Editorial

What the people of the country would have wanted from budget 2017 would have been a reduction of their tax burden, stimulation of the economy to produce real growth and the generation of well-paying jobs.

While following the announcement of the Grade Six Assessment results, great emphasis was placed on the creditable achievements of the top candidates, nothing was said by the Ministry of Education about the overall performance of the student body as a whole.

Fidel Castro remained a paradox up to end of his life.

In October 2016, the Commonwealth Secretariat released its second Global Youth Development Index, mere days after the Guyana Government passed its National Youth Policy in Parliament, a policy which was said to, inter alia, “[encourage] leadership, participation and representation.”

With renewed focus on preventing HIV infection, the world observes World AIDS Day today under the theme ‘Hands up for #HIV prevention,’ which speaks to the very real need to continue and expand on HIV prevention education, especially among young people, the vulnerable and those at risk.

Almost simultaneously with the last breath of Fidel Castro, the incoming president of the United States has indicated the basis of his attitude to the Cuban regime by announcing (or rather, tweeting) that “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the US as a whole, I will terminate the deal”.

Setting aside the recent and apparently ongoing row between the Police Commissioner and his high-ranking subordinate there are quite a few other matters of pressing public concern that have to do with the functioning of the Guyana Police Force.

For decades, the Directors of the Government Analyst-Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD) have done yeoman’s working in protecting the health of citizens from unwholesome foods and improper food handling practices.

It is hard to think of another leader from such a small state who had the kind of impact on world affairs that Fidel Castro had.

Every day hundreds of millions of people turn to Facebook for their news.

Reacting to information that a section of the Queen’s College agricultural lands located within the school compound was to be utilized to facilitate the construction of a multi-complex canteen, students staged a protest on Tuesday through Thursday last to oppose the decision.

Last Sunday, when the world observed Universal Children’s Day, much of the focus was on children in conflict situations.

An interesting aspect of the presidential election campaign in the United States was a developing controversy over the role of (and benefits to) the United States in participating and cooperating in new mechanisms for consolidating the management of international trade.

One can appreciate the sense of frustration felt by the Georgetown City Council’s Public Relations Officer Debra Lewis over what, by her own admission in her letter to SN of November 19, is the customary “widespread criticism” inflicted upon the municipality every time it “seeks to employ a new revenue earning venture.” 

On November 15, 2016, Parliament Office distributed the Order Paper for today’s session of Parliament which contained the hitherto unknown bill for a pension for former Prime Minister Hamilton Green and a range of other benefits.

Georgetown is one little democratic experiment that seems to have gone off the rails already.

Yesterday morning, after debating whether to broadcast such distressing imagery,  Al-Jazeera English aired footage recorded in a hospital in Eastern Aleppo during a bombing raid.

One of the recommendations of the Justice James Patterson led Commission of Inquiry into the state of the Georgetown prison following a deadly riot in March was the need for an effective surveillance system in the prison yard to monitor and record both prisoners and officers’ conduct.

One thing is sure, a garbage collectors’ strike in Georgetown would be crippling.

All over the world discussion is obviously intense in both public and official circles about the future attitude of the United States to countries in the hemisphere, in the light of doubts as to whether there would be the usual general policy continuity which governments have been accustomed to.