Editorial

There was something almost surreal about the sight of Libyan Prime Minister, a matter of hours after he was abducted then released by militiamen, conceding in a television interview that occurrences like his seizure from a hotel in Tripoli last Thursday were to be expected given the chronic weakness of the state and the inability of the government to protect itself and its high officials.

More than 10 months into a new security initiative dramatically announced on the final day of last year by the Minister of Home Affairs, the citizens of this country remain besieged by all sorts of vicious and frightening crime and are unable to see even slivers of light.

On Thursday, a research vessel on contract to  US oil company Anadarko was undertaking a survey of the seabed in Guyana’s waters when it was arrested by a Venezuelan navy frigate and escorted to the island of Margarita. 

The shutdown of the US government and the brinkmanship of the Republican Party are a useful reminder that advanced democracies also have serious political dysfunctions.

Norman Girvan, Irwin LaRocque and Sir Dennis Byron, three prominent Caribbean personalities, have all been in the news in the past couple of weeks, signalling another upsurge of interest in the health of the regional integration process.

Even as a high-level dialogue among states and governments on the issue of international migration began at the United Nations Headquarters in New York last Thursday, October 3, the media were reporting that more than 100 African migrants had perished (now believed to be more than 300) when their boat capsized and sank in the Mediterranean off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.

Guyanese in particular, we suspect, will be strongly appreciative of the decision of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) concerning the Shanique Myrie case on freedom of movement in the Caricom area, pursuant to Article 207 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.

Last week, an official of the Chinese Embassy in Georgetown made the rather interesting revelation at a forum organized by the Guyana Manufacturers and Services Association (GMSA) to the effect that some enterprises in China advertising themselves as suppliers of Chinese goods were in fact con artists who dupe buyers into making full or partial ‘up front’ payments for goods then simply fail to deliver.

On September 17, 2013, the Minister in the Minis-try of Local Government, Mr Norman Whittaker wrote to Mr Orrin Gordon, the Chairman of the Interim Management Committee (IMC) of Linden notifying him that the government had revoked the Kara Kara road toll.

Everyone believes we are in election mode. The vilification is there; the vulgarity is there; and the rallies up and down the country for the 5th October 1992 anniversary are there. 

The tragic drowning in the Mediterranean Sea of scores of African migrants is a painful reminder of the terrible humanitarian challenges caused by the developed world’s strict immigration policies and the vast, cynical trade in human trafficking that preys on those hoping to outwit the system. 

Professor Norman Girvan, in an address entitled, ‘Reinventing the CSME,’ to the Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers (CAJO) in Barbados, last Friday, assessed the crisis in the regional economic integration process, focusing on the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME), and proposed a possible way out.

Over the past two years this newspaper has been invited to highlight the centenary birth anniversaries of at least ten people; the majority of them being women.

In a recent editorial entitled, ‘Obama, Syria and a world rearranging itself,’ we suggested in focusing on events in the Middle East, that changes were taking place in countries’ perceptions of each other that were inducing the major powers, and specifically the United States, to relook at their relations to each other.

By the end of last week the United States had still not made up its collective mind about the significance of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s remarkable diplomatic demarche in New York.

Delivering an address on Friday on the occasion of the 44th anniversary of the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), its Chairman, Dr Roger Luncheon for the first time acknowledged that its recurring and projected deficits were not sustainable. 

Last Sunday Commissioner of Police (ag) Leroy Brumell along with Crime Chief Seelall Persaud and some senior officers held an Outreach with members of the Meten-Meer-Zorg community.

“Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small”; wrote the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff became the first head of state ever to postpone a state visit to the United States of America.

On Wednesday, July 25, 2012, UNiTE, the UN Secretary General’s campaign to end violence against women proclaimed that the twenty-fifth day of every month would be dubbed Orange Day and it would be used to bring attention to preventing and ending what has been dubbed ‘the Global scourge’ ‒ violence against women and girls.