Editorial

“Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby / I’m goin’ away, in a sailing boat, /And if I don’t come back, /Stay home and mind baby.”

In celebrating Arrival Day, notwithstanding the critical importance of commemorating the contributions of all of our ancestors to the building of our nation – still a work in progress – we run the risk, as is recognised by some, of emphasising our differences rather than focusing on our similarities.

Early this year, when they revealed the road accidents statistics for last year, the police had said that while there was a 5% increase in fatal accidents over the previous year, the number of deaths was the same; 115 people were killed on the roads in 2010 and another 115 were killed in 2011.

As was not entirely unexpected, President Sarkozy of France was defeated in the second round of the presidential elections, though his margin of victory was not substantial – 51.6% to 48.4%, as had been implied in the first round of the voting.

Teachers appear mostly to internalize the issues that affect them in the delivery of the service that they provide.

More than ever before, the selection of an elections commissioner to replace the late Mr Robert Williams has underlined the fact that the Carter-Price formula for the Commission that was used for the 1992 elections has no relevance to the present context and must be abandoned in its entirety before any new poll is held.

Last week the major Venezuelan newspapers began to cautiously explore political scenarios which  assumed that President Hugo Chávez would not be leading his party (The United Socialist Party) in the foreseeable future.

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest held last week in Port of Spain is a timely reminder that however bleak political and cultural life in the West Indies may seem from time to time, at least Caribbean literature is alive and well.

“Lions led by donkeys” was the pithy assessment of the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of British Empire troops sent to their slaughter by incompetent generals on the Western Front in World War I (1914-1918).

Just over a week ago, four girls all below the age of 18, and two under the age of 16, were rescued from a gold mining location in the interior, where it was reported they were being forced into prostitution.

Returning from attendance at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia where she focused on getting support for her country’s claim to the Falklands, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner turned her attention to another issue destined to attract headlines in the international press.

Shortly before the start of the recently concluded 13th Caribbean Sustainable Tourism Development Conference the Government Information Agency (GINA) issued a media release in which it announced that government was partnering with the private sector to ‘spruce up’ the city so that our visitors could experience a more wholesome capital than that which those of us who live here must live with, day in, day out.

Where theatrics and histrionics are concerned, the government has outdone itself on the opposition budget cuts that have reduced subventions to the Government Information Agency (GINA) and NCN to a dollar.

If one didn’t know better, one might have thought that some of our politicians were competing with the rulers of the Italian city states in Renaissance times, since there has been more than enough intrigue and perfidy to go around in the last ten days.

The battle between online giants Apple and Amazon to control the lucrative ebook market took an unexpected turn three weeks ago when the US Department of Justice (DoJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and seven major trade publishers for colluding to “substantially increase the prices that consumers pay for ebooks.”

Generally recognised as the greatest writer in the English language and perhaps the greatest playwright the world has ever seen, William Shakespeare would have been 449 on April 23.

Over the past 16 months or so, the world has been preoccupied with the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions, which started in December 2010 and the ongoing global economic downturn that spawned the universal ‘occupy’ movement.

The first round of French presidential elections has been disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, for President Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).

On February 16, during the debate in the National Assembly on supplementary  budget allocations, Finance Minister Ashni Singh declared that the government had found itself “in completely uncharted territory,” a reference to the delayed approval of supplementary budget financing based on opposition queries relating to the legality of some of the spending.

No matter how it is parsed or spun, APNU’s deal-making last week with the PPP/C government will be seen as a continuation of the historic engagement of the duopoly that has bestridden the political landscape for the last 55 years or so and which has left the country wallowing in the backwaters of development and deeply divided.