分类： politics

A prominent Jamaican environmental and beach advocacy organization is pushing back against the Andrew Holness administration’s new beach access framework, arguing that the proposed policy falls short of guaranteeing unfettered public access to the island’s public foreshore lands.

Last month, Prime Minister Andrew Holness tabled the long-awaited Beach Access and Management Policy in Jamaica’s Parliament, a piece of policy that aims to update outdated legal definitions of coastal land types including beaches, foreshores, backshores and water shelves. The proposal also maps out the government’s plan to formalize beach access rules, outlines necessary legislative changes, and revises approval requirements for new coastal development projects. A key provision of the draft policy encourages hotels that control sections of public beach to implement a tiered beach pass system, where non-hotel guests pay a government-consulted reasonable fee to access the stretch of beach within the hotel’s property.

But Dr. Devon Taylor, president of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JaBBEM), says the proposed system violates the fundamental public right to Jamaica’s coastal lands, which are legally vested in the public trust. Taylor argues that under Jamaican law, all foreshores and seabeds are held in perpetuity by the Crown as a public trust for the Jamaican people, not for government or private commercial interests to monetize. “Foreshores are the heritage of the Jamaican people, enshrined in our constitution,” Taylor explained in an interview. “It is unacceptable for a private hotel to charge Jamaicans to access a natural resource they already collectively own.”

Taylor notes that his group does not oppose hotels charging for the private amenities they provide, such as restroom access, bar service, or lounge facilities. Instead, he calls for a clear separation between access to public beach land and access to private on-site services. “If a visitor wants to use a hotel’s private bathroom or restaurant, that is fair for the hotel to charge for,” Taylor said. “But charging people just to step onto the public foreshore is effectively selling the Jamaican people back their own heritage.”

To back his argument, Taylor points to existing successful models across the Caribbean, where nations including Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, The Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands guarantee free public access to all beach lands while still allowing hotels to charge for private amenities. “Critics claim free access would destroy the hotel industry, but there is no evidence to support that claim,” Taylor said. “None of these peer nations see chaos on their beaches, and hotels still turn a healthy profit. The argument that exclusion is necessary is nothing more than a baseless farce.”

Beyond the beach pass provision, Taylor highlights two additional critical flaws in the draft policy. First, the policy frames public beach access as a regulated privilege granted by the state rather than an inherent, inalienable right of the Jamaican people. Taylor calls this framing a reintroduction of colonial-era resource exclusion, wrapped in modern policy language, and demands that public access to the foreshore be codified as absolute, unconditional, and independent of any state licensing regime. Second, the policy endorses the construction of private artificial beaches, a practice Taylor says prioritizes commercial profit over ecological health. Artificial beaches require the removal of natural limestone and volcanic rock formations that naturally absorb wave energy, reduce storm surge damage, and support native fisheries. This practice also converts publicly owned submerged land into a private amenity, effectively dispossessing the Jamaican people under the guise of leisure development.

JaBBEM is calling for an immediate moratorium on all new artificial beach construction and an independent ecological audit of all existing artificial beach installations across the island. The organization is also demanding that the entire draft policy be withdrawn from Parliament and revised to enshrine full public right of access to all Jamaican foreshores. “The sea belongs to Jamaica. The beach belongs to Jamaica. The foreshore belongs to Jamaica,” Taylor stressed. “No government licensing framework can ever change that fundamental fact.”

A controversial AI-generated image that depicted former U.S. President Donald Trump in a Jesus-like healing pose has been pulled from his Truth Social platform, after fierce pushback from prominent conservative Christian leaders — some of the politician’s most loyal core supporters. The digital artwork, which was uploaded to the platform late Sunday, showed Trump draped in flowing red and white robes, placing his hand on the forehead of a figure presented as unwell. Glowing light radiated from both Trump’s hand and head in the image, with an American flag displayed in the background and a crowd of onlookers staring up at him with expressions of reverence. The image quickly sparked widespread outrage across religious and political circles, prompting the former president to take it down on Monday. When questioned by reporters about the inflammatory post, Trump pushed back against claims he intended to frame himself as Jesus Christ. “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do Red Cross,” he told reporters. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.” Despite the former president’s explanation, the post drew sharp condemnation from high-profile conservative Christian commentators. Megan Basham, a widely recognized conservative journalist and political commentator, publicly denounced the image in a post on X, calling it “outrageous blasphemy.” “I don’t know if the president thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” Basham wrote. “He needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.” This incident is far from an isolated case: Trump has a well-documented history of leaning into religious imagery to frame his political persona, particularly ahead of the 2024 presidential election. During his 2023 New York civil bank fraud trial, the former president shared a supporter-drawn sketch that depicted him sitting alongside Jesus inside the courtroom. Beyond shared imagery, Trump’s closest political and spiritual advisors have repeatedly drawn deliberate comparisons between Trump and Jesus to frame his political struggles as a kind of divine mission. Earlier this April, during an Easter lunch held at the White House during his first term, prominent televangelist and long-time Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain directly compared the former president to Jesus Christ, framing his legal challenges as a modern-day parallel to Jesus’ own betrayal and false accusation. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Saviour showed us,” White-Cain stated at the event.

After days of high-stakes closed-door negotiations in Islamabad, hopes for a breakthrough deal to de-escalate months of escalating conflict between the United States and Iran have completely collapsed, leaving U.S. President Donald Trump trapped between a set of unappealing policy choices that carry major domestic and international risks ahead of upcoming midterm elections. U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who led the American negotiating team in marathon talks with senior Iranian officials, left Pakistan without any framework for an agreement, shattering earlier expectations that a deal could ease the tensions that have rippled across the entire Middle East since conflict erupted in late February.

The core challenge now centers on Trump’s earlier order to implement a full naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic chokepoint that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil shipments, set to take effect this Monday. Independent regional and security analysts across the globe have warned that moving forward with the blockade would only complicate an already intractable crisis, while walking back the threat would undermine the Trump administration’s repeated public claims that Iran had been cornered and had “no cards” left to play.

Domestically, ramping up military action carries significant political risk for Trump’s party ahead of the midterms. American voters are already grappling with surging gasoline prices driven by market uncertainty over Middle Eastern oil supplies, and a new round of escalation could further alienate an already skeptical electorate. The broader global economic impact also looms large: the proposed blockade would do little to ease the market volatility that has pushed energy prices higher in recent months, deepening the economic jitters already facing major economies worldwide.

Many foreign policy experts have criticized the Trump administration’s approach to the crisis as unplanned and reactive. Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, argued that Trump’s off-the-cuff rhetorical style and frequent aggressive threats—what he describes as the president’s “carnival barker” approach—have left senior White House and Pentagon officials constantly scrambling to adjust policy with no clear long-term strategy. “He may be simply buying more time to move in more military assets or because he doesn’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t call it a strategy; it is a military-centric approach without strategy,” Katulis told AFP in an interview.

Shibley Telhami, a leading scholar of Middle Eastern affairs at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the threat of a Hormuz blockade “bewildering and seems self-defeating.” He noted that Iran already has deep-seated distrust of Trump, and the unilateral threat has done lasting damage to America’s global diplomatic credibility. “Hard to understate what this makes of what’s left of America’s global credibility,” Telhami said.

Tehran has already issued a sharp warning in response to the blockade threat. Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, the country’s elite military force, pledged over the weekend that any hostile move against the strait would trap Tehran’s enemies in a “deadly vortex” of prolonged conflict.

Israeli security analyst Danny Citrinowicz, a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, echoed the widespread skepticism that a blockade would force Iran to back down. “There is little reason to believe that a blockade would force Iranian capitulation. If anything, Iran’s demonstrated resilience thus far suggests the opposite,” Citrinowicz posted on the social platform X. He added that Iran’s size and mature military capabilities mean any sustained blockade would require massive, long-term commitments of American military and financial resources, a burden that the U.S. is poorly positioned to take on at this moment.

Public opinion polling suggests that a prolonged military engagement would face significant pushback from the American public. A CBS News poll released Sunday found that negative emotions—worry, stress, and anger—far outweigh feelings of safety and confidence among U.S. adults when asked about the ongoing conflict. More than 80 percent of respondents said the U.S. should prioritize reopening the Strait of Hormuz to improve global oil access, lower domestic gas prices, and support greater freedom for the Iranian people, but fewer than 10 percent believe the Trump administration has made progress on any of those goals.

“ I don’t see how, 40 plus days into this war, that we are safer, that our allies are safer. I’m not even sure Israel is safer,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner said Sunday on CNN’s *State of the Union*. “I don’t understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into opening it. I don’t get the connection there.”

Returning to sustained, meaningful negotiations also faces major hurdles, after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 multinational nuclear accord with Iran, which had restricted Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from crippling international sanctions. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine noted that the U.S. withdrawal from that previous agreement destroyed any remaining trust Iranian leaders might have had in Washington’s commitments. “This is not going to be an easy negotiation because the last negotiation that led to a control of Iran’s nuclear programme, the US made the decision to tear it up and walk away from the deal,” Kaine told CNN.

Katulis echoed that assessment, arguing that mutual distrust runs deep on both sides. “Iranian officials are also untrustworthy and duplicitous, but the Trump Administration is providing the mirror image of that,” he said. “If I were an Iranian official leaving Islamabad, I would wonder if I am back on the Israeli kill list.”

KINGSTON, Jamaica — In the wake of Hurricane Melissa’s destructive sweep across the island, Jamaica has marked a major milestone in its post-storm recovery: the national utility Jamaica Public Service (JPS) has outperformed its agreed power restoration target for March, bringing the country significantly closer to full grid recovery after the devastating weather event.

Data released by the Ministry of Energy, Transport and Telecommunications confirms that more than 6,000 customers were reconnected to the JPS grid throughout March, beating the initial goal of 5,000 set by the government and utility. As of April 1, 2026, only 3,022 customers across the island remain without power.

This rapid progress builds on gains made in February, when the government had already restored service to 98 percent of the total JPS network, cutting the number of outages from tens of thousands to fewer than 10,000. By the end of that month, 9,135 of the utility’s roughly 690,000 total customers were still waiting for power to be restored.

Ramping up operations through March, crews successfully reconnected 6,113 customers by the start of April – representing 67 percent of all customers who remained without power at the beginning of March. That reduction has left just over 3,000 customers still waiting for service.

The vast majority of remaining outages are now concentrated in the hardest-hit, geographically challenging communities across the island. Roughly 84 percent of all customers still without power are located in the parish of Westmoreland, where extensive damage to critical infrastructure and complicated logistics have slowed recovery work. According to the ministry, current restoration efforts center on highly complex operations: traversing steep, hard-to-access terrain, repairing large-scale damaged infrastructure, and resolving individual barriers to customer connection, such as damaged in-home wiring that prevents safe reconnection.

Portfolio Minister Daryl Vaz emphasized that the steady, accelerated progress is the direct result of intentional government policy and strict accountability measures put in place after the storm. Back in December 2025, the Jamaican government approved a $150 million US loan to speed up restoration work. This move came in response to initial projections from JPS that full grid restoration could stretch all the way into late 2026, or even the first quarter of 2027 – a timeline the administration rejected as unacceptable for Jamaican households.

“That was not acceptable to us,” Vaz stated in an official release Monday. “When we approved the loan in December, it was on the basis that we would achieve full restoration by the end of February. While we reached 98 per cent restoration by that deadline, the Government made it clear that aggressive restoration efforts would continue into March and April to close the remaining gap.”

After meeting the 98 percent benchmark in February, the government and JPS agreed to a specific target of reconnecting 5,000 customers in March – a goal the utility not only met but surpassed by more than 1,000 connections. “That is a strong performance, and JPS deserves commendation. Every target agreed with the Government has been met. That is an extraordinary achievement in a recovery effort of this scale,” Vaz added.

Vaz went on to highlight that without the government’s early intervention and dedicated financing, restoration timelines would have been far longer, leaving thousands of Jamaicans without power for additional months. “The alternative would have resulted in many communities waiting months longer for electricity,” he said, noting that the administration took decisive action to avoid that outcome and speed up relief for all affected residents.

The current phase of work, widely referred to as the “last mile” of restoration, relies on close coordination between local JPS crews, domestic contractors, international line crews brought in to supplement local capacity, and multiple state agencies focused on clearing access routes and removing storm debris.

The Jamaican government has reaffirmed its unwavering commitment to reaching near-total restoration as quickly as possible, noting that ongoing work is prioritizing the most technically complex connections. The administration’s goal is to reconnect every customer who can safely receive power as rapidly as possible, even as full infrastructure rebuilding continues across all affected parishes. With steady progress month over month, Jamaica continues to advance toward full recovery from Hurricane Melissa’s impact.