Jamaica

Blooms of smelly and unsightly sargassum seaweed have impacted the tourism industry across the Caribbean. Now, solutions must balance environmental factors and local livelihoods.

As part of her election campaign, Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson Miller announced her intention of breaking ties with the British monarchy and becoming an independent republic. While this is no doubt a long overdue and symbolic act, breaking ties with the real neocolonial power in Jamaica—the International Monetary Fund—should be a much higher priority.

The killing of 21 people—including a 13-year-old girl and an elderly man—by the Jamaican police in the past six days has highlighted the systemic problem the country is having with controlling the inappropriate use of deadly force.

The prosecutors in the trial of Christopher "Dudus" Coke have asked for a 23-year sentence, to stop the Jamaican criminal kingpin from resuming his criminal activities upon his release from prison. What this saga has shown is that in many ways Coke was indeed more powerful than Jamaican prime minister Bruce Golding.

On June 22, Jamaican police arrested Christopher "Dudus" Coke in the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston and immediately delivered him into U.S. custody. Many Jamaicans are hoping that Coke will now reveal the long history of connections between the country's political leaders, its business elite, and its gunmen in the street. Such revelations are likely to illuminate past actions of the CIA, which helped create one of Jamaica's most powerful organized crime organizations, the Shower Posse. These links are ever more important as the United States is poised to invest millions of dollars to make the Caribbean its newest front in the drug war, ostensibly fighting some of the same personalities and groups they themselves helped create.

The Jamaican government took several important steps vis-a-vis the bauxite industry in 1974. First, it began negotiations with the companies

Today, Jamaica is known around the world for the culture it produces. Indeed, the mere mention of the island conjures

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Violence is perhaps the single most discussed issue in many Anglophone Caribbean societies today. The ongoing murders in Jamaica, the

“It may not be right,” the off-duty police officer said, “but it does make my job easier.” We were sitting

"LAST WEEK ALL OF A SUDDEN THE NEEDLE went right through me fingernail. But you can't use a thimble-it would

APPLE PICKERS MANY CALLED, FEW CHOSEN At the outset of this past fall's East Coast apple harvest, most of the