STEVIE AND SHAUNAE THE OLYMPIC CHAMPIONS: The Golden Twins in Tokyo. It was Steven Gardiner's turn on 5 August 2021 to win gold in the 400 metres at the Olympics. The next day 6 August 2021 day belonged to Shaunae Miller Uibo. Gold again for The Bahamas in the 400 metres. We predict one day she will be our Minister of Sports. CONGRATULATIONS and well done. 6 August 2021. OUR PHOTO OF THE WEEK. They celebrated each other in the stands.
The poem that starts with the words “I am master of all I survey” is the apt beginning to this short piece today on where we are in the world dominated by the aggression of the leaders of the United States toward the rest of the world. They were not kidding when they announced in various publications as Joe Biden was making his exit that they intended to upend the entire world order and deconstruct what their predecessors had carefully and thoughtfully put together based on a common and agreed morality
That has now gone out of the window for power being the only fact. There is no friend of America any more. It appears that the whole world is at bay.
With the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela for offences that clearly are a tissue of lies, there is a free for all in whole world. The Russians are free to trample on Ukraine and the Chinese on Taiwan. That means that anyone is at risk.
This has not missed the leaders of CARICOM countries who have all fallen in line, with nary a word to say about their much touted independence, hard fought and won against the retreating British.
No CARICOM country wants to end up with the poverty, hunger and degradation of their societies like Cuba. The Cuban people are being starved to death for ideological reasons, in a country that poses no threat to the United States at all.
So Bahamians want to go first and foremost to the United States. The Foreign Minister of The Bahamas Fred Mitchell now says that is the number one priority for the country to preserve that access. This should tell the country where we ourselves are headed. The whole idea is to survive in the current climate that is not rules based but one where whatever is said and done on the day in question goes.
Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 10 January 2026 up to midnight: 994,394;
Number of hits for the month of January up to Saturday 10 January 2026 up to midnight: 1,382,039;
Number of hist for the year 2026 up to Saturday 10 January 2026 up to midnight: 1,382,039;
Members of Parliament reconvened following the Christmas break in Nassau on Wednesday 7 January 2026. They met to receive the report of the Constituencies Commission that outlined the boundaries on which the General Election of 2026 will be fought. The bet is that the election will be held in the first half of the year. No party has been able to resist the tinkering with boundaries except Hubert Minnis who ended up losing also. All those who have tinkered with boundaries in the last 30 years have ended up losing. Clearly there is no formula for success. The law says the constituencies should be more or less equal. To achieve that result, the government has proposed and agreed to create a new seat in New Providence called St James in western New Providence. The result is consequential changes to Englerston, Garden Hills, Ft. Charlotte, Killarney, Golden Isles, Southern Shores and Tall Pines. The House then adjourned to Tuesday 13 January 2026 at 3 p.m. to debate the report. They went to church at the Church of God Lilly of the Valley Corner to hear Bishop Delton Fernander in his swan song as head of the Christian Council. He warned the parliamentarians about forgetting their roots and thought that the church has been lax in declaring “thus said the lord”.
There will be 41 seats up for grabs in the next House of Assembly. The Constituencies Commission laid its report on Wednesday 7 January 2026 in the House of Assembly and it creates two new seats up from the 39 that we now have. One seat will be called St James and that is to split the present Killarney that most people say was too big. The other seat is Bimini and the Berry Islands. This is the recreation of a seat that was previously held in the Parliament from 1982 to 1987 by George Weech.
The PLP will be a much morphed organization once the general election is done. Should it accomplish the hat trick of winning a second term that no party has done in 30 years, there are some fundamentals that must change in the country. First it must fix the laggard bureaucracy including that of the Ministry of Finance. Secondly, it must ensure that the government remains the most powerful force in the country and in order to do this should consider the implementation of a national lottery. The country’s health care has been suffering for lack of funding and there appears no new tax source on the horizon. The national lottery could help solve that issue and bring into force once and for all National Health Insurance.
We wish to congratulate Aljournal Nathaniel Miller who was the founder of the Montague Ramp fish market way back in 1981, starting with a single table and 25 conchs. He resisted the opposition of the Royal Nassau Sailing Club and the police and enlisted in his battle to survive the help of then activist Fred Mitchell, today the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Mitchell was there with his Fox Hill constituents on Friday 9 January 2026 to award Mr. Miller a plaque for his pioneering work.
Thank you Rev Edmund Munroe of Global Inspirational Ministries in Holmes Rock, Grand Bahama for welcoming us to your church even though we missed the last hymn. Our branch delegation from Fox Hill Ida Symonette, Desiree Gibbs and Jacklin Brice joined us for the photo with MP Kingsley Smith and Mrs Smith. Fred Mitchell MP Fox Hill 4 January 2026
Thank you Rev Fr Oswald Pinder for blessing the ladies: Fox Hill Chair Ida Symonette and Fox Hill Executive Desiree Gibbs as they celebrated their birthdays at St Mary Magdalene Church in West End, Grand Bahama. We were joined by Kingsley Smith MP and Mrs. Smith together with Alfred Sears, Immigration Minister and Henry Dean of United Sanitation.
The PLP will mark the date of Majority Rule Day at a service at Harvest Church on John F Kennedy Drive at 10 a.m. 12 January 2026, followed by a march to the PLP’s headquarters in Farrington Road at 11:30 a.m. This marks the 59th anniversary of a black government in our country.
This piece first appeared in the Jamaica Observer and was written by the former Prime Minister of Jamaica Bruce Gelding. We agree entirely and could not have said it better. Thank you—Editor
THINGS fall apart, the centre is clearly not holding, and anarchy seems to have been unleashed upon the world.
I was born two years after the end of World War II in which some 80 million people were killed. In a never-again reaction, world leaders came together and agreed on an architecture that would guide relations among countries to prevent another such conflagration. Its core principles were:
Those principles have not always triumphed. There have been hundreds of armed conflicts between countries since World War II, but they were regarded as deviations from the rules, not the new norm…until now, until Donald Trump.
Trump has almost effortlessly upended the world’s rules-based system that, with all its deficiencies, we had come to recognise and even take for granted. He has neutered the World Trade Organization which is supposed to ensure fair trade among countries by the widescale unilateral imposition of import tariffs, the US being the world’s largest importer. He has placed in uncertainty the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the most effective deterrent against Russian aggression, with the threat of US withdrawal.
He has hobbled the vital effort to mobilise a global response to climate change by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. He has reincarnated the Monroe Doctrine, but with an undisguised interpretation that the Western Hemisphere exists primarily for the interests and benefit of the United States.
It is on the basis of what he has renamed the “Donroe Doctrine” that the US has launched, so far, 35 strikes killing more than 100 people on boats, including in the Caribbean Sea, which it claims were transporting narcotics to the United States. No evidence was ever provided and no attempt was ever made to apprehend and prosecute the alleged traffickers. What evidence there may have been has been obliterated along with the lives of the boat occupants. Trump’s USA has arrogated to itself the right to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in accordance with its redefinition of the rule of law.
Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to use military force, if necessary, to annex resource-rich Greenland, and this past week said that he would make a decision on this “within the next 20 days to two months”. He has also set his sights on Canada, which is actually larger than the United States and which he wants to become its 51st state. It is not far-fetched that he would consider using military force to do so, which would certainly overwhelm Canada’s defence capability. With Greenland and Canada, the US would more than double its land area, displacing Russia as the world’s largest country. No doubt, this is part of his legacy ambitions.
Denmark, of which Greenland is a dependency, and Canada, both members of NATO, seem to be relying on Article 5 of the NATO treaty which speaks to collective security and provides that an attack on any one member State is an attack on all and for which there would be a collective response. It is not likely to work. The treaty provides that each country’s response shall be “as it deems necessary”. That could mean financial contributions or diplomatic initiatives or simply expressions of solidarity, not boots on the ground or fighter jets in the air.
NATO’s standing response capability provides for the deployment of 100,000 troops within 10 days, another 100,000 troops within 30 days, and a further 300,000 within six months. Half of those troops would be expected to be provided by the US, which it certainly would not provide in combat against itself. Beyond those numbers, it depends on how many additional troops the other member states are willing to provide. A NATO force would hardly be any match against the US military might.
More importantly, the NATO treaty was designed to repel an external attack on a member State. It makes no provision for an attack from within. Faced with such a conundrum, NATO would more than likely disintegrate and Greenland (Denmark’s armed forces are about the size of the Jamaica Defence Force) and Canada (with about 100,000 troops) would be left on their own to contend with the US, which boasts an armed forces compliment of 1.2 million.
Trump’s posture offers a troubling signal to Taiwan, which China has long contended belongs to it, and even South Korea, that North Korea, with its military strength, has long wanted to capture. Other countries with border disputes would now consider new options, free of the constraints of international law.
Trump’s most hegemonic display, however, is the recent invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife on the grounds that they are narco traffickers. Never mind that just last month he granted a full and complete pardon to the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been convicted in US courts and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment on charges almost identical to those laid against Maduro. The inconsistency doesn’t seem to bother Trump one bit. Hernandez earned his pardon by being a vocal Trump supporter.
The US refuses to recognise Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela on the grounds that he stole the 2024 elections. There is convincing evidence that he did so, abused human rights, and reigned oppression on opposition forces in the process. But how is that different from Trump’s attempt to steal the US elections of 2020 by mobilising violent protesters whom he called “patriots” to storm the Capitol and demand that his vice-president “do the right thing” or his retribution on those who prosecuted him for his actions?
He has also voiced strong support for Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who attempted to steal the 2022 election, and imposed a 50 per cent tariff on imports from Brazil as punishment after Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Trump declared that the US would now “run” Venezuela, and when asked who would be in charge his response was “Me”. He meant it. He has commandeered 30-50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, saying, “This Oil will be sold at market price, and that money will be controlled by me as president of the United States of America.” He has told the acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriquez, that if she doesn’t cooperate her fate will be worse than that of Maduro. He has warned Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico that they are next on his radar. What blazing audacity! Trump is like a raging bull charging through Half-Way-Tree and mowing down everyone and everything in his path.
Most disheartening is the muted international response to these clear violations of international law and repudiation of the Charter of the United Nations. There has hardly been any outrage. Trump has succeeded in intimidating almost everyone on the planet, and even major countries in Europe are afraid of incurring his wrath.
Even Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has come out in support of the kidnapping of Maduro, so dependent is he on Trump’s support in his struggle against Russia and oblivious of the fact that what Russia is determined to do to Ukraine is no different from what Trump plans to do to Greenland and perhaps other countries. Such is the power that the country with the strongest economy and the most powerful military in the world can exert. It becomes especially dangerous when that power rests in the hands of a megalomaniac whose inclinations are so mercurial and most virulent at three o’clock in the morning when he should be asleep.
The situation poses a crisis dilemma for Caricom countries that are especially vulnerable. A principled stance for which it is renowned in situations like this is a dangerous gambit in the Trump orbit. Antigua and Barbuda as well as Dominica have recently been slapped with visa restrictions that will have serious implications for their economies when their citizens, business people in particular, have difficulty travelling to the US.
The stated basis is their citizenship by investment programmes, but the real reason is the close relationship that their leaders have had with Maduro. Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia operate similar programmes, but they have not been subjected to these restrictions, their leaders having maintained respectful distance from Maduro. St Vincent and the Grenadines which, under Ralph Gonsalves, was firmly opposed to citizenship by investment programmes would almost certainly have been included in the restriction list if he had retained power in the December election, because he has been Maduro’s staunchest ally within Caricom.
Caricom countries are in a vice. Taking a principled stance against Trump’s rampaging would almost certainly invite retribution. He has already placed in his arsenal the tools for this. These include visa restrictions a la Antigua and Dominica; a requirement for a US$15,000 bond for visa applicants, as has been imposed on some 13 countries; increased tariffs on our exports to the US beyond the 10 per cent that took effect last August; reduction if not termination of financial assistance in critical sectors like health and security; and, perhaps most damaging, restrictions on our access to the international financial system, most of which is channelled through US institutions. Imposing a US$250 tax on airline tickets to Jamaica, for example, would deliver a devastating blow to our tourist arrivals.
We are between a rock and a hard place. No head of Government in Caricom is safe. Any of them could be snatched in the dead of night like Maduro was, with charges to follow.
Caricom faces the additional problem that even if it had the cojones it is unable to speak with one voice. Kamla Persad-Bissessar took a unilateral but decisive position. “Kill them all violently” was her response to the US boat strikes. She went further to declare that “Caricom is not a reliable partner”. She may yet discover to her chagrin and that of the Trinidadian people that under Trump it is the US that is not a reliable partner unless one is willing to do its bidding.
The response to the Maduro capture by even the Organization of American States (OAS) — whose membership includes Venezuela and all the other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean except Cuba — has been far from strident. That, too, is understandable. The US accounts for a half of the OAS’s operating budget. Trump doesn’t need much provocation to scuttle that and ensure its demise.
During my time in office I urged the OAS Permanent Council to flatten the assessed contributions by member states so as to lessen its reliance on the US. Countries like Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic could afford to carry more of the load. Even Jamaica, which contributes only one-twentieth of one per cent should be prepared to do more. I got blank stares in response and we quickly moved to the next agenda item.
We are not in uncharted waters. The threat of recolonisation is upon us, but we have been there before. We are in the waters that we were in 80 years ago. We tried and somehow managed to chart our way through. We will have to do that again. Come 2029 we will say goodbye to Trump. What happens after that will depend on whether he has firmly put in place a new ideology and the framework of a new world order that will enjoy significant support among the American people and whether any of his sycophants will be given the charge in the 2028 presidential elections to perpetuate that legacy. Like it or not, the future of the world now rests in the hands of the American voters.
At 78 years old I had hoped to leave the world a better place than I found it. Much of what I have witnessed, especially in my own country, gave me confidence that that would be so and I would be able to go to my grave with some level of satisfaction. I now have cause to be deeply troubled, which is not a good state of mind to be in at my age. Things are indeed falling apart.
Bruce Golding served as Jamaica’s eighth prime minister from September 2007 to October 2011.
Every day since the United States invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president by the U S military, the leaders of the CARICOM region have been walking a tight rope. The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and the President of Guyana both embraced the invasion and kidnapping. The other states have been walking a thin line between not attacking the United States but seeking to stand up for their principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty. None of that makes any difference to the United States. It has imposed sanctions on two states that of Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda because of their citizenship by investment programme and now those two states plus St Kitts have agreed to take expelled refugees from the United States whose own countries will not accept them. The decision was done in such a way that it has split the country of St Kitts and Nevis in half. The Prime Minister was accused of having signed a secret deal without consultation with the rest of his government and one that accepts those expelled provided they are not Haitians. Haiti is a member of CARICOM. Journalists throughout the region have attacked the leaders of the region as being feckless and weak as a result. The problem is given the pressure from the United States, the leaders feel they have no choice if their nations are to survive, otherwise they end up in the graveyard that the United States has imposed on Cuba.
IN 1962, there was something that went down in history as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The drama was that the then Soviet Union, today Russia, was planting nuclear missiles in Cuba that the U S perceived as offensive weapons toward them. The US President John Kennedy implemented a blockade of the island to prevent any further missiles from going there. There was the threat of a nuclear war. In the end the Soviets backed down and agreed to withdraw them, with that the U.S. promised two things in exchange for the Soviet withdrawal: to remove the weapons nuclear tipped that the U.S. had pointed at Russia and situate in Turkey and they promised not to invade Cuba. Today the economic blockade of Cuba by the United States continues. There is starvation on the streets of the country as a result. It has become impossible for them to trade across the world. People have no food or medicine and no fuel. The United States refuses to relent, and now it appears that the promise not to invade is no longer inviolate. The United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has indicated that Cuba may be the next target of an invasion similar to that of what transpired in Venezuela and the removal of President Nicholas Maduro.
Last week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Bahamas issued an advisory statement that indicated that Bahamians should not travel to Venezuela, given the hostilities in that country. The statement said that The Bahamas stood by the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty. It also added that a Bahamian citizen was unlawfully held in the prisons of Venezuela and that the country was seeking assurances about the safety and security of the individual and wanted his release. The Venezuelan administration of Nicholas Maduro has been promising to release that individual for almost four years and has not fulfilled its promise. The press identified the man as Ornan Munroe who was caught in a failed drug operation when his plane crashed landed in Venezuela. He has been held by the authorities ever since. Despite promises to release the man, Venezuela has not lived up to its promises.
