The next scheduled insurance examination is from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on Wednesday, Sept. 5, in the Division of Personnel testing room at #3009 Orange Grove,C'sted, suites 6,7& 8.
Registration will take place at the Division of Banking and Insurance Office at #1131 King Street, and will end at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 4.
The registration fee is $25. Individuals reporting for testing are asked to be in the testing room by 9:45 a.m.
For more information contact Myra Mendez or Gwendolyn Collins at 773-6449.

The next scheduled insurance examination is from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on Wednesday, Sept. 5, in the Division of Personnel testing room at #3009 Orange Grove, C'sted, suite #'s 6,7,& 8.
Registration will take place at the Division of Banking and Insurance Office at #1131 King Street and will end at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 4.
The registration fee is $25. Individuals reporting for testing are asked to be in the testing rooms by 9:45 a.m.
For more information contact Myra Mendez or Gwendolyn Colling at 773-6440.

The next scheduled insurance examination is from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on Wednesday, Sept. 26, at the Department of Licensing & Consumer Affairs located at the Property and Procurement Building in Subbase.
Registration will take place at the Division of Banking and Insurance Office at Nisky Center and will end at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 25.
The registration fee is $25. Individuals reporting for testing are asked to be in the testing room by 9:45 a.m.
For more information contact Linda Scarbriel at 774-7166.

The next scheduled insurance examination will be held from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on Wednesday, Sept. 26, at the Department of Licensing & Consumer Affairs located at the Property and Procurement Building in Subbase.
Registration for the St. Thomas exam will take place at the Division of Banking and Insurance Office at Nisky Center and will end at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 25.
Registration fee for the exam is $25. Individuals reporting for testing are asked to be in the testing room by 9:45 a.m.
For further information contact Linda Scarbriel at 774-7166.

The Rotary Club of St. Thomas II will meet at 12 noon on Wednesday, Sept. 5, at Marriott's Frenchman's Reef Beach Resort.
Edward Thomas of WICO will be the guest speaker. The topic will focus on our cruise ship industry.

Aug. 29, 2001 – After conducting an inspection on Tuesday, Planning and Natural Resources Department officials approved plans Wednesday for repair work to begin immediately on the main classroom building of All Saints Cathedral School.
Expedited approval of the necessary permits will allow work to begin Thursday, and this is expected to make it possible for construction workers to complete the repairs in time for the school to open as scheduled next Tuesday.
"I was satisfied with the plans, and I'm approving them today," Brent Blyden, director of the Planning and Natural Resources Permits Division, said as he sat looking over the repair plans Wednesday afternoon.
Blyden inspected the classroom building at the Garden Street school on Tuesday along with school officials, engineers and construction contractors after his office had received a report of possible structural problems at the building, located just south of the school offices.
They found two problems:
– The concrete wall supporting an outside stairwell was buckling, and if left unrepaired, would eventually have had a structural failure.
– A beam supporting a wall was corroding in some areas where joists were attached.
The problems were not so severe that they posed any immediate danger, Blyden said, but they did need to be fixed. It would be possible to make the repairs in a few days, he said, but work would have to begin at once to get it done before students were to return to class. He reviewed the plans on Wednesday so work could begin Thursday, he said.
Alton Adams and Associates drew up the plans to repair the structures, and Reliable Construction was expected to begin the work Thursday, Blyden said.
The Rev. Canon Ashton Brooks of All Saints Episcopal Church, which operates the school, said Tuesday that the building had been properly inspected by the government officials and that the school was ready to move forward into the new academic year.
"All Saints Cathedral School will be ready as usual to continue on track serving the community of St. Thomas as an academic center," he said in a printed statement.
The school opened about 50 years ago at its current site. In February, All Saints embarked on an $11 million capital development campaign to build a new school on 6.5 acres of land being donated by the Harthman family in the Fort Mylner area. At that time, the target date for the start of construction was given as the end of 2002.

Aug. 29, 2001 – Roaming donkeys are a St. John problem that just doesn't seem to go away. While efforts have been made over the years to reduce their numbers, nothing has worked.
The problem is so bad that the V.I. National Park plans to put a barbed-wire fence around Cinnamon Bay Campground to keep them out. It will make its case for the fence at a Coastal Zone Management Committee hearing at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Legislature Building.
"The donkeys are known to eat wallets, passports, airline tickets and food items," said Rafe Boulon, the park's chief of resources management. They've made serious holes in tents and sleeping bags, too.
To keep the beasts at bay, campers assembled Rube Goldberg-like barriers that included tin cans, trip wires and other alarms. Successive campers at the sites would improve upon the contraptions already in place, creating what Boulon said "was not a pleasant sight."
Many campers have said they will not return to Cinnamon Bay until the campground does something about the donkey problem, Boulon said. While he recalls only one incident in which a camper was attacked by one of the animals, many people outside the campground have been bitten and kicked.
Residents all over the island have put up fences to keep the donkeys out of their gardens. People with open houses have been known to find them munching food at their kitchen counters.
Catherineberg resident Katherine Demar and her husband, Dennis, were forced to fence in their property. Before they did, the donkeys made meals out of their landscaping. "They liked the palms and firecracker plants," she said. And she was awakened many a night by the sound of donkeys slurping up water from her pool.
Demar said a neighbor just lost the tops off three newly planted — and expensive — palm trees when donkeys visited.
Over the years, the park has made some efforts to reduce the donkey numbers. A 1991 experiment to inoculate females with a birth control vaccine was unsuccessful. The vaccine worked on the 25 donkeys in the study, but only for a year. "In order for it to be effective, you had to inoculate every female, and you had to do it every year," Boulon said.
This is no easy task. Donkeys aren't all that cooperative, posing danger for those trying to capture them. "It takes an incredible amount of human effort, all those kicks and bites," Boulon said, noting that one V.I. Fish and Wildlife Division researcher was knocked unconscious when a donkey kicked him in the head.
The park did get rid of some donkeys in the early 1990s, when it exported about 20 of them to St. Croix for use in donkey races and grazing. Since then, no one has volunteered to take any more.
But such efforts made only a minuscule drop in the population. Boulon said no one knows how many donkeys live on St. John. A study in the 1980s by David Nellis, then chief of wildlife at Fish and Wildlife, counted 212. In 1997, Nellis said the number had grown to around 600.
Boulon said he doesn't think St. John has more than 500 now. They roam all over the i island, which makes counting them difficult.
The donkeys cause environmental damage, too. As they munch their way around the island, they denude the hillsides, which causes soil erosion. But Boulon said the problems the donkey cause in this regard are insignificant compared to unpaved roads and the island's voracious roaming goats.
The donkeys do alter vegetation by spreading seeds to places where such plants do not normally grow. And they are selective eaters, which allows the plants they don't eat to take over areas. Curtis Bridgewater at the V.I. Agriculture Department office in Coral Bay said the department makes no effort to control the donkey population. He also said the department gets no complaints about them.
Boulon said the park might someday address the donkey issue again. Right now, it is working on an environmental assessment plan to rid the park of small animals — specifically rats, cats and mongooses. [See earlier Source story, "Rats, cats and mongooses have got to go".] When that problem is solved, park officials will tackle the pigs and goats, he said. The donkeys come last.
"If we have the nerve," Boulon said, laughing.

Aug. 29, 2001 – If you're planning to stop by your travel agent's office Thursday to book a trip, pick up tickets or make any other arrangements, don't do it between 1 and 3 p.m.
The doors of most local agencies will be closed. It's part of a "Nationwide Day of Awareness" protest of the recent move by most of the nation's major airlines to drop the cap on domestic ticket commissions to $20 from $50.
Many travel agents on St. Thomas and St. John will be putting those two hours to what they hope is good use — attending a meeting at Caribbeal Travel Agency to discuss ways to mobilize opposition to the cutback.
On St. Croix, travel agents will gather outside Global Tours to discuss their concerns with the news media and anyone else who's interested.
For the Virgin Islands, "This is much more than a travel agency issue," Courtney Gabrielson, secretary-treasurer of Caribbean Travel, said. "It's such a tremendous destination issue. Travel agents in the United States are not going to sell the V.I. when they can make much more money booking travel to other islands."
The airlnes' cap on commissions for "international" travel is $100. But they consider the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to be "domestic" destinations for commission purposes. Thus, agents booking trips to anywhere else in the region would earn five times the commission they would get for travel to the two U.S. possessions.
Gabrielson, like all other members of the American Society of Travel Agents, has received a series of e-mail messages from ASTA urging all U.S. agencies to close their doors from 1 to 3 p.m. Thursday to protest the domestic cap cutback.
On the national level, ASTA is protesting what it says is the airlines' intention to put travel agents out of business. In the territory, travel professionals say, that isn't the big issue; what will happen to the flow of tourists into the Virgin Islands is. See the earlier Source story "Travel agents get an incentive to avoid the V.I." The cutback in commissions to agents on the mainland will have a disastrous effect on the territory's economy, they believe.
"It's not about our little agencies having our commissions cut," Gabrielson said. "It's about the livelihood of these islands." And so she has organized a meeting during the two-hour closing to discuss what can be done.
"ASTA sent its memo to all members and invited non-member travel agents to join in as well," she said. "I pretty much called and faxed everybody on St. Thomas and St. John."
That included All Travel, Bittner's Travel Services, Cruises Plus, Discount Travel, Monsanto's Travel Agency, Paradise Travel and World Wide Travel on St. Thomas and At Your Service Travel Agency on St. John.
She also has invited the St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association, the St. Thomas-St. John Chamber of Commerce, the V.I. Taxi Association and the offices of the governor and the delegate to Congress to send representatives.
On St. Croix, Debby Hodge, manager of Southerland Tours, said that "all travel agents on St. Croix will be closing their doors" for the two hours Thursday, and representatives of many of them will gather outside the Global Tours office during that time to talk to the news media and anyone who is interested in learning more or lending support.
Agencies in addition to Southerland that will close on St. Croix include Global Tours, Regency Travel, Roxanne's Travel, Travel Desk of St. Croix and Tranberg Cruise & Travel.
Personnel at several other agencies contacted by the Source on St. Thomas and St. Croix were unable to provide information as to whether they would participate in the protest.
"We are aware that this will not bring back the loss in commission, but it's about the service and the unbiased information" that travel agents provide to consumers, Hodge said. "This will not only affect us as travel agents, but it will have a great impact on the economy of the V.I. and Puerto Rico. Agents located in other geographical areas will sell destinations that pay a higher commission and don't fall under the cap. So you see, this will affect us all."
Derryle Berger, also of Caribbean Travel, noted that "as far as ticketing for outbound passengers, the Virgin Islands is small potatoes. We have to push this from the point of view that it represents a drastic hindrance to the economy of the islands."
"We're talking about more than ASTA solidarity," Gabrielson said. "If travelers stop choosing to vacation in the Virgin Islands, who's going to ride in the taxis? Who's going to buy the jewelry and booze? Who's going to stay at the hotels? Who's going to pay the housekeeping staff at the hotels?"
For Thursday's meeting, she said, she is "asking people to come and show their support, get some media attention, and possibly support some sort of legal action. We can't just sit here and let the airlines keep cutting at us."
She added, "In the end, it's the travelers who get hurt" — because they aren't really given all the information they need to make an informed choice.
ASTA has urged its members and other travel agents to use the two hours on Thursday "to engage in political and communications actions about airlines' abuse of market power and the consequences for the consumer."
Richard M. Copland, ASTA president, called travel agents "the last remnant of consumer protection the traveler has." In an e-mail message to society members, he said the airlines "want to deny consumers access to the last unbiased source of travel information — travel agents! They feel if travelers are forced to call them directly or shop via the web, their costs will go down. We know the truth. Consumers will pay more … consumers will have less information and fewer choices."
Copland said what widespread participation in the protest nationwide will accomplish is that "the media, our customers, our good supplier friends, our employees and our communities will understand at last that without a travel agent, you're on your own."
Gabrielson said she knows that local airline managers are sympathetic, "but they don't have the ear of the powers that be. There's nothing that they can do."
Berger said she is not aware of any organized lobbying efforts in the past on behalf of the Virgin Islands with regard to the domestic versus international status of the territory for ticketing purposes. If the airlines would reclassifiy the islands as international destinations, "That would solve the problem as far as commissions for inbound travel," she said.
The practice of considering the V.I. international is an arbitrary one on the airlines' part when it serves their interests, she said. "Any time you call an airline and ask for ticket information about travel to the Virgin Islands, they immediately tell you, 'Let me transfer you to the international section,'" she said.

Aug. 28, 2001 – For the third year, Rotary East members delivered goodie bags filled with supplies such as reading books, copy books, crayons and pencils to first graders at four elementary schools on St. Thomas.
The goodie bags were received by students Tuesday at Dober Elementary School, Jane E. Tuitt Elementary School, Evelyn Marcelli Elementary School and Peace Corps Elementary School.
The bags are funded by donations from businesses in the community, friends of Rotary East, the Human Services Department and Rotary Club of St. Thomas East. Next year, the goal is to supply the bags to all the schools on St. Thomas and St. John, according to Rotary East member Corinne Van Rensselaer.

Aug. 29, 2001 – All three suspects in the shooting death of Kaunda Bryan, 25, turned themselves in to police at the Patrick Sweeney Headquarters around 8 a.m. Wednesday, where they were interrogated and processed. They were to be transferred later in the day to the Golden Grove Detention Center.
An advice of rights hearing for all three is scheduled for 9 a.m. Thursday at Territorial Court on St. Croix, Deputy Police Chief Novelle Francis said.
"They all arrived together, accompanied by their parents," Francis said. "It all took place without incident."
The three were identifed by police earlier as Zacchaeus "Iceman" Blake, 26, and Blaine Claxton, 22, of Castle Coakley; and Eugene "Tayo" Williams, 18, of the Harvey housing community. Police had said earlier that the suspects were being sought on first-degree murder and weapons charges.
According to Francis, police were not notified in advance that the three planned to surrender Wednesday morning. "But we had activated a special team that had made contact with their families last evening and let them know we were searching for them and that it would be in their best interests to come in," he said. All arrived with their parents, and none was accompanied by legal counsel, he said.
Bryan, the son of Sen. Adelbert Bryan, was fatally shot Sunday near the Texaco service station in Estate Betty's Hope. The shooting reportedly occurred when an argument at an impromptu horse race on the scene escalated into gunfire. Shot once in the chest, Bryan was pronounced dead shortly before noon Sunday at Juan F. Luis Hospital.