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  • Sex crime silence: Yes or no?

    Sex crime silence: Yes or no?

    A fierce public debate over media and legal transparency in child sexual crime cases has erupted in Jamaica, sparked by a high-profile incest charge against a former ruling party politician, with advocates and media leaders clashing over conflicting priorities of victim justice and child protection. At the center of the controversy stands Joy Crawford, executive director of Eve for Life Jamaica — a non-profit dedicated to empowering vulnerable young mothers and survivors of sexual violence through mentorship, counseling, and policy advocacy. Crawford is demanding a fundamental shift in long-standing policy: once an individual accused of a sexual crime against a minor has been formally charged and arraigned in court, their identity should be released to the public.

    Crawford argues that the current practice of withholding accused names, which is most often justified as a measure to protect child victims, in reality silences survivors who have already chosen to come forward. When a victim summons the courage to publicly name their abuser and demand accountability, she says, that act of bravery should not be muted by excessive editorial caution. Continuing to grant anonymity to charged offenders, Crawford contends, risks emboldening repeat offenders and eroding public confidence in Jamaica’s justice system. She dismisses the claim that anonymity protects victims as a misplaced narrative, arguing that the policy instead protects societal discomfort, powerful connections, and outdated moral sensibilities rather than the survivors themselves. “When a victim works up the mental fortitude to come forward, name their attacker, and pursue legal action, we should not push them back into silence,” Crawford told the Jamaica Observer. “Victims have already counted the cost of speaking out. The discomfort with naming names is ours, not theirs.” Crawford also notes that anonymity is largely performative: in small local communities, word of an accused’s identity often spreads through informal channels anyway, leaving no real meaningful protection for victims while denying them the open justice they seek.

    The debate was triggered by a recent case involving a former Member of Parliament affiliated with the People’s National Party, who stands charged with raping a 13-year-old female relative. According to police reports, the former MP picked up the minor under the pretense of running errands in January 2024, before taking her back to his home and sexually assaulting her. The victim filed an official report with law enforcement, leading to the former MP’s arrest and charge. In line with standard practice, the accused’s name has been withheld to avoid indirectly identifying the underage survivor.

    Crawford’s call for transparency has drawn sharp pushback from Jamaica’s leading media and child protection organizations, who warn that abandoning anonymity rules would put child survivors at grave risk of further harm. Dashan Hendricks, president of the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ), emphasized that media caution in these cases is never intended to protect offenders — it is a deliberate choice to prioritize the safety and privacy of child victims. In cases of incest or intra-family abuse, Hendricks explained, releasing the accused’s name almost always makes it simple for community members, neighbors, and classmates to deduce the victim’s identity, given the close family relationship between attacker and survivor. This exposure can subject child survivors to severe stigma, social shaming, and repeated trauma, compounding the harm they have already endured.

    Hendricks pointed out that this policy is not just an ethical choice for media outlets — it is a legal requirement under Jamaica’s Child Care and Protection Act. Sections 44 and 45 of the Act explicitly ban any reporting that reveals identifying details of a child involved in legal proceedings for sexual abuse, mandating that the best interest of the child must always be the paramount consideration. “Responsible journalism starts with compliance with child protection law,” Hendricks told the Sunday Observer. “If naming the accused creates a meaningful risk of identifying the child, media are right to withhold the name. Justice for a child cannot come at the cost of further harm.”

    Hendricks’ stance is backed by local and international child protection groups. The Fi We Children Foundation, a Jamaican youth empowerment organization, released a statement last week affirming that public demand for accountability must never override a child’s right to safety and dignity. International child protection standards and UNICEF guidelines, the group noted, strictly require that the identity of child abuse victims be protected at all times, even when that means withholding details that would lead to an offender’s identification. UNICEF’s framework mandates that journalists alter names, obscure visual identifiers, and omit any details that could lead to the recognition of a child victim, to prevent stigma, retraumatization, and ongoing risk to the survivor.

    While the number of officially reported incest cases in Jamaica has declined steadily over the past five years — dropping from 33 reports in 2019 to just eight as of mid-November 2024, according to Jamaica Constabulary Force data — researchers warn that this trend may not reflect a real drop in incidents. Official data from previous years recorded 30 cases in 2016, 29 in 2017, and 23 in 2018, but analysts have long noted that underreporting of sexual and incestuous abuse is widespread in Jamaica, due to stigma, family pressure, and lack of trust in official systems. The current debate has thrown a spotlight on the ongoing tension between survivor autonomy and child protection frameworks in the country, as stakeholders grapple with how to balance accountability for offenders with safety for the children who survive these crimes.

  • Man City must respect Arsenal in title showdown

    Man City must respect Arsenal in title showdown

    LONDON — As the English Premier League title race hurtles toward its climax, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has stressed that his side cannot afford to take Arsenal lightly when the two title favorites meet in a high-stakes showdown at the Etihad Stadium next weekend.

  • The secret struggle of former national footballer Michael ‘Zun’ Clarke

    The secret struggle of former national footballer Michael ‘Zun’ Clarke

    A soft, knowing laugh, steeped in the quiet triumph of a life built against all odds, escapes 67-year-old former Jamaican national footballer Michael “Zun” Clarke as he looks back on a journey few would have bet on. His path winds from the tough, working-class streets of Waltham Park Road in Kingston, through the high-stakes glory of Jamaica’s Manning Cup schoolboy football at Tivoli Gardens High School, all the way to the lecture halls of American universities, where he would eventually graduate with a bachelor’s degree in counselling and guidance.

    What hides beneath that warm laughter is a story of almost unbelievable grit, rooted in a secret few knew during his childhood: for all of his primary school years, Michael Clarke could not read.

    Speaking with the Jamaica Observer, Clarke explained that poverty, not lack of ability, created that barrier. Raised by a single mother after his father passed away when he was just four years old, the youngest of nine siblings grew up in a household so strapped for cash that his mother Isadora simply could not afford to buy him a basic reading book for his studies at Whitfield Town Primary School.

    Rather than surrender to self-pity or let his circumstance define his future, Clarke made a quiet, deliberate choice to teach himself literacy — and he turned his daily football training into a classroom. While training at the old Cable and Wireless playing field near his Cortina Avenue home, he built his reading skills one word at a time.

    “I started out by pulling a word from the dictionary, writing out each letter, and as I ran around the track in the evenings, I’d spell the word out loud and practice pronouncing it,” Clarke recalled. “Every single day I learned at least two or three new words. Over time, I started putting them together into sentences — I actually taught myself how to read.”

    By the time he enrolled at Tivoli Gardens High School, he still had years of catching up to do to match the literacy level expected for his grade. Even after graduating high school with no O-Level qualifications, Clarke knew he was already far behind his peers — so when a rare football scholarship opened up to Alderson Broaddus University in the United States, he vowed to squeeze every possible opportunity out of the second chance.

    “When I got that scholarship, I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is this? This is your last shot to build something for yourself,’” he told the Sunday Observer. “And trust me, I made it count. I studied almost day and night, made the Dean’s List with a 3.6 GPA first, then a 3.8. I never failed a single class in college.”

    His academic performance was so strong that after completing his undergraduate degree, Clarke earned a full academic scholarship to pursue abnormal psychology at West Virginia University in 1985. That remarkable academic rise came just over a decade after a fateful encounter that changed the course of his life as a teenager.

    At 15, Clarke was attending Tivoli High on the evening shift when he crossed paths with Neville Myton, the school’s football coach and a former Jamaican Olympian who competed at the 1964 Tokyo Games while still a student at Excelsior High. Myton had built a reputation for spotting hidden raw talent, and that evening he spotted Clarke playing in the school auditorium.

    “He asked me my name, then asked if I wanted to switch to the morning shift to join the football program. I said yes immediately. He told me to show up before the school gate opened on Monday, and that’s exactly what I did,” Clarke said, smiling at the decades-old memory.

    Myton placed Clarke on the school’s Colts youth team, and that year, they took home the championship. One victory that still stands out to him is a 1-0 win over powerhouse Kingston College — the first time Tivoli Gardens had ever beaten Kingston College in any sport, by Clarke’s recollection.

    By 1976, Clarke was a starting striker on Tivoli Gardens’ Manning Cup squad, a team stacked with extraordinary young talent that included Dennis “Den Den” Hutchinson, Ken Bailey, Leon Osbourne, and brothers Dave and Delmonte Clarke (no relation to Zun), that claimed the Manning Cup title. For a school that was only five years old at the time, the win felt almost otherworldly.

    “To be honest, it was almost surreal that a young program just five years old could achieve that much in so little time,” Clarke said. “After a while it hit me: ‘Holy crap, we actually did this.’ We nearly repeated the win the next year, too. It taught me that big things are actually possible, even when everyone counts you out.”

    While fans across Jamaica marveled at the underdog win, Clarke said the team simply saw it as the result of playing the game they loved the way they always had. “We didn’t do anything extra. We just played like we normally did,” he said.

    After high school, Clarke played for Jamaican club side Cavalier, worked on the production line at local manufacturer Seprod, and earned a call-up to represent Jamaica at the national level. His final cap for the Reggae Boyz came in 1987, after he had already moved to the U.S. He flew back to Jamaica after picking up his green card, trained with the squad, and came on as a substitute in an exhibition match against a side that included English stars John Barnes and Luther Blissett.

    Clarke soon found that the discipline, quick thinking, and strategy he had honed on the football pitch translated seamlessly to his post-academic career. After graduating university, he took a role with New York City Parks and Recreation, before spending decades as a youth counsellor with the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, working with court-ordered juvenile delinquents.

    “As a youth counsellor, you hear some terrible, dangerous stories — especially from the girls, 12 to 18 years old, talking about ongoing abuse and trauma,” Clarke explained. Early in his tenure, the weight of those stories drained him mentally, especially as a father of two daughters with his wife Sandra. “At one point my wife told me, ‘Don’t bring this work home. If it’s eating at you this much, leave and find something else.’ Over time, I learned how to process it, how to empathize without carrying the pain home with me, but it was always heavy work hearing what those kids had gone through.”

    Clarke retired from his role in December 2000, just a month after celebrating his 67th birthday in January this year, he splits his time between Jamaica and the United States, where he owns property, and spends much of his time traveling between the two countries to visit his three children, all of whom have built successful careers of their own.

    His son Leon, from a previous relationship, is a high school principal in Delaware with a PhD, who earned an American football scholarship to the University of Delaware. His oldest daughter Aneka, 41, is a certified public accountant after graduating Temple University on an academic scholarship, while his youngest daughter Michelle, 31, a Howard Business School graduate, works as a strategy consultant for a digital technology firm in Washington, D.C. Clarke speaks of his children with a father’s quiet, unshakable pride.

    But for all the joy and success Clarke has earned in his later years, he carries a quiet grief: when his mother Isadora passed away in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was stuck abroad and could not get home to be with her before she died. Jamaica had closed its borders and locked down to slow the spread of the virus, so Clarke could not return before she died of natural causes, aged 102.

    “COVID didn’t kill her, she died of natural causes, but it hurts to talk about it. The country was shut down, the ports were closed, no one could come in, and I was stuck overseas,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. As soon as lockdown restrictions lifted, Clarke booked the first available flight home to honor the woman who made endless sacrifices to support his education, even when she could not afford a reading book for him. He finds solace in the fact that she lived to 102, a milestone he describes with a typically Jamaican cricketing metaphor: “She was a good batswoman. She batted the whole innings well.”

  • EU chief von der Leyen hails Orban defeat

    EU chief von der Leyen hails Orban defeat

    BRUSSELS, Belgium – In a reaction that underscores deep ideological divides within the 27-nation bloc, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly celebrated Sunday’s legislative election outcome in Hungary that brought an end to Viktor Orban’s 12-year consecutive tenure as prime minister.

    Posting to the social media platform X in both English and Hungarian, von der Leyen framed the election result as a pivotal moment for the central European nation’s relationship with the European Union. “Europe’s heart is beating stronger in Hungary tonight,” she wrote. She went on to emphasize the mutual alignment between Hungary and the broader bloc, adding, “Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary. A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”

    Orban, a right-wing nationalist who long positioned himself as an unconventional counterweight to Brussels’ mainstream policy agenda, spent years in open conflict with most other EU member states. The nationalist leader once famously described himself as a “thorn” in the side of the union, a label that accurately reflected his frequent confrontations with bloc institutions over a range of contentious issues. Most notably, Orban diverged sharply from the EU’s unified foreign policy approach toward Russia following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beyond foreign policy, his administration also faced repeated accusations from Brussels that it had eroded judicial independence and undermined core EU rule-of-law principles, leading to years of regulatory and funding disputes between Budapest and Brussels.

  • Coalition firm in rejection of close-in-age sex pass

    Coalition firm in rejection of close-in-age sex pass

    Debate over Jamaican legal policy regarding sexual relations between minors has intensified, as a prominent faith-based advocacy organization has drawn a line in the sand against any adjustments to existing law, urging policymakers to target the root causes of risky adolescent behavior instead.

    The Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society (JCHS), a pro-Christian advocacy group, laid out its firm position during last Thursday’s deliberations of parliament’s joint select committee, which is currently conducting a review of the nation’s Child Diversion Act. The ongoing review centers on identifying effective strategies to cut the number of young people entering the country’s formal justice system, with stakeholders across the political and civil society spectrum weighing in on competing priorities.

    JCHS Advocacy Officer Philippa Davies told the committee that while legislative overhauls often draw the most attention during policy reform processes, the core challenge goes far beyond changing statutory language. Instead, she argued, policymakers must first unpack why minors engage in conduct that puts them at odds with the law, pointing to early sexual activity as one of the most critical contributing factors. Davies warned that efforts to normalize underage sexual relationships, or to carve out new legal exceptions for close-in-age encounters, would create cascading long-term harms for Jamaican youth.

    “We strongly object to this suggestion [of close-in-age sex legislation] and to the notion that minors can consent to sex, whether with each other or with adults,” Davies told the committee. “We also disagree with the suggestion that adolescent sex is to be deemed as normal, mere exploration, and unharmful. This is so far from the truth. Sex is more than a physical act. It carries long-term psychological consequences.”

    Davies grounded her organization’s position in existing research on adolescent brain development, noting that young people lack the fully developed neurological capacity to make high-stakes decisions that carry lifelong impacts. The prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for impulse control, long-term planning, priority-setting, and complex decision-making, does not finish maturing until a person reaches between 25 and 30 years of age. “Even if adolescents understand that something is dangerous, they may still engage in risky behaviour,” she explained. Her argument was further bolstered by Jamaican national data showing that a large share of young people’s first sexual encounters do not involve full, freely given consent, directly undermining the widespread assumption that all underage sexual relationships are harmless consensual encounters.

    The JCHS’s formal submission to the committee comes as a growing number of advocacy and policy groups have pushed for the introduction of “close-in-age” exemptions to Jamaica’s current law, which criminalizes sexual relations between minors.

    JCHS President Dr. Wayne West clarified that the group does not advocate for unnecessarily criminalizing young people who engage in underage sexual activity. Instead, he stressed, the existing law serves a critical normative purpose as a guide for acceptable social behavior that must remain intact. “We are not saying that if persons are caught in sexual activity at their age, that they should be criminalised. We say we keep the law as is, because the law is a teacher, and we don’t want the law to be used to teach something else,” West explained. “We are not denying that things do happen. But what we are saying is that the law is a teacher, and there is a consequence to activity. So we don’t want the law to teach people that there is no consequence to activity.”

    Alongside its call to keep the current law unchanged, the coalition is pushing for a broader preventative public health and education approach that includes expanded comprehensive education, greater parental involvement in youth development, and targeted outreach to encourage healthier behavioral choices among Jamaican adolescents.

    Committee chairman and Justice Minister Delroy Chuck acknowledged the deeply complex nature of the issue, noting that rigid, one-size-fits-all application of the current law can leave lifelong, damaging marks on young people who engage in consensual underage sexual activity. Chuck pointed to ongoing requests for criminal record expungement from former farm workers who pleaded guilty to consensual underage sex as teenagers, noting that the conviction continues to block opportunities decades later. “Because, if a person is actually convicted when they are a teenager for consensual sex, it follows them for the rest of their lives, to be frank with you,” he said.

    Chuck raised questions about whether greater discretionary power within the justice system could create a workable middle ground, particularly for cases involving minors close in age, and suggested many of these cases could be diverted out of the formal court system through existing alternative mechanisms. The JCHS has signaled it supports diversion for these cases, but has reiterated that this support does not extend to changing the underlying text of the law itself.

    State Minister for Justice Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert also shared her perspective on the debate, acknowledging that robust moral guidance for young people is a critical public priority, but warning that an overly rigid legal framework can permanently derail the future prospects of youth who make early mistakes. She noted that many productive, upstanding adult Jamaican citizens and community leaders engaged in underage sexual activity during their adolescence, and argued that these early mistakes should not define their entire lives.

    Pointing to the widespread employment barriers faced by people with juvenile criminal convictions, Dalrymple-Philibert argued the justice system must strike a careful balance between accountability and rehabilitation, especially for young people who acted without the full cognitive maturity to understand the consequences of their choices. “You’re correct, we need to teach children all the good values,” she said. “But I hold strongly to the fact that it happened to people who are excellent adults and leaders in society now that made mistakes as young people, sex with women underage, between minors. We are saying at this point, when it happens, there must be a way not to criminalise them, help them through the Child Diversion Programme.”

    First introduced to give justice system officials alternatives to prosecution for children who come into contact with the law, the Child Diversion Act under review centers on rehabilitation rather than punishment, connecting young people to counseling, mentorship, and targeted support services instead of formal court processing and criminal conviction.

  • Orbán concedes defeat as Opposition sweeps Hungary’s elections after 16 years

    Orbán concedes defeat as Opposition sweeps Hungary’s elections after 16 years

    Hungary’s decades-long era of conservative populist rule came to an abrupt end Sunday, as long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán formally conceded defeat to the opposition Tisza Party, which surged to a historic landslide victory in the country’s parliamentary election.

    Based on partial official results published by Hungary’s national election office, Tisza Party is on track to claim a rare two-thirds supermajority in the 199-seat national parliament, securing 135 seats — a threshold that gives the incoming government broad authority to reshape the country’s constitutional framework. Tisza Party leader Péter Magyar, who is all but certain to be sworn in as Hungary’s next prime minister, confirmed Sunday that Orbán personally called him to extend congratulations on his election win.

    “While official final vote tallies are still being compiled, the overall outcome of this election is unambiguous and clear,” Orbán said in a public address following his concession, acknowledging that the result represented a “painful” end to his 16 consecutive years in office.

    The projected supermajority won by Tisza gives the party the same constitutional amendment power that Orbán’s Fidesz party leveraged to rewrite Hungary’s founding document in 2011. Beyond domestic constitutional changes, the election outcome is widely expected to trigger a major shift in Hungary’s position within the European Union. Analysts forecast that the new government will ease long-running tensions between Budapest and Brussels, and could reverse Orbán’s policy of blocking EU aid and military support for Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion.

    Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, was quick to react to the results Sunday, saying in a statement that the Hungarian people had “chosen Europe” and that the country was now set to reclaim its full place at the heart of the European bloc.

    Orbán, a polarizing right-wing leader whose populist, anti-establishment political style has frequently drawn comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump, saw his support erode steadily in recent years amid mounting domestic discontent. Stagnant economic growth, skyrocketing living costs, and widespread public anger over opaque wealth accumulation among elite figures with close ties to Orbán’s government all contributed to his government’s falling approval ahead of the election. The result also comes amid recent international friction surrounding the race: during a visit to Hungary earlier this year, U.S. Vice President JD Vance publicly praised Orbán’s leadership and launched a sharp criticism of the European Union’s engagement in the election campaign.

  • For the sake of our children and a brighter future

    For the sake of our children and a brighter future

    Investing in holistic, high-quality care for children is universally recognized as a foundational pillar of sustained social stability. Yet awareness alone has failed to resolve a growing crisis in Jamaica’s youth support system, where systemic gaps are leaving thousands of vulnerable children behind with consequences that ripple across the entire society.

    The grim reality is that hundreds of children with unaddressed behavioural challenges are being pushed into inappropriate state care pathways every year, a problem that two top Jamaican officials have recently brought to national attention during parliamentary review proceedings. Junior Justice Minister Marisa Dalrymple Philibert and Children’s Advocate Diahann Gordon Harrison recently presented their findings to Parliament’s Joint Select Committee, which is currently conducting a review of the 2018 Child Diversion Act. Their testimony has pulled back the curtain on long-standing systemic failures that demand urgent national action.

    According to the pair, children who have never committed any criminal offense, but struggle with behavioural issues, are increasingly being routed into the national child diversion program and placed in state-run children’s homes and correctional facilities. This practice not only overwhelms diversion programs designed for an entirely different population, it also directly violates the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty Jamaica ratified decades ago.

    Gordon Harrison clarified the core purpose of the child diversion system in her testimony, noting it was structured to support children who have already committed criminal offenses, connecting them with specialized care to prevent future reoffending. It was never intended to serve children who run away from home or are chronically truant from school, she emphasized.

    The children’s advocate traced the root of the crisis to a long-unaddressed gap in Jamaica’s youth care infrastructure: the complete absence of dedicated therapeutic care centers. These facilities, mandated under the country’s Child Care and Protection Act, are supposed to provide specialized, targeted support for children with behavioural challenges, but they have never been fully established or resourced. Gordon Harrison stressed that these centers must be made operational, staffed with trained personnel, and equipped with adequate resources as an urgent policy priority.

    Dalrymple Philibert, who also serves as the Member of Parliament for Trelawny Southern and is a former Speaker of Jamaica’s House of Representatives, offered full, unwavering backing for Gordon Harrison’s assessment. She confirmed that courts across the country are routinely sending these vulnerable children to general state children’s homes, which lack the training and resources to support children with complex behavioural needs. Speaking directly to Justice Minister Delroy Chuck, who chaired the committee meeting, Dalrymple Philibert drew on decades of personal experience to emphasize that this misplacement has plagued Jamaica’s child care system for generations. The centers mandated by law have never actually existed, she confirmed, and the status quo can no longer be ignored.

    Tackling this long-standing gap is no simple task, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Melissa, which has stretched Jamaica’s public resources to breaking point. Building out a national network of therapeutic care centers will require significant financial and human capital, resources that are already in short supply for the government in the aftermath of the devastating storm.

    Despite these fiscal challenges, the newspaper’s editorial argues that Jamaica cannot afford to set this issue aside as the country recovers. Investing in appropriate care for behaviourally challenged children is not just a moral obligation—it is a long-term investment in public safety. Over time, targeted early support will reduce the likelihood that these children turn to criminal or antisocial behavior later in life, ultimately reducing the massive public costs associated with crime control and the justice system. As Jamaica rebuilds after the storm, officials say protecting the country’s most vulnerable children must remain a core part of the nation’s vision for a more stable, prosperous future.

  • Vernal Sage believes in ‘Good over evil’

    Vernal Sage believes in ‘Good over evil’

    After stepping away from the music industry for more than a decade to pursue a corporate tech career, veteran Jamaican reggae performer Vernal Sage—pronounced Sajay—has returned to the spotlight with a purpose-driven new single aimed at sparking meaningful cultural shift. Titled *Good Over Evil*, the track grows out of Sage’s deep concern over eroding moral standards and fading empathy across global society, and he says he is confident the work can lift collective spirits and reframe public mindsets both in his native Jamaica and across the world.

    In explaining the core message behind his latest release, Sage pointed to growing social disconnectedness that has paved the way for a surge in destructive societal problems, from widespread scamming operations to rising violent criminality in Jamaica. Beyond local community issues, he extended his critique to global politics, noting that many world governments now operate without empathy or regard for the welfare of citizens in other nations, pointing to the ongoing crisis unfolding across the Middle East as a stark example.

    Sage emphasized that failing adult leadership has disproportionately harmed young people, who grow up without receiving the consistent care and loving example they need to thrive. “It’s turning into a harsher, more unkind world, and that has to be fixed,” he explained. “Good has to hold the balance to keep the world right. That’s why I sing of good triumphing over evil, and that’s what I pray for every day.”

    Since its release, *Good Over Evil* has earned broad, enthusiastic backing from Jamaican radio personalities. Top DJs including DJ Amber, Big A, Collision and DJ Bryan from the popular local station IRIE FM have added the track to regular rotation, alongside other prominent DJs Roderick Howell, Dalton Leith, and Richie B. Programming teams at Connection Radio and Captain Kirk of Island Gold Radio have also thrown their support behind the single. The track made its public debut at the iconic Kingston weekly street event Weddy Weddy, hosted by Dwayne Pow, and DJ Shawn 13 has been spinning the track consistently at local street events ever since. “The feedback and support we’ve gotten has been absolutely incredible,” Sage said of the early response.

    A native of Westmoreland, Jamaica, Sage grew up as the oldest of eight siblings, cutting his first musical teeth as a member of his high school choir at Glenmuir High School before relocating to Rocky Point, Clarendon, and completing his secondary education at Clarendon College. He cut his first three recorded tracks in the early 1990s under the stage name Green T, after graduating from the University of Technology. For years, he balanced a full-time career as an information technology specialist with his passion for music, even releasing multiple tracks through the legendary reggae label Greensleeves Records. Eventually, the heavy demands of his corporate role led him to step back from music, taking an extended sabbatical that lasted until 2010.

    Sage’s return to full-time music began through a personal and professional connection with iconic Jamaican performer Boris Gardiner. In 2020, he officially relaunched his recording career, teaming up with Gardiner and Donovan Downer, a core member of the beloved reggae group Fab Fifty. Since resuming his craft, he has poured consistent energy into refining his work, earning early commercial success with the 2020s single *One Night Stand*, which climbed the ethnic regional music charts across the United States.

  • A ‘wow’ moment for our country

    A ‘wow’ moment for our country

    Across the globe, few nations can claim more than a handful of truly transformative, jaw-dropping ‘wow moments’ – achievements so unexpected, so extraordinary, that they redefine what a country believes it can accomplish. For Jamaica, these rare landmarks have long been tied to the dominance of its world-class athletes, from Usain Bolt’s record-breaking feats at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the legacy of Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, and an early upset win by the national combined martial arts team against top-ranked Japan. But for a nation that spent decades grappling with endemic gang violence and sky-high homicide rates, the most staggering ‘wow moment’ has arrived not on a track or mat, but in the crime statistics that are reshaping Jamaica’s global reputation.

    The first drop in homicides that shook veteran crime fighters last year was unprecedented enough to earn the ‘wow’ label. But no one, not even those who had spent a lifetime advocating for safer communities, predicted the follow-up: as of the end of the first quarter of this year, homicides have plummeted a further 30% from 2025’s already record low. Longtime crime researcher and former law enforcement insider describes the shift as nothing short of revolutionary – a outcome he never expected to witness in his lifetime.

    What makes this drop even more remarkable is the shift in policing strategy that has driven it. Where decades of crime-fighting focused on containing mass carnage and minimizing monthly murder counts, today’s force is deploying more than 100 officers to proactive operations in volatile communities to stop a single potential homicide before it occurs. This new level of preventative policing is bearing fruit across every division in Jamaica’s high-crime Area 5, which once included some of the country’s most dangerous killing zones – Spanish Town, Central Village, Grant’s Pen, Common, and 100 Lane.

    In St Catherine South, the division where the author works, just five homicides have been recorded in the first quarter, down from a high of 40 in a comparable quarter decades ago. Neighboring St Catherine North, long notorious for violence in Spanish Town, has recorded seven homicides, a 46% improvement over last year, and once recorded nearly 50 murders in a single first quarter. Most strikingly, Area 5 now holds the lowest homicide count of any police division in Jamaica – a first in recorded history, a milestone that once seemed impossible for a region synonymous with gang killings. The murder clear-up rate in St Catherine North already outpaces that of Queens, New York, and the St Andrew North division, also part of Area 5, reports zero homicides for the first quarter of 2026 – a rate matching the safest divisions in Sweden, one of the world’s safest countries.

    Criminologists will spend years unpacking the multiple factors that have driven this seismic shift, but the authors points to two core changes under current Police Commissioner Dr. Kevin Blake’s leadership. First, a new focus on micromanagement of crime prevention by commanding officers, paired with a push to promote young, frontline officers to leadership roles early in their careers, rather than waiting for their energy and drive to fade with age. Many of the current senior leaders cutting homicide rates cut their teeth on high-risk entry operations alongside the author, bringing on-the-ground experience to command positions and proving to young officers that there is no glass ceiling for frontline officers willing to take risks. Second, the force has seen a growing, critical role for female officers, with operational leadership regularly joining officers on the ground in harsh, high-risk conditions.

    The shift is not just structural: modern resourcing has also transformed policing, bringing the Jamaican force on par with North American departments in equipment. Officers now wear level-four protective vests, drive new vehicles, and work in a culture that recognizes individual effort and provides basic support like meals during long operations – a far cry from decades past when officers carried rifles older than themselves and wore outdated colonial-style uniforms. Most importantly, this progress has been achieved while upholding democratic values and human rights, with no indefinite detention and officers who break the law prosecuted internally by the force.

    If Jamaica can maintain the first quarter’s homicide rate for the rest of the year, the national annual rate will drop to 17 per 100,000 people – lower than the Pan-American average of 19 per 100,000. For St Catherine, which has a population of 500,000, the annual rate would drop to 9.6 per 100,000, nearly matching the rate of Miami-Dade County in the United States.

    The pressure to maintain this historic progress is high, falling heaviest on Commissioner Blake, who has earned global acclaim as one of the most successful criminal justice leaders of the modern era, equally praised for cutting homicides and upholding human rights. The author stresses that sustaining this progress requires collective national effort: political collaboration between the government and opposition to marginalize gangs, clear recognition from human rights organizations that gangs are the primary enemy of public safety, and protection of Jamaican sovereignty against unnecessary international interference in policing. Most critically, the author argues, the government must provide Blake with full resources and ensure he remains in post to cement this new, safer normal for Jamaica – a future that once seemed unthinkable, but is now within reach.

  • ‘A Hit Mek’ charts journey of Jamaica’s music heritage

    ‘A Hit Mek’ charts journey of Jamaica’s music heritage

    Jamaica’s globally beloved musical tradition has long been celebrated around the world, but a groundbreaking new work by author Rohan Budhai argues that many critical chapters of this cultural legacy have remained hidden from mainstream documentation. Titled *A Hit Mek* — a clever reference to Desmond Dekker’s iconic 1967 track *007 (Shanty Town)* that unpacks the deeper cultural roots of the classic phrase “A it mek” — this 560-page volume offers the most sweeping examination of the island’s sonic and cultural evolution ever published, challenging long-held assumptions that Jamaican music history has already been fully mapped.

    In his foreword to the book, respected music consultant Clyde McKenzie praises Budhai’s unique approach, which ties pivotal moments in Jamaican social and political history directly to the emergence and transformation of the nation’s core musical genres. Unlike many earlier works that focus only on the global boom of reggae in the 20th century, *A Hit Mek* stretches its narrative back more than 500 years, opening with Christopher Columbus’s 15th-century arrival on the island and the Indigenous Taíno community whose rhythmic drumming, call-and-response vocal traditions, and handmade instruments carried the earliest echoes of African cultural influence that would shape all future Jamaican sound.

    Budhai weaves together a complex narrative that accounts for the layered impacts of Spanish and British colonial rule, the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade, and the irreplaceable cultural contributions of every community that shaped the island: Taínos, Maroons, enslaved Africans, and indentured laborers from across Asia and the Middle East. The book traces the step-by-step evolution of Jamaica’s most defining genres, from sacred traditional styles like Kumina to the first commercially recorded local sound Mento, through the mid-20th century explosion of Ska and Rocksteady, and on to the global dominance of Reggae and the contemporary energy of Dancehall. It also centers the underrecognized role of Jamaican sound system culture, a grassroots innovation that redefined live music and went on to reshape popular sound across the globe.

    A key strength of the work is its commitment to highlighting the contributions of diverse communities that have long been sidelined in official music histories, including Afro-Jamaican, Lebanese, Syrian, Chinese, and Indian Jamaican creators, alongside the bands, radio outlets, and entertainment organizations that nurtured local talent and expanded the reach of Jamaican sound. The book even addresses longstanding scholarly debates: for example, it notes that while Mento holds the title of Jamaica’s first widely recognized and electronically recorded local genre, cultural icons like Rex Nettleford long argued that it drew significant formative influence from Cuban musical traditions.

    The volume devotes special attention to reggae, Jamaica’s most globally impactful export, framing it as a dynamic fusion of West African ancestral traditions, American rhythm and blues, jazz, and soul. It maps reggae’s far-reaching legacy, from spawning iconic subgenres including dub and lovers rock to shaping everything from modern hip-hop to global electronic dance music, cementing Jamaica’s outsize influence on contemporary popular music worldwide.

    Budhai, who launched his career in music production before founding Howlers International Music, began the ambitious project in 2021, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and brought it to completion in 2025. His years of research uncovered major gaps in existing historical accounts, with many key influences — including church music introduced during colonial rule, and cultural traditions dating back to pre-Columbian and enslaved African communities — having been largely overlooked in earlier works.

    Today, *A Hit Mek* is available for purchase globally through Amazon, with translated editions already published in Spanish, French, and Portuguese to make this comprehensive history accessible to audiences around the world. While Budhai describes the book as one of the most exhaustive works on Jamaican music history ever compiled, he emphasizes that the story of the island’s sound is far from finished. For him, Jamaican music has always been, and remains, a living narrative that reflects the struggles, extraordinary resilience, and unmistakeable cultural identity of the Jamaican people, with new chapters still being written every day.