A package of news briefs from the Caribbean

ST. LUCIA: Official: PM 'very unlikely' to resume duties after suffering mini-strokes

CASTRIES, St. Lucia (AP) _ A St. Lucian official who visited Prime Minister John Compton in a U.S. hospital said Thursday the 82-year-old leader's ill health would almost certainly preclude his return to office.

Cabinet minister Lennard Montoute said Compton, a three-time premier of St. Lucia who is one of the world's older leaders, was lucid and in good spirits, but still frail and unable to stand or walk without assistance as he recovers from a series of small strokes.

"It is very unlikely that (Compton) will be able to resume his position in the government," Montoute said after visiting an unspecified New York hospital where the premier has been hospitalized since May 1. "He, of course, speaks slower than usual, and he is in a very weak physical state."

Montoute did not say whether that assessment was shared by Compton, who may be allowed to fly home this weekend.

Mini-strokes, or transient ischemic attacks, are caused by a blood clot that forms anywhere in the body and lodges in a vessel in the head, depriving part of the brain of blood and oxygen. They are associated with a high risk of a full-blown stroke in the coming months, according to the American Heart Association.

HAITI: Gunmen kill prominent radio journalist in troubled Caribbean nation

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) _ Gunmen killed a prominent journalist in northwestern Haiti, shooting him 11 times outside his fiancee's house, his radio station said Thursday.

Alix Joseph, director of private Radio Provinciale in the port town of Gonaives, was ambushed late Wednesday by two assailants as he sat in a car with his fiancee, who escaped unharmed, said Frantz Justin Altidor, a journalist at the station.

"She screamed 'Oh my God, they got us,' and started running. She thought Alix was right behind her," Altidor said. Colleagues returned hours later and found Joseph's body on the floor of the car.

Police have not identified suspects or established a motive.

Altidor said he did not know if Joseph, 38, had received threats, but said some people were unhappy with the station's reporting on local crime.

Altidor said Radio Provinciale and other stations in Gonaives went off the air Thursday to protest insecurity in the town, a base for armed gangs blamed for a string of recent killings.

Last month, gunmen in the city shot and killed a former journalist with ties to ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide while he slept. His killers were not caught.

GUANTANAMO: New York lawsuit demands Gitmo lawyers' wiretap records

NEW YORK (AP) _ A civil rights group sued the federal government on Thursday, demanding a response to requests for records of warrantless wiretapping of lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on behalf of 16 attorneys, that the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency had provided inadequate responses to its request for documents.

The lawsuit says the government agencies refused even to acknowledge the existence of documents related to whether attorneys were being subjected to warrantless surveillance at the naval base in Cuba, where the U.S. military is holding about 380 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The NSA produced two documents that already had been made public, the lawsuit said. The Department of Justice provided 85 pages of unredacted documents and two redacted documents, most of which were already public, and said it was withholding 84 pages and an e-mail, the lawsuit said.

A lawyer listed in the lawsuit as a plaintiff, Wells Dixon, said in a release that he was "outraged that the NSA and DOJ have categorically refused to say whether they have eavesdropped _ without a warrant _ on me or other attorneys simply because we have fought for basic due process rights for men imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantanamo."

CARIBBEAN: British sailor rescued at sea by his neighbor

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) _ Competitive sailor John Fildes traveled a long way to meet a neighbor _ losing his racing yacht, and almost his life, in the process.

Fildes was sailing his 12-meter (40-foot) trimaran to Newport, Rhode Island, when a storm collapsed his sails and swamped his engine near Bermuda. As he drifted in the Atlantic, a passing cruise ship responded to his distress call and took him aboard.

The next morning he met the Crown Princess's captain, Alistair Clark, and the men discovered they live within 1.6 kilometers (one mile) of each other in the coastal English village of Warsash, Hampshire.

"The whole thing was probably fate," Fildes told The Associated Press on Thursday. "He was there and I was there, and there was absolutely nobody else."

Fildes, 32, set out from St. Maarten on May 9 and ran into trouble during violent weather the night before his Monday rescue. He had planned to enter the yacht, Dangerous When Wet, in a race between Newport and Bermuda, but the vessel has probably been lost at sea.

Fildes said he had never met the captain before, but he left a thank you note inviting him to dinner in Warsash.

CARIBBEAN: Region seeks strategy to keep nurses from taking jobs elsewhere

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) _ The Caribbean must find a way to stem an exodus of nurses seeking higher-paying jobs in Europe and North America, regional officials said Thursday.

A study by the 15-member Caribbean Community found that 50,000 nurses left the region from 1996 to 2005, creating shortages and depriving the small countries of a return on investments in nurse training.

Edward Greene, a Community assistant secretary-general, said that Caribbean leaders will discuss a "managed migration" of nurses to wealthier nations during a three-day conference next month in Washington.

According to a study last year by the International Monetary Fund, the Caribbean is losing up to 40 percent of its highly skilled workers in fields such as education, medicine and law.

CUBA: Island to spend US$185 million (euro135 million) to boost tourism

HAVANA (AP) _ Cuba will spend about US$185 million (euro135 million) to upgrade more than 200 resorts, golf courses, marinas and other facilities in a bid to reverse a dip in tourism to the island.

The government has said the number of visitors to island dropped by about 100,000 last year to 2.2 million, hitting the communist nation's leading source of income. Washington's 45-year-old trade embargo prohibits Americans tourists from coming to Cuba and chokes off most trade between the countries.

Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero announced the development plan last week at a tourism fair that was closed to the international press. The plan detailed this week in Opciones, a state-run newspaper for foreign investors, will run through 2010 and seeks to make Cuba more competitive.

Some US$162 million (euro119 million) will be used to upgrade non-hotel facilities, such as golf courses, yacht clubs and theme parks. Other funds will be used to build 50 boutique inns around the country in addition to 10 already under construction and to improve the country's outdated highways, Marrero said.

Opciones did not say how many tourists have visited Cuba so far this year, but quoted Marrero as saying that "in 2007, for the fourth consecutive year, the number will be greater than 2 million visitors."

TURKS AND CAICOS: Developers start work on luxury resort and condominium project

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) _ Crews have broken ground for a luxury resort and condominium development on the westernmost end of a fast-growing island in the Turks and Caicos, the British dependency's government said Thursday.

The 59-residence Watermark resort is scheduled to open in late 2008. The development, located along a stretch of Grace Bay Beach in Providenciales island, will include a spa, 24-hour room service, and panoramic ocean views, according to a statement by the Turks and Caicos Islands.

It is being built along the last developable lot along the stretch of western Grace Bay by Apollo Development Ltd., based in Providenciales.