Publication date: 5 December 2018 | Covering: November 2018 Monthly Briefing US midterm elections November 6: Democrats take House of Representatives; Republicans…

Brexit uncertainty weighs on UK-based diaspora buyers as Jamaica’s housing market closes 2018 on a cautiously confident footing.

Barbados secures a landmark IMF programme in October 2018, providing a credibility anchor for the island’s fiscal reform. As the Caribbean holiday tourism season peaks, Dominica marks 14 months of slow-but-steady reconstruction and Jamaica’s property market closes the year on strong footing.

Tasmania’s Anglican Church cut its redress sale list from 107 to 73 properties, sparing churches such as Evandale and Hagley, but the Southern Midlands still faced losing seven of eight churches.

After six years of painful fiscal discipline, Jamaica’s economic scorecard is showing genuine human progress — unemployment and poverty have reached multi-year lows not seen since before the crisis era. Yet the IMF’s fourth review of Jamaica’s Stand-By Arrangement delivers an uncomfortable verdict: macroeconomic stability has not yet translated into the growth that would make those gains permanent. Without a decisive response to the structural barriers holding back private investment, the hard-won results of the reform programme may prove more fragile than the headline numbers suggest.

US Episcopal parishes have helped Cuban congregations stabilise an unsafe church at Itabo, build visitor dormitories and install about 26 water filtration systems, while a Santa Cruz del Norte church still awaited roof repairs after Irma.

At least 350 Christian-owned properties on Iraq’s Nineveh plains were occupied by officials while their owners were displaced by the Islamic State, with only 50 blocked from sale, a Premier report said.

The United Church of Jamaica and Grand Cayman says squatters on about 10 acres of its 135-acre Chapleton property have delayed plans for a community college, and it wants to cut off the occupied section so residents can be regularised.

London churches are partnering with developers to put flats on their land in exchange for new or restored church buildings, with schemes in Bethnal Green, Hackney and Mildmay delivering dozens of homes, Metropolis reported in 2018.

St David’s Church in Carmarthen, a Grade II listed building closed after storm damage in 2003 and sold to a developer for £1 around four years earlier, was put back up for auction with a guide price of £50,000-plus.