There is something passionately redemptive about a country like Jamaica that as poor, underdeveloped and crime-ridden as we are, we produced the great Dr T.P. Lecky, Usain Bolt, Drs Henry Lowe and Lawrence Williams and many others who could easily...
Jamaica's Supreme Court made a historic ruling last week in Brendan Bain's case which should be cause for thoughtful reflection by Jamaica's evangelical churches in their current quarrel with the Rev Garnett Roper.By way of background, Professor...
The police force is investigating the deputy chairman of the Firearm Licensing Authority (FLA) (Gleaner, July 30). This is subsequent to serious allegations about the issuing of gun licences. I thought I heard the chief executive officer (CEO) of...
Confederates, a new HBO series that will follow its blockbuster Game of Thrones, has excited quite a reaction on social media with its premise: What if the South won the Civil War? What would the United States look like today? It prompted Jamal...
Anthony Zurcher, the BBC's North America correspondent, nailed it in a report on July 27. "Where Abraham Lincoln had his famous 'team of rivals' in his administration, this is something different," Zurcher wrote. "Trump White House seems more akin...
As he presides over the celebrations for Jamaica's 55th anniversary of Independence and 179 years since slavery ended, Prime Minister Andrew Holness ought not to miss the latest evidence of the cynicism and mistrust entertained by Jamaicans. And...
Where do I start? I definitely couldn't start at the beginning, since I am talking about a year worth of stress. Yes! I am referring to the Ministry of Education. And I am quite sure I am not alone in my distress if its online reviews are testament...
Nowadays, most media accept that they must move with the times and speak to their readers/viewers in language they'll understand and appreciate.The alternative is to surrender to the articulate majority on FacetyBook, Twatter, Gaggle, What's Up, and...
The minister of national security makes it clear that the issue of conjugal visits in prisons isn't yet carved in stone. It's up for discussion. Well, Mr Minister, I want to join in on the discussion.In all the discourse I've heard and read on the...
My professors have lways discouraged me whenever I have research ideas relating to crime. Out of an abundance of fear, mainly. This time, it is not fear that will force me forward; it is my simmering anger about the special operations zones...
Robert Montague, the national security minister, needs to speak with greater clarity about the Firearm Licensing Authority (FLA), as well as to order the agency's chairman, Dennis Wright, to imbibe a heavy dose of transparency. And perhaps, under...
One day, several years ago, while taking my daughter home from school, she asked me a very interesting question: “Daddy, regarding the buggery law, if two men are caught having sex, the punishment is to lock...
We take as a good sign the fact that the Government didn't back, at the House's last sitting, the bill by which it aims to establish a single anti-corruption agency. We assume that it is engaged in a serious rethink of the problematic Clause 52,...
I've been practising as a family physician for almost three and a half decades and four negative things always come up about men.Most men pay very little attention to their health until something bad happens to them.Most men want their ability to...
The children in the summer school don't know how to pray or when to keep silent or how to form a straight line. But they know how to dance, to 'cut eye' and to 'chups' their teeth in scorn at one another.Although most of them are about to enter high...
There are so many things happening concurrently in the Jamaican society and specifically in the body politics that there is a stench across the country. Persons who have been elected, persons who are identified with, and persons who have...
Businesses, unfortunately, can't survive merely on sentiment. If they could, Air Jamaica would still be 'the little piece of Jamaica that flies'. Few enterprises enjoyed such national romantic attachment.Unfortunately, like most state-owned firms,...
I'm reading the Gleaner editorial 'Conjugal visits as prisons collapse' and thinking: So what exactly is the incentive to avoid a life of crime now? There's little chance of being apprehended. If apprehended, there's little chance of being convicted...
Internal party rivalry and contests are usually verbally brutal matters, sometimes even more so than elections between the PNP and JLP. Fairly recent examples are there for us to recall with much clarity.In her rise to the very top of the PNP in...
Last Sunday morning, at about 8:30, I had a revelation at Reggae Sumfest. I had suffered two consecutive nights of sleep deprivation. That was probably what inspired the vision. It came to me in a flash that it was time to rebrand the festival as...
Groucho Marx, the humorist, once declined membership in a club by responding, "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." I tend to be the same, so that when for the first time in my life one...
Older Jamaicans may be forgiven for bemoaning the lack of innovation by millennials and their parents before them, for while technology has been moving at breakneck speed across the globe, our growth in this area has been sluggish.The traditional...
Robert Montague is prone to muddling his priorities. In this case, it is the welfare of prisoners.On Monday, addressing the biennial Diaspora Conference, the national security minister announced a policy for private spousal visits for inmates of...
I have not read the written submission by Anglican Bishop Howard Gregory to the parliamentary committee examining the Sexual Offences Act and related laws, and all I have to go on is the report in The Sunday Gleaner of July 23, 2017. The report...
The Gold Cup is over and the Jamaican public now has a chance to look back at the performance of the team. Not too many of us would have predicted that we would have gone all the way to the final, especially after that loss to Curacao in the...
