In his latest book "The Future" former Vice-President, Al Gore emphasises the need to compensate for the work done by individuals. There is a decoupling of "gains in productivity from gains in the standard of living for the middle class", which needs to change as "This trend is now nearing a threshold beyond which so many jobs are lost that the level of consumer demand falls below the level necessary to sustain healthy economic growth."...[Read more]

NEW YORK (CMC) - The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), has placed Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago on a watch list of countries that have failed to make the adequate copyright payments for US musical compositions aired in the broadcast media. The USTR also decided to retain Jamaica although the country has taken steps to enforce regulations related to copyright payments... [Read more]

Four Caribbean writers have been shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. The regional finalists for the prestigious literary competition hail from Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas. Interestingly, this year’s shortlist has been dominated by female writers. None of the Caribbean writers are male and there are only a total of six male writers shortlisted. Trinidad and Tobago’s Barbara Jenkins ('A Good Friday') and Sharon Millar ('The Whale House') as well as Bahamians Janice Lynn ('Mango Summer') and A. L. Major ('Antonya’s Baby Shower on Camperdown Road') are the finalists from the Caribbean region...[Read more]

An update to German copyright law, providing for an auxiliary protection for tiny extracts from press articles, has been passed by the German Upper House (“Bundesrat”). The enactment of a related right to copyright will ask commercial aggregators to pay publishers for the use of headlines and extracts of news articles. Internet platforms will require a licence for the use of publishers’ content, except for “single words” or “minimal extracts”...[Read more]

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist seen by millions as the father of African literature, has died at the age of 82. African papers were reporting his death following an illness and hospital stay in Boston this morning, and both his agent and his publisher later confirmed the news to the Guardian. Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin, called him an "utterly remarkable man"...[Read more]

Poetry contributes to creative diversity, by questioning anew our use of words and things, our modes of perception and understanding of the world. Through its associations, its metaphors and its own grammar, poetic language is thus conceivably another facet of the dialogue among cultures...[Read more]