The forum of emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), is very much in the news. There is much global interest in the economic developments in this group, especially as it relates to creating an alternative...
The Gleaner editorial of March 29 made reference to the origins of the Integrity Commission, the act that establishes and governs that entity, and the position of the Opposition with respect to it, on which I wish to shed light. This is necessary...
Even after last week’s first public disclosure of the matters on which it is already agreed, it remains unclear how the Constitutional Reform Committee has structured its work and its timetable for delivering its report to the Government. This...
It appears Chris Tufton can’t stop thinking about Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) or, more precisely, ways to avoid accepting responsibility for that expensive public health shambles. On March 10, he was marking a new steam boiler installation at...
The late appointment of Elaine McCarthy to the committee reviewing Jamaica’s constitution will be interpreted as a move by the Government to appease the anti-LGBT rights lobby and people who are against liberal abortion laws. If this is indeed a...
April is being observed as Venous Month. One of the most common and troubling vascular diseases involves our veins. Veins carry blood back to our heart. As a rule, they transport deoxygenated blood. The only exception is the pulmonary vein (which...
Read the Letter of the Day in last Wednesday’s Gleaner from two teachers pleading for understanding of the horrible deficit of learning and behaviour standards among school youths in the wake of COVID-19. We were losing a high proportion of that...
One of my favourite Anansi stories has a stinging moral about greed. It’s one of the many tales recorded by the American anthropologist Martha Beckwith who did research in Jamaica between 1919 and 1922. Her collection, Jamaica Anansi Stories, was...
It is surprising that Delroy Chuck, the justice minister, is resistant to amending the law to narrow the pool of people exempt from jury duty. He apparently believes that the crisis of courts being unable to find sufficient jurors can be solved...
In recent times, an expressive saying has developed among the populace that ‘Jamaica is not a country, it is a place’. They say that too many of the usual attributes of a country are absent from this land of ours. When questioned, they explain that...
Do not muzzle the ox, that is grinding the grain (1 Timothy 5:18). Oxen are cattle, generally male and believe me, if you approach them from the wrong end, you have to deal with a lot of bull chips. Bovine species have served man for centuries. And...
The past two years have been the most health-conscious period in recent history. One only has to give a “pandemic baby” a bottle of sanitiser and they will automatically rub their hands together. Mask wearing and the awareness of droplets and...
Making justice equal to all Jamaicans is a work in progress. Impatience with the slow advancement of that ideal has caused various sectors of society to clamour for criminal justice reform. Concerns range from access to bail, the lack of jurors, to...
I was astonished, recently, to be told by one of the representatives of the Caribbean on the board of the World Bank (WB) that Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, St Kitts-Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago, should not expect any change in the...
The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, believed, “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” This is why I write a humorous column. Then the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, took it from...
In the absence of a compelling explanation to the contrary, it is hard to conclude other than that the constabulary deliberately frustrated attempts by the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) to monitor its handling of detainees under states of...
A head-scratcher which has puzzled some sociologists of the Caribbean is why places like Jamaica where blacks outnumbered whites 30 to one never had a successful slave rebellion. Surely the force of numbers alone could have overpowered the few...
We must distinguish between ‘growth’ and ‘development’. Growth is simply an increase in GDP, however achieved. Development, however, is the transformation of the production structure. This difference is captured in Harvard’s ‘economic complexity...
Even with Anand Biradar’s far less dire prediction, Jamaica’s business process outsourcing (BPO) sector – comprising primarily call centres – could be heading into difficult times. In two years or so, says Biradar, the president of Global...
Between 2013 and 2016, some 130 Trinidadian nationals, men and women, travelled to Syria to join ISIS in their fight to establish an Islamic State. Trinidad was the largest contributing nation, on a per capita basis, in the Western Hemisphere. At...
For the second straight week, Champs’ ugly side continued to grab some of the headlines coming out of the spectacular championships to which we were treated by our high school children a few weeks ago. And yes, I called them children because,...
While this newspaper shares Belize’s concern of its territory being used as a staging point for people being smuggled into the United States, the Belizean authorities must be mindful that the sustainable solution is not to walk away from its...
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 was the third anniversary of the establishment, as a full international organisation, of the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS). The secretary general of the organisation, H.E. Georges Rebelo...
MA multitude of crises have placed the world on a path towards a profoundly unjust economic future. If we are going to protect the global commons and create a better existence for future generations, we need moral leadership coupled with just...
It is exciting news that Bobby Stewart’s minerals exploration outfit, Geophysx Jamaica, is moving towards new testing of the feasibility of extracting rare earth elements (REE) from red mud, the effluent left when bauxite is refined into alumina....
