Editorial

Robert Corbin’s successor as Leader of the People’s National Congress/Reform (PNCR) is about to embark on an assignment that will either make or break his political career.

That President Ramotar was unable to travel to Linden on Saturday as planned is another sign of how unsure the administration is of itself and incapable when it comes to handling crises.

While the drama of Linden has been commanding national attention, other things have been happening under the radar, so to speak.

Historians of the Olympics credit much of their modern success to the glamour of the 1908 games, in London.

The much-anticipated 30th Olympiad begins today in London and the British, at least, are eagerly awaiting the revelation of who will be afforded the honour of lighting the Olympic Flame to signal the official commencement of the Games.

On Monday when the Demerara Harbour Bridge failed, this newspaper interviewed two vendors trapped on the East Bank Demerara with perishable items which they were taking to the West Demerara and East Bank Essequibo to sell.

The decision of the financial ratings agency Standards and Poors (S&P) to downgrade its ratings on the Barbados government’s potential ability to service its foreign bond repayments, seems to have come as a shock to both the government and the highest technocratic levels of public sector financial management.

Analysts of political events inside the highly secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) usually preface their offerings by conceding that they include healthy measures of speculation, even hearsay.

News that the investigation into the macabre killing of eight men at Lindo Creek in 2008 has come to an end is unlikely to convince members of the public that real answers will be forthcoming.

Last week, demonstrators were on the streets of the major cities of Spain in their hundreds of thousands.

Yet again the United States is reflecting on its persistent problems with gun violence following a mass shooting at a suburban movie theatre near Denver, Colorado. 

After a period of relatively little comment regionally on the changing of the guard in Mexico’s July 1 general elections, two of our editorials last week focused on the implications of the return to office of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), for that country, its neighbours and the Caribbean, not only in political and economic terms but also with respect to the long-running drugs war that has claimed more than 50,000 lives.

Patchwork approaches to fixing what goes wrong in this country seem to be the order of the day.

Comment so far on the 33rd meeting of the Conference of Caricom Heads of Government has not suggested that there was much consideration of the effect, or effects, of the current economic crises plaguing countries in the region, in particular Jamaica, once, along with Trinidad & Tobago, considered a key lynchpin of the regional integration system.

Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee is usually not inclined to allow critical public comment on any matter that falls under his portfolio to pass without weighing in with a view of his own.

What the Guyana Chronicle editorial of July 2nd,   has wittingly or unwittingly succeeded in achieving is to focus attention again and perhaps conclusively on the need to end the abuse of the state media by ruling parties and their coterie of elites.

A week last Friday Mr David Granger, the Leader of the Opposition, gave the inaugural lecture in the National Assembly’s Governance and Democracy series.

The somewhat underwhelming return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party  (PRI), with less than 40% of the vote in Mexico’s recent elections, is one measure of the jostling and competitive political culture that has emerged since the party lost its seventy-year lock on government in the 2000 elections.

There is not inconsiderable irony in the sense that the removal of President Fernando Lugo by Paraguay’s Congress last month and his replacement by Vice-president Federico Franco, has actually been of some benefit to Mr Lugo’s leftist ally, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

In the midst of congratulatory notes to pre-teens for their success at the National Grade Six Assessment and to children in general who have passed their end-of-year examinations and are moving up to a higher grade in school, yet another underage girl has made the news for the wrong reason.