Editorial

The sense of national anticipation that had attended the announcement by ExxonMobil in May 2015 that a “significant oil discovery” had been made offshore Guyana has subsided.

Notice has been served to the public by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEGPL) has applied for an environmental authorisation for petroleum operations in the offshore Stabroek Block where the lead explorer ExxonMobil made a huge oil discovery in 2015.

The present arrangements for selecting the Gecom chairman date back to 1991, and the intervention of the Carter Center and President Jimmy Carter himself in helping to forge agreements which made possible the first free and fair election for twenty-four years.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, with a three-vote margin, the US Senate approved a budget measure that sets up the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Protecting children from abuse, neglect, outright violence, and exploitation is a responsibility that first and foremost lies with the parents or legal guardians of the children, and it is normal to expect that those parents and guardians will go out of their way to ensure the safety of their offspring or wards.

It becomes more glaringly obvious with each passing Assize session that the backlog in the High Court, as far as criminal matters go, is unlikely to be cleared anytime soon, regardless of how many justice improvement programmes are conducted, unless there is a drastic increase in the human resource capacity of that court, that is more judges are appointed.

On New Year’s day, the American television investigative journalism programme 60 Minutes dedicated a quarter of its weekly episode to the sale of passports by various cash-strapped  territories within Caricom, highlighting the potential for possible security risks for the region.

Nothing of substance has been heard from the Government of Guyana in the wake of the visit here at the end of last year by two officials from the Russian aluminum giant RUSAL, which company is the majority shareholder in the locally based Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI).

With his election as General Secretary (GS) of the PPP on Saturday, Bharrat Jagdeo has now been formally installed as both the PPP and parliamentary opposition supremo.

The revocation of the lease for the Red House and the events which followed that, have caused a bruising of ethnic sensitivities when the issue, while a little delicate, perhaps, could have been dealt with far more rationally and with minimal repercussions.

A corruption trial making headlines in France is a cautionary tale of what happens when power remains in the same hands for too long.

As the clock wound down on the year 2016, there was a growing sense that while violent crime did not give the population much respite last year, there was a remarkable improvement in the performance of one section of the Guyana Police Force, namely the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

As is typical at this time of the year, we are in the middle of one of the rainy seasons experienced in this country.

It would hardly have been expected with negative relations between the United States and Russia (the former USSR) having subsided in accordance with the apparent end of the Cold War, that as President Obama prepares to leave the White House, relations between the two powers would have soured to their present state.

In November 2015, Minister of Finance Winston Jordan told a Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association annual dinner and awards that Guyana and Norway had agreed to do a final review of the contentious Amaila Falls Hydropower Project (AFHP).

We now stand on the first rung of the 2017 ladder. 

As the new year approaches, the buyer’s remorse of the post-Brexit UK and the widespread anxieties of the pre-Trump US suggest that the clash between disruptive populism and established political elites is far from over.

The capital city of Georgetown is 235 years old with a rich and varied history which can be seen in the architectural structures still standing, some of which have been designated as heritage sites.

In two days we will be singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and bidding farewell to 2016, a most remarkable year any way you look at it, and yet a year no one will be sorry to see end.

As a new year dawns, leaders and populations of most countries will be turning their eyes even more sharply towards the United States as a new president assumes office.