Editorial

After the breakout of four remand prisoners from the Georgetown Magistrate’s Court lockups on Monday, one can only wonder which official it was who approved the security features of the building.

Weeks away from the start of the World Cup, strikes and protests in Brazil have raised concerns over security during the tournament, and renewed public doubts about the wisdom of spending an estimated US$11 billion (including $4 billion on 12 new and renovated stadiums) on a event that will add, according to most economists, no more than 0.2 percentage points to the economy.

When President Lula da Silva’s government won Brazil the right in 2007 to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the idea was to capitalise on the country’s post-1994 economic boom and to move from the status of a rapidly growing, emerging economy to that of a developed country.

Earlier this month, on May 10, this newspaper carried an article on maternal mortality, based on a report produced by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and the United Nations Population Division.

After a hectic campaign that took on the proportions of a general election exercise, the People’s National Movement consolidated its acceptance of Dr Keith Rowley, functioning in an acting capacity since the indisposition of Patrick Manning, as the new leader of the party.

The poignancy of the recent remark by the Director of the Child Care & Protection Agency (CC&PA) Ann Greene regarding what she says is a high tolerance for the sexual abuse of children in Guyana is as chilling as it is distressing.

While the Minister of Youth, Dr Frank Anthony has welcomed the probe of the alleged sexual and physical abuse of girls at the remedial facility, the New Opportunity Corps (NOC), it is clear that major problems exist at the Essequibo institution and that it will have to be radically transformed.

No one could have imagined that so much hidden talent resided at the apex of our capital city.

In The Magic Mountain, his fictional masterpiece, Thomas Mann asks, “Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?”

When, in 1988, the great Trinidadian calypsonian Black Stalin sang “We could make it if we try,” that his country was facing its “darkest hour,” referring to the economic crisis of the time, he obviously could not have foreseen the more serious trials and tribulations to come.

Local drug traffickers’ moves to put cocaine in everything they possibly could to get it out of the country to where it can earn big bucks in North America resulted in a tragic occurrence last week when four people died, including a child, after drinking what was suspected to be SSS Tonic laced with liquid cocaine.

An interesting, though brief, episode occurred in Barbados last week that suggested a certain nervousness deriving from the decline in economic growth which the country has been experiencing in recent times, and we are perhaps yet to see its implications.

Over the last weekend a female secondary school teacher confided in this newspaper that she had become aware of what she suspected was an organized drug-peddling practice by some students at the school where she teaches.

Pressed at Wednesday’s Europe Day event on why local government elections have not been held, President Ramotar had this to say: “As far as local government elections is concerned I cannot be oblivious to the political situation that exists in this country and further I say not.”

As we reported the week before last, Attorney General Anil Nandlall answered US Ambassador Brent Hardt’s comments on the state of media freedom in this country in the first instance by saying that press freedom should be taken in the context of the evolutionary process of the country, and that “not so far in the distant past” all kinds of aberrations occurred ‒ some of which he listed ‒ including the denial of newsprint.

President Xi Jinping’s decision to send troops to Xinjiang province in order to strike a “crushing blow” against terrorism marks a troubling resurgence of a political crisis that has been simmering for years.

In one of the many curious coincidences thrown up by human existence, ANR Robinson, the former Prime Minister and President of Trinidad and Tobago, and Norman Girvan, the Jamaican development economist and Caribbean public intellectual, both dedicated regionalists, died on the same day, April 9, 2014.

A police officer, personally ‘investigating’ a robbery committed against a relative of his, goes outside of his jurisdiction, picks up an underage witness and removes him from his parent’s home without his parent’s permission, places a gun into his mouth and shoots him and yet this policeman has not been charged.

Towards the end of April, President Obama visited a number of countries in Asia and the Pacific, a trip obviously designed to reassure their leaderships that in the face of a China which is on the brink of becoming the largest economy in the world, that the United States still considers itself the major power in those areas.

Nothing can gainsay the continual retrogression of media freedom in Guyana under the administration of the People’s National Congress (PNC).