Bruce Golding raised the heat in the deteriorating relations between Jamaica and the United States (US) by criticising the US over American-made guns in Jamaica in his Budget speech on April 20.
"How many more babies are to be shot in their heads; how many children in the inner cities are to have their birthday parties pierced by sniper bullets; how many more mothers and grandmothers must make their daily ritual of casting themselves on the...
In the April 22 edition of The Gleaner, newly appointed Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington called on the public to join with the security forces to aid in the fight against crime in the Jamaican society.
The prime minister delivered an intellectually robust, piercingly logical and commanding Budget presentation last Tuesday, but you would never know from the commentary about it. The Government's widening credibility deficit over the Dudus extradition/Manatt, Phelps and Phillips issue has added to our own peculiar challenge of assessing things outside a partisan context.
Waking up every morning to sensational news headlines in the print and electronic media in Jamaica is terribly depressing, to say the least. 'Bad' news is the order of the day and one doesn't seem to get any breathing space anymore. The daily diet of local sensational news stories has, in my mind, intensified the sense of gloom and doom that has pervaded the minds of too many Jamaicans.
A number of governance problems are evident in making Jamaica's latest Budget. Six days after the minister of finance presented the Budget for 2010-2011, a sympathetic newspaper said there was doubt Jamaica would pass its first quarterly International Monetary Fund (IMF) test, which this Budget was primarily geared towards.
In a desperate attempt to keep Jamaica's first politically appointed president in power, his Government has fired another weapon of mass distraction (WMD). Its use of Harold Brady as a WMD having failed to find any intelligent target, the latest salvo comes in the shape of a lawsuit filed by a private lawyer (Greg Christie, where are you?) on behalf of the attorney general of Jamaica as claimant.
This year's Budget Debate, conducted between two middle-of-the-road, managerialist political parties forming Government and Opposition by a meagre margin of seats, was more respectful, collaborative and data-driven than many past.
The fiscal Budget is a statement of affairs for the most important entity in Jamaica, that of the Government of Jamaica. It is expected to convey a clear picture of where the country is coming from, where it is at, where it is going to, and perhaps most important, how it is going to get there.
The Budget Debate has been largely an anticlimactic bore this year; in my view, the dullest and most yawn-inducing I have observed since I began following them intensely in the 1970s.
In Budget Debate season I have not only had the special privilege of participating in the media analysis, but also in a conference on current trends and issues and a colloquium on Jamaican civil society.
To those who even half believed their promise of a new approach to governance, this Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government has been a terrible disappointment.
Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity - or because of their sexual orientation.
A few weeks ago I applied for and received a brand new passport on behalf of my now three-month-old daughter and was delighted to see the insignia of the Caribbean Community embossed on the top of the passport and the Jamaican...
Two recent articles carried by The Gleaner are worthy of discussion, not in a cause and effect mode, but in the broader framework of our confusion and waffling in any meaningful effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of Gender Equality and...
The following is an edited version of a position paper presented at a Church Conference in Nassau, Bahamas in February 2010.The focus of this presentation is on a single, carefully selected...
An interesting aspect of the history of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is that, although the idea of an international criminal court was raised from as far back as the period after World War I, the...
The United States (US) government, the most powerful government in the world, we hear, is investigating three senior ministers of the Jamaican Government for possible conspiracy to prevent information from...
Section 48 of the Jamaica Constitution provides that: 'Subject to the provisions of this Constitution, Parliament may make laws for the peace, order and good government of Jamaica ...
Jamaica's social crisis is deeper than its economic crisis. Sure, it is fuelled and exacerbated by our economic crisis, but in the dialectical relationship between the two, at this stage I give precedence to the social crisis.
Permit me please the privilege of responding to your columnist Ian Boyne who, annually it seems, finds it opportune to assail Easter from a peculiar perspective.On what is known as Easter Sunday in the Church's calendar, he devoted...
Two and a half years into its term, an incisive midterm assessment of the Bruce Golding-led government's performance in the area of national security reveals its absence of direction and...
