In Focus

Robbie Earle, the first man to score a goal for Jamaica at the World Cup finals, chronicled how then Minister of Sports Portia Simpson Miller contributed to the Reggae Boyz World Cup experience in France 1998. Earle reported that the night before their first game against Croatia, the entire squad watched in horror a TV documentary by Britain's Channel 4 which painted a very unfair picture of the Boyz's camp in Jamaica.

In recent discussions about the backlog of cases in the Circuit Courts, some persons are blaming the preliminary enquiry for the problem and advocating its abolition. The backlog is caused by delay in disposing of cases, and it has taken many years to get to what is now a veritable crisis.

Common sense must always prevail: in politics, in life, with an acute sensitivity to the distress of the poor, unemployed and working.

The protests that erupted this spring at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona - in which angry students, excluded for their inability to pay fees, forcefully disrupted final examinations - were not unique to Jamaica. They are part of a wider international pattern of student angst about how to manage their immediate finances in the midst of education cutbacks, while also facing bleak long-term employment and loan-repayment prospects.

On Sunday, April 15, a column ('Follow Jesus' map') I'd submitted for Easter Sunday was finally published by the Conservative Old Lady of North Street (COLONS). It was intended to be a controversial but thought-provoking analysis of Christ's message.

Today's foremost scourge; the source of much of the world's violence; and the number one reason we don't have world peace is discrimination.

"The real challenge of our politics is to be able to debate more of the things that are of national interest and subordinate the partisan competition, which just allows everybody to take the easy populist route.

The civil-society group Citizens Action for Principle and Integrity was spot on last Monday as it raked the Simpson Miller administration over the coals for breaking its election promises and engaging in what it described as "barefaced deception".

Last week, a minibus driver, in a desperate attempt to evade the police and Transport Authority (TA), crashed his vehicle laden with passengers. When the dust settled, a teenage boy had his life snuffed out.

After promising to save the poor, Portia Simpson Miller's tax package has been fiercely condemned as a betrayal of society's most vulnerable. Now many of her harshest critics and most devoted supporters, especially those from the 'bowels of the working class', have united around one question: whether her election promises were a kiss from Judas.

Fresh on the heels of Education Minister Ronnie Thwaites' revelation that he has started a series of meetings with commercial banks, as his ministry seeks to help students find more ways of financing their tertiary studies, Finance Minister Peter Phillips opened the 2012-13 Budget Debate, highlighting the urgency of sourcing more resources to the education sector without further burdening the Consolidated Fund.

Humanity won when Barack Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage. It was also a brilliant, carefully planned and ruthlessly ...