This coming Sunday is celebrated as the Fourth Sunday in the Advent Season. Five hundred and ten years ago on the Fourth Sunday of Advent 1511, a sermon was preached in Santo Domingo which affected the course of the history of the New World....
“Who is your role model?” Is it Barack Obama? Mahatma Gandhi? Or L.A. Lewis? We ask kids this question until they are old enough to resent it, almost expecting that they will pinpoint some notable public figure in society and laud them for … really...
LAST WEEK, I wrote an article asking for modern-day Jamaican heroes to step to the fore and to put in a shift in the country’s fight against corruption and crime. Aside from giving me an excuse to play over three hours of some of Rihanna’s...
WE NEED to step back a little into the history of the coronavirus pandemic to appreciate where we are with sickness, deaths, testing and vaccines and as yet no cure. Then we may not be too sceptical of our responsibility to control the spread of...
THE CARIBBEAN Community’s (CARICOM) appointment this week of the respected diplomats, Wayne McCook and Donna Forde, as its trade and foreign policy chiefs, respectively, signals, this newspaper hopes, the start of a new, assertive response to...
Whatever happened to Nkrumah Fong and the VT EXACAP model 1? Earlier this year, Mr Fong, 31, a graduate student in environment management at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, placed second in the university’s Vincent HoSang Venture...
Published:Wednesday | December 15, 2021 | 12:08 AM
Breasts are causing problems again – female breasts, that is. Recently, Instagram removed a photograph of pop star Madonna and she was not amused. According to Madonna, “The reason they gave my management ... was that a small portion of my nipple...
Published:Wednesday | December 15, 2021 | 12:08 AM
In considering their status, the World Bank, using their GDP per capita, classifies five CARICOM countries as high income, eight as upper middle income, and one as a least developed country (LDC). CARICOM countries have been arguing that GDP...
If Fayval Williams had kept up her guard, as this newspaper warned, she might have avoided the clutches of the bureaucrats at the education ministry who seem to be constantly poking around machines programmed to spew out pompous titles and acronyms...
For those still unable to see how obsequiously sycophantic we are of Westminster and how damaging that is to psyche, morale and political maturity, this one’s for you. On December 8, BBC reported that PM Boris Johnson apologised for a video showing...
All Governments face the dilemma of promoting growth and providing a healthy environment for the citizens, especially in blighted inner-city areas. When the focus dwells on the first versus the latter, or when nothing is done in either case, you...
So if Mr Holness agrees that Jamaica must become a republic, why not a gracious reply to Mr Patterson, agreeing with him and confirming the immediate start of bipartisan Vale Royal talks towards that end? After all, in an entirely unhelpful and...
The government frequently uses the catchphrase, ‘getting back to normal’, in its effort to encourage citizens to adhere to the anti-COVID-19 protocols of distancing, hand/surface washing/sanitisation, wearing masks properly (when among others who...
In the English equivalent of Jamaican, Prime Minister Andrew Holness might be accused of ‘throwing words’. That is, making a criticism, or implying disapproval of someone without calling that person’s name, but being sufficiently clear that it is...
Believe it or not, the Queen of England appoints our national heroes. Not directly, of course! It’s her manservant, the governor general, who acts on her behalf. And it seems as if her favoured servant must always be a man. Why can’t a...
The folks back in Monterrey are probably wondering how long I will belabour the point of CEMEX taking royalties of up to four per cent from the earnings of Carib Cement Company Ltd (CCCL). The truth is that there is a legion of concerned Jamaicans...
Most of Jamaica’s current health infrastructure predates independence in 1962 and has not been sufficiently maintained. With this in mind, the Government of Jamaica has committed significant capital expenditure of between US$205.7 and US$236.2...
As a youngster, no male wanted to be called a board man. No, it had nothing to do with wood; but rather, it meant that such an individual was incapable of doing anything of substance. True, there was a slight sexual innuendo as well. So perhaps I...
Since Fayval Williams’ November 30 report to Parliament of her plan to reopen 383 more primary schools, providing an additional 164,000-plus students the opportunity to return to face-to-face classes, the education ministry hasn’t told the public...
Lerone Laing may well have Stephen Hawking’s IQ, dreams in astrophysics and the ability to decipher the world’s most complex economic equations. Which is the kind of contortionist argument the transport ministry is now attempting to not only...
United States (US) President Joe Biden declared at the opening of a ‘Summit for Democracy’, which he convened on December 9, that “democracy needs champions”. He is perfectly right. And he has good reason for saying so. Last year, the US - which...
First thing this morning, an online US news source hit me with the word ‘twindemic’ meaning not just the Delta and Omicron variants but COVID and flu spreading simultaneously. Yesterday, the same source published what is known as the WOTY for 2021...
Three businessmen – a Catholic, a Protestant, and an atheist – were discussing what Christmas means to them. The Protestant said Christmas means a 50 per cent increase in profits. The Catholic says Christmas means a 20 per cent increase in...
When this newspaper last year challenged the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) and its president, Derrick Deslandes, to assume intellectual leadership of propelling Jamaica’s agriculture into the 21st century, we did not...
We are in a bit of a crisis. Young people are having sex, are putting themselves at risk and contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Last year, there were 618 new cases of HIV and 16 per cent of them were among young...
