In Focus
As we enter 2026, Jamaica confronts a stark paradox. In 2025, the nation achieved a historic breakthrough: murders fell to a provisional 673, the lowest annual total in over three decades and a roughly 41 per cent decline from 2024. This dramatic...
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Bruce Golding’s recent article in the Jamaica Observer, titled ‘Things fall apart’ in almost every respect, is a truthful and courageous reckoning with the collapse of the post-WWII rules-based international order. The article, written by someone...
So, USA foreign policy results in an invasion of Venezuela to capture an alleged drug trafficker/“narco-terrorist” who also happens to be President. Why? How come this is how you “arrest” Nicolas Maduro on a USA indictment but not Christopher Coke...
At his core, the US president swims in a huge void.One of the great Trump policy directions is one of non-intervention, that is, no armed intervention. That, I believe, was his intention until a little thing called Jeffrey Epstein gave life to many...
For those who believed that the age of imperial adventurism and piracy was confined to the history books — age-old memories of the Barbary Coast or the scramble for Africa — the events unfolding in Venezuela this January stand as a stark and...
As we reflect on 2025 and look ahead to a new year, we do so at a moment of profound national significance. For the first time in more than three decades, Jamaica has recorded fewer than 700 murders in a single year. The provisional figure of 673...
I was warned about what I would see before heading to Black River, but no image of the damage from Hurricane Melissa fully captured the devastation, and nothing prepared me for the horror of the stories people shared. I had visited Black River...
Last week’s story in The Gleaner - “When Kids Get Caught — Heartache as grandmother struggles with teen grandson’s sexual assault charges” - laid bare a heartbreaking but avoidable consequence of our current law. A 16-year-old boy - a prefect and...
Jamaica knows the Atlantic story too well. Between the early slave trade and abolition, somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 Africans were forced onto the island. Shipping records show that a material share of Jamaica’s human cargo came from ports...
In my customary perusal of the Sunday Gleaner, December 7, two interesting articles caught my eye. The first questioned God’s purpose following Melissa’s untimely destruction of a country, which I remind you, has the most churches per square mile...
A useful parallel can be drawn in contemporary international relations between 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The comparison suggests that the war in Ukraine has...
I know this is a New Year. But will Jamaica take a new approach to overcome the fundamental obstacle to its progress? It’s neither political nor religious. The one issue blocking Jamaica from success is the way we educate our children. This isn’t...
Despite most of us having no clue where the time went it seems another new year is upon us. The thing about time is that it not only flies but changes direction, fortunes and perspectives while doing so. Time is multi faceted. And relentless. For...
Jamaica has agreed to a number of international agreements that bind it to providing an accessible and inclusive environment for persons with disabilities. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the...
Jamaica’s prolonged mistreatment of Haitian migrants is often defended in the language of capacity, sovereignty, or political realism. Yet five years on — and now brutally exposed by Hurricane Melissa (a manmade weapon of mass destruction without...
Hurricane Melissa’s vastly different human and infrastructural impact between eastern and western Jamaica has continued into the early recovery stages. There is another, far less obvious, disaster divide that is affecting some of the most...
