They went to Islamabad with briefing books; they came back with a blockade

They went to Islamabad with briefing books and came back with a blockade. That is the plainest way to describe what followed the collapse of the latest US-Iran talks. Trump did not announce a total closure of every vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz. What is being enforced is narrower in legal form but wide in practical effect: a US blockade aimed at ships entering or leaving Iranian ports, while non-Iranian transit is still formally allowed. Yet in the real world of insurers, tanker owners, and frightened captains, such legal distinctions do not calm the sea very much.

That is why the move is more than a military maneuver. It is economic coercion applied to one of the shared arteries of world commerce. Washington says it is trying to prevent Iran from using geography as a weapon. But allies are not rushing to stand at attention. Britain and France have held back. China says the blockade runs against global interests and is urging restraint. ASEAN has called for a permanent resolution and for safe and continuous navigation. America may still command force, but on this question, it does not command broad legitimacy.

The strategic criticism taking shape across the world is strikingly consistent. John Mearsheimer argues that the attack on Iran rested on a fantasy of coercion: the belief that air power and pressure alone could break a regime and force surrender. Jeffrey Sachs, from another angle, says that war has achieved nothing that serious diplomacy could not have done at far less cost, while also damaging the legal order. Kishore Mahbubani adds the Asian warning: every long war the United States enters without a credible political endgame drains American power and gives China strategic time and space. Different schools, different vocabularies, same basic verdict: coercion without a realistic settlement is not strategy. It is drift wearing medals.

Even the more speculative voices now circulating in Asia tell us something important about the temper of the age. Professor Jiang Xueqin has become newly visible because he offers a story many in the Global South find plausible: that China plays a longer, colder, more patient game while the West exhausts itself in wars, sanctions, and moral grandstanding. One need not accept all his claims to see why they travel so quickly. When the old order shakes, prophecy becomes a growth industry.

The wider editorial mood points in the same direction. The Economist has called Trump’s move a dangerous gamble. TIME has noted that energy is once again becoming not merely a commodity, but a weapon. That is exactly the problem. People speak loosely of ‘alternative routes,’ as if pipelines and ports were magic tunnels immune from war. They are not. If Hormuz is strained, the whole system trembles. If the Red Sea also becomes more dangerous, shipping, insurance, fertilizer, food, and inflation all begin moving in the same dark direction.

Even the moral voice from Rome has entered the argument. After being attacked by Trump, Pope Leo XIV refused to descend into political sparring, saying in effect that he was not there to play politician but to speak from the Gospel. He said he would continue speaking strongly against war and for peace, dialogue, multilateralism, and reconciliation. Days earlier, he had already called the threat against the Iranian people unacceptable, urged a return to the negotiating table, and reminded the world that attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law. In a season of blockades, bravado, and geopolitical vanity, the Pope sounded like one of the few grown men left in the room.

From Mearsheimer’s realism to Sachs’s legal alarm, from Mahbubani’s Asian statecraft to the Pope’s moral clarity, the warning is much the same: coercion without a credible political endgame is not strategy but drift, and drift in a chokepoint of world energy can become a global punishment.

Where then does this go? One possibility is that the blockade becomes bargaining leverage and produces another round of ugly talks. Another is a gray-zone stalemate in which the strait remains technically open but commercially half-paralyzed by fear, insurance costs, and selective interdiction. The third, and worst, is regional widening: Hormuz remains tense, the Red Sea tightens, and inflation spreads outward from the Gulf into every import-dependent country in between. Modern war no longer arrives only by bomb. It also arrives later in freight rates, empty shelves, and household budgets.

For the Philippines, the matter is painfully concrete. We are not seated in a safe balcony watching somebody else’s fire. We are an import-dependent economy. When oil surges, transport costs rise, electricity strains, food prices follow, and ordinary families begin doing arithmetic with worry in their bones. So, our response should be practical, not theatrical: push for de-escalation, support freedom of navigation, work through ASEAN, build fuel buffers, strengthen energy diversification, and accelerate mass transport and electrification.

As for ordinary Filipinos, the old virtues still apply. Conserve fuel. Combine trips. Avoid panic-buying. Watch household budgets. Prepare not only for higher gasoline prices but for second-round effects on fares, food, and power. Civilization is often preserved not by dramatic gestures, but by disciplined households and steady nerves.

Hormuz is no longer just a narrow strait between Iran and Oman. It has become a mirror held up to a fraying world order. America is testing whether it can still dictate terms at the chokepoints of global commerce. Iran is testing whether geography can outmuscle superior firepower. China is watching, calculating, and counseling restraint while time quietly works in its favor. And the rest of the world, including the Philippines, is learning once more that when great powers play imperial chess in narrow seas, ordinary nations pay in diesel, rice, fertilizer, freight, and fear. That is why this blockade is not merely a naval act. It is a warning that in an interdependent world, unilateral force in a shared artery quickly becomes everybody’s burden.

Apple’s next CEO is the quiet engineer in the room

On a gray Monday in Cupertino this spring, Apple did something it has only done a handful of times in its history: it told the world who would run the company next. When the press release hit inboxes-Tim Cook to become executive chairman; John Ternus to be chief executive officer-it looked, at first glance, almost boring. No coup, no activist slugfest, no outsider visionary parachuted in from the cloud. Just a quiet insider, a hardware guy, formally taking a job that rumor-watchers had already half-awarded him for months.

But inside Apple, the elevation of John Ternus was anything but routine. It was a decision about what kind of company Apple wants to be in the 2030s: one where the most powerful person in the building still thinks in aluminum, silicon, and heat, not just in subscriptions and services.

If Tim Cook’s origin story is about spreadsheets and supply chains, John Ternus’s begins in chlorinated water. In the mid-1990s, on winter mornings at the University of Pennsylvania, he was in the pool with the men’s varsity swim team, chasing marginal improvements that would never make televised highlight reels. Swimming is a brutal sport: the repetitions are mind-numbing, the gains microscopic, the victories measured in hundredths of a second. It’s you, your lungs, the clock-and the knowledge that everyone else is doing the same thing before dawn.

Ternus studied mechanical engineering, the kind of degree that comes with more problem sets than parties. For his senior project, he worked on a mechanical feeding arm controlled by head movements, designed to help people with quadriplegia eat independently. It was a small thing, easily lost among the standard catalog of student prototypes, but it wired a particular instinct into him early: technology is at its most consequential where human bodies meet mechanical constraints. That combination of empathy and rigor would quietly echo through his later work.

What he did not do, crucially, was start a company. There were no dorm-room startups, no mythology-ready founding story. After graduation, he went to work, not to pitch.

The first stop was a now-vanished name in the long prehistory of virtual reality: Virtual Research Systems. It was the 1990s, and VR was still a clunky promise-bulky headsets, grainy displays, nauseating lag. The job was not about sleek experiences; it was about physics. How do you mount optics and screens on a human head without wrecking someone’s neck? How do you keep a device firmly attached and still tolerable after 20 minutes? At the time, it was just work. He learned the stubbornness of materials, the trade-offs between field of view, weight, and cost, and the sobering fact that you cannot charm physics with a product launch. That humility-hardware doesn’t care how good your story is-would serve him well later, when the stakes were measured not in prototype units but in tens of millions of devices.

In 2001, Apple wasn’t yet the planetary object it would become. Steve Jobs had been back for a few years; the original gumdrop iMac had shocked the beige PC world; the iPod was on the cusp of changing how people thought about music and about Apple itself. Into that still-fragile company, John Ternus arrived as a product design engineer.

His early work was not on the soon-to-be-iconic iPhone or iPad, but on the things that made the ecosystem feel serious: the Apple Cinema Display, for example, a hushed slab of metal and glass aimed at creative professionals who cared less about marketing adjectives and more about color accuracy and reliability. It was an object that needed to disappear-visually and aurally-so that editors, designers, and producers could focus on what was on the screen. Making something disappear, it turns out, is complicated. The display had to be thin but rigid, cool but quiet, mass-manufacturable yet premium. That’s where Ternus lived: in the gap between industrial design’s sketches and the manufacturing line’s tolerance stack-ups. Apple’s product design culture at the time has been described as part monastery, part knife fight. Industrial designers pushed for impossible thinness, invisible seams, unbroken planes of aluminum. Engineers pushed back with thermal envelopes, antenna geometries, battery chemistry. Ternus’s job was not to choose a side; it was to make the two sides coexist in actual objects that could be built by the millions.

As Apple’s hardware ambitions grew, so did Ternus’s portfolio. He moved into managerial roles, then into leadership positions on Mac hardware programs, including the G5-based iMacs that turned the desktop computer into something like a single sheet of floating screen. These projects forced him to engage deeply with Apple’s far-flung manufacturing partners, learning the choreography of component sourcing, assembly lines, and quality control that underpins every gleaming product on a launch slide.

Along the way, he had the chance to do something symbolic: take a private office. He didn’t. Coworkers noticed that he stayed out in the open, at a desk among his team. In a company where proximity to power often translates into actual power, this was not a small choice. It signaled how he wanted information to flow and how approachable he expected to be. Good engineering cultures depend on people surfacing bad news early; nothing kills that faster than a leader who is literally and figuratively behind a closed door. His version of authority is quieter, flatter, more about density of context than volume of voice. By 2013, Ternus had climbed to vice president of hardware engineering. The company was now in its iOS golden age. The iPhone had detonated the phone industry. The iPad, launched in 2010, was trying to decide what it wanted to be when it grew up: a couch computer, a laptop replacement, a professional tool for illustrators and video editors.

Ternus’s remit spanned the iPad line and portions of the Mac business, plus something new and slightly weird: AirPods. At launch, AirPods looked like the punchline to a joke-expensive white toothpicks dangling from early adopters’ ears. Within a few years, they were everywhere, a pair of white exclamation points hanging from commuters and teenagers, as recognizable as the iPod’s white cables once were. They became both a cultural signal and a financial one: a major chunk of Apple’s wearables business, a pillar of a category that, if it ever spun out, could stand as a large company on its own.

The fact that the same executive was overseeing the guts of a MacBook Pro and the click of a tiny, magnetized AirPods case says something about Apple’s internal logic. To Apple, these are not separate product stories; they’re different surfaces of the same system. Ternus had to think in that system-level way: about radios and batteries, sure, but also about how someone moves from a Mac to an iPad to AirPods to a Watch without thinking about the transitions at all.

If there is a beating heart of Apple’s business, it’s the iPhone. Getting near it is like being invited onto the bridge of a ship in heavy seas. In the late 2010s and around 2020, responsibility for iPhone hardware increasingly flowed toward Ternus. Suddenly, the person who had been sweating hinge tolerances on laptops and fit-and-finish on displays was in charge of the physical manifestation of Apple’s most important product line.

This would have been a big job even in a stable technical era. But Apple was about to undertake a chip-level revolution in a different product line: the Mac’s shift from Intel processors to Apple’s own silicon. Deciding to abandon Intel after 15 years was one of the most consequential technical and strategic calls of the Cook era. The transition risked breaking developer workflows, confusing consumers, and fragmenting the Mac base. But the upside-a family of chips designed in lockstep with the operating system and the hardware-was enormous.

You could feel, in Apple’s first Apple-silicon announcements in 2020, a kind of pent-up relief. In one of those tightly produced keynotes, Ternus stood in a white-walled lab, gesturing over exploded diagrams of M-series chips and logic boards, explaining how unified memory meant the CPU and GPU stopped fighting over the same scraps of RAM. He talked through performance per watt in a way that felt less like marketing and more like someone finally allowed to brag about work that had been happening in secret for years.

The gambit worked. Reviewers and users loved the battery life and performance. Developers ported their apps; consumers mostly did not care about instruction sets, only that the new MacBook Air was weirdly fast and refused to get hot. For Apple’s board, this was a critical data point: Ternus had just helped guide one of the company’s riskiest multi-year engineering projects to a clean landing.

In 2021, Apple made it official: John Ternus was promoted to senior vice president of hardware engineering and joined the elite group of executives who sit one step below the CEO. On paper, his portfolio now encompasses almost everything you can hold that has an Apple logo on it: iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch.

In practice, that means he is the person who has to referee conflicts between battery life and camera modules, between industrial design’s hunger for thinness and wireless engineers’ need for antenna volume, between environmental goals and supply-chain realities. He also had to become more visible. For most of his career, Ternus was an internal name, familiar to Apple watchers but not to the general public. As SVP, he climbed onto Apple’s polished virtual stages more often, narrating the evolution of iPads and Macs with a tone that was confident but intentionally un-flashy. There are executives who treat product launches like performances; Ternus is not one of them. His energy reads more like ‘respected lab lead,’ which is exactly what many engineers want in their boss.

Succession at Apple is a slow-motion sport. Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, but the handoff had been telegraphed years in advance. Under Cook, speculation about his own eventual replacement became a kind of parlor game. For years, chief operating officer Jeff Williams-another operations savant, often described as ‘Tim Cook 2.0’-was the presumed heir. There were other names, too: software chief Craig Federighi, marketing lead Greg Joswiak, services boss Eddy Cue.

Ternus was the new variable. As he accumulated responsibility for more hardware lines, and as Apple-silicon Macs landed cleanly, analysts and reporters started saying the quiet part out loud: this is what grooming a successor looks like. With Williams edging toward the phase of a career where boards think in five- and ten-year increments, the younger hardware chief began to look like the more logical long-term bet.

Apple is not a company that likes surprises. By the time the company formally announced that Cook would become executive chairman and Ternus would be CEO, it felt less like a twist than an acknowledged reality. The machine had been quietly routing itself toward this outcome for years.

On paper, the obvious move in 2026 might have been to elevate a services, AI, or operations executive. Apple’s services revenue has exploded under Cook; the company’s future differentiation will be defined at least as much by what happens in software and models as by what’s machined out of aluminum.

But Apple is not a cloud company that happens to make hardware. It is a hardware company that uses software and services to make its devices more valuable. The iPhone is still the sun in the Apple solar system. The Watch, the Mac, the iPad, AirPods, whatever comes after Vision Pro – they orbit around a core belief that you can win on design and integration, not just raw compute and price. Choosing a hardware engineer as CEO in 2026 is a statement that this identity is not up for renegotiation.

It is also a statement about where Apple thinks the next decade of computing is going. Generative AI has made the cloud feel magical again, but it has also made latency and privacy newly painful. There’s a reason Apple talks so much about ‘on-device intelligence’: the company wants to handle as much as possible locally, on chips it designs, under power and privacy constraints it understands. The person who has spent years wrestling with thermal envelopes and board layouts is well positioned to understand what ‘AI on your wrist’ or ‘AI in your glasses’ actually entails – not as a slogan, but as a set of hard trade-offs between battery capacity, heat, and model size.

The job Ternus is walking into is larger than any single product line. As CEO, he will have to navigate regulators who want to pry open the App Store, governments that demand data access, and a supply chain still deeply entangled with China as geopolitical tensions shift. He will be asked about labor practices at overseas factories, about climate targets, about misinformation traveling through devices his company makes.

He will also have to decide what ‘next’ means. Apple is famously late and then very good. It rarely races to be first into a new category, preferring to watch competitors take the initial hits, then arrive with a version that feels finished. In an era of AI-infused everything, though, the timeline for ‘finished’ is compressing. His first years in the top job will collide with a run of high-stakes launches – from Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone to more affordable spatial-computing hardware – all expected to lean heavily on on-device AI. The future he has to design for is one where people expect their devices to anticipate, adapt, and respond almost invisibly.

If John Ternus succeeds, the story of Apple under his watch may not have an obvious plot twist. It will look, from a distance, like a series of incremental engineering decisions: a more efficient chip here, a thinner display there, a new sensor tucked into a familiar form factor. Look closer, though, and you may see something else: an engineer who never stopped thinking about bodies and machines – about how we wear our computers, how we look through them, how much of our lives we entrust to their silent decisions – quietly steering one of the world’s most powerful companies toward a future where the most radical thing it can do is make that power feel invisible.

African economies show resilience despite rising global tensions

The improvement in PMI readings underscores resilient business momentum across the continent, even as higher energy costs and supply chain disruptions begin to pressure input prices and operating conditions.

Out of eight African economies tracked, six recorded expansion in business activity during the quarter-up from five in the same period last year and three in Q1 2024. Egypt and Ghana were the only countries to remain in contraction territory.

As a high-frequency indicator of economic activity, the PMI often mirrors broader shifts in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Readings above 50 signal improving business conditions, while those below 50 indicate deterioration. The index is compiled from survey responses by purchasing managers across roughly 400 private sector firms, stratified by sector and company size based on GDP contribution. Egypt recorded the weakest performance among the sampled economies, with an average PMI of 48.9. Rising material costs linked to the Middle East conflict drove a sharp increase in input prices in March, contributing to the steepest cost uptick since late 2024.

‘Egyptian companies reported a steeper decline in business activity in March, as demand weakened and prices rose due to the war in the Middle East. Egypt PMI, which tracks conditions in the non-oil economy, fell to its lowest point in almost two years during March,’ the index report said.

The report added that new sales declined at a faster pace, while firms turned pessimistic about future activity for the first time on record.

Despite the weak quarterly performance, the Arab nation PMI remains slightly stronger than its 2024 average of 47.6, suggesting a modest underlying improvement.

Ghana posted the second-weakest reading at 49.7, unchanged from a year earlier, even as inflation continues to ease-highlighting a lag between price stability and business recovery.

Uganda leads as demand supports expansion

Uganda emerged as the strongest performer in Q1, with its PMI rising to 53.8 from 51.7, supported by robust demand conditions, increased output, and stronger hiring activity.

‘The Stanbic Uganda PMI release for March 2026 showed sustained growth in the private sector at the end of Q1,’ said Christopher Legilisho, economist at Stanbic Bank. ‘Firms reported expansions in output, new orders and employment, implying broad-based growth driven by robust client purchasing power and a supportive macro environment. Backlogs of work increased due to buoyant consumer demand, driving up new orders.’

He noted that firms remain optimistic about output over the next 12 months despite global uncertainty, with increased purchasing activity and inventory accumulation reflecting confidence in demand.

‘Firms indicated that higher total input prices and purchase costs were due to greater utility and fuel prices as well as costs for some raw materials, such as timber. Further, there were increases in staff costs and output charges, implying a pass-through to customers.’

According to the latest data from UBOS, Uganda’s headline inflation eased to 2.8 percent year-on-year in March.

South Africa’s weakness highlights uneven recovery

While Q1 data points to improvement, broader trends from 2025 underscore the uneven nature of Africa’s recovery.

South Africa recorded the weakest average PMI on the continent in 2025 at 49.3, down from 50.0 in 2024, with six months of contraction during the year. The economy ended the year on a weaker footing, with December PMI falling to 47.7 from 49.0 in November.

‘Business activity decreased sharply in December, with the contraction widespread across sectors and the most pronounced since January,’ SandP Global said, citing weak demand and difficult economic conditions.

New orders declined for a third consecutive month, reflecting softer household spending, weaker business demand, and declining export orders.

‘After a strong first half, the South African economy experienced softer conditions in the fourth quarter,’ said David Owen, senior economist at SandP Global Market Intelligence. ‘The downturn intensified in December as customers reacted to higher prices and broader economic headwinds.’

Inflation in Africa’s most industrialised economy eased to 3.5 percent in November, prompting the South African Reserve Bank to cut its benchmark repo rate to 6.75 percent.

Uganda sustains leadership in 2025

Uganda also maintained its position as Africa’s strongest PMI performer in 2025, with an average reading of 53.7, up from 53.3 in 2024. It recorded the highest PMI in six months of the year, followed by Nigeria with five.

‘Uganda’s private sector performance reflects a resilient domestic economy,’ Legilisho said. ‘Employment conditions remained stable after ten months of growth, while rising orders led to mounting backlogs.’

Firms expanded purchasing activity and inventories to meet rising demand, signalling sustained momentum likely to feed into official growth data.

Recovery remains fragile

Despite the improvement in Q1, risks remain elevated.

According to a recent report by the World Bank, high-frequency indicators, such as the PMI, point to a volatile and uneven recovery across Sub-Saharan Africa, shaped by structural constraints and external shocks.

‘In the early months of 2025, private sector activity in Ghana and South Africa struggled to gain momentum, with reduced output and weaker export orders reflecting soft global demand and ongoing logistical bottlenecks, while activity in Mozambique was primarily disrupted by civil unrest and protests,’ the report said.

AIS, ministry join forces to promote AI-ready workforce

Advanced Info Service (AIS) has upgraded its digital literacy scheme to promote artificial intelligence (AI) literacy as part of a nationwide skills push.

Saichon Submakudom, chief corporate communications officer at AIS, said the company has partnered with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) and Chulalongkorn University to launch “Aunjai Cyber: AI Literacy”, a comprehensive learning programme designed to equip Thais with practical AI knowledge, ethical awareness, and cybersecurity resilience.

The programme is offered free on the Thailand Massive Open Online Course (Thai MOOC) platform under an MHESI initiative, as well as via the AIS LearnDi for Thais platform and the AIS Aunjai Cyber app.

The Aunjai Cyber platform was introduced in 2019 to promote digital literacy and online safety. Having reached more than 1.05 million users, the programme initially focused on basic digital skills and cyber awareness.

However, the emergence of AI as a transformative force across industries has prompted AIS to recalibrate its approach.

Ms Saichon said the transition from digital literacy to AI literacy is not merely an upgrade in curriculum, but a fundamental shift in how individuals engage with technology.

“Digital literacy was about enabling access and safe usage. AI literacy is about empowerment — enabling people to think, create, and make decisions with AI as a partner,” she said.

The new course reflects this philosophy, introducing learners to AI fundamentals, real-world applications and responsible usage, while emphasising the concept of AI as a “thinking companion” that enhances human capability rather than replacing it.

The upgraded programme highlights the deepening collaboration between the private sector, government, and academia to future-proof Thailand’s human capital.

Chulalongkorn University played a central role in developing the curriculum, drawing on expertise from a multidisciplinary faculty and AI specialists to ensure both academic rigour and real-world relevance.

Wilert Puriwat, president of the university, said the initiative reflects a broader shift in the role of higher education.

“In an era defined by AI and rapid technological disruption, universities must go beyond knowledge transfer to shaping individuals who can critically and responsibly engage with technology,” Mr Wilert said.

The MHESI views the initiative as a key pillar in its lifelong learning agenda.

Punpermsak Aruni, deputy permanent secretary of the MHESI, said the collaboration is expected to broaden access to AI education nationwide and support more than 1.8 million learners.

Ms Saichon said one of the programme’s distinguishing features is its accessibility, aiming to reach learners across all demographics, from students to working professionals.

She said AIS and its partners are exploring ways to integrate the course into formal education systems, allowing university students to accumulate learning hours that may be converted into academic credits in the future, bridging informal and formal learning systems.

CARIBBEAN-WOMEN-CARICOM celebrates 10th anniversary of Girls in ICT Day

The Guyana-based Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat says the CARICOM Girls In ICT Partnership will spearhead regional activities as it joins the international community in commemorating the 10th International Girls in ICT Day on Thursday.

It said that this annual observance highlights the importance of encouraging and empowering girls and young women to pursue studies and careers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), a sector that continues to shape the global economy and future of work.

The observance will be held under the regional theme ‘Empower, Educate, Elevate: Building a Future-Ready CARICOM with Girls in ICT,’ and CARICOM Secretary-General, Dr. Carla Barnett; Dean of the CARICOM Youth Ambassadors, Shakiah Lewis and Dr. Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, Director, Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), ITU will deliver remarks at the opening ceremony.

The CARICOM Secretariat said that the 2026 observance will bring together stakeholders from the region, including educators, industry professionals, development partners, and students, to engage in meaningful dialogue and share experiences to bridge the gender gap in the digital sector.

It said the day-long virtual sessions will be livestreamed across CARICOM’s digital platforms and the Restore A Sense of I Can (RSC) platform, and will range from a ‘Youth Spotlight: Next Gen Leaders Speak’, ‘Achieving Gender parity in the age of AI’ to a practical coding session and exploring the challenges girls and women continue to face in the IT space.

‘As CARICOM continues to advance its digital transformation agenda, initiatives such as Girls in ICT Day play a critical role in fostering inclusivity, innovation, and equal opportunity. By equipping girls with the necessary digital skills and confidence, the Region strengthens its capacity to compete in an increasingly technology-driven world.’

The CARICOM Girls in ICT Partnership includes representatives of government ministries, CARICOM institutions and associate institutions, international agencies, and youth, women and ICT-related organisations and programmes.

CRICKET-REGIONAL-LEAD Brathwaite, Wickham lead authoritative response from Pride

Centuries from Barbados Pride skipper Kraigg Brathwaite and the outstanding Kevin Wickham drove their side to an impressive first innings lead over the Jamaica Scorpions in their second-round match in the West Indies Championships, which seems destined for a draw.

Brathwaite crafted a patient 176 – his 34th first-class hundred – while Wickham scored 105, his third successive ton of the tournament, to carry the Pride to 460 for five in response to the Scorpions’ first innings total of 457.

The commanding display with the bat was largely due to a superb batting performance by their top order.

Resuming the day on 125 for one following Monday’s rain-shortened second day Brathwaite and Drakes extended their partnership for the second wicket to 77 runs to leave them comfortably placed at 182 for one.

However, shortly after scoring a half century, Drakes was dismissed by leg spinner Abhijai Mansingh for 55 off 66 deliveries.

His dismissal brought the in-form Wickham to the crease, fresh from his outstanding start to the tournament that saw him record scores of 153 and 108 not out in their opening round loss to the Scorpions.

The two shared a 195-run stand for the third wicket that put the Pride on track to chase down the Scorpion’s competitive first innings total.

Brathwaite, who started the day on 51, got to his century first by driving fast bowler Marquino Mindley past mid-on for four shortly after lunch off the 200th delivery he faced.

Wickham then created more history by flicking off spinner Peat Salmon to the fine leg boundary to bring up his century off 166 balls and complete one of the most impressive starts in the tournament.

Salmon had the last laugh though, when he had Wickham caught after facing 181 balls and hitting 11 fours and one six, to leave the score 377 for three.

Roston Chase, playing his first match of the competition, only scored 16 before he too was dismissed by Salmon with the score on 405.

Brathwaite continued to spearhead the Pride’s fightback and seemed on course for another double century until Salmon bowled him to bring his marathon innings that spanned 343 balls and contained 19 fours and one six to a close.

Kyle Mayers and Leniko Boucher ensured there would be no middle order collapse, with both playing cautious innings to carry the Pride to a slim first innings lead of three before the end of play.

Mayers is unbeaten on 16 off 69 balls, while Boucher is 12 not out.

Salmon led the Scorpion’s bowling attack to end the day with 4-100.

BOXING-GUYANA-Harvey cops bronze at Youth Games

One of Guyana’s most talented pugilists, Ken Harvey secured his country’s first medal of the 2026 South American Youth Games when he captured bronze in the 60kg division.

Harvey, who represents the Andrew Lewis Gym in Albouystown, delivered a string of impressive performances to earn Guyana’s first medal at the Games since the 2017 edition in Chile.

His road to the semifinal included a dominant stoppage victory over Paraguay’s Edgar Miranda in the quarterfinals.

However, in his next fight Harvey was edged by Brazil’s Dos Santos Maicon 3-2 in a closely contested bout, with the winner earning a place in the gold medal match.

His performance was lauded by the Guyana Boxing Association (GBA), with President Steve Ninvalle acknowledging his historic accomplishment.

‘The fight was close, and even though we would’ve loved for him to advance to fight for the gold medal, we are extremely proud of his performance and how he represented Guyana and the work we’ve been doing at the boxing association.

‘He has shown that he can compete with the best in South America, and he has now positioned himself as one of the best,’ Ninvalle added.

Ninvalle highlighted the association’s structured youth development programme, which focuses on identifying promising talent and gradually exposing them to regional and international competition.

According to the president, Harvey’s success reflects not only his individual dedication, but also the collective effort of his coaches at both the national level and within his Berbice-based gym.

JAMAICA-CRIME-Government condemns stabbing death of student

Education Minister Dr Dana Morris Dixon has ‘strongly’ condemned the incident in which a student of Seaforth High School was fatally stabbed during an altercation reportedly at the Morant Bay Bus Park in St Thomas, south east of here Monday.

‘On behalf of the ministry, I extend deepest condolences to the family of the deceased and the entire Seaforth High community. This heartbreaking loss of a young life is a stark reminder that we must confront the issue of violence in all its forms with renewed urgency and unity. All of Jamaica must become anti-violence,’ Dr. Morris Dixon said in a statement.

‘I appeal for everyone to work with us on eliminating the scourge of violence in the education system. The ministry will continue to work closely with all stakeholders to strengthen the systems of support, discipline and intervention that protect all our children,’ she added.

Media reports said that the suspect is believed to be a fellow schoolmate who was in a previous altercation with the boy on the school compound and the Ministry of Education said that three students are currently in police custody as investigations continue.

In its statement, the ministry reiterated its ‘steadfast commitment to fostering a safe, secure and resilient education system outputting responsible young people to lead our nation.

‘Efforts to maximise the conflict resolution programmes, strengthen behavioural support frameworks and expand student counselling services through the leadership of our principals remain a top priority,’ it added.

It said that it continues to collaborate with the security forces, school administrators and community partners to ensure that appropriate actions are taken and that such tragic incidents are prevented in the future.

In the meantime, the ministry said it is deploying a team of guidance counsellors and ministry officials to Seaforth High School to assist students, staff and administrators during this deeply distressing time and to aid with the investigations.

CRICKET-REGIONAL-CLOSE West Indies Championship scores – 2nd day, 2nd round

Summarised scores on the second day of the second round of matches in the West Indies Championship on Monday.

At Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua: Leeward Islands Hurricanes lead Trinidad and Tobago Red Force by 92 runs with four wickets remaining.

HURRICANES 131 and 136-6 in 44 overs (Mikyle Louis 73, Jahmar Hamilton 41 not out; Jayden Seales 6-33).

RED FORCE 175 in 60 overs (Jyd Goolie 51 not out, Joshua Da Silva 36, Evin Lewis 18, Amir Jangoo 13, Jayden Seales 13, Anderson Phillip 12; Kelvin Pitman 6-52, Oshane Thomas 3-52).

At the Antigua Recreation Ground in Antigua: Guyana Harpy Eagles lead Windward Islands Volcanoes by 210 runs with two wickets remaining.

VOLCANOES 151.

HARPY EAGLES 361-8 in 131 overs (Kemol Savory 72, Keemo Paul 56, Matthew Nandu 54, Richie Looknauth 42, Kevlon Anderson 41, Tagenarine Chanderpaul 35, Veerasammy Permaul 25 not out, Shamar Joseph 10 not out; Kenneth Dember 3-82, Shadrack Descarte 2-59).

At Sabina Park in Jamaica: Barbados Pride trail Jamaica Scorpions by 332 runs with nine wickets remaining.

SCORPIONS 457 in 103 overs (Kirk McKenzie 114, John Campbell 96, Javelle Glenn 65, Odean Smith 54, Brad Barnes 40, Romaine Morris 25, Ojay Shields 14; Shamar Springer 3-99, Johann Layne 2-67, Jomel Warrican 2-89, Roston Chase 2-92).

PRIDE 125-1 in 27 overs (Shayne Moseley 53, Kraigg Brathwaite 51 not out, Jonathan Drakes 17 not out).

CARIBBEAN-SECURITY-US to provide funding to support Caribbean port infrastructure

The United States says it will provide US$10 million in programming to support ‘resilient’ Caribbean port infrastructure through the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).

The CBI is a U.S. economic programme launched in 1983, primarily through the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) providing more than 19 Caribbean/Central American countries duty-free access to the U.S. market for many goods.

It aims to foster economic development, trade, and export diversification and it is distinct from the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), a security-focused partnership.

In a statement, the US Department of State said that the funding was announced during a roundtable with US maritime industry leaders and Caribbean port authorities held on Monday to advance commercial diplomacy and safeguard critical infrastructure in the Caribbean.

‘This event underscores the U.S. commitment to strengthening economic engagement and high-quality infrastructure development in the Caribbean port sector,’ the State Department said in a brief statement, without naming any country that would benefit from the funding. .

It said that roundtable participants discussed expanding US private sector investment and identifying opportunities to strengthen port infrastructure, trade, and tourism across the region, while maintaining ethical and transparent business practices.

‘The United States looks forward to continued collaboration with Caribbean partners and further strengthening our economic ties across our region,’ the statement added.