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Bahamas: Tax network to expand
Related to country: Bahamas
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By CANDIA DAMES ~ Guardian News Editor ~ candia@nasguard.com:

Amid ongoing concerns that The Bahamas could once again be blacklisted by the powerful bloc of industrialized nations, the government announced last evening that it is negotiating tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs) with 14 countries.

The minimum number of TIEAs required by a jurisdiction to satisfy the standard set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is 12. The government advised that negotiations have commenced with Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Germany, France, Turkey and the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands).

"It is the intention of The Bahamas to conclude negotiations on these agreements by the end of this year," said Minister of State for Finance Zhivargo Laing in a press statement.

The government also announced that it has initiated discussions for an agreement on tax information exchange with the People's Republic of China, and proposes to initiate discussions with Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Ireland, South Africa and India.

"In addition to a new legislative framework to support the expanded network of tax information exchange agreements, it is proposed that the Criminal Justice (International Cooperation) Act will be amended to enable cooperation with all countries in relation to tax offenses," the statement said.

"The government is confident that these activities will allow The Bahamas to meet the Exchange of Information standards that have been set by both the G-20 and the OECD on the shortest possible timetable and within the given time frames, while avoiding any potential adverse listing."

The statement from the government came nearly four months after the OECD named The Bahamas on a list of 38 jurisdictions that have failed to substantially implement the internationally agreed tax standard. Global leaders also vowed at that time to crack down on so-called tax havens while declaring an end to bank secrecy.

There have been growing concerns that tax havens have substantially contributed to the global economic crisis that is still unraveling.

The OECD progress report in April noted that The Bahamas committed in 2002 to the internationally agreed tax standard, which was developed by the OECD in cooperation with non-OECD countries.

It requires "exchange of information on request in all tax matters for the administration and enforcement of domestic tax law without regard to a domestic tax interest requirement or bank secrecy for tax purposes. It also provides for extensive safeguards to protect the confidentiality of the information exchanged."

Speaking in the House of Assembly in March, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham said The Bahamas reaffirms its commitment recorded in the March 2002 agreement with the OECD and recognizes significant advances in commitments to broader application of OECD standards of transparency.

The prime minister said greater standards of transparency and exchange of information are evolving to become the international standards applicable to all countries. He noted that many countries have now indicated their adoption of the standards being required and soon to be applied by the OECD for transparency and exchange of information.

Ingraham said at the time that there are a number of outstanding requests for The Bahamas to enter into TIEAs and each request will be considered on an individual basis.

The government's statement yesterday noted that all significant financial centers that were formerly opposed have now declared their commitment to the internationally agreed standards, and are all engaged in implementing the standards to accommodate the sharing of tax information.

The Bahamas government signed a TIEA with the United States government nearly a decade ago.


Thursday, July 30, 2009

thenassauguardian

July 30, 2009 | 4:08 PM Comments  3 comments
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Foulkes Praises Bahamas-Haiti Ties
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By Staff Writer:


Minister of Labour and Social Development Dion Foulkes, praised the relationship between The Bahamas and Haiti during the 2nd annual Youth Conclave of the United Association of Haitians in The Bahamas (UHAB).

"There is a long history between The Bahamas and Haiti with people of Haitian ancestry making significant contributions to the development of the modern Bahamas in every area of our national life from politics to commerce to journalism," said Mr. Foulkes.

The conclave, held at the Calvary Baptist Haitian Church, drew a full house during the opening ceremony, last Wednesday.

"Today, The Bahamas continues to be on the forefront of efforts to assist in Haiti’s economic and political development," he said. "The prime minister was recently in Haiti promoting closer economic ties and the export of Haitian food to The Bahamas."

"We have also pressed for the stabilization of elected governments in Haiti and worked with other CARICOM nations towards this end."

Minister Foulkes said despite the prejudice in many quarters, "The Bahamas has been a welcoming community" for thousands of Haitians fleeing the difficulties of their country.

"In this regard, we have provided health care and education to those who have sought refuge in our land, regardless of a person’s race or country of origin," he said.

"Those measures have helped to create social peace and demonstrate The Bahamas’ commitment to equality and justice. "By guaranteeing education for all, we have seen these two cultures, mix, marry and together assist in The Bahamas’ national development."

Mr. Foulkes underscored the need for children to have respect for the law and for others.

"I realize that many children, due to the immigration status of their parents, or the illegality of their migration, have not been fully accepted into either culture," he said.

"This is unfortunate but there is a correct process to obtain work permits, passports, and citizenship."

July 27, 2009

jonesbahamas

July 28, 2009 | 8:27 AM Comments  0 comments


Space Travel: The Path to Human Immortality?
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By Tad Daley, AlterNet:


On December 31st, 1999, National Public Radio interviewed the futurist and science fiction genius Arthur C. Clarke. Since the author had forecast so many of the 20th Century's most fundamental developments, the NPR correspondent asked Clarke if anything had happened in the preceding 100 years that he never could have anticipated. "Yes, absolutely," Clarke replied, without a moment's hesitation. "The one thing I never would have expected is that, after centuries of wonder and imagination and aspiration, we would have gone to the moon ... and then stopped."

Were Clarke alive today, he undoubtedly would have added, "and then lost so much interest that we erased the tapes of our epochal voyage because of a shortage of blank cassettes."

This month, the 40th anniversary of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the moon, you will hear many rationales for sending humans into space, many noble goals that the challenge of space can help humanity to fulfill. However, in cosmological consequence, one, and only one, stands paramount above all others -- human immortality. Space is the only place where we can ensure ourselves against extinction.

Jonathan Schell, our great chronicler of the dilemmas of the nuclear age, has written often about the ascending gradations of extermination that human beings might commit. Genocide is an act aimed at annihilating all members of a particular human group - defined by ethnicity or religion or some other perceived collective hatred - Hitler's attempt to obliterate the Jews the most famous but hardly the only historical example. Specicide would be an act eliminating the whole of the human race. Ecocide, or perhaps biocide, or perhaps omnicide, would be an act exterminating not just all humans, but the entire circle of life on planet earth itself.

An asteroid impact, or certain kinds of disruptions of our sun, or perhaps other cosmological cataclysms could probably pull all those off without even breaking a sweat. And our sun in any case has an expiration date, some 4 or 5 billion years down the road. A quarter century before the voyages of Apollo, the invention of the nuclear weapon gave life on Earth, for the first time, the capacity to bring about its own extinction by its own hands. It will not be long before biotech and nanotech and god-knows-what-other techs obtain the same capacity. And it is far from impossible to suppose that human-induced climate change may unfold so badly in the decades to come that it too could threaten to bring about the same result.

This period, where we hold this capability to destroy ourselves but before we have found a way to save ourselves, might be called the human race's ultimate "window of vulnerability." But we also now possess a "window of opportunity," to endeavor, in, oh, the next five or ten centuries or so, to establish the human race permanently beyond the cradle of its birth -- first perhaps on our moon, then perhaps on Mars and in the asteroid belt and on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and then beyond the bounds of our solar system itself. We have it within our grasp to venture slowly but inexorably outward, in tiny lifeboats afloat on an infinite sea, to explore and then to colonize and then to live our lives among the stars. Imagine our galaxy, a mere thousand years hence, with millions of homo sapiens who are born, who live, and who die without ever setting foot on planet earth. Once we achieve that, once we have indeed established an enduring and self-sustaining human presence off the planet of our origin, it becomes very difficult to envision any comprehensive catastrophe that could eliminate completely the progeny of Mother Earth. Then, it would seem, we would be as close to immortality as the universe itself.

Does this mean we should not devote extraordinary efforts to the prevention of extinction-inducing catastrophes here on Earth? Of course not. We should abolish nuclear weapons, and endeavor to enact a universal, verifiable, and enforceable Nuclear Weapons Elimination Convention. We should impose serious transnational regulatory constraints on biotech and nanotech, before the development and proliferation of those technologies makes it much more difficult to do so. We should dedicate the kinds of resources and attentions to ameliorating the worst effects of climate change that the magnitude of the stakes requires. And we should even invest seriously in things like the monitoring of celestial bodies - so that, with perhaps decades of warning about an imminent collision between a big space rock and ourselves, we might figure out a way to avoid it.

Nevertheless, even people who eat right, exercise every day, and look both ways before crossing Fifth Avenue still take out policies for life insurance.

Stephen Hawking, just before boarding his zero gravity airplane flight in April 2007, said, "Life on Earth is at risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus. ... I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space." Clarke, speaking from Sri Lanka on a huge video screen to aficionados gathered in Kansas City to commemorate the centennial, on 7/7/7, of Clarke's fellow science fiction giant, the late Robert A. Heinlein, said "I have no doubt that the great master will be revered by future generations - if any." Heinlein himself, some years earlier, said that the actions of the thousands who worked to lift a fragile spacecraft off the surface of the earth, and set it down gently on the surface of the moon, "tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind. The door they opened leads to hope that h. sapiens will survive indefinitely long, even longer than this solid planet on which we stand tonight. As a direct result of what they did, it is now possible that the human race will never die."

But not if we wipe ourselves out before we have scarcely even gotten started. Not if we fail to dodge the bullet in the chamber in the gun in our own hands. Not if we lose so much interest in the fate of humankind that we erase not just the tapes of our most epochal achievements, but wind up erasing ourselves.

Colonel Ilan Ramon was the first-ever Israeli astronaut, who perished aboard the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003. When he was training for his flight, he contacted officials at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, and asked if he might be allowed to carry along with him a relic of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem officials searched deeply through their archives - and then suddenly came across the only possible answer to Col. Ramon's request. They provided him with an exact replica of a small pencil sketch of the landscape of the moon, with our beautiful earth looming above the far horizon, lonely and fragile and whole, suspended among the blazing stars. It was created by a 14-year-old Jewish boy named Petr Ginz. He drew it in 1942, more than a quarter century before the Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to witness that whole earth, while incarcerated behind the walls of the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Two years later, Peter Ginz was murdered behind the walls of Auschwitz.

For that boy to sketch that sight, so long before any human had actually seen that sight and in the midst of the greatest degradation of the human spirit imaginable, can only be called a triumph of the imagination, and a triumph of the will. Petr Ginz did not survive the great holocaust of his era. Ilan Ramon did not survive his journey into the cosmos. But if we aspire now to equal the imagination and the will of Petr Ginz, and if we endeavor now to complete the mission on which Ilan Ramon embarked, then - even if another great holocaust comes and even if despite all our struggles it brings to our fair planet not just genocide but specicide or omnicide - we still can.

July 24, 2009



Tad Daley is Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, www.ippnw.org, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He has served as a foreign policy advisor to Congresswoman Diane Watson, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and the late U.S. Senator Alan Cranston.


alternet

July 25, 2009 | 12:52 PM Comments  0 comments


Bahamas: Pastors applaud Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham's rejection of lottery to fund education
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By JASMIN BONIMY ~ Guardian Staff Reporter ~ jasmin@nasguard.com:

A group of religious leaders commended Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham yesterday for his recent statement that the government has no intention of introducing a national lottery to fund public schools and their programs.

The press statement was released by Pastors Lyall Bethel of Grace Community Church; Bill Higgs of The Bahamas Conference of The Methodist Church; Allan Lee of Calvary Bible Church; Cedric Moss of Kingdom Life Church; Alfred Stewart of New Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, and Geoffrey Wood of Temple Baptist Church.

"Bearing in mind that we publicly expressed grave concerns about the Ministry of Education's call for a national lottery, we welcome Prime Minister Ingraham's clear and candid refutation of that tragic idea, thus definitively putting it to rest," said the release. "Further, we are encouraged by the prime minister's renewed comment that a national lottery is not a part of his government's agenda."

The Nassau Guardian recently revealed that a national plan proposed for education calls for the introduction of a special tax and national lottery to better fund the nation's schools.

The 65-page document proposes that a referendum on the national lottery be held by December 2011. As a means of funding education, the Ministry of Education also proposes that the departure tax be increased by $2 per passenger.

"We commend Prime Minister Ingraham for his principled leadership on the national lottery question, and, as he and his government seek to lead us towards our national goal of being a disciplined, industrious people who have an abiding respect for Christian values and the rule of law, we encourage them to take the same principled position against any further legalization of gambling in any form," said the release.

Ingraham said in an interview with The Guardian on Sunday that authorities at the Ministry of Education had stepped out of line in suggesting how education in The Bahamas should be funded.

Ingraham said, "[The Ministry of] Education is not to determine how education is funded. That is not their business.

"They can determine what sorts of policies they want to put forward etc. and I value their suggestions in terms of development of a 10-year education plan, and I called for them to seek to engage the opposition, churches, civil society and parents etc. in the discussion so we can end up with an education plan and program that is national, that doesn't change when I change a minister of education; that doesn't change if the PLP comes to office tomorrow or another party comes to office the next day and everybody's got their own plan for education etc."

How the government funds education is another matter entirely, the prime minister added during that recent interview.

"And so any thoughts that I saw in the [article in The Guardian] about a tax of $2 or a national lottery etc. that is beyond Education's competence to determine and the Government of The Bahamas has made no such determination and has no such funding mechanism under consideration and does not expect to have any such funding mechanism for consideration."


July 24, 2009

thenassauguardian

July 24, 2009 | 6:14 AM Comments  0 comments


Harry Potter and the Blah-Di-Blah-Blah
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By Eileen Jones, eXiled Online:

So Harry Potter, the latest one. Making a lot of money. Yep. How many more to go? Ten? Oh, only two? Well, good, that means they'll finish up before the kids turn 30.

I'm not into the Harry Potter phenomenon. I have friends who are fans. I also have friends who are foes, who find it a source of intense bitterness that Diana Wynne Jones -- a vastly superior writer, they tell me, within the same genre of young adult fantasy fiction -- has never had a fraction of the recognition or reward spewed at J.K. Rowling.

But I've got no investment one way or another beyond liking genre stuff, plus a vague interest in seeing what supposedly creative types do when they have all the money and attention in the world, when they're in Fat City. The film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a good example of what often results: a bland, safe bet, plush and comfy, taking no chances and pleasantly vegetative to watch.

It's old news that, when directing the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Alfonso Cuaron came up with the bright idea that these films ought to look good, at least. Previous director Chris Columbus hadn't thought of that. He'd been too busy documenting every time Dumbledore blew his nose, in deference to the fans' obsession that he omit nothing of vital importance from the books, in which everything is, of course, vitally important.

Cuaron put the production designers and CGI people to work bringing gorgeous gloom to the series, its rains and mists and rich colors and trails of black smoke. That's done a lot to ease the pain of watching these things. The current director, David Yates, follows Cuaron's lead in dedicating a chunk of the budget to beautiful weather effects. Nice snow scenes!

A much bigger chunk went, as usual, to buying up British actors and not challenging any of them, so they noodle around at their individual crafts, presumably to stave off boredom. Alan Rickman practices his vocal exercises, for example, in the role of Severus Snape. He tests how long he can draw out dramatic pauses, how sonorously he can extend syllables versus how severely he can clip off the final consonant, how nasal he can get if he really tries, which is so extremely nasal it's like that old commercial with the giant stuffed-up nose talking about allergy relief.

Don't misunderstand, I actually like Snape, I look forward to Snape scenes. He's one of the few dark, interesting characters in Rowling's world who gets to stay center stage for any length of time. She's forever shoving the villains and weirdos and monsters to the margins, or converting them, or revealing them to be really good underneath, so we can spend more time with all the virtuous types. (Sirius Black was a potentially great character who could never be wholly "safe," so she killed him off.)

The film directors, sadly, follow her lead. No proper sense of sustained menace. Jeez, people, Dickens laid all this out for you. The villains must be scary, powerful and ascendant for the bulk of the story, squeezing the virtuous into tighter and tighter corners, with everything light turning dark, until the sudden reversal at the very end! As Snape would say, the very ennnnnnd!

The Half-Blood Prince was structured to be suspenseful. It sets up the gathering evil right away: Death Eaters have so broken the bounds that they're even attacking the Muggle world, students are dropping out of Hogwarts, and Snape is involved in some mysterious double-dealings, taking "the vow that can't be broken" to defend and protect the vile Draco, who has been commissioned to do some awful deed, etc.

Clearly we're supposed to retain this impression of impending doom while Harry, Ron and Hermione (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emily Watson) go through the torments of teen love. But we don't. Draco and Snape lurk around, and Dumbledore gives Harry strange secret assignments, but it's all episodic and unconnected. It seems to have no relation to the mooning around of the goofy, old-fashioned teens with nothing on their minds but their hair. The impression should be, "Hogwarts is under deadly attack, Harry, stop worrying about the prom," but instead it's just A-story, B-story.

But then, maybe I don't have a clear sense of what counts as menacing these days. I read an interview with Michael Gambon, who replaced the late Richard Harris as Dumbledore, and he claimed that whereas Harris was a warm and twinkly wizard headmaster, he plays Dumbledore as formidable, even dangerous. Wow! Totally news to me. I'd have said there was nothing formidable about Gambon's Dumbledore but his fake beard.

I dread the Dumbledore scenes for their sheer length and mildness. He always talks to Harry like a kindly uncle in approximately six-to-eight interminable scenes in every book/film, and kindly uncle talks just aren't the most riveting things in the world. Maybe it's different if your uncle's Jack the Ripper, but not if he's a gentle bearded wizard who snuffles, "Once again I must ask too much of you, Harry."

My grandmother was more formidable than Dumbledore. Ten times more.

Jim Broadbent plays a very middling sort-of villain as Professor Horace Slughorn. He experiments with an impressive range of smarmy, fatuous academic expressions, including one with blank eyes bugged out so far I feared the sockets couldn't hold them. Helena Bonham Carter is more promising as the nasty Bellatrix Lestrange. She looks like rotting fruit, which is very becoming, and she flings herself around with abandon trying to generate some sense of depravity in her few scenes. But really, there's not a lot to do.

Flashbacks to Lord Voldemort's youth as the brilliant Hogwarts student Tom Riddle are sadly minimal. These are the memories Harry is assigned to retrieve from Professor Slughorn because they will give Dumbledore needed intel with which to fight the dark lord. Trouble is, when Harry finally retrieves the key memory, Dumbledore already seems to know all about it, rendering Harry's efforts moot.

I know -- whatever. It's a Harry Potter movie.

But since they do spend so much time on the teen-hormone angle, I have to say that the Harry Potter-Ginny Weasley love story is disastrous in both book and film.

It's eye-wateringly dull, and Harry passes up so many other, better bets -- sweetly eccentric Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch), and that beautiful girl who makes a date with him at the coffee shop early on, and almost anybody else he walks by in the halls of Hogwarts -- that you really have to wonder about Rowling's fixation on the drab and virtuous.

July 20, 2009

Eileen Jones is a writer for eXiledonline.com.

alternet


July 21, 2009 | 6:23 PM Comments  0 comments
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