Interiors from MSI will host the St. Thomas/St. John Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours at Interiors located at Fort Mylner Shopping Center. Join in for a chance to win a Hunter Original Fan and listen to the sounds of Glen Samuel's steel pan music.
Members, guests and potential members are encouraged to attend. Complimentary horsd'oevers will be served as well as the famous Chambe $2 bar.

The Virgin Islands American Classic, Inc. will host its annual Recognition Luncheon at the Palm Courts Harbor View Hotel.
The luncheon will honor Mrs. Eileen C. Jackson, Mrs. Gwendolyn R. Harley, Mr. Arthur Raymo, Mrs. Marjorie Pell and Mrs. Marilyn Adina Penn.
Tickets are $35 and can be purchased at Family Health Center, Nisky Pharmacy, Orchid Boutique and Krystal & Gifts Galore.
for more information contact Ms. Cheryl Plaskett at 774-5265.

The Virgin Islands American Classic, Inc. will host its annual Recognition Luncheon at the Palm Courts Harbor View Hotel.
The luncheon will honor Mrs. Eileen C. Jackson, Mrs. Gwendolyn R. Harley, Mr. Arthur Raymo, Mrs. Marjorie Pell and Mrs. Marilyn Adina Penn.
Tickets are $35 and can be purchased at Family Health Center, Nisky Pharmacy, Orchid Boutique and Krystal & Gifts Galore.
For more information contact Ms. Cheryl Plaskett at 774-5265.

There will be a general meeting for all St. John veterans at Mooies Bar meeting room. All veterans are urged to attend and bring another veteran.

Oct. 5, 2001 – As Tropical Storm Iris moves in a westerly direction from south of Puerto Rico Friday night, the territory will see continued heavy showers and gusty winds associated with the storm's outer bands. Sustained winds of 15 to 30 mph are expected, and flash flood and wind advisories remain in effect.
Gusty winds and occasional heavy rains began early Friday morning across the territory. The weather system is expected to taper off overnight, but residents could see some heavy rain showers and thunderstorms on Saturday. Forecaster Brad Diehl at the National Weather Service in San Juan said there was a 50 percent chance of showers on Saturday.
Tropical Storm Iris developed late Friday afternoon from Tropical Depression 11. At 5 p.m. Friday, it was located 126 miles south of Ponce, Puerto Rico, at 15.8 degrees north latitude and 66.8 degrees west longitude. "You're out of harm's way," Diehl said, referring to the Virgin Islands.
With sustained winds of up to 60 mph, Tropical Storm Iris was moving west-northwest at 17 mph Friday eveing. Forecasters said the storm could become a hurricane on Saturday. Hurricane warnings were issued for the south coasts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with tropical storm warnings issued for Jamaica.
Meantime, Diehl said, a tropical wave now making its way across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean could become a tropical depression over the weekend.

Oct. 5, 2001 – Suspected protesters in two small boats fired what appeared to be two marine flares at a U.S. Navy helicopter from restricted waters off Vieques Thursday, a Navy spokeswoman said Friday.
Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode said that the flares missed the SH-3 Sea King helicopter and "nobody was injured."
Navy and police patrol boats along with a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter and an SH-3 Navy helicopter had been dispatched to pursue the unidentified boats because they were trespassing in a restricted area, Goode said. When the Navy helicopter approached the trespassing boats, she said, they fired the flares at it.
A Coast Guard spokesman, Petty Officer 2nd Class Thomas O'Brien, said Friday that the Coast Guard cutter Matinicus "chased the two unidentified boats as they sped away to the west hugging the shoreline." Meanwhile, he said, another Coast Guard cutter, the Vashon, moved to intercept the fleeing boats from the west. He said the cutters converged off Vieques' southern coast near Esperanza and "observed the two unidentified boats leaving the water on boat trailers at Puerto Real."
Goode said the FBI is investigating the incident. Efforts to reach FBI officials for information were unsuccessful.
The bombing range off Vieques is currently being used by the Navy's USS John F. Kennedy Battle Group for essential training using inert, non-explosive ammunition rounds.
Navy exercises in the area have prompted widespread protests by residents of the island, which is a part of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and by residents of Puerto Rico itself and elsewhere. "Let's hope that anybody [else] that decides to protest does it legally," Goode said Friday.
The island of some 9,100 inhabitants, many of them related to Virgin Islands residents, is often visible roughly 20 miles southwest of St. Thomas and 40 miles northwest of St. Croix. The sounds of bombs detonating often can be heard on the west end of St. Thomas.

Oct. 5, 2001 – In his home on a quiet road near the Peace Corps School, Etienne Querrard took in "problem" North Side boys and provided them with shelter and discipline. After the conflicts with family cooled off in a month or so, he sent them home. He also ran a little shop for the neighbors. This was in the 1940s and '50s.
Querrard's granddaughter Annette Etienne and her husband, Aaron, have just taken over ownership of the Mandahl Market, started in that same building in 1992 by Annette's parents, Eleanore and George Querrard.
When Eleanore Querrard retired from the Health Department in the early 1990s, she found that the volunteer work she was doing just wasn't enough to use up her energy. "I had always wanted to be a business owner," she recalled. One day her daughter Annette sat her down and said, "I think you and George can open a convenience grocery on that land in Mandahl."
So they picked up the idea and ran with it, and all of their family members have worked alongside them from the time the neighborhood store opened.
Now Eleanore Querrard is retiring again, and the Etiennes have taken over the running of the market. Following in the tradition of her grandfather, Annette Etienne wants to provide "a community gathering place." So, they have begun holding Saturday flea markets in the parking lot.
The first, on Sept. 29, was a great success, even with parking-lot confusion during the benefit carwash. The second is this weekend, from 7 a..m. to 6:30 p.m. If there's interest, they plan to expand the operation to Sundays, too.
A sign-up fee of $20 entitles vendors to tents and tables — and a crowd, Annette Etienne indicated. For schools and community organizations, the fee is waived, and there has been a special request for sellers of Girl Scout cookies.
The first week's vendors offered new and used items, arts and crafts, barbecue and Cajun food, plants and more. For this week, a masseuse has signed on, and the Etiennes hope more personal services providers — offering haircuts or manicures, for example — will set up.
Annette Etienne expressed particularly the hope that "parents will encourage children to come set up a small table, sell, and earn a little change of their own, in a safe and friendly environment." In her own way, she would be carrying on her grandfather's tradition of caring for youngsters and preparing them to make their way in the world.

Oct. 5, 2001 – Jeffrey Prosser's Virgin Islands Community Bank filed a $50 million lawsuit against Chase Manhattan Bank on Thursday, effectively scuttling his bid to purchase Chase’s assets in the territory.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court on St. Croix, alleges that Chase acted fraudulently and had misrepresented itself.
Prosser had written to JPMorgan Chase, the bank's parent company, in New York on Aug. 29 informing its officials of his intention to file the suit.
Prosser accused Chase of having "attempted to sell assets that were otherwise unmarketable to avoid the Virgin Islands Plant Closing Act," causing VICB to invest "in excess of $5 million in the aborted transaction and to forgo opportunities to expand its business to the islands of St. Thomas and St. John."
The deal between the two banks "can be considered to be dead at this point," VICB President Michael Dow said Thursday night.
No Chase representatives in the Virgin Islands or in New York could be reached Thursday night. The Source could not confirm whether Chase had filed a suit against Prosser or his bank in New York on Thursday. Dow said he was unaware of such a move but that a suit and countersuit situation wouldn’t be unusual in a "matter of this kind."
The VICB lawsuit alleges that Chase misrepresented itself in the deal when it initially failed to disclose information about a pending $25 million class-action lawsuit. In his August letter to Chase, Prosser said that after entering into a contract with the New York-based company, VICB uncovered information regarding Chase’s operations in the Virgin Islands that were "contrary to representations made by Chase which were material to the transaction …"
Chase, Prosser wrote, caused him to "expend millions of dollars in good faith pursuit of the transaction that could not be closed," including paying $2 million upon signing the contract.
The main problem, according to Dow, was a pending multimillion-dollar, class-action lawsuit against Chase Bank and Chase Agency Services, a bank subsidiary that sells mortgage insurance. Had the deal been completed, VICB would have been liable for any damages awarded in the case.
"It would be downright foolish for us to close on a deal when the seller is being sued in a class-action suit," Dow said. "That really is the crux of the whole thing — that class-action lawsuit."
In a story in early August about the delay in the deal between the two banks, The Source reported that if VICB had to assume Chase Agency Services liabilities, meaning the potential $25 million lawsuit, it could become a basis for Prosser to pull out of the planned deal without being forced to pay Chase a substantial penalty for negotiating in bad faith.
Dow, however, said VICB was "ready and willing to close."
Prosser in his Aug. 29 letter to Chase alleged that the company was illegally selling insurance through Chase Agency Services. That, he said, in turn, negatively affected Chase local branches' current and future earnings, the valuation of loans to be acquired in the deal, and the "value and goodwill" of Chase Agency Services.
Even after VICB learned of the class-action suit, Prosser said, Chase failed to provide requested information.
"The Chase acts demonstrate an ongoing deceptive pattern of conduct that persisted from the negotiations through this day with the intent of drawing the purchaser into a precarious position," Prosser wrote Chase officials in August. "That may have been part of the plan, scheme and design of Chase’s undisclosed motive."
A month ago, VICB received an extension to Dec. 7 from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to complete the purchase of the territory's Chase Bank assets. It was the second such extension granted by the FDIC to acquire the seven V.I. branches of the New York-based Chase Bank. The initial deadline of May 7 had been extended at VICB's request to Sept. 7. Chase and VICB entered into negotiations in 1999.
The VIBC lawsuit, filed by St. Croix attorney Joel Holt, states that the proposed deal had an international aspect, in that the parties had contracted for V.I. Community Bank to purchase from Chase "its bank branches and certain other assets including its insurance business in the Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands."
In his Aug. 29 letter, Prosser wrote that as a pre-contract condition, "Chase required the purchaser to enter into confidentiality agreements that precluded all contact with the government of the British Virgin Islands." Further, he charged that Chase "failed to disclose its own closedown problems with the B.V.I. government, which created for the purchaser an unknown hostile environment in the B.V.I."
Prosser founded V.I. Community Bank on Dec. 30, 1994. The bank operates only on St. Croix, where it has three branches with some $78 million in assets. Chase in the U.S. Virgin Islands has four branches on St. Thomas, two on St. Croix and one on St. John. According to the FDIC, had the Chase acquisition gone through, VICB would have had assets of about $500 million.
Prosser also claimed that Chase failed to disclose that another Chase subsidiary, Chase Trade, was adversely affected by a World Trade Organization decision that effectively outlawed foreign sales corporations in the territory. The WTO action, Prosser said, negative affected the value of the deal.
Molly Morris contributed to this report.

Oct. 5, 2001 — The current emptiness of St. Croix hotels could extend into the height of the tourist season unless the government’s newly announced advertising plan and additional marketing efforts are successful, the island's hotel association president says.
Last week, there were 148 hotel guests staying in St. Croix’s approximately 1,000 rooms, according to Wendell Snider, St. Croix Hotel and Tourism Association president and general manager of the Hibiscus Beach Resort. That number improved only slightly this week, he said, almost a month after the terrorist attacks on the mainland.
"We didn’t have enough to fill the Divi [Carina Bay Resort]," he said. "The short-term forecast is very grim."
The Divi, meanwhile, is reporting that only 10 percent of its 150 rooms are occupied, and for that reason it has laid off 20 employees.
Considering the effect the attacks had on air travel, Snider said, it was inevitable that the remainder of September and October would be understandably slow locally. September is traditionally a quiet month anyway because it is the height of hurricane season.
A bigger concern to hoteliers now, Snider said, are the months to come that make up the bulk of their business. Snider said most hotels -– and other tourism-related businesses -– earn their profits in December, January, February and March.
"Cancellations have basically wiped out October, November and December," he said.
At the Hibiscus Beach Resort, he said, staff schedules have been cut, but no one has been laid off. Current bookings are down 80 percent to 90 percent, he said.
He has only two rooms booked for Christmas — "and for the first half of January, nothing," Snider said. Hotels territorywide have lost 5,000 room nights, which translates into about $5 million, he said, and "we are in great danger of not having a season."
In an effort to avert such a disaster, the government announced plans Wednesday to launch a $6.5 million advertising and marketing campaign to promote tourism with a patriotic emphasis. The new campaign will be in addition to a $17 million expenditure on advertising and marketing this year, making for the largest advertising push in the territory's history, according to Tourism Commissioner Pamela Richards.
Beginning on Oct. 22, TV viewers of CNN, the Weather Channel, the Travel Channel, ESPN and CNBC will see the most extensive V.I. marketing campaign ever, she said on Wednesday.
"This is a global crisis," Richards said Wednesday. But, she added, "If, in fact, the American traveler has decided to fly, we have a good chance of getting them here."
In Snider's view, "The Department of Tourism’s ad campaign, if anything, is going to work. We have to hope it does." But, he added, "The private sector has to build on it."
That may difficult, because the millions of dollars hotels traditionally use to promote their properties come from their income.
Another challenge will be what kind of fallout there will be if or when the United States retaliates for the terrorist attacks, Snider said. "We are at the mercy of timing," he said. "We all know when the shooting starts, things will stop again.
Whether some hotels and businesses on St. Croix can survive the coming months remains to be seen, he said.
"There are many hotels that won’t make it on 90 days existing cash flow," he said. "But there aren’t many choices."

Oct. 5, 2001 – Jeffrey Prosser, owner of the Virgin Islands Community Bank, filed a $50 million lawsuit against Chase Manhattan Bank on Thursday, effectively scuttling his bid to purchase Chase’s assets in the territory.
Before filing the lawsuit on Thursday in St. Croix District Court alleging that Chase acted fraudulently and had misrepresented itself, Prosser wrote JPMorgan Chase in New York on Aug. 29, informing leaders of the parent company that owns Virgin Islands Chase Bank of his intention to sue for $50 million.
Prosser said Chase "attempted to sell assets that were otherwise unmarketable to avoid the Virgin Islands Plant Closing Act causing VICB to invest in excess of $5 million in the aborted transaction, and to forego opportunities to expand its business to the islands of St. Thomas and St. John."
The deal between the two banks "can be considered to be dead at this point," VICB President Michael Dow said late Thursday.
No representatives from Chase in the Virgin Islands or in New York could be reached Thursday night. The Source could not confirm whether Chase had filed a counter suit in New York on Thursday. Dow said he was unaware of such a move, but said it wouldn’t be unusual in a "matter of this kind."
The VICB lawsuit alleges that Chase misrepresented itself in the deal when it initially failed to disclose information about a pending $25 million class-action lawsuit. In his August letter to Chase, Prosser said that after entering into a contract with the New York-based company, VICB uncovered information regarding Chase’s operations in the Virgin Islands that were "contrary to representations made by Chase which were material to the transaction…"
Chase, Prosser wrote, caused him to "expend millions of dollars in good faith pursuit of the transaction that could not be closed," including paying $2 million upon signing the contract.
The main problem, according to Dow, was the multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit against Chase and Chase Agency Services, a Chase subsidiary that sells mortgage insurance. Had the deal been completed, VICB would have been liable for any damages awarded in the case.
"It would be downright foolish for us to close on a deal when the seller is being sued in a class-action suit," Dow said. "That really is the crux of the whole thing; that class-action lawsuit."
In an a story in early August about the delay in the deal between the two banks, The Source reported that if VICB had to assume Chase Agency Service liabilities, meaning the potential $25 million lawsuit, it could become a basis for Prosser to pull out of the planned deal without being
forced to pay Chase a substantial penalty for negotiating in bad faith.
Dow, however, said VICB was "ready and willing to close."
In his Aug. 29 letter to Chase, Prosser alleged that the company was illegally selling insurance through Chase Agency Services. That in turn negatively effected Chase’s local branches current and future earnings; the valuation of loans to be acquired in the deal; and the "value and goodwill" of Chase Agency Services, he said.
Even after VICB learned of the class-action suit, Prosser said Chase failed to provide requested information.
"The Chase Acts demonstrate an ongoing deceptive pattern of conduct that persisted from the negotiations through this day with the intent of drawing the purchaser into a precarious position," Prosser wrote Chase officials in August. "That may have been part of the plan, scheme and design of Chase’s undisclosed motive."
A little less than a month ago, VICB received an extension to Dec. 7 from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to complete the purchase of the territory's Chase Bank assets. It was the second such extension granted by the FDIC to acquire the seven V.I. branches of the New York-based Chase Bank. The initial deadline was May 7.
At VICB's request, that date was extended four months to Sept. 7. Chase and VICB entered into negotiations in 1999.
Prosser founded V.I. Community Bank on Dec. 30, 1994. The bank operates only on St. Croix, where it has three branches with some $78 million in assets. Chase in the Virgin Islands has four branches on St. Thomas, two on St. Croix and one on St. John. According to the FDIC, if the Chase acquisition goes through, VICB will have assets of about $500 million.
Prosser also claimed that Chase failed to disclose that another Chase subsidiary, Chase Trade, was adversely affected by a World Trade Organization decision that effectively outlawed foreign sales corporations in the territory. The WTO action, Prosser said, negative affected the value of the deal.