Editorial

On Wednesday night, a 15-year-old boy, Alex Christopher Griffith was shot in his mouth allegedly by a policeman who at last word was under close arrest.

Last week the Government of Guyana revoked the work permit of the head of the USAID Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project, Glenn Bradbury, for activities contrary to the immigration laws of Guyana.

Last month, in a scene few novelists would dare to write, an Iranian woman spared the life of her son’s murderer seconds before his execution.

In an extraordinary editorial, last Saturday, the Trinidad Guardian excoriated the President of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Sir Dennis Byron, for calling on those countries that have not yet accepted the CCJ as their final court of appeal, “to fully realise our independence by acceding to the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ.”

On Sunday last, a resident of Nonpareil, East Coast Demerara hanged himself after killing his wife of 11 years, reportedly by strangulation.

The PPP/C administration has never given the impression that it sets much store by foreign affairs, as a consequence of which it has never invested the kind of resources which would have allowed it to frame a policy reflective of this country’s longer term interests, or build up the expertise which would allow it to respond in anything other than an ad hoc way to unanticipated situations.

The extent of the Guyana economy’s dependence on the gold mining sector is set to grow significantly when two news investors, Guyana Goldfields Inc of Canada and Troy Resources Inc of Australia come on stream here in 2015.

Whichever way it is twisted and turned, what the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, Mr Nigel Dharamlall was recorded as saying at a meeting last week of Toshaos and Community Support Officers (CSOs) at the Guyana International Conference Centre (GICC) must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Once in a while the government does something which no one can find fault with.

Earlier this month, after an investigation that lasted five years and cost more than US$40M, the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,000-page analysis of the CIA’s use of torture concluded that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was unnecessary.

Jorge Domínguez is a professor of political science at Harvard University.

Finally, obviously frustrated by the inane and groundless statements being made with regard to the 911 service, if it could be called that, the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) has fired back a salvo that hit the target.

Followers of political changes in the region will have been observing the battle for succession in the People’s National Movement (PNM), the party formed by Dr Eric Williams, which has only had two political leaders since the mid-1950s – Williams himself and Patrick Manning who gave up the leadership on account of ill health.

Once the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration had announced that there would be an official enquiry into the killing of Dr Walter Rodney on June 13, 1980, it was almost certain that neither the announcement nor the enquiry itself would pass without a flurry of public comment.

Now that the budget has been passed the PPP/C administration can now fulfil its oft-broken promise to the electorate to convene local government elections.

Sometimes one wonders whether the bureaucrats who sit in Georgetown really know anything about the basic geography of this country.

It has to be one of the great paradoxes of the digital age: as computers and the internet make our lives easier, so do they seem to make them more complicated.

Urban development cannot proceed without proper waste management and Guyana is a prime example of this.

Urban development cannot proceed without proper waste management and Guyana is a prime example of this.

Professor Norman Girvan, who passed away last week following injuries sustained during a hiking accident in Dominica had, well before his death attained the sobriquet of Caribbean Man for the extent of his academic, policy and practical work over the Caribbean as a whole.