Editorial

It is the attack by al-Shabab militants on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, which has been dominating the foreign news reports since Saturday.

On Sunday Irma was vending at one of the many Sunday markets that are held in Region Four.

It remains exceedingly disturbing that in an era of what should be open, responsive and transparent government, underpinned by such staples as access to information legislation and the recently promised whistleblower legislation, that the government can have avoided for so long coming clean on who the major equity investor in the proposed Marriott Hotel is.

In our Thursday edition we carried a report on a Gina release about the launch of an Arawak language revival project in Capoey.

In September 1957, an Arkansas press photographer captured one of century’s iconic images as a young black girl tried to enter a newly desegrated school.

Last week, whilst the United States and most countries within its sphere of influence were sombrely marking the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, the effects of which continue to reverberate in today’s world, relatively remote Chile was commemorating the 40th anniversary of its own 9/11 – the bloody coup that overthrew the democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende, and ushered in the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the legacy of which is still a divided country.

Next Monday, as part of the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly which opened on Tuesday last, a high-level meeting will be convened on persons with disabilities.

As we advert to a world rearranging itself, there can be little doubt that in the midst of this suggested rearrangement is the role of a United States deeply involved in various aspects of Middle Eastern affairs that have certainly been reverberating over the globe as a whole.

Up until a week ago, not a great deal had been heard in Guyana, nor, it seems, in Trinidad and Tobago about the bilateral agreement reached between the two governments that would see 10,000 acres of land in the first instance, and perhaps up to 100,000 acres in the longer term being allocated by Guyana to allow for T&T private sector investments in major farming projects in Guyana.

What is crystal clear is that the Konawaruk River, Cuyuni/Mazaruni is severely polluted, can’t be drunk from, its banks are eroded and the course of the waterway is changing.

On Tuesday we reported that the Government of Guyana was investigating the circumstances of the ‘visit’ by a group of Venezuelan civilians and military personnel to Eteringbang on the Cuyuni River.

Stabroek News regrets that the last line of the editorial in our edition yesterday (Saturday, September 14) was inadvertently omitted.

The diplomatic chess game that will settle what action, if any, is taken against Syria has produced almost as many surprises as earlier debates over Iraq.

Our July 19, 2013 editorial (Trying to understand ‘convergence’) had attempted to make sense of Trinidad and Tobago Foreign Minister Winston Dookeran’s “New Caribbean Convergence Model,” as set forth in the inaugural issue of the Caribbean Journal of International Relations and Diplomacy, which advocated widening the scope of Caricom, through alliances with the wider Caribbean, in pursuit of production integration and “building competitive industries globally.”

In the aftermath of the bloody February 23, 2002, prison break this country was caught in the throes of a crime spree that had up to that point been unprecedented.

Last week, Prime Minister Kamal Persad-Bissessar of the People’s Partnership (PP) government, made another effort to stabilize her team with her third Cabinet reshuffle in the three years since the general elections that saw the ouster of then Prime Minster Patrick Manning and the Peoples National Movement (PNM) from office.

Once one is aware of the long-held collective Caribbean Community (Caricom) position on the use of force in the settlement of disputes and disagreements, then last weekend’s statement frowning on the very idea of the use of external force in Syria appears altogether predictable.

Qualfon’s announcement on September 4 of a 3,500-person contact centre campus and the creation of 6,000 jobs over five years with an initial investment of US$4M is most welcome.

Last Saturday, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela arrived here on a one-day state visit, following in the footsteps of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1978, and President Hugo Chávez in 2004.

Two months ago, while addressing the National Assembly at a biannual conference, President Raul Castro surprised his audience by focusing at length on the “social indiscipline” that could no longer be tolerated within Cuba.