The Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, has announced that the process for selecting the finalists for the 2022 Jamaica Festival Song Competition is now completed.

Minister Grange said the selection panel has decided on the 10 finalists.

Minister Grange said:

“We will remember that initially, the panel selected three songs, which was not a sufficient number for a competition.  After that we decided to re-open entries and we received 209 new entries during the course of a week.  After reviewing all the entries, the panel has selected 10 finalists.”

The finalists are:

Grange said she was “pleased" with the response to the re-opening of entries.  “We have never received so many entries in one week”.

The Minister said the songs are being mastered and the recordings will be released soon.  She has called on broadcasters “to play the songs so that the public will get to know them and be able to choose their favourite for Jamaica 60”.

The Ministry through the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission is making arrangements to put the finalists on social media and on global music streaming platforms. 

The winning song will be selected following two televised shows on July 14 and 28.  The song will be selected by a combination of judges scores and telephone voting by members of the public.

There’s a prize of three million dollars for the winning song to be shared among the producer, the writer and the singer. 

The Darliston Police in Westmoreland have charged 20-year-old Justine Barnes, a farmer of Pike district in the parish with the murder of a 55-year-year-old shopkeeper on
Saturday, May 14.

A team of officers assigned to the Trelawny Police Division arrested and charged a mother and two sons in relation to the seizure of an illegal firearm and fifteen rounds of ammunition during an operation in Kettering, Duncans in Trelawny on Tuesday, June 28. 

Disgraced R&B superstar R. Kelly was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison, months after he was convicted on all nine counts against him in a high-profile sex trafficking case.

The mother of the Clarendon woman who was slain along with her four children last week says the man now before the court for their murder should die a slow death, even as she admitted that if he is executed it would not bring back her daughter and grandchildren.

Human rights lobby group, Jamaicans for Justice, is being taken to task for its decision to oppose the death penalty for the accused killer in the Cocoa Piece massacre.

Police have released the name of another person of interest as they deepen the probe into the killing of 17-year-old Devenese Nelson of North Street, Kingston 14 on Sunday, June 26.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is to seek the death penalty against Rushane Barnett, the man accused of killing a mother and her four children in Cocoa Piece, Clarendon last week.

Health authorities here have increased surveillance for Monkeypox after being alerted to the fact that a crew member on a flight to the island has tested positive for the virus.