesque south Caribbean island in a rearguard bid to refocus a region used to existing mostly for tourism on agriculture, given a mounting food import bill and fears of yet another global food crisis.

When a psychotic senior superintendent of police and several subordinates sprayed three young criminal suspects with machine-gun and rifle fire for several minutes, killing all of them, early one morning in 2001, citizens in the small South American nation thought that the local police force had sunk to a new low.

Earlier this month, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula DaSilva flew more than 1,600 kilometres from his base in Brasilia to a remote state on the Guyanese frontier to formally commission a border river bridge with his country's English-speaking neighbour.

The suspicions of several Caribbean leaders about Venezuela’s growing political and economic clout in the region boiled over last week as they met for their four-day annual summit in Guyana.