Editorial

It may well come as a surprise to many Guyanese to know that Sports Tourism – international travel to participate in or view sport-related activities is reportedly worth an amount in excess of US$600 million a year, and has been growing at the rate of around 6 per cent annually over the past decade or so.

Whenever your main penitentiary is obliterated by arsonists within and the main plotters make a clean escape and haven’t been recaptured a week later, the country faces a major problem.

After a week has passed, citizens still do not know exactly what happened at the Camp Street Prison last Sunday, or the timeline of events.

In the final weeks of his life, Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was granted a brief respite from the usual rigours of his 11-year prison sentence for “incitement to subvert state power.” 

On a mundane Sunday afternoon on July 9 last, a remarkable thing occurred: the deeply ingrained inertia and reactionary mindset that characterises the current administration was suddenly and dramatically exposed.

Guyana’s season of fear has had an unnecessary, though not totally unexpected extension wrought by Sunday’s well-planned, well-executed prison breakout where fire was used as a diversionary measure.

The thirty-eighth regular meeting of the Conference of the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) was held last week Tuesday to Thursday (July 4-6) in Grand Anse, Grenada.

It strains credulity to think that two by no means large local private sector companies have been able to remain in business in circumstances where, together, they are owed amounts totalling well in excess of $300 million for essential services which they have been rendering to the capital for years.

Step by step the country is being brought closer to a clear understanding of the whopping single-sourcing of $632m in supposedly emergency drug purchases by the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) earlier this year.

The name of the third deadly sin rolled off many a commentator’s tongue following the abortive robbery on Republic Bank last Tuesday.

Last week, with his habitual lack of concern, President Trump tweeted a link to an Internet meme which remixed footage of him at a WrestleMania event so that he appeared to body-slam someone with a CNN logo superimposed on their head.

At the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA) dinner held last month, Minister of Finance Winston Jordan, in his delivery to those assembled, more than hinted at an inertia gripping the private sector in terms of innovation when he charged them with, “Don’t wait for the government to lead the way; you, the private sector, are the proverbial engine of growth.

In our Tuesday edition, we ran a column by Miami-based Argentinian writer Andres Oppenheimer in which he bemoaned the lack of innovation emanating from Latin America and the Caribbean.

In February, 1970, some members of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), a group based in London, England travelled to Guyana for ‘A Caribbean Writers and Artists Convention’, organized by the government as part of the country’s celebrations on becoming a republic.

Hardly a day has passed over the last two years without there being some reference to oil and gas in the local media.

Embedded in the house rental for Minister Simona Broomes are two important questions for the government: the basis on which decisions are made on emoluments for its senior officials and having made these decisions, whether it is prepared to be fully transparent about them.

The Grade Six Assessment results were announced on Friday, and as in previous years the high-flyers recorded a truly impressive performance.

Today Canada marks 150 years of Confederation with lavish firework displays, celebrations and concerts.

The desire for progress is something intrinsic to human beings, both at the individual level and collectively speaking.

There are several disturbing things that the current rainy season has forced into the spotlight.