Even More Earthquakes shake the Caribbean...

Norovirus outbreak reported on Princess cruise ship that departed Fort Lauderdale

By Matthew Ablon

Updated on: May 9, 2026 / 1:04 PM EDT / CBS Miami

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports it is monitoring a norovirus outbreak on board a Princess Cruises ship that departed Fort Lauderdale more than a week ago.

A report from the agency said the outbreak unfolded on the Caribbean Princess, which departed from Port Everglades on April 28. Data gathered by CruiseMapper shows the Caribbean Princess is currently on a 13-day voyage in the Caribbean, with stops in the Bahamas, Netherlands Antilles, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The ship is set to end its one-way cruise by docking at Port Canaveral in Orlando on May 11.

The CDC report indicates that 102 of the ship's 3,116 passengers reported ill, while 13 of the ship's 1,131 crew members reported ill. The main symptoms shared have included diarrhea and vomiting. The agency said Princess Cruises has responded to the norovirus outbreak by increasing cleaning and disinfection procedures; collecting specimens for testing, isolating ill passengers and crew; and consulting with the agency's Vessel Sanitation Program about cleaning procedures and reporting ill cases.

The CDC notes the VSP is conducting a field response for an environmental assessment and outbreak investigation to help control it. The outbreak was reported on Thursday, May 7.

The outbreak on the Caribbean Princess comes more than a month after another norovirus outbreak was reported on another Princess ship. In March, the Star Princess faced an outbreak that sickened more than 104 guests and 49 crew members. That ship also left Fort Lauderdale and made stops in the Caribbean, albeit in Honduras, Belize and the Mexican Riviera. The Star Princess returned to Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale at the conclusion of that voyage. When the outbreak was reported, the Star Princess would have been sailing from Belize City to Cozumel, according to that itinerary.

In early January, the CDC reported that an outbreak on board a Holland America cruise ship had sickened more than 80 people after departing from Fort Lauderdale at the end of December.

In February, the agency said 27 people were sickened in an outbreak of an unknown gastrointestinal illness on board a luxury cruise ship, the Regent Seven Seas, which was sailing from Miami to Honolulu.


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Fuerzas Comando 2025

News | Aug. 18, 2025
Fuerzas Comando 2025

By Maj. Trevor Wild,
ILOPANGO, El Salvador –

Sixteen special operations teams from across Central and South America and the Caribbean will gather in Ilopango, El Salvador, Aug. 18–29, for Fuerzas Comando 2025, the 19th iteration of the premier special operations skills competition and senior leadership seminar.

Established in 2004, Fuerzas Comando is a 10-day event designed to test participants’ skills through a friendly competition among special operations forces. The event promotes interoperability and military-to-military relationships through cordial contests, enhances training knowledge, and strengthens regional cooperation.

Concurrently, a senior leadership seminar will convene, uniting top multinational special operations leaders to address transnational threats impacting defense and stability across the region.

Participating nations include Argentina, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States.

Fuerzas Comando 2025 is sponsored by U.S. Southern Command and executed by Special Operations Command South in partnership with the Fuerza Armada de El Salvador.

The competition will feature a series of evaluated events:
Day 1: Weapons zero (non-graded)
Day 2: Physical training event (100 points) and opening ceremony
Day 3: Assaulter stages 1 and 2 / Sniper stage 1 (300 points)
Day 4: Assaulter stages 3 and 4 / Sniper stages 2 and 3 (300 points)
Day 5: Assaulter stage 5 / Sniper stages 4 and 5 (400 points)
Day 6: Assaulter stages 6 and 7 / Sniper stage 7 (400 points)
Day 7: Assaulter and sniper stage 8 / Combined assault (300 points)
Day 8: Ruck event (200 points)
Day 9: Obstacle course (200 points)
Day 10: Water event (200 points)
Day 11: No evaluation
Day 12: Closing ceremony

For updates and standings, follow @SOCSOUTH and @FUERZARMADASV on Instagram, Facebook, and X.

“Juntos somos Fuerzas Comando.”

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The Caribbean is pioneering CBDCs with mixed results amid banking difficulties

The Caribbean region is in a tough situation for banking. The 35 nations comprising the region face challenges common to many tiny economies, such as dollarization and dependence on foreign trade and remittances. In addition, the increasingly common banking practice called de-risking is taking a heavy toll. So, it is probably no coincidence that the region is also at the forefront of digital currency adoption.

Carmelle Cadet, the founder and CEO of banking solutions company Emtech, is a native of Haiti who has experience working with central banks in Haiti and Ghana. Her company is also a member of the new Digital Dollar Project Technical Sandbox Program that is exploring aspects of a United States central bank digital currency (CBDC). Cadet spoke to Cointelegraph about her experiences in the Caribbean and the United States. She said rolling out functioning CBDCs in the region is “a long game.” It is easy to see why.

The risks of banking in the Caribbean

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) lists countries that are under special monitoring for money laundering or other illegal activities. Although only four countries in the region were on the so-called gray list as of June, the list seems to cast a pall over the region as a whole. Because of it, extra due diligence efforts are required when large international banks provide services such as settlement to smaller local banks in those countries in a process called correspondent relationships.

Additional due diligence drives up international banks’ costs of doing business. Banks often choose to sever ties with banks in gray-listed countries rather than pay the increased costs. That decision is referred to as de-risking. Some Caribbean countries have lost 50% of their correspondent relationships, with severe consequences for their economies and societies.

The United States House of Representatives Financial Services Committee held hearings titled “When Banks Leave: The Impacts of De-Risking on the Caribbean and Strategies for Ensuring Financial Access” on Sept. 14. Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Keith Rowley attended the hearings.

#financialinclusion is possible: Modern #Regulatory Frameworks + Modern #Technology. Banks have moved away from the Caribbean and cost of payments is not going down. It feels like punishment indeed. Thank you for testifying in front of Congress on this topic! #bardados — Carmelle Cadet (@CarmelleCadet) September 14, 2022

Mottley described what banking services are like in the region:

“When we were growing up, opening a bank account was part of our rites of passage in becoming an adult. Today […] we spend weeks, and businesses that come into our region spend weeks and months, just to open a bank account.”

Ten days after the Congressional hearings, on Sept. 24, Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis brought the issue of de-risking before the United Nations General Assembly. “Why are all the countries being targeted small and vulnerable and former colonies of European states?” he asked. The Bahamas is not currently on the gray list.
CBDCs to the rescue?

According to the Atlantic Council CBDC tracker, three CBDCs have been launched in the Caribbean region: the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Jamaica’s Jam-Dex and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank DCash in seven of its eight member states.

The council lists Haiti’s Digital Gourde as under development. Cadet said Emtech and its Haitian partner HaitiPay presented a proof-of-concept for a CBDC at the Haitian Embassy in Washington on May 5.

Cadet, who immigrated to the U.S. in her youth, was an executive in the IBM blockchain division when the Bahamas made its request for proposals for the Sand Dollar. She was “by luck a little bit in the front seat.” In 2019, when Haiti was “making the rounds with a roadshow” to develop its CBDC, “I thought ‘if the Bahamas can do it, why not Haiti?’” Cadet said. She added, “Kudos to the central bank governor for seeing the possibilities.” She left IBM and founded Emtech.

The first financial technology companies appeared in Haiti in 2010, after the earthquake that ravaged the country, and technologies relying on mobile wallets took the lead, Haitian Central Bank Governor Jean Baden Dubois said in 2021. Dubois said mobile telephone penetration was about 60% in 2008 and “likely higher in 2021.”

Emtech’s proposed CBDC design functioned online and through mobile telephone unstructured supplementary service data. The rollout of a Haitian CBDC would include device distribution through a partnership with a charity, Cadet said. The use of telecommunications rather than data networks to support CBDC functions is a hallmark of emerging economies, she added.

Dubois said the Haitian Central Bank saw a CBDC as a means to achieve greater policy efficiency and increased transparency, which would help the FATF gray-listed country meet Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism standards.

“Dollarization undermines the central bank and its mission of stability,” Cadet said. “Using CBDCs for cross border payments would provide better liquidity and visibility on reserves.”

The peculiarities of emerging markets

Cadet said there are a number of ways in which a CBDC design for an emerging market will differ from one intended for a developed market. Developed markets can “afford to go slower,” she said, as they work toward a real-time settlement, while in emerging markets, CBDCs have a more pressing mission of inclusion.

Emerging markets have “less baggage,” she continued, so fintechs can thrive. In developed markets, commercial banking can make adoption easier, but the CBDC has more legacy systems to integrate with.

Be that as it may, it is not clear how much success CBDCs are enjoying in the Caribbean. The Sand Dollar, commonly considered the first CBDC when it launched in 2020, had only about $300,000 worth of electronic currency in circulation and 30,000 digital wallets in July 2022, with about 845 merchants accepting it. The Bahamian government makes regular efforts to promote it.

DCash, introduced in April 2021, crashed in January and was down for almost two months. A spokesperson for Grenada-based conglomerate Geo. F. Huggins & Co., the first company to accept a DCash payment, said during the outage that the CBDC represented a “minimal” portion of its sales.

Cadet said her company had been in talks with the Haitian Central Bank “to understand licensing and risk” for about a year before its proof-of-concept presentation and has been in touch with the bank since then. She said the company is now waiting for the central bank to issue a request for proposals for vendors.

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International Court Pushes Gay Marriage on 20 Latin American Nations

Michelle Riestra / January 17, 2018

The autonomous Inter-American Court of Human Rights has faced growing resistance from Latin American countries in recent months. (Photo: iStock Photos)



Commentary By

Michelle Riestra



Michelle Riestra serves as legal counsel for ADF International in Washington, D.C., where she engages in legal advocacy at the Organization of American States.




The Inter-American Court of Human Rights called last week for the recognition of same-sex marriage and of proclaimed “gender identity” as a protected category for nondiscrimination under the American Convention on Human Rights.

Although the decision is not binding, 20 countries throughout the Americas have accepted the jurisdiction of the court, and will now be pressured to implement its decision.

The 20 countries are Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Uruguay.

Same-sex marriage is already legal in some of those countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay, and others recognize civil unions, but still others do not recognize either and will be expected to change their laws.

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The case originated from Costa Rica, which requested an advisory opinion from the court on whether its domestic law violated international law, as it does not facilitate name changes based on gender identity, nor recognize patrimonial rights of same-sex partnerships.

Advisory opinions are not even binding on the country that asked the question, let alone the other 19 nations that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction. However, the court ignored this legal reality and called upon the countries to issue temporary decrees recognizing same-sex marriage until new legislation can be enacted by those countries.

The court has no authority to order such a thing, and the decision goes against the clear wording of the American Convention on Human Rights, as well as several national constitutions. However, the court’s decision is just the latest example of judicial activism, which stretches back more than a decade.

The court is tasked with interpreting the American Convention on Human Rights and operates within the broader Organization of American States framework.

Faced with stubbornly conservative member nations that are slow to follow the legal and cultural liberalism flowing out of Canada, the U.S., and much of Western Europe, the court has taken it upon itself to force its own liberal agenda on a reluctant region.

Strong quake in Caribbean Sea shakes Honduras, Mexico and Belize, no tsunami

By Gustavo Palencia,
Reuters•January 10, 2018


Magnitude 7.6 quake hits in Caribbean north of Honduras
WGBA - Green Bay Scripps


By Gustavo Palencia

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 that struck near remote islands belonging to Honduras on Tuesday was felt across northern Central America but there were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage.

Related SearchesEarthquake MagnitudeCaribbean SeaEarthquake UsgsEarthquake Scale

The quake rattled windows in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa roughly 323 miles (519 km) to the east and was felt at least as far north as the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, but no damage was immediately reported.

Rodrigo Anaya Rodriguez was in a hammock inside his house near the popular tourist site of Bacalar Lake near Mexico's Caribbean coast when he felt three tremors.

"It felt like a bulldozer was driving past," he said. "It didn't last long but was very violent."

He ran to his balcony and saw electricity posts and cables swaying.

In Honduras, firefighters said some residents in southern neighborhoods fled their homes after feeling the shaking.

The country operates a small naval base on Great Swan Island, about 27 miles (44 km) west of the quake's epicenter, but it was not immediately clear how the tremors affected the station.

"We have reports that it was felt in the majority of the country, but we don't have reports of damage," said Lizandro Rosales, director of Honduras' contingencies commission.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake, initially reported as a magnitude 7.8, was centered 125 miles (202 km)northeast of Barra Patuca in Honduras and 191 miles (307 km)southwest of George Town in the Cayman Islands.

The quake was very shallow, at only 6.2 miles (10 km), which would have amplified its effect.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned that tsunami waves up to 1 meter (3 feet) above tide level could hit parts of Honduras, Belize and Puerto Rico along with the U.S. and British Virgin Islands.

About two hours after the quake, the center said the threat had passed, withdrawing all tsunami advisories connected with the quake.

The tremors were felt in Belize's capital, Belize City, but there were no immediate reports of damage.

Belize's minister in charge of emergency management, Edmond Castro, spoke on local radio to urge people living in low lying coastal areas and islands to stay alert for potentially dangerous waves.

(Additional reporting by Sandra Maler in Washington; Daina Beth Solomon, Adriana Barrera and Frank Jack Daniel in Mexico City; Jose Sanchez in Belize City; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Simon Cameron-Moore)

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