Editorial

On the stroke of midnight and way into the wee hours of today, many persons would have been singing the traditional ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Knowing that there is still a tendency among some in the region to doubt the utility of close Caricom-Cuba relations, Caricom heads of government will have felt gratified that so soon after the 5th Caricom-Cuba Summit held in Havana, the leader of what used, in the days of the Cold War, to be called the Free World, made bold to announce that the United States and the Government of Cuba had decided there is now, after so many years of estrangement, to be a deliberate progression of increasing US-Cuba interaction.

Guyana is a country in which it is common for the powerful and the influential to cast long and unpalatable shadows.

As stated in the November 23rd Sunday Stabroek editorial, the deep flooding of Georgetown on November 20 was “a painful commentary on government’s inability to think ahead, consult the best skills available and manage projects of a certain technical complexity.”

If you asked Georgetowners what was at the top of their wish list for the capital in 2015, the majority of them would probably say flood relief.

Another year, another Christmas; in many respects, the song remains the same.

Someday at Christmas we’ll see a land With no hungry children, no empty hands One happy morning people will share A world where people care – Stevie Wonder – Someday at Christmas Today many will sit at overburdened tables and overindulge while many have nothing, or not nearly enough.

The favourite public portrayal of North Korea in the Western world, and particularly in the United States, is that North Korea is one of the most backward countries in the world, incapable of advancing its own development, and led at the present time, by a political infant, Kim Jong Un, inclined to buffoonery.

No sooner had US President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro made their separate pronouncements about an initiative designed to lead to the normalization of relations between their two countries, than commentators began to speculate about the thicket of opposition that is likely to descend on the initiative, particularly from the powerful anti-Castro Cuban-American lobby in the United States, not least in the Congress.

There is no doubt that this country’s security sector is in need of a lot of help.

One would have thought that the PPP had done enough damage to itself over the past few months to give it genuine cause for hesitation the next time it was overtaken by the compulsion to inflict self-harm.

Whatever battles lie ahead with Congressional hardliners who still believe in the Cuban embargo, the Obama administration’s initial steps towards a ’normalization’ of US-Cuba relations are a triumph of common sense after decades of political posturing.

It was pure coincidence last week that just as one Caribbean candidate was elected to the post of Secretary-General of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group for 2015-2020, another Caribbean candidate was withdrawing from the race to be the next Secretary-General of the Commonwealth for 2016-2021.

Blackouts have become so much a part of life in Guyana that citizens are often hard pressed to remember a time when there were no power outages; it requires thinking way back for people who are over 35 years old, while those who are younger cannot, as they would have experienced blackouts all of their lives.

As had been announced earlier, elections held in Dominica last week resulted in the retention of the country’s government by the Dominica Labour Party (DLP), led by outgoing Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit.

A few weeks ago this newspaper reported that part of the reason why the Food and Drugs Analyst Department is unable to perform important aspects of its work anywhere near as effectively as it should has to do with a scarcity of skills.

In the April 30th, 2014 edition of Stabroek News there was a Page One comment lamenting the absence of local government elections over the last 20 years and criticizing the PPP/C for withholding these.

Underneath the lead story in our Tuesday edition there was a court report about a Venezuelan soldier being remanded to prison in Georgetown.

The release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s ‘Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’ marks the point at which there can no longer be any doubt that senior Bush administration officials deliberately enabled the use of torture during the Global War on Terror.

Much has been written about the tragic death of the young Australian cricketer, Phillip Hughes, felled by a not particularly vicious bouncer, a couple of weeks ago, in a state match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.