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OAS observer mission lands as Christian Council pleads for civil tone before next week's vote

The Organisation of American States has deployed its 21-expert Electoral Observation Mission for next week’s Bahamas general election. The team, drawn from 14 nations, will focus on electoral organisation and boundaries, electoral technology, electoral justice, political-electoral finance, and the political participation of women. They will meet with government officials, electoral authorities, candidates, and civil society leaders to gather information on the process. International electoral observation rarely changes the outcome, but it changes the conditions under which the outcome is contested afterwards.

Pinard official funeral today as Skerrit's Caribbean Investment Summit visit closes a busy diplomatic week

Former Government Minister Ian Pinard, who passed away on April 17, receives an official funeral today at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Pointe Michel. The Government of Dominica accorded the service in recognition of his public service. State funerals are political occasions as much as personal ones, and the gathering today brings together a cross-section of Dominica’s political class for the first major public ceremony since the regional election cycle quieted.

Westmoreland hospital rebuild gathers pace as a UK custody order tests jurisdictional reach

Health and Wellness Minister Christopher Tufton briefed reporters this week on the rehabilitation of Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital in Westmoreland, the western parish institution battered by Hurricane Melissa last October. Tufton struck an optimistic tone on the pace and scope of works, with the Western Regional Health Authority coordinating restoration of facilities damaged in the storm. The political read: Melissa recovery remains a live performance metric for the administration, and the western parishes are watching whether ministerial visits are followed by visible reconstruction.

Browne's Cabinet is fully constituted as the U.S. visa fallout becomes the first test of the fourth term

The mandate is settled. The portfolios are out.

Antigua and Barbuda’s new Cabinet was fully constituted Tuesday, with fourteen ministers — including the Prime Minister and Attorney General — formally appointed and issued instruments of office at the American University of Antigua. The remaining ministers took their oaths before Governor General Sir Rodney Williams. The April 30 election delivered the ABLP a 15-of-17 seat sweep, reversing the 9-7 squeaker of January 2023. Browne becomes the first prime minister in the country to win four consecutive general elections.

CIP launch locked for mid-2026 with residency mandate and ring-fenced fund as Argyle suspends night flights

CIP launches mid-2026 — but the structure is the story

The Friday administration is positioning Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ Citizenship by Investment programme launch for mid-2026 with three locks the rest of the OECS CIP market does not have: a mandatory residency requirement, a legislatively ring-fenced investment vehicle (the SVG Investment Fund), and a Fiscal Resilience Protocol that directs 100% of non-debt capital to verifiable long-term productive expenditure.

Allocation breakdown: Productive Capital Investment (climate-resilient infrastructure and productive sectors), Social Infrastructure (healthcare, education, technical training), and a Fiscal Resilience and Contingency Buffer (national debt reduction and disaster liquidity). The PM’s framing — “sovereign capital mobilisation strategy” rather than revenue at all costs — is a direct response to the EU and US scrutiny that has reshaped the regional CBI conversation through 2025–2026.

Davis buys back Grand Bahama Power for a 37 percent bill cut as Abaco calls Grand Cay relief an insult

Five days. One acquisition. A 37 percent number.

The Davis administration has acquired all outstanding shares in the Grand Bahama Power Company. The PM put the headline number at the top: a 37 percent average reduction on Grand Bahama electricity bills. The deal was announced one week before the May 12 general election. Read that timing twice.

The policy case for the buyback is straightforward — Grand Bahama has paid premium rates for years and the political capital from getting that number down is real. The political case is less subtle. A nine-figure utility transaction announced inside the final week of a campaign is going to face questions about valuation, financing, and whether the structure survives a change of government.

First-ever National Disability Policy tabled as EV import duties are slashed under SOLARISE AND DRIVE

A first National Disability Policy

Senator Isalean Phillip has tabled Saint Kitts and Nevis’ first-ever National Disability Policy. This is the kind of legislative milestone that sets the framework for the next decade of access design — public transport, building codes, employment quotas, education accommodations. The instrument matters less than the implementation timeline that follows it. Watch for the regulations and the ministerial uptake over the next six months.

The policy itself is the floor. The funded action plan is the ceiling. The country has the first; the second is what stakeholders will be pressing for at every committee stage.

Guyana presses Essequibo case at The Hague as a GDF rank takes fire at the western border

The Hague, Day Four

Guyana’s legal team is back at the Peace Palace today, continuing the oral arguments that opened Monday on the merits of the Essequibo dispute. The hearings run through May 11. Venezuela’s turn comes next week. Caracas, predictably, has spent the week reiterating that it does not recognise the court’s authority — a position it has held through two prior jurisdictional rulings, the 2023 referendum, and the 2024 “Organic Law” purporting to absorb the territory.

Jazz Festival main stage opens with Kingdom Night as 22 EVs join the government fleet

Jazz Festival main stage opens

The Saint Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival concert series moved to its main stage Wednesday with Kingdom Night. Organisers walked media through the venue and layout ahead of opening. The festival has long been one of the country’s most reliable seasonal economic engines — hotel occupancy, F&B spend, and the regional and diaspora flights it drives all show up in the next quarter’s tourism numbers.

Kalinago Territory recovery continues as the first Health Climatic Bulletin lands and the cable car nears commissioning

The Kalinago Territory recovery is the story of the week

A meeting was held this week with farmers in the Kalinago Territory as recovery efforts continue from the April 26 trough system. The economic dimension matters as much as the immediate damage: the Territory’s agricultural production is woven directly into the island’s food security, and a single severe weather event can compound for months without the right support reaching the right farmers fast.

Mount St. Catherine geothermal moves to wider directional drilling as VAT on digital services reaches the Bill stage

Mount St. Catherine: the geothermal bet just got bigger

Preparatory work is now ongoing for Grenada’s expanded geothermal exploration drilling campaign at Mount St. Catherine. The plan has been upgraded — wider wells via directional drilling instead of the originally planned slim-hole wells — pushing the project timeline to 2028. The new phase is backed by a £10M contribution from the UK’s FCDO, building on the Caribbean Development Bank’s USD $9.4M approval in 2023, with additional support from the IDB, the Global Environment Facility, the EU, the Government of Italy, and technical assistance from New Zealand.

Stolen guns inside the system as T&TEC workers get COLA and Mexico pushes Tobago direct flights

The guns are leaving from inside the building

The week’s most uncomfortable story is the one nobody wants to underline: firearms reportedly going missing from inside a municipal police facility, with theft and at least one murder linked to that loss. The TTPSSWA president has surfaced the concern publicly. The Municipal Police Association has had to respond.

The structural question — the one that should drive the next round of reporting — is not who took the guns. It is how the chain-of-custody framework was designed such that this could happen at all, and what audit cycle, if any, currently runs against municipal armouries. Until that framework is named, the public conversation will keep circling the symptom.

The 11-Plus is on the way out as police pull 49 firearms and the Senate names elder abandonment a national crisis

The 11-Plus: out the door, but not before one more rough day

The Ministry of Education Transformation has confirmed the 11-Plus is being replaced. Beginning September 2026, a 50/50 assessment model starting in Class Three takes over from the single high-stakes exam. Current Class Three students will be the last cohort to sit the existing format, in 2027.

The reform is overdue and the framing is broadly correct: continuous assessment plus a final component, beginning earlier in the primary cycle. The execution risk is in moderation — whether internal scoring across schools holds up to scrutiny once placement decisions ride on it.

UHWI committee names governance failure as the mace fallout escalates and Speid takes the Reggae Boyz job

UHWI in the “intensive care unit”

The Institutional Review Committee reviewing the University Hospital of the West Indies has handed down a verdict with unusual bluntness: prolonged governance failures have left the type-A teaching hospital in an “intensive care unit” state. The committee’s framing — that decades-old legislation governing the institution has become a highway for abuse — points to billions bleeding out of the hospital while public patients wait on subpar care.

WTO completes its fourth trade policy review as Belize triggers anticipatory drought cash for farmers

Geneva looked at Belize this week

The World Trade Organization completed its fourth Trade Policy Review of Belize on May 4 and 6. The review process — built around a WTO Secretariat report and a Government of Belize report — is the kind of routine multilateral exercise that does not generate front-page coverage but does shape what the country can credibly say about itself when negotiating bilateral terms.

The takeaway lines from these reviews matter most six months later, when investors and partner governments quote them back. Worth watching for the Secretariat’s final language on services exports, the sugar regime, and the small-state preferences regime.

Speedeet & Wilar: De Glasses

Every week, join two twelve-year-old friends from Pike Street, Kitty as they navigate life in Guyana.

Three days.

That was how long Wilar had walked past Speedeet on Pike Street without saying a single word. Not Actually. Not a sigh. Not even a look. Just his red glasses pointed straight ahead and his sneakers slapping the pavement like Speedeet wasn’t even there.

Three days was a long time on a street as small as Pike Street.

Browne returns with 15 of 17 seats and a mandate that dwarfs his last one

Antigua and Barbuda’s general election, called nearly two years early, delivered Prime Minister Gaston Browne a fourth term and a parliamentary majority that bears almost no resemblance to the narrow 9-7 result of 2023. Preliminary results show the ruling Antigua Labour Party taking fifteen of the seventeen seats — a near-sweep that effectively returns the Opposition to single-digit benches.

Caribbean leaders moved quickly to congratulate the Prime Minister, with messages flowing in from across CARICOM through Friday and into the weekend. Analysts watching regional politics describe the size of the win as significant beyond domestic borders: an expanded Antiguan mandate strengthens Browne’s hand in CARICOM bargaining on reparations, climate finance, and the long-running tensions over Foreign and CARICOM Affairs portfolios.

Cavalier buys Turner's Oval as Holness lectures Opposition for fifteen minutes

Cavalier Soccer Club has acquired Turner’s Oval in Clarendon, becoming the first Jamaican football club to own its home ground. Club leadership describes the purchase as the foundation for a wider commercial complex and a turning point for local-club economics in a league where rented grounds remain the norm.

In the courts, five women who spent nearly a decade waiting for a verdict on a multimillion-dollar fraud case alleged at Tax Administration Jamaica were exonerated on Tuesday. The trial collapsed under the weight of nearly three dozen adjournments and an abandoned proceeding. The outcome raises familiar questions about case-management capacity and the human cost of slow justice.

DOMFESTA opens the cultural calendar as Paradise Valley hosts Jazz 'n Arts

DOMFESTA 2026, the country’s flagship cultural festival, has rolled out its full schedule of performance, visual-arts and literary events for the month. The festival anchors the spring cultural calendar and feeds into the broader run of Creole-music programming that defines Dominica’s tourism positioning through the second half of the year.

In Paradise Valley, the Jazz ’n Arts Festival drew strong weekend attendance and continues this week. Organisers describe the format — intimate venues, valley acoustics, regional headliners — as the platform for a longer-arc rebuild of Dominica’s music tourism after recent infrastructure losses.

Flower-festival season opens as the cultural calendar takes over the spring agenda

The Cultural Development Foundation’s national flower-festival programming opens its first-half rotation this month, with venues across the island staging the dance, dress and music events that anchor the country’s pre-Carnival cultural calendar. The festival sits alongside Jounen Kwéyòl in October as the twin cultural pillars of the Saint Lucian year and continues to draw heritage-tourism visitors from the diaspora.

On tourism strategy, the Saint Lucia Tourism Authority continues to position the country toward longer-stay and experience-led travellers as the broader Caribbean cluster recalibrates after softer 2025 US arrivals. Industry engagement on direct-route partnerships and small-property capacity remains active.