Editorial

With over three months of his administration having elapsed, there will be ever growing interest in where President Ramotar stands on issues and what he stands for.

Last Tuesday we reported on a one-day workshop held by CXC in Barbados on a common regional primary assessment programme, or what was described as a modified and enhanced version of the Common Entrance exam, which it was hoped could be introduced in all the anglophone Caricom territories.

Last Monday an American nonprofit organization that helps African children posted an online documentary about the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

With Prince Harry visiting Jamaica this week, Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller repeated her intention to hold a referendum on Jamaica becoming a republic and no longer having Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.

One hundred and one years ago, the first International Women’s Day was observed on March 19 in four countries in Europe – Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, following the establishment a year earlier at a meeting in Copenhagen of a ‘women’s day’.

Amid protests from his opponents and from the main organization monitoring the Presidential elections, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) of which Russia is a member, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin registered a substantial victory in last Sunday’s general elections, amassing 64% of the vote.

Scarce skills are the bane of the private sector’s existence. Not that there is any shortage of unemployed persons in Guyana.

In the March 2nd edition of Stabroek News a Trinidad Express report was carried on the harvesting of what has been described as the first-ever commercially viable onion crop in the Twin-Island Republic.

As Georgetowners sloshed around in the water last Wednesday, they must have wondered whether it might be worth investing in a wooden boat and paddles, rather than a Toyota or a Hyundai, given that flooding is becoming such a regular feature of existence.

Citizenship ceremonies in Canada and the United States are bittersweet occasions.

At the beginning of the week, the news from Havana was that Cuban surgeons had completely removed a lesion from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and that he was in good physical condition and in direct contact with his government in Caracas.

Cities are failing children, UNICEF warns in ‘The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World.’

The ferocity of recent widely publicized observations, written in a letter from Prime Minister Gonsalves to Caricom Secretary General Irwin LaRocque on the progress, or lack of it, as he perceives it, of Caricom integration, reflects an obvious frustration on the part of the Prime Minister which is not entirely inconsistent with his demeanour, but is nevertheless surprising.

On February 7 this newspaper published an editorial addressing remarks made by Labour Minister Dr N K Gopaul in another section of the media regarding what he said was the “brazen disrespect” for the country’s labour laws that obtains at some private sector workplaces and the government’s preparedness to invoke the laws of the land to ensure that those rights are respected.

While preposterous, President Ramotar’s claims earlier this month that the elections had been manipulated by the APNU and AFC to the extent that the ruling party had been robbed of 4 to 5% will have serious repercussions on the Guyana Elections Commission and public confidence in the electoral process.

It was Ms Nadia Ragnauth in a letter to this newspaper published on February 14, who reminded everybody that the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) was reported to be funding the importation of an elephant. 

In one of her final reports from the Syrian city of Homs, the American war correspondent Marie Colvin described the experience of watching a two-year old child die from a shrapnel wound.

The vituperative, smear campaign against Henrique Capriles, following his landslide triumph in Venezuela’s Democratic Unity primary, on February 12, might have had more to do with concerns regarding President Hugo Chávez’s health than the wellbeing of democracy in Venezuela.

Given the hype that usually preceded the former Minister of Health, and followed him as well, the revelation in the 2010 Auditor General’s Report, tabled in Parliament last week, that nearly $40 million in expired drugs had to be destroyed was shocking, even more so when it was made clear that there was still a large quantity of expired stock on hand pending processing and destruction.

Since the visit of President Richard Nixon and his then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Beijing in February 1972 and the subsequent re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the Peoples Republic of China and the United States, both sides have seemed careful not to act in any manner that would lead to the possibility of a breach in those relations and the extensive network of  economic ties that they have established over the years.