Editorial

The popular consensus is that the inaugural Limacol Caribbean Premier League was a “massive success.”

On Tuesday morning citizens woke up to the news that a 14-year-old boy had been shot dead the day before; mowed down by a stray bullet, reportedly fired indiscriminately by some trigger-happy moron reportedly shooting at the unseen for the pleasure of it.

There can be little doubt, as the civil war in Syria has continued and virtually stalemated, and as the Alawite-led government of President Assad has seemed to hold a slight upper hand, that sentiment among Western governments has been gradually shifting towards some form of military intervention.

Last week, the likelihood of United States missile strikes in Syria appeared imminent after Secretary of State John Kerry announced that Washington was in possession of evidence that the Syrian government had, on August 21, used chemical weapons against its civilian population and that more than 1,000 people had been killed.

What finally scuttled the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project wasn’t the question of whether the country needed hydroelectric energy.

Strange things happen in Guyana. Imagine that a woman who has been a miner in the interior for many years, and is familiar with the lawlessness which is part of life there, joins with other women to form a women miners’ organisation.

The Caribbean is the ‘home of hybridity’ but this legacy does not necessarily underpin our regional culture and identity.

When President Barack Obama delivered his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on Wednesday, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, he was standing, symbolically, in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln and in the footsteps of Dr King.

The long August vacation is drawing to a close and teachers, parents and children are preparing for the beginning of the new school year and, in some instances, new schools.

Since Michael Manley succumbed in the second half of the 1970s, after his experiments in economic and foreign policy radicalism, to the IMF’s insistence that he accept one of their more severe programmes for the recuperation of a depressed Jamaican economy, the country has gone through a number of attempts at trying and retrying those IMF policies to which it had originally objected.

It has been just over a year since the political opposition passed a vote of no confidence in Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee following the shooting to death of three persons during demonstrations at Linden.

If nothing else, the last 18 months must make crystal clear to the government that accountability with public funds and the highest standards of financial probity must be adhered to. 

Every year the CXC results are announced it triggers the annual hand-wringing about English and Maths, and a spate of suggestions about what can be done to rescue the education system.

The baffled outrage produced by the recent bloodshed in Cairo is indicative of deep confusion at the heart of the West’s political attitude to Egypt.

No one knows exactly what is going to happen in Egypt, although the prognostications are not good.

How do we honour our heroes? By remembering them; by ensuring that whatever they lived by, stood for or died changing is treasured and taken account of in what we do and how we live.

The Middle East and its environs has remained a centre of concern of the major powers, in particular the United States.

Up to last Friday the Ministry of Education was yet to release the findings of its investigation into the death of Joshua Hubbard.

We extend a hearty welcome to the delegates of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s 44th Annual General Assembly and wish them the most fruitful of deliberations in Georgetown.

Former president Jagdeo’s voice has not been heard much since he demitted office, except intermittently in relation to his international commitments on the environment.