The more surprising detail buried in this chart update is not that Buju Banton is still on the Billboard Reggae Albums chart, but that “Too Too Bad” is the first album he has released since 2006 that failed to crack the Top 5.
Beenie Man, Future Fambo
Future Fambo Accepts $1.5 Million Offer For Beenie Man’s Summer Sizzle Amid Feud
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News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. August 10, 2026: Thousands of Caribbean nationals and soca fans packed into Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield this past weekend as Trinidad’s “Soca King,” Machel Montano, brought his “This Is The Encore” tour to New York City for two high-energy nights, August 8 and 9, as part of Central Park SummerStage‘s 40th season.
Flags from Trinidad, Guyana, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Grenada, Puerto Rico and Brazil waved throughout the crowd as Montano delivered hit after hit, backed by special guests including Skinny Fabulous and Full Blown, transforming the Manhattan park into a stretch of Trinidad Carnival for two straight evenings.
The tour’s name is no accident. Montano claimed his 12th Road March championship at Carnival 2026 for the song “Encore,” breaking his previous tie with legendary calypsonian Lord Kitchener to become the outright record holder for the most Road March wins in Trinidad Carnival history.
Machel Montano brought Trinidad Carnival to Central Park for two sold-out nights of his “This Is The Encore” tour
“Central Park, THANK YOU!!! Day 1 was pure LOVE!!! The crowd was loud, the vibes were high, and the whole park was movin and jammin,” Montano posted following the first night’s show.
The Central Park run adds to a milestone year for Montano, who became the first soca artist to perform on NPR’s Tiny Desk in January 2026, recorded the same day he sold out Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Soca star Machel Montano performing at Central Park Summer stage on August 8th 2026.
Montano will also bring the heat to Barclays Center with Bunji Garlin, Skillibeng, Problem Child, Skinny Fabulous, Ravi B, Lady Lava, Ayetian, and Travis World on Sunday, August 24th and Brooklyn Public Library will launch Journey of a Soca King: The Exhibition, presented by the library and the Machel Montano Foundation for Greatness from August 22 through September 12, celebrating Montano’s more than four-decade career and Brooklyn’s own role in his rise.
The exhibition features costumes, trophies and vinyl records from Montano’s career, offering an immersive look at the artist who began performing at age seven in 1982 and released his debut album, Too Young To Soca, in 1985. Montano remains Trinidad and Tobago’s most decorated Road March champion, with a record 12 titles, and holds titles including National Calypso Monarch, Chutney Soca Monarch, and the Hummingbird Gold National Medal.
The exhibition follows the 2026 documentary Like Ah Boss: Journey of a Soca King, centered on Montano’s 16 performances during the 2015 Carnival season. The film will be projected onto Central Library’s facade on September 3.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Sun. August 9, 2026: CARICOM or the Caribbean Community has spent this year pressing its case for reparations with real momentum. Every CARICOM member state backed a United Nations resolution in March recognizing the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as humanity’s gravest crime. In July, regional leaders approved a revised Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, renewing demands that European nations formally account for slavery, colonialism and Indigenous genocide.
There is just one detail complicating the moral clarity of that demand: eight of CARICOM’s own member states still have the British monarch as their head of state.
A man holds a flag calling for reparations in Windrush square during the commemoration.. Fifth anniversary of remembering those who have been impacted by the Windrush scandal which saw people from the Caribbean treated like illegal immigrants by the Home Office despite arriving in Britain legally. (Photo by Thabo Jaiyesimi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines remain Commonwealth realms, meaning King Charles III, not a president or a citizen of their own nations, sits constitutionally atop their governments. Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Dominica removed the monarch decades ago, in the 1970s. Barbados was the most recent to go, becoming a republic in November 2021.
The contradiction is sharpest in the two countries that have been loudest on reparations. Jamaica’s government has said publicly, repeatedly, that it intends to remove the King as head of state. Foreign Minister Alando Terrelonge told reporters the country remained “hopeful” it would complete the constitutional reforms and referendum needed to do so, a target that has already slipped past its original 2025 deadline. Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne has likewise pledged a referendum on becoming a republic, calling it “the final step to complete that circle of independence.”
Neither has happened yet.
To be clear, retaining a constitutional monarch is not the same as excusing colonialism, and removing the King as head of state carries no guarantee of reparations, accountability, or justice on its own. Many of the same governments pushing hardest for European accountability, including Jamaica’s, argue their monarchy question and their reparations case are separate matters entirely: one a constitutional and legal process requiring supermajorities and referenda, the other a demand rooted in a historical injustice that predates any of the sitting monarchs.
But the optics remain difficult to ignore. A regional bloc that spent 2026 demanding the Crown’s institutions reckon with the wealth extracted from enslaved Africans is, in eight of its own member states, still constitutionally headed by that same Crown. It is one thing to ask a king to answer for the sins of his ancestors. It is another to keep him as your own head of state while you do it.
None of this means CARICOM’s reparations case is wrong, or that the region’s demands on Europe should wait until every member state becomes a republic first. But full sovereignty and moral consistency are not unrelated projects. If the region wants its case for reparatory justice to carry the weight of complete independence, rather than a demand made with one hand while the other still swears allegiance to the Crown, finishing the work Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and the six other remaining realms have already promised to do would remove the one contradiction critics can point to first.
NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking CARICOM’s reparations push and the region’s ongoing relationship with the monarchy.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. August 10, 2026: Five of the CCJ – Caribbean Court of Justice’s six sitting judges have accused the court’s president, Justice Winston Anderson, of running the region’s highest court in an “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” manner, according to internal correspondence obtained by the Trinidad Express in a bombshell report. Among the specific allegations: that Anderson attempted to improperly influence the outcome of the case that dismissed Guyana Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s final appeal against U.S. extradition proceedings.
Justice Peter Jamadar, in a detailed email to fellow judges, wrote that he experienced “an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner” specifically in “the Mohamed vs MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter.” Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji went further, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” in a separate case, and said Jamadar’s experience “was not unique.”
Mohamed’s own office has now formally weighed in. In a statement issued Sunday, the Office of the Guyana Leader of the Opposition called the revelations “deeply disturbing” and demanded “full transparency and an appropriate independent examination” of what occurred during deliberations in his case. The statement emphasized that the concerns come from a majority, not a lone dissenting judge, and posed a direct set of questions it says “demand credible answers”: Were attempts made to influence judges who disagreed with the president? Why did a clear majority of judicial colleagues reportedly object to the timing and manner in which the decision was announced? Were established conventions departed from? And did any of this affect the integrity or perceived fairness of the process?
“This is bigger than any individual litigant, judge, government or political party,” the statement reads. “A court that demands accountability, independence and adherence to the rule of law from governments must hold itself to those same standards.”
The CCJ unanimously dismissed Mohamed’s appeal on July 29, clearing the way for U.S. extradition proceedings against him and his father, businessman Nazar Mohamed, to resume before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman on September 3. The ruling, delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” was presented publicly as a clean, unanimous decision.
Jamadar’s email suggests the reality inside the court’s deliberations may have been considerably less settled. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in correspondence cited directly in the opposition’s statement, described being told the court’s president intended to announce the Mohamed decision “at a time and in a manner in which a clear majority of his colleagues had very strongly communicated to him as inappropriate.” If a sitting judge is alleging the court’s president attempted to pressure colleagues who disagreed with him specifically on this case, it raises a legitimate question the ruling’s public unanimity was never meant to answer: how much genuine disagreement existed among the judges before that unanimity was reached, and did it reflect independent judicial reasoning or institutional pressure.
The allegations land at a particularly difficult moment for an institution that has spent more than 20 years trying to convince the wider Caribbean it deserves full trust. The CCJ was established by agreement in February 2001 and inaugurated in April 2005, created explicitly to replace the British Privy Council as the region’s final court of appeal and complete a long-delayed step toward full judicial independence.
Yet more than two decades later, only five of CARICOM’s 14 full member states, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, and St. Lucia, have actually made the CCJ their court of last resort. The rest, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the OECS states, continue to send their final appeals to London. Jamaica’s House of Representatives voted to adopt the CCJ back in 2015 and still hasn’t finished the process. Antigua and Barbuda held a referendum on the question in 2018; voters rejected it.
Proponents of the CCJ have long argued that lingering attachment to the Privy Council reflects colonial habit more than genuine concern, a reluctance to fully trust a court of the region’s own making. This week’s revelations, and now Mohamed’s own formal demand for an independent examination, complicate that argument considerably.
Justice Eboe-Osuji, in his email, captured the irony directly: “There is, of course, a surreal problem in all this. It is that an apex court who decides questions as the final arbiter of the rule of law and democracy according to the rule of law would labour so badly under a leader that does not believe in the ethos of democracy in his own leadership.”
Neither the CCJ nor Justice Anderson has publicly responded to the allegations.
NewsAmericasNow will continue following developments at the CCJ and their impact on the Mohamed extradition case.