In Focus

I wrote recently to Dennis Lalor, chairman of the Air Jamaica Divestment Committee, and subsequently visited him at his offices at the ICWI building. I had written to him to congratulate him at the announcement of the 'deal' that had been arranged between Caribbean Airlines and Air Jamaica.

A phantom email. A mystery letter. Obeah envelopes. St Patrick's Day at the Manatt enquiry was straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps the strangest turn was the reaction to the reply from Manatt to a letter sent by Attorney General Dorothy Lightbourne.

One of the online respondents to Martin Henry's article 'PIOJ's growth-boosting strategy' (The Sunday Gleaner, March 13, 2011) - where he (Henry) attempted to summarise the content of the recently released PIOJ document, 'A Growth-Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and Medium Term' - remarked: "The country is not short of so-called road maps. It is in the implementation of their prescriptions that we have fallen short...

The minimum requirement for democracy is elections. Haiti is having trouble even meeting those requirements. The country will have another go at it today. It will have a run-off presidential election between Mirlande Manigat and Michel 'Sweet Mickey' Martelly. Many other run-offs will take place between candidates for the legislature as well.

You can tell a great deal about a country by the way it treats its women and children. The status that they occupy in the hierarchy of the society is usually a good indicator of whether the country is progressive or backward, oppressive or caring. What can we say about Jamaica?

Between 2006 and 2010, CARICOM countries saw women rising to powerful political positions in three of the 'Big Four' countries in CARICOM, plus another in Haiti. Portia Simpson Miller (Jamaica), Mia Mottley (Barbados) and Kamla Persad-Bissessar (Trinidad and Tobago) became heads of their respective political parties and leaders of their parliamentary Opposition.

The nation had hardly absorbed the latest round of Everald 'Go to Hell' Warmington's crassness, crudeness and boorishness before it was faced with the dramatic explosion between K.D. Knight and Justice Minister Dorothy Lightbourne, who charged that Knight had told her 31 years ago, "Every Labourite fi dead."

As the Manatt-Coke commission of enquiry rambles on, the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) is to launch A Growth-Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and Medium Term on Tuesday in the same venue that the enquiry is being staged, the Jamaica Conference Centre.

In September 2005, then Prime Minister P.J. Patterson and Opposition Leader Bruce Golding signed a Declaration on Political Conduct in Parliament in the presence of the political ombudsman, Bishop Herro Blair.

In everyday life, we assume many risks, beginning from the moment we awake to the moment we go to sleep and throughout the night. The fact that we get out of bed safely without breaking a leg, or cross a busy street without getting hit by a motor car, does not mean that these risks did not exist.

Thomas Hobbes would have just loved to be in Libya right now. But he has been dead for a while. Since 1679, in fact. Hobbes, in 1651, published Leviathan, one of the most important and influential books ever published in political philosophy.

It was the Tuesday, September 1, 2009 edition of The Gleaner that significantly brought to public light the request for the extradition of Christopher 'Dudus' Coke to the United States (US) on narcotics and firearm charges.