News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Thurs. Sept. 3, 2026: The extradition hearing for Guyana opposition leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father, Nazar “Shell” Mohamed, continues today, Sept. 3rd in the Guyana Magistrate’s Court, part of six all-day court dates scheduled through next week after Guyana’s Court of Appeal ordered the proceedings to move forward.

Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman has scheduled hearings for September 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 and 10. The United States is seeking to extradite the pair to face trial in Miami federal court. According to a Southern District of Florida indictment returned in October 2025, Nazar Mohamed is charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and mail fraud, while Azruddin Mohamed is charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.

Florida US prosecutors allege the pair’s company, Mohamed’s Enterprise, evaded an estimated $50 million in Guyanese gold export taxes and royalties between 2017 and 2024 by reusing government seals on unreported shipments and paying bribes to customs officials, and that Azruddin Mohamed separately evaded more than $1 million in Guyanese taxes on a Lamborghini shipped from Miami to Guyana. Both men were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in June 2024, and the indictment seeks forfeiture of $5.3 million in gold bars seized at Miami International Airport that year. An indictment is an allegation; both men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

Notably, Guyana’s own Director of Public Prosecutions withdrew a separate, domestic tax evasion and false declaration case against Azruddin Mohamed over the same Lamborghini in November 2025, citing the active U.S. extradition request. The DPP said the charges were dropped in the interest of ‘international comity, appropriateness and fairness’ so domestic and international proceedings would not conflict. A Guyanese High Court judge separately ruled the tax authority lacked legal power to reassess taxes on the vehicle at all, a decision the GRA is appealing

The Guyana hearings are proceeding under a Court of Appeal order issued last week, which ruled that the extradition proceedings should not be halted entirely despite the Mohameds’ ongoing constitutional challenge to the Fugitive Offenders (Amendment) Act. In a unanimous decision, the court, presided over by Chancellor of the Judiciary Roxane George-Wiltshire and Justices of Appeal Rishi Persaud and Nareshwar Harnanan, ruled that “having considered the arguability of the appeal, the respective risks of injustice, the balance of convenience, prejudice and the public interest in the orderly and expeditious conduct of extradition proceedings, the Court is not satisfied that those proceedings should be halted entirely.”

And the Caribbean Court of Justice on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, dismissed a bid by Nazar and Azruddin Mohamed to halt the extradition proceedings. The Mohameds had sought special leave from the CCJ to appeal the Court of Appeal’s ruling allowing the Magistrate’s Court case to continue, along with interim orders to stay the proceedings while that application was considered. The CCJ dismissed both the stay application and the other relief sought. It comes two months after the CCJ upheld earlier High Court and Court of Appeal rulings that Guyana’s Minister of Home Affairs acted within his powers under the Fugitive Offenders Act in authorizing the extradition proceedings to resume following a four-month suspension. With the latest bid dismissed, hearings in the Magistrate’s Court are set to resume as scheduled on September 3.

The judges said it was “just in the circumstances to preserve the effectiveness of the appeal by permitting the proceedings in the Magistrate’s Court to continue while staying the final disposition pending the hearing and determination of the appeal.” That means the Magistrate’s Court can hear the case, but must withhold any final ruling until the constitutional appeal is resolved.

The Mohameds must file their record of appeal by September 4 and written submissions by September 9, while Guyana’s Attorney General must file written submissions by September 23. The constitutional appeal itself is scheduled for an in-person hearing on October 13.

The Mohameds are represented by attorneys Roysdale Forde, Siand Dhurjon and Damien DaSilva. The state is represented by Attorney General Mohabir Anil Nandlall, Solicitor General Nigel Hawke, Deputy Solicitor General Shoshana Lall, and attorneys Joshua Cullen and Dishon Persaud. Mohamed has denied wrongdoing and has framed the U.S. case against him as politically motivated.

Days earlier, a rally with the diaspora in New York

The hearing comes just days after Mohamed rallied the Guyanese diaspora from Guyana at a sold-out inaugural launch of the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party’s New York City chapter in Long Island on August 29th.

In a video message to supporters, Mohamed reaffirmed his commitment to a “people centered” Guyana, invoking the legacies of founding leaders Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. “These are the leaders who understood that the nation’s strength comes from its people. Not its politicians,” he said. “I have seen my people oppressed and I want more because Guyana deserves better.”

WIN Members of Parliament Vishnu Panday and Janelle Sweatnam joined as guests of honor, while WIN NYC chapter founders Hana Mohamed and Charles Sugrim were recognized for organizing the launch. Hana Mohamed told the gathering the movement had persevered despite what she described as political persecution against the opposition leader, saying he “has faced relentless political persecution and intimidation, oppression, attacks on his character… He has been forced to fight battles in the court while simultaneously carrying the vision entrusted to him by the Guyanese people.”

Event host Hadiyyah Mohamed said the party’s vision for the diaspora extends beyond remittances. “For far too long the diaspora has been overlooked, unheard and treated as though your contributions to Guyana began and end with sending money home,” she said, calling instead for a Guyana “where coming home is not a sacrifice but an opportunity.” Attendees also held a candlelight observance in remembrance of those who died in the MV Barima disaster.

NewsAmericasNow will continue following the Mohamed extradition hearing as it continues this week. Reporting from Kaieteur News and Demerara Waves contributed to this story.

By Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Sept. 3, 2026: Jamaican author Marlon James has released what he calls his most personal novel yet, “The Disappearers,” a 600-page epic drawing on his own closeted youth in Kingston – and it has already earned him a second Man Booker Prize nomination.

The 600-plus-page novel, out on Sept. 1st from Riverhead, centers on a brutal attack on a group of gay men rehearsing a play in 1980s Kingston, and follows the survivors as they begin to disappear in the years after. James told the New York Times the book was inspired by a rumor he heard in his youth about an attack on a queer safe space that was never officially confirmed, the kind of violence against marginalized people that often goes unspoken out of fear.

James, 55, grew up gay and closeted in Kingston through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period when Jamaica broadly rejected homosexuality. He told the Times he began writing partly to navigate school bullying, eventually studying literature at the University of the West Indies before working years in advertising and design. He published his first novel, “John Crow’s Devil,” in 2005, following it with “The Book of Night Women” in 2009 and his breakout, Booker Prize-winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” in 2015. James currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

According to the Times, James said the idea for “The Disappearers” came after he had already come out publicly and settled into life in the U.S., giving him the freedom to revisit the Jamaica he’d left behind out of fear. He described the novel as confronting “the story I was not allowed to live.”

To research the book, James interviewed nearly 20 people across Kingston about gay Jamaican life, past and present, telling the Times he expected to hear only horror stories but instead found comedy and defiance. He also conducted archival research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York and traveled to London to research a chapter set in the city’s secret gay bars of the 1940s.

James finished the manuscript in December 2025 after working on it for months with his editor at Riverhead, according to the Times. The book was formally completed in July 2026 and was nominated for the 2026 Booker Prize shortly after, a moment James described to the paper as confirmation that the novel’s vulnerable characters “mean something to other people.”

Booker Prize judges called it “among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy.”

“Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning, he judges added. “James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.”

The Times Dwight Garner writes: “It’s also an AIDS novel, a book about dying alone. (The disappearing acts of gay men are one of the title’s many meanings.) We follow one urbane Jamaican man named Havelock Titus back in time to Oxford University, where he studied and became a sexual chew toy for a set of patrician cads. He speaks of “malice” in old dining halls. He was at the doomed rehearsal and is ashamed that he ran away. He was an early AIDS patient. He recalls the days when a man could get hacked to death for wearing eye shadow.”

NewsAmericasNow will continue covering major literary milestones from the Caribbean diaspora.

By Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Sept. 2, 2026: Two US Navy littoral combat ships have arrived at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the latest sign of escalating US military pressure on the island.

The USS Billings docked first as part of its scheduled Caribbean deployment, followed by the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which departed Naval Base Mayport, Florida on August 27th and arrived at Guantanamo Monday, according to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay’s social media announcements. Both vessels are designed for shallow coastal-water operations; the Navy describes the littoral combat ship class as addressing threats from coastal mines, terrorism, and stealth submarines while maintaining freedom of navigation through continuous maritime presence.

THE ARRIVAL

The arrivals follow months of unprecedented diplomatic and military maneuvers between Washington and Havana. In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe met in Havana with senior Cuban interior ministry officials, delivering a message from the Trump administration that a “window of opportunity” would not remain open indefinitely. Days later, SOUTHCOM commander General Francis L. Donovan met at the Guantanamo base perimeter with Cuban General Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, marking what CiberCuba described as the first such meeting between the two commands in recent times.

In mid-June, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited Guantanamo and warned Cuba against acquiring weapons capable of reaching the base or US territory, saying “the future of Cuba is in the hands of its leadership” and that the Pentagon would consider “every possible option” in any contingency.

The military buildup extends beyond Guantanamo. Puerto Rico’s Roosevelt Roads naval base is now operating at full capacity with more than 8,100 troops conducting exercises under SOUTHCOM’s Operation Southern Lance, a deployment with a projected $79 million investment, CiberCuba reported.

ABOUT THE SHIPS

The USS Billings LCS 15, a Freedom-variant littoral combat ship (LCS), is the 8th Freedom-variant LCS, integrating new technology and capabilities to support current and future operations from deep water to the littoral. The LCS platform is a highly maneuverable, lethal, and adaptable shipdesigned to support focused missions, including mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, and surface warfare. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay is a vital U.S. military base in Cuba, serving as a key operational and logistics hub for maritime security, humanitarian aid, and joint operations.

The USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul LCS 21 is a Freedom-class littoral combat ship and is the 11th ship in the U.S. Navy’s family of modern vessels that maneuver in shallow coastal waters. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) network counters threats of coastal mines, terrorism, and stealth submarines. The ship preserves our nation’s freedom of navigation across the globe through an innovative combination of ship design and construction, crew skills and training, and operational programs that create continuous maritime presence and protection.

CUBA

Within Cuban exile circles, figures including José Daniel Ferrer and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara have expressed support for military action against the government, and an independent digital survey in May, with more than 42,000 responses, found 60.9% support for direct US military intervention, with 58% of responses geolocated from the island, according to CiberCuba.

Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel promised in March what he called “impregnable resistance” against any military action, while Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla has rejected characterizations of Cuba as a threat to US national security.

The USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul is scheduled to next participate in UNITAS 2026, the 67th edition of a multilateral naval exercise involving 24 nations, off the coast of Lima, Peru, beginning September 10.

NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking developments in US-Cuba relations. Reporting from CiberCuba contributed to this story.

RELATED: The Caribbean Is Now At The Center Of The Most Dangerous US-Cuba Confrontation In Decades

By Teacher Kishma Isaac

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Sun. August 30, 2026: The most important thing in Caribbean education in a Caribbean classroom may be the thing a teacher has not yet discovered. Behind a student’s name on the register is a world of family, culture, language, experience, aspiration, and circumstance. Some of it is visible. Much of it is not. In a region shaped by migration, economic pressures, climate uncertainty, digital acceleration, changing family structures, and an increasingly connected world, teaching well requires more than knowing the curriculum. It requires knowing something about the person who will encounter it. A teacher’s understanding of the learner influences the examples chosen, the expectations established, the responses to behavior, the partnerships formed with families, and the opportunities created for participation. Knowing students is therefore not an accessory to teaching. It is part of the craft itself.

The Caribbean child does not arrive culturally empty. Students enter school with stories, music, sport, faith, humor, family knowledge, local history, language, creativity, and the resourcefulness of communities accustomed to making much from little. These are intellectual resources. When teachers connect legitimate elements of students’ lived worlds to rigorous academic work, relevance becomes a pathway rather than a slogan. This requires cultural responsiveness without romanticizing culture or lowering standards. It also requires a clear view of human dignity. If each child bears the image of God, then no student should be reduced to a grade, a behavior, a stereotype, or a perceived limitation. A quiet learner may be thinking deeply. A restless learner may need another entry point. A student struggling academically may possess strengths that conventional assessment has yet to reveal.

Understanding becomes valuable when it changes decisions. CONTENT + LEARNER + CONTEXT = DESIGN. What must students learn? What do we know about these particular learners? What features of their circumstances might influence the learning? Those answers can reshape examples, questions, grouping, pacing, differentiation, and assessment. They can also sharpen classroom management. Rather than treating behavior as an isolated event, teachers can notice patterns, investigate before assuming, and respond while preserving expectations. Family partnership can follow the same discipline: ASK → LISTEN → ALIGN → FOLLOW THROUGH. Three low-burden practices make the approach practical: greet students intentionally at the door, ask one meaningful question each week, and use NOTICE → NAME → ASK → ACT → FOLLOW UP to convert observation into purposeful action.

The aim is not to collect interesting facts about students. It is to develop better professional judgment. A five-minute learner profile can surface strengths, interests, aspirations, and challenges. An Interest and Hobbies Map can reveal authentic connections between curriculum and students’ worlds. An Observation and Check-In Grid can bring together student voice, teacher observation, and learning evidence. Yet information about a child carries responsibility. Use it to understand, never to label. Separate evidence from assumption. Ask before concluding. Support without quietly reducing the standard. Most importantly, let what students reveal influence what happens next. Listening becomes educationally meaningful when it produces a wiser decision, a different response, or a better learning experience.

The evidence of knowing a learner is ultimately found in changed practice. A teacher redesigns a lesson because she has discovered how her students connect with an idea. Another recognizes a behavioral pattern early enough to prevent escalation. Another hears a parent’s perspective and revises her approach. Another notices the student who has become remarkably good at going unseen. None requires a spectacular intervention. Each begins with attention, followed by judgment, action, and follow-through. Caribbean education needs teachers who can hold cultural understanding alongside academic rigor, technology alongside humanity, and high expectations alongside intelligent support. That work begins before the lesson plan, before the first question, before the bell rings. Know the Caribbean child. Change the learning.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teacher Kishma Isaac is an author, values-based advocate, mentor to young people, mother, community leader, and educator with more than 18 years of teaching experience. Her work brings together educational practice, empowerment, human dignity, and youth development, with a particular commitment to creating learning environments in which Caribbean young people are understood, challenged, supported, and prepared to flourish.

RELATED: When Rebellion Speaks: Guiding Children With Wisdom, Not Warfare

By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, LONDON, England, Fri. August 28, 2026: As Notting Hill Carnival marks its 60th anniversary this weekend, an estimated 2 million people are expected to descend on West London for what remains Europe’s largest street festival, and once again, local businesses along the route are boarding up their windows before the celebration even begins.

The precaution isn’t new, but it remains striking for an event rooted in joyful Caribbean cultural celebration since its founding in 1966. Shops, bars and restaurants across Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Grove have been advised to consider boarding up windows and installing temporary security fencing ahead of the weekend, with organizers, local authorities and the Metropolitan Police running resident and business drop-in sessions throughout July to prepare the area.

A new layer of security

Storefronts and residential buildings are boarded up with wooden and metal panels in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, United Kingdom, on August 27, 2026, as business owners and residents take precautionary security measures ahead of the annual Notting Hill Carnival. Renowned as Europe’s largest street festival celebrating Caribbean culture and heritage, the massive two-day event is scheduled to take place on August 30-31, drawing hundreds of thousands of revellers to the area. (Photo by Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

This year’s carnival arrives with its most extensive security operation yet. The Notting Hill Carnival will take place in London August 29-31. The carnival attracts over one million attendees across three days and requires a large police presence due to the prospect of increased crime. Last year’s edition saw  2 murders, 8 stabbings, and 349 arrests: 72 for possession of an offensive weapon, 1 for possession of a firearm, 13 arrests for sexual offenses, 53 for assaults on emergency workers, and 61 police officers were assaulted over the weekend event. Fifty-five officers were assaulted. In the past two years, the Metropolitan Police have reported arrests for bladed weapon violations, stabbings, and assaults on police officers and members of the public. Historically, violence and arrests occur most frequently during the afternoon and evening portions of the carnival.

The Metropolitan Police Federation, representing 30,000 rank-and-file officers, has produced a hard-hitting 24-page dossier documenting what their members really think about their safety at the Notting Hill Carnival. Based on astonishingly candid quotes and comments from front-line officers who have worked at the annual event, survey results, newspaper cuttings from the last 10 years, and crime statistics from the Carnival.

Simon Hill, Deputy General Secretary of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said: “For years we have made it known that officers don’t like the event. But we had no tangible evidence to support that.”

“I felt it was important to get some concrete evidence, to hear the views of officers who work Notting Hill Carnival so we could truly understand what they think of the event and whether they enjoy policing it,” he added. “We chose to focus our survey on the Notting Hill Carnival rather than another large-scale event because of the consistent volume of assaults reported by officers after the event every year. Officers also work approximately 30 to 40 hours over the two days, which can have a significant impact on their well-being. We are also extremely concerned about the public who attend the event being victims of crime that officers feel powerless to prevent due to the sheer number of attendees and crimes committed. No other event in London has this combination or level of issues for officers.”

Other comments received from officers in the Federation survey include:

• “Punched, kicked, hit with objects including bottles. Spat at and sexually assaulted.”

• “It is a dangerous environment with no concern for officer safety.”

• “As an ethnic minority, I often feel anxious about policing carnival.”

• “I would rather crawl naked through broken glass.”

• “I dread this event every year, it gets more violent each time. How many more officers have to get injured or innocent members of the public killed before anything is done?”

In response, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that live facial recognition and number plate recognition technology will be deployed for the first time this year, aimed at identifying wanted individuals before and during the festival. Last year’s use of similar technology helped identify nearly 100 people of interest and led to 61 arrests.

“We have taken full control but we are fully supported by the Metropolitan Police Service as well,” carnival chief executive Matthew Phillip told the BBC, calling the new measures “a massive step” for the event. Ironically, the US Embassy in the UK has put out a warning to “avoid afternoon and evening portions of the carnival.”

A celebration that endures regardless

None of the security preparation has diminished the scale or spirit of the celebration itself. Saturday’s Panorama steel pan competition, Sunday’s J’Ouvert starting around 6 a.m., and Monday’s Adults’ Parade, running from late morning into evening, will once again transform the streets into a vivid display of Caribbean masquerade, sound systems and culture, drawing visitors from across the UK and around the world now six decades running.

NewsAmericasNow will continue covering Notting Hill Carnival and Caribbean cultural celebrations across the diaspora.