Editorial

With the passing on Friday of social justice activist Andaiye, this is an appropriate point to reflect on the sage words she co-authored with Eusi Kwayana and Moses Bhagwan in the Stabroek News’ In the Diaspora column of January 8, 2018 on the APNU+AFC government’s stewardship and the plight of the laid-off sugar workers.

Tertiary education is enormously expensive to fund.  While some fortunate older universities in the Western world might receive endowments from wealthy alumni from time to time, or in the case of the UK, might own property which allows them to earn a bit of extra income, the vast bulk of funding for tertiary institutions derives from tuition fees and state subventions.

Asked about the Mueller report  on a popular daytime talk show, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently observed that if Donald Trump “were anyone other than the President of the United States, he would be in handcuffs and indicted … I didn’t take an oath to support [him] I took an oath to support the Constitution.

The week before last a 37-year-old Wismar man, Leonard Moriah, died from injuries he had received from the residents of Block 22 who had caught him in the act of robbing someone’s house.

Tomorrow is the global annual observance of World No Tobacco Day, created by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1987 to draw attention to the tobacco epidemic and its contribution to the spread of chronic non-communicable diseases and death.

Last week, the presidents of two sporting organisations, one national and one regional, visited the local shores.

Confirmation of Guyana’s considerable oil reserves and the attendant likelihood of significant change in the country’s economic fortunes in the relatively near future has altered external perceptions of a country that had once been  lumped by writers with the poverty-stricken countries of the hemisphere, deploying the demeaning sobriquet ‘banana republic’ in the process; never mind the complete misapplication of the term to a country that possesses none of the criteria that might otherwise  place it in that category.

Following a series of letters to the newspapers by public communications specialist Kit Nascimento about senior members in government not being in compliance with the Integrity Commission law, President David Granger disclosed on Wednesday that he himself had not submitted his returns.

Last week we carried a report on the Chagos archipelago and Guyana’s vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations on the question of its sovereignty.

Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay on “The End of History” argued that America’s Cold War victory had left  “no serious ideological competitors” to liberal democracy and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy [was] the final form of human government.”

On Wednesday Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Shalimar Ali-Hack, Stephen Fraser, Carole James-Boston, Robert Ramcharran and Rajendra Nath Poonai were presented with their instruments of appointment as Senior Counsel by President David Granger.

The results of India’s elections, held between April 11 and May 19 this year, are likely to be announced today.

Last Friday Seymour MacDonald Nurse made his final appearance at the famous Kensington Oval in Barbados.

If you have been carefully following the rollout over the years of the repetitive official undertakings to better position the country’s “tourism product” to contribute more meaningfully to the country’s economy and as well the promises to deploy the beauty of the country, our hinterland particularly, to attract favourable international attention, you are probably likely to agree that those promises have more or less fallen flat on their faces.

On Friday, via his Facebook page, Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson confirmed that US$9,000 had been transferred in 2017 to his personal account in respect of a trip to China’s Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Macao for a June 2016 construction forum.

It was chartered accountant and attorney Christopher Ram who first drew public attention to the fact that six ministers of government attended the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) hearings on the no-confidence vote case in Trinidad earlier this month.

On the 2016 campaign trail, candidate Trump railed against NAFTA as a “politician-made disaster” created by “a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”

In 2017 there were 417 reports of noise nuisance and up to November 2018, there were 300.

Thirty years ago, the member states of the United Nations agreed to a binding treaty of international law that would allow all children in all countries and of all ethnicities, cultures and orientations to live in a world in which their human rights would be respected and adhered to.

On the 1st of May, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), an international court for sports based in Geneva, Switzerland, handed down a decision that will forever change the landscape of the sporting world.