Editorial

It was Ram & McRae which pointed out in their 2015 ‘Focus on Guyana’s National Budget’ that the public service is broken and therefore the government would not be able to avoid hiring some people on contract while the problems in the system are being addressed.

Despite the UN’s stalemate with peace negotiations for Syria and continuing turmoil in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, attitudes towards refugees are hardening throughout Europe.

Since last Friday’s editorial thanking Shivnarine Chanderpaul for his 21 years of exemplary service to West Indies cricket, we have learnt that former West Indies cricketer and ex-president of the West Indies Players’ Association Dinanath Ramnarine is planning a gala dinner in Trinidad to honour Mr Chanderpaul.

Georgetown is in clear and present danger of being choked by the sheer number of vehicles which jostle for space on its narrow and congested roads.

Prime Minister Portia Simpson, who led her People’s National Party (PNP) to victory in December 2011, has chosen to call for the general elections on February 25th, almost a year before they are statutorily due, and with public opinion polls showing her party holding a 4% lead over the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

It was always likely that one of the important areas of public interest in this year’s budget proposals would be whether or not there would be an announcement regarding salary increases for public servants.

Producing two budgets within six months is a feat that is deserving of the highest commendation and the Minister of Finance and all of those who participated in this process must be given their deserved credit.

There was a time when you could walk around Georgetown, and street after street would be lined with traditional houses – not necessarily always the grand, elegant, colonial variety, but also the small-scale, equally attractive cottages of the working people.

Months before she endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in a speech that will be long remembered for inventing the delightful word “squirmish”, Sarah Palin was asked to speculate about her political future.

It was back in 2011 that we asked, “What more can one say about Shivnarine Chanderpaul that has not already been said?”

Whether the weather be fine Or whether the weather be not… We’ll weather the weather Whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not.

As the American political arena rolls down to the presidential elections due in November of this year, observers from around the world are experiencing a spectacle of contention among what some Americans refer to as “presidential wannabees”.

“The Olympic Games must not be an end in itself, they must be a means of creating a vast programme of physical education and sportscompetitions for young people.”

As outlined in yesterday’s editorial, the manner in which the APNU+AFC government and GuySuCo communicated the decision to close the Wales Sugar Estate was insensitive to a community that faces the loss of hundreds of jobs and puts families at risk of further penury and disintegration.

The announcement of the closure of Wales estate struck like an earthquake.

Twenty years ago the historian and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien argued that a key aspect of global security, one that was nearly always overlooked, was the United Nations’s unrelenting search for solutions to insoluble crises.

The news that Sarah Palin has endorsed Donald Trump for the Republican nomination to run for the presidency of the United States of America has been met by general derision in most quarters.

Late last year, three Guyanese-American siblings won the first place in an Innovating Justice Challenge for the police rating and review mobile and web app they had created and entered into a worldwide competition.

The implementation of agreements reached between the Western powers, but essentially between the United States and Iran, is a significant element in the reduction of what we referred to in an editorial last week, as current global uncertainties.

Less than a year after receiving news of the country’s first significant oil find it must surely be a sobering thing for Guyana to watch neighbouring oil-rich Venezuela experience a condition that now bears a conspicuous resemblance to an economic freefall as the price of crude oil, which brings in more than 90 per cent of the Bolivarian republic’s earnings, continues to tumble.