Western Bureau: Residents of Woodsville, in Hanover, who have been operating with a makeshift bridge they created following the collapse of the 100-year-old Woodsville bridge four years ago, are making yet another plea to the authorities to replace the bridge immediately. They say  the one they created from logs and trees has become structurally unsafe, following recent rains.

WESTERN BUREAU: Malaika, Mahari and Mikalli Foster, known in gospel music circles as the Foster Triplets, have been awarded the keys to the city of Worcester, in Massachusetts, for their ongoing ‘We Will Rise’ benefit initiative, which is raising funds to assist families in Westmoreland, who were displaced by Hurricane Melissa.

When the next academic year begins in September 2026, Jamaican Justin Brown will be one of 10 international students starting a Master of Management in Analytics postgraduate programme at McGill University in Canada.

The Portmore Municipal Council has sharply rebuked Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon, the minister of education, skills, youth and information, accusing her of misleading the public with claims that bureaucracy caused an 18‑month delay in building approvals for a perimeter fence at Naggo Head Primary School in St Catherine.

A 13-year-old Excelsior High School student remains in a coma at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) after she was stabbed while trying to intervene in a violent domestic dispute in Bayshore Park in the vicinity of Harbour View, St Andrew, on Saturday night.

Wayne Chai Chong said the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) board he led for about a year from December 2022 had identified corrective steps for a litany of problems later flagged by the Auditor General’s Department (AuGD) in a performance audit. However, he said very little was done by the management to implement the recommendations.

Period poverty in Jamaica is to be addressed by the government, according to Health Minister Christopher Tufton, who made the announcement during his Sectoral debate in parliament on Tuesday. Period poverty is one of 10 areas that will get attention under the government’s new initiative, the half-a-billion dollar Social Determinants of Health CARE Fund, the minister disclosed.

Four months after Category 5 Hurricane Melissa left a path of destruction, particularly across southern and western Jamaica, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) had spent only $26 million, or 1.8 per cent of the $1.44 billion in cash donation to assist Jamaicans devastated by the storm.

WESTERN BUREAU: Former colonels Meredith Rowe and Ferron Williams, who plan to contest the upcoming Accompong Maroon leadership elections, have raised concerns about the process, which is being managed by the incumbent chief, Richard Currie, who is seeking re-election. The men are arguing that the electoral process is unfair and flawed.

Amid ongoing complaints about the state of infrastructure in the health sector, the Government will, this year, be pumping $1 billion into the establishment of its Health Infrastructure Maintenance Fund (HIMF), through which a range of initiatives are to be established this year with the aim of addressing ongoing concerns about the rundown state of facilities in the health sector as well as tackle the social factors that play a role in determining the poor state of health of large segments of the Jamaican population.

Among the delights of life that bring people together while aligning cultures is food, and Chef Claudia Parkinson knows that only too well. For the last eight years, the St Mary native has been feeding the family and guests of three British high commissioners to Jamaica, serving Asif Ahmad and Judith Slater, and now Alicia Herbert.

Vice-Admiral Antonette Wemyss-Gorman, chief of defence staff of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), released her first memoir, Life, Duty & Command, on Sunday on Amazon. Within 24 hours of its release, the memoir earned a place on Amazon’s Best Seller list in the Jamaica, Caribbean & West Indies History category.

Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton said Jamaicans should begin seeing improvements in the health sector in the coming months as the Government makes progress in addressing the shortage of specialist nurses in the sector, which worsened when the country ended its medical cooperation with Cuba.

The European Union (EU) is seeking to rebrand its relationship with Jamaica, signalling a shift away from traditional donor-recipient dynamics to a partnership of potential amid a crumbling global order.

With a little over a month to go before the 11th Biennial Diaspora Conference takes place in Jamaica, efforts are being ramped up to generate interest and get more people in the diaspora to register for the event.

Businessman and author Dwight Clacken has been ordered to discontinue the publication of the offending material contained in the book No Justice in Jamaica after the High Court found it contained defamatory statements about his former business partner, Michael Causwell Sr, and his son, Michael Causwell Jr.

WESTERN BUREAU: Fresh concerns are being raised over the increasing incidents of school violence, including student-on-student conflict and assaults on teachers, with Dr Darien Henry, the principal of the Montego Bay Community College (MBCC), saying they must be denounced and Jamaica's youth must be rescued from the brutality.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has made real gains over recent decades in education, health, democratic governance, and poverty reduction. The region, however, remains stuck. Not because progress is absent, but because advances in some areas consistently fail to connect with advances in others. The result is a region where partial gains rarely add up to sustained improvements in living standards.

Jamaica’s sport federations face a familiar reality: overwhelming workloads and too few hands. Many of these national governing bodies, which are responsible for organising and developing their sports, operate with little to no paid staff, often just one to five administrative or management personnel, and rely heavily on volunteers who cannot provide the consistency or continuity of a full‑time professional workforce.

Tuberculosis has been linked to the deaths of two inmates at the Hunts Bay Police Station lockup in St Andrew between August 2024 and April 2026. Over the same period, more than 30 other cases were registered in state detention facilities.

The horrifying news came from the suspected killer’s mother. On the other end of the line, the woman’s breathy, raspy voice told stunned relatives in New York that Melissa Kerry Samnath had been killed while on vacation in Jamaica.

Karel Donaldson wanted to have her name added to the title for a property that was already registered in her cousin’s name when she hired attorney-at-law Debby-Ann Samuels in 2017. Both women agreed on a fee of $80,000 for the transaction, which the attorney indicated would be completed in approximately six months.

With close to 54 million YouTube subscribers, Internet sensation IShowSpeed has turned his visit to Jamaica into a global spectacle, giving the island major visibility among younger travellers.

The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) has hailed winning the coveted OCCUR’s Regulator of the Year Award for 2025 and the Winston Hay Award for Most Outstanding Consumer Protection Initiative as a rare and meaningful validation of its much-vaunted position in the region.

About 60 Jamaican non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are set to receive training under the Fulbright Specialist Programme, an effort to strengthen their ability to secure funding and better communicate their impact.

Jamaica’s tourism sector could soon undergo its biggest legislative overhaul in decades, with Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announcing plans to repeal and replace the Tourism Act as part of a sweeping restructuring of the industry.

Concerns are growing over the use of social media platform TikTok as a marketplace for the sale of endangered Jamaican species, with conservation biologist Damion Whyte urging the authorities to make every effort to find and prosecute individuals who engage in the practice. 

Nominations are now open for WATA’s Hydrate to Educate initiative, with the 2026 programme set to invest more than $12 million in educational support and school development across Jamaica.

Teachers at Lawrence Tavern Primary School were given laptops and classroom technology during a Teachers’ Day ceremony in St Andrew on Wednesday. All 36 teachers received laptops, courtesy of the Flow Foundation, while the school was presented with a BlackPoint smartboard through a partnership with Imperial Appliances.

For hundreds of girls across Jamaica, the start of their menstrual cycle does not simply signal a natural stage of growing up; it marks the beginning of a monthly struggle defined by uncertainty, embarrassment, and, too often, absence from school.

A 55-minute stand-off between Judge Maxine Ellis and attorney-at-law Matthew Hyatt unfolded in the Half-Way Tree Parish Court yesterday in the 31-year-old case involving Courtney Anderson, as the matter was not listed for hearing and the lawyer ‘sounded off’ after it was disclosed that the case file is still missing.

he two law-enforcement agencies that investigated a multimillion-dollar fraud at Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ) nine years ago are now in the process of consulting the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) after the case against the five accused persons collapsed in court on Monday.