Editorial

100 years ago last Saturday, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, fired shots that were heard around the world, the reverberations of which are still being felt today.

Tomorrow marks the 41st anniversary of the signing of the original Treaty of Chaguaramas, which established the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and the Caribbean Common Market, doing away with the Caribbean Free Trade Association (Carifta) which was officially discontinued the next year in May.

Even as we considered Britain’s relations with the Caribbean Community last week, as British Foreign minister Hague met with our countries’ foreign ministers in London, it was clear that Hague had something else on his mind, specifically the campaign being led by his Prime Minister David Cameron to get his own choice of President of the European Commission.

Several talking points have arisen out of government’s announcement that it would commit half of the one billion dollar coastal clean-up allocation to rehabilitating the capital.

On March 1st this year in Trinidad, a baby, Simeon Cottle died at the Mount Hope Women’s Hospital after a horrific mistake during a routine caesarean operation.

On January 4, 2001, the National Assembly passed an amendment to the Constitution of Guyana prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things, by a vote of 55 to 0.

A week ago, on World Refugee Day, the UN placed the number of refugees and internally displaced people worldwide at more than 50 million, an increase of more than six million over the previous year.

In a series of short interviews leading up to this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the BBC World Service has been asking athletes, their supporters and cultural personalities from around the Commonwealth, to choose a piece of music that inspires them.

Commuters around Georgetown may have seen him – a young man, possibly in his early 20s, dressed in a dirty neon green t-shirt, neon green lens-less plastic eyewear and torn pants.

Caricom governments and the United Kingdom government, represented by their foreign ministers, met last week in the latest of a series of such meetings held periodically since 1998.

This is the period during which post-CXC students await the results of their examinations, wondering as the days go by just where their school days have gone and, perhaps, just what the next, possibly more challenging phase of their lives, will bring.

Just over four years ago in these columns, Stabroek News addressed the disturbing problems of the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) in the aftermath of the acid attack on one of its executives Mr Pretipaul Jaigobin, an accountant who had raised questions about the accounts of the GCB and other matters, and following the decision of the Minister of Sport, Dr Frank Anthony to convene a meeting of the entire board.

The current political panorama is not of a quality to lift the electorate’s spirits.

The circus that plays out daily on our roads would be laughable were it not for the fallout.

Juan Manuel Santos was re-elected president of Colombia on Sunday in the narrowest election race in the country’s history.

Drumroll! Ring the bells. Hoist the banners. Send out the cheerleaders.

It was not so long ago, indeed during the last presidential campaign in the United States, that President Obama felt that he could congratulate himself that his decision to pull American troops out of Iraq had proven to be right; and that Iraq as a major issue in American, and indeed global foreign relations, had been removed from the limelight.

Last Saturday’s issue of the Barbados Today newspaper published an article in which it sought to discuss the nexus between the behaviour of children in that Caricom country and the quality of parenting that they receive.

Considering the depth and seriousness of the problems that have gripped the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) it defies logic that the government is proceeding with plans for a confinement building at this facility for juveniles who have had brushes with the law.

Minister of Education Priya Manickchand announced the National Grade Six Assessment results on Friday, accompanied by some preliminary analysis of what the figures implied.