This morning a woman was found on a football field at the Price Barracks in Ladyville. The report is that she was allegedly raped and heavily intoxicated. The identity of the woman is still not clear but what we do know is that she is from Honduras and purported to be a sex worker. We […]
On Thursday night Doctor Luz Longsworth was inducted as the Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal of the U.W.I. Open Campus – it is a role she has been acting in since 2015 but it was made official right here in Belize City. Longsworth has spent twenty five years with the U.W.I. and even worked here […]
The U.W.I. is the region’s leading tertiary institution – it has four campuses – Mona, Cavehill, St Augustine and the Open Campus. The Open Campus is the newest of the four and is available in seventeen Caribbean jurisdictions. It has been rapidly growing and aims to meet the needs of students through its unique offerings […]
Where is Orange Walk North area representative and former Minister Gaspar Vega? He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, never mind the House of Representatives, in whose precincts he has not been seen since his resignation as Minister of Natural Resources in October 2016. After Vega’s decision to step down as […]
If you’re looking for some clean entertainment this weekend, head west to Belmopan for the Annual Gospel Fest at the Showgrounds. It’s a time for the Christian family of Belize to come together for healing, worship and prayer and spreading the Gospel among youth. For the evening concert, the headline artist is Trinidad and Tobago’s […]
Two young men from the village of Teakettle are facing charges of murder in connection with the brutal slaying of eighteen-year-old Keonia Ara over the weekend. As we’ve reported, the charred remains of the teenager were discovered on Saturday afternoon by a watchman at a dumpsite approximately four miles outside of Belmopan. The body remained […]
There have been two fires in the past two days in Belize City, one of which was fatal for an elderly woman. The most recent fire occurred just after one a.m. today as members of an Iguana Street household were in slumber. The fire started within a small wooden structure at the back of the […]
The other fire occurred on Wednesday morning on Price Street in downtown Belize City. Sometime after seven o’clock, Arilee Scott and her four-year-old grandson were inside the two storey wooden structure when a fire broke inside a bedroom on the upper flat of the building. According to Scott, the minor said that he was simply […]
The first serious objection to the bundle of tax measures introduced by Prime Minister Dean Barrow and the government at Monday’s budget presentation was raised by the Belize Tourism Industry Association a day later. They and the Association for Protected Areas Management Organizations argue that the Protected Areas Conservation Trust needs the money to urgently […]
News Five has uncovered information of an unreported, unexpected increase in the excise tax on rum, reported to us at as much as a hundred-percent increase. It has been proposed to raise the tax from ninety to one hundred and eighty dollars. News came as late as Wednesday when the Customs Department was handed an […]
Rodolfo Bol is the Immigration Department’s former System Manager, and current I.T. Manager. He has been with the Department since 2004. He manages the passport machine system and border management system, as well as the Department’s internal network which connects the regional offices and international embassies from the U.S. to Taiwan. But Auditor General Dorothy […]
Bol was also questioned on the most infamous example of how the Belize Passport and Information System was breached during the tenure covered by the Auditor General’s Report from 2011 to 2013. That is South Korean fugitive Won Hong Kim, who made a desperate bid to obtain Belizean nationality and a passport to claim citizenship […]
Twenty-year-old Stephen Mejia of Antelope Street in Belize City is behind bars after he was sentenced to one year in prison for keeping an unlicensed firearm and ammunition. In September of last year, Mejia was busted with a loaded nine millimeter firearm with nine live rounds of ammunition. According to two officers attached to the […]
After nine months behind bars, forty-six-year-old Santiago Cholom is home free, following a decision by the Court of Appeal to have him released due to a number of errors during his trial. Cholom’s attorney, Oswald Twist, successfully argued on several grounds, despite the fact that Cholom was convicted of carnal knowledge of a thirteen-year-old minor […]
On Wednesday night, we told you about the B.T.I.A.’s strong position on G.O.B.’s proposed revenue measures which include increasing the PACT fee, as well as taking ten percent of the2017-2018 income of some statutory boards like PACT and B.T.B. Executive Director of the B.T.I.A. John Burgos said that these new proposed measures will be bad […]
A dental initiative for Anglican primary schools in Belize City has students motivated to smile and show off their clean, pearly whites. Project Smile is a dental program of the Episcopal Church of Savannah, Georgia that sees hundreds of students on an annual basis benefit from professional dentition. News Five’s Duane Moody reports on the […]
The YWCA is celebrating sixty-one years of being in Belize. To mark this milestone, on Sunday they started a week of activities under the theme “Empowering Women in a Changing World.” News Five’s Andrea Polanco stopped in at the YWCA on Wednesday for a youth information and educational fair and shares how that went. […]
A team of athletes from the Belize National Coast Guard, the Belize Police Department and the Belize Defense Force is headed to the United States next week to participate in the 2017 Challenge Cup/Baker to Vegas. The law enforcement officers will join other runners from across the U.S. in a relay race that is set […]
Doctors are accustomed to seeing cases of certain illnesses rise at specific times of the year. This time of year – although the weather is quite “UN-Marchlike” – pediatricians tend to see increases in asthma attacks and a few other illnesses. Tonight in Healthy Living, we find out what the common threats are for children […]
The family of eighteen-year old Keonia Ara of Blackman Eddy continues to reel over her gruesome murder over the weekend. Ara was stabbed multiple times, her throat slit and then her body set on fire at the Belmopan dump. A second post mortem is to be held since it is suspected that she was also […]
On Monday, the Prime Minister presented the new budget. For the first time, the Government is proposing to collect over one billion dollars in tax revenues, an increase of eighty-eight million dollars from last year. To improve revenue, there has been some tightening of the belt with cuts here and there in ministries. But we […]
The Belize Tourism Board has been asked by industry operators to account for its sizable income and revenue, especially as it relates to tourism marketing. So, what would a cut into the B.T.B.’s income mean for the work that they do for the tourism industry? Executive Director Burgos says that they are unclear about the […]
The Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation is reporting minimal cuts in its budget for the fiscal year. However, there has been increased taxation on the industry in the form of the environmental tax on imported goods and the increase in departure tax for visitors. The Tourism Board, despite the Prime Minister’s commendations in an […]
Two of the scheduled three witnesses for today’s public hearings of the Senate Special Select Committee on Immigration testified. They are current information technology manager Rodolfo Bol and former database administrator, now Acting Director of the Central Information Technology Office (CITO), Francisco Gonzalez. Bol, as former systems administrator for the Department, was in charge at […]
Bol disputed the Auditor General’s assertion that inactive users were not removed from the system under his tenure. He pointed out that he and his successor as Systems Administrator, Georgia Bowen, held sole power to change the passwords and user roles of fellow Department employees, but in practice they only changed passwords and occasionally user […]
