Editorial

In the mid-1990s, when former US presidential candidate Bob Dole made a television commercial for Viagra, gravely recounting his bout with prostate cancer and the difficulty of post-operative complications like erectile dysfunction, many Americans were nonplussed.

It is difficult to understand, from a distance, what exactly is going on with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and her People’s Partnership (PP) government in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago.

Amid the stench of shame engulfing this country in the wake of government’s admission in this Education Month that it had been and intended to continue indulging in the theft of intellectual property, there came a ray of hope in the constancy of the Guyana Book Foundation (GBF), which recently began its annual distribution of supplementary reading books and teachers’ resource materials to hinterland schools.

The drama of anti-American demonstrations in the Middle East, Pakistan in Asia, North Africa and other parts of the world in the period just prior to the November elections in the United States, is obviously not the best background for President Barack Obama to be bringing his campaign to a climax.

High-profile personages including politicians are, as a general rule,  better positioned than run of the mill citizens to ‘make’ news, that advantage arising out of an entirely reasonable assumption that their pronouncements and actions will be of greater national import and therefore more newsworthy.

Without a doubt, the following rhetorical question by the Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Luncheon at a press conference on September 12 will go down in the record of this government as the clearest self-admission of the criminalization of the state.

The authorities do not have much of a record in terms of catching major drug barons or having an impact on local narco-trafficking activities, but my goodness, their ability to draft National Drug Strategy Master Plans is nothing short of sensational.

A week used to be a long time in politics. In our day rival campaigns fight each other one news cycle at a time, constantly looking to wrong-foot the other side and force them into damage control.

The Venezuelan elections on October 7 may well prove to be the most momentous in Venezuela’s recent history, with hugely important implications for the Latin American and Caribbean region as well.

Before Monday night, Bibi Samaroo was just another resident of the sprawling, new housing development at Diamond, East Bank Demerara.

The murder of the United States Ambassador and three colleagues in Libya, followed by demonstrations in other countries of the Middle East, indicate that the cauldron is still boiling in that part of the world, as it certainly continues to do in Syria.

Acting Police Commissioner Leroy Brumell’s engagements on Thursday with family members of the slain teenager Shaquille Grant and with residents of Agricola who had protested the young man’s killing by police might be interpreted as an attempt by the Guyana Police Force (GPF) to strike a more conciliatory posture than it usually does in response to public protests over police killings.

The death of any 17-year-old is difficult to fathom much more one at the hands of the police in what was clearly reckless behaviour.

If reporters at Dr Luncheon’s press conferences often get themselves tangled in the thicket of words, such was not the case on Wednesday; the Cabinet Secretary’s deliveries were a model of straightforwardness and clarity.

In 1988, when Salman Rushdie’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Satanic Verses earned a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini and triggered violent protests in several countries, many Westerners were puzzled at the furore.

A few months ago, it was announced that a sub-atomic particle called the Higgs Boson may have been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider atom smashing machine near Geneva.

The Guyana Police Force may have closed the chapter on the Lindo Creek massacre on Tuesday when it interred the burnt remains of the eight victims after a funeral service, but the complete book has not been written – at least not for some of the relatives of the slain men – and perhaps it never will be.

The announcement by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia that his government will recommence negotiations with the main guerilla grouping, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), towards a solution of their continuing contention over the movement of narcotics in the context of a wider, long-running civil war, has been welcomed on all sides.

To the surprise of many ordinary Colombians, President Juan Manuel Santos has opted to engage the so-called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army, a guerilla group popularly known as FARC – in talks aimed at bringing the hemisphere’s longest running armed conflict involving a government and an insurgent military force to an end.

Shrouding the contretemps between the government and Fedders-Lloyd over the contract for the specialty hospital is the stark fact that the infrastructure for the most rigorous examination of complaints by bidders – the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) – is still not in existence, more than a decade after it was catered for in groundbreaking constitutional reform.