
More than 50 maritime professionals from across the Overseas Territories, Crown Dependencies and the UK are coming to the Falkland Islands for the Red Ensign Group Conference.

By Gwynne Dyer – In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is it can respond very fast. The bad thing is it won’t respond at all until the dictator-in-chief says it should. All the little dictators who flourish in this sort of system won’t risk their positions by passing bad news up the line until the risk of being blamed for delay outweighs the risk of being blamed for the emergency in the first place.

The BBC said on Wednesday it will cut around 450 jobs from its news division as part of an £80 million (US$103 million) savings drive and modernization program. The corporation said it would reorganize its newsroom along a story-led model where staff will be assigned to stories and not attached to individual programs.

Former Argentine president Mauricio Macri has been appointed executive chairman of the FIFA Foundation, the organization founded by world football's governing body in 2018 to promote social change. But his nomination was received with a raft of criticisms by Argentine clubs and associations.

Cruise line operators have canceled cruises to China after the outbreak of the coronavirus in China. The new virus that first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December has so far killed over 100 people and infected approximately 6,000 others.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson granted Huawei a limited role in Britain's 5G mobile network on Tuesday, frustrating a global attempt by the United States to exclude the Chinese telecoms giant from the West's next-generation communications.

President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday that China was sure of defeating a devil coronavirus that has killed at least 106 people, but the international alarm was rising as the outbreak spread across the world.

An IMF technical mission is expected to travel to Buenos Aires in February to continue to exchange views on macroeconomic plans and debt sustainability, announced from Washington the IMF Chief Spokesperson Gerry Rice following the meeting on Tuesday of Argentine Economy minister Martin Guzman IMF members of staff in New York. made the following statement on Argentina today:

A major 7.7 magnitude quake struck on Tuesday in the Caribbean northwest of Jamaica, the US Geological Survey reported, raising the risk of tsunami waves in the region.

ExxonMobil today announced its 16 discovery in the Stabroek Block, located off the Guyanese coastline. The Texas-based company announced that it encountered 29 meters of high-quality oil-bearing sandstone at the Uaru well.