A FEW weeks ago, veteran pollster Don Anderson asked this very same question of a sample of Jamaican respondents. I was quite surprised to learn that this was his very first such poll, given that for as long as I can remember, this question has...
SINCE THE massacre of over 1,200 Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023, and the retaliation that the Palestinians have been subjected to continuously since then, in the name of eliminating Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there has been no sight of a...
Readers of Carolyn Cooper’s weekly column in The Sunday Gleaner know that the squalor of Papine Market in Eastern St Andrew is a peeve about which she wrote often, until she perhaps grew tired of the authorities’ failure to heed her complaints. Or...
For January, I have been looking at the growth projections for the global economy for this year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its report of October 2023, projected that the world economy would achieve growth of 2.9 per cent in 2024,...
One day last week, while checking my WhatsApp messages, I came across a video sent to me by a friend. In the clip, a woman is seen arguing with a schoolgirl at a gas station in Half-Way Tree. The girl pushes her away, she proceeds to rain blows on...
Fasten your seatbelts because The Old Ball and Chain is on one of her public affairs rants. Old BC: Old Grey Balls thinks he’s the only one with concerns. But he keeps on bleating about Constitutional Reform when Jamaica’s biggest problem is...
Over the last 30 years, supporters of the West Indies cricket have observed many false dawns of the team’s recovery, and even more declarations of its imminent turning of the corner. After each new Test match or series loss, they endured vacuous...
Last week, an international comparison of education efficiency punctured the public relations jag that we are being fed in place of substantial change. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report should arrest the consciences...
There is little, if anything, surprising in the educational performance of Jamaican high school students in the assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Rather, the findings are in concert with the several...
I am writing this in response to The Gleaner’s editorial of January 23, titled ‘Dehring wrong on Rowe’. More than most, I was hurt and angered by the South African ‘rebel’ tours. There is no justification for what they did and, 42 years later, we...
There is a labour shortage in the tourism industry and by all accounts there is an urgent need to address it before it impacts the delivery of service. Some have called for the immediate importation of workers to fill the gap. However, I question...
The usual reflex of Jamaica’s police force is to bristle at any form of criticism, no matter how well-intentioned. That, hopefully, won’t be the response to Justice Bertram Morrison’s sensible advice to cops this week that roughhouse tactics isn’t...
Two Saturdays ago, just as I was heading out to the weekly Ujima Natural Farmers Market in Hope Gardens, I got an instructive call from one of my friends. He wanted to make sure I’d seen a text he’d just sent about a post by @iamcarlenes on X: “...
April 1980, the newly-independent Zimbabwe was celebrating the latest bite of the self-government pie, south of the Sahara Desert. A little Jamaican man, no taller than five feet seven inches, a hybrid of a British father and an Afro-Jamaican...
Because our emboldened murderers are killing citizens with impunity, many want to see the reinstitution of Jamaican’s form of capital punishment, hanging. Although we are sick and tired of the vicious and macabre killings, of the constant fear of...
Of the several emotive issues in this newspaper’s report of 12-year-old Karif Mitchenere’s drowning in Kingston Harbour on Wednesday, two were particularly poignant and ought to be of interest to Prime Minister Andrew Holness in his quest for a...
Dedicated to Tobago and young fisherman, Nkosi Walker, who taught the old bird new tricks You are never too old to learn. If this was not something I have always known, I would have found it out the hard way earlier this week. My son Zubin, who...
Up until a few weeks ago, the Red Sea and Yemen held little significance for the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, an unexpected turn of events thrust these regions into the spotlight — the relentless attacks on commercial...
In a country plagued with actual problems, it’s interesting how our leaders often fabricate issues where there are absolutely none, only to provide the ‘solutions’ we never needed. Of course, it is then easy for them to brand themselves as the...
Former Minister of Education Ruel Reid is to be congratulated for having Jamaica evaluated under PISA – The Programme for International Student Assessment – conducted by the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Another...
The smart money is on municipal elections being held in mid-February. Which means, if that time frame is really in play, Prime Minister Andrew Holness will have to announce the date either today or tomorrow, to ensure the 21 days between the...
We live in an unprecedented era of misinformation and disinformation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bellowed across my living room for someone to shut off the radio (yes, I still own a radio), whenever I hear one of the known purveyors of...
A week ago, this newspaper told Mikael Phillips, the shadow transportation minister, to get on with the job of crafting the policies and programmes he hopes to implement in government, rather than wait until the People’s National Party (PNP) enters...
THE YEAR 2023 is now behind us and I found myself thinking: A year has passed, I have lived to see another. How did I get here so quickly? It was only yesterday that I had achieved my first real objective in life and that was to reach age 21 and be...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its associated technologies have begun impacting jobs worldwide. AI, with its human-like programmable persona, is one of the latest trends affecting many low to medium-skilled job roles today. The rapid...
