As they arrive for the Tests against England, West Indies are average on the field and a shambles off it. Stephen Brenkley reports

All 163 passengers and crew on board a Caribbean Airlines jet survived when the plane skidded off the runway while landing at night in Guyana and broke in two on the edge of a ravine.

Guyana novel flows like a river

World-class wildlife, swathes of untouched rainforest and historic cities. Donald Greig finds much to recommend about a trip to Guyana and Suriname

The Good, the Bad and the Odd

Katharine Birbalsingh is the deputy head whose observations on South London schools in her blog, and at the Conservative Party conference, put her under pressure to resign from a Streatham "Academy". You needn't agree with her views, or how they were publicised, to call this over-reaction. And this fictionalised re-creation – borrowing its title from ER Braithwaite's To Sir, With Love (1959) – will be pored over for political significance.

A wheezy alarm call, like a smoker's cough, is the first clue. Then, as your dugout noses further into the Amazonian backwater, a flurry of wingbeats has you peering upwards. A big, chestnut-coloured bird lurches out of the tangle and flaps clumsily away, like some deranged, prehistoric pheasant.

A plane owned by Venezuela's state-run airline Conviasa crashed yesterday during a domestic flight with about 50 people on board, but at least 23 survived.

Forget the sanitised world of modern package tourism. For Dom Joly, it’s more rewarding to spend time visiting the planet’s more difficult destinations

Two Islamist militants were found guilty yesterday by a federal jury of plotting to bomb John F Kennedy International Airport. Russell Defreitas, 67, a US citizen born in Guyana, and Abdul Kadir, 58, of Guyana, conspired to blow up buildings, fuel tanks and pipelines at the airport in the New York City borough of Queens.

Writers, even the most conformist and conventional of them, very seldom receive knighthoods. Adventurous, uncompromising and idiosyncratic novelists almost never do. Yet, last week, in the Birthday Honours List, the Queen rewarded just such a figure. Raised in Guyana, by training a surveyor with a profound, life-changing knowledge of the fragile eco-systems of his native land. he has long lived in Essex. Half a century ago, TS Eliot (in his role as editor at Faber & Faber) talent-spotted his first novel.

All the talk now is of Eoin Morgan. It began as an excited muttering in South Africa last September, grew into something more voluble on his return there in November, became more urgent in Bangladesh in March and has shown no sign of declining from fever pitch in Guyana this week.

This week I'm writing about a recent break that I took to a wonderful rum distillery in Guyana. What with my tequila mission to Mexico last year, as well as quite a few wine trips abroad, it's true that many of my excursions are based around alcohol, but I justify them by telling myself that having a full understanding of all the types of alcohol in the world is an integral part of my job – at least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Cy Grant has died after a brief illness at the age of 90. He was the first black person to appear regularly on British factual television.