Editorial

As we said in the editorial of February 10 relative to the granting of a licence and allocation of frequency to China Central TV, the PPP/C government appears unshakably determined to maintain a stranglehold on the airwaves and is accomplishing this by granting licences to only those it is comfortable with.

This week Mr David Jessop in his column ‘The view from Europe’ (page 21) revisited in some detail the topic of global energy sources, this time expanding on the consequences of changes currently under way.

President Obama’s State of the Union address earlier this week was largely given over to visions and promises, carefully phrased to make them sound practical and affordable, as though eventual success was all but inevitable.

An excessive deference to figures in authority and an unhealthy obsession with titles, especially academic ones, are traits not necessarily confined to the Caribbean.

On January 20, Tirtawattie Shoandeo of Whim, Corentyne died at the New Amsterdam Hospital some hours after she had undergone a surgical procedure.

It is something of a truism of United States politics that a president makes his own foreign policy.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the expression of concern proffered by the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) in response to the reported exclusion of Guyanese labour from the construction phase of the Marriott Hotel project.

There is enormous public interest in the security reforms announced by Minister Rohee particularly as it relates to the Guyana Police Service.

In a letter to this newspaper on February 1, Mr Enrico Woolford of EMW Communications/Capitol News criticized the National Frequency Management Unit (NFMU) for failing to divulge who is operating on which frequency in Guyana.

On the eve of confirmation hearings for John O Brennan − President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser and proposed CIA Director − the White House instructed the Department of Justice to share classified documents that justify its drone programme with two congressional Intelligence Committees. 

Obviously, when we focused, in last Friday’s editorial, on PJ Patterson’s cry from the heart and forthright warning about the perils of neglecting Caricom, we thought that his argument was well reasoned and very persuasive.

Two days ago, a man who pleaded guilty to beating his wife to death, after which he gruesomely degraded her corpse was sentenced to 22 years in prison, but will serve just 14 years.

Prime Minister Freundel Stuart of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), Barbados has eventually called the long-awaited date for general elections in his country and the citizens go to the polls on February 21.

On Tuesday January 22, during an event held to mark the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, US Ambassador Brent Hardt alluded to the success which the American political process has enjoyed in setting aside partisan political rivalries and collectively embracing the national interest.

In a letter in the February 2nd edition of Stabroek News entitled `No parking for taxpayers at new GRA location’,  Ms Nadia Burke related the tribulations she endured while trying to find parking close to the new Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) Headquarters on Camp Street.

The news that Mayor Hamilton Green had convened a meeting attended, among others, by some well-known engineers, not to mention Eddy Grant, on how to go about restoring City Hall was certainly uplifting to the spirits of all citizens who have the material heritage of Georgetown at heart.

The hue and cry that has greeted President Obama’s proposals to impose commonsense limits on his country’s multi-billion dollar firearms industry is a reminder of how entrenched the gun lobby has become in American politics.

A précis of PJ Patterson’s “cri de coeur for Caricom,” his speech to the Rotary Club of Georgetown on Monday, would actually make an excellent editorial, without any need for additional comment.

Two days in last week—Tuesday and Wednesday—saw two similar but unrelated incidents of school violence to the extent that blood was spilled and in one case a child is still hospitalised.

For the better part of a half-century after the French ceded independence to most of their colonies in the 1960s, the relationship between the newly sovereign states and the ex-mother country was relatively benign and uneventful.