Editorial

As the 35-nation Summit of the Americas gets underway in Cartagena, Colombia the United States faces a long overdue reckoning on its War on Drugs.

Just prior to this weekend’s 6th Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, the Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Chilean politician, José Miguel Insulza, expressed a wish that all the countries of the continent would be present at future summits.

The silence is deafening. The silence is deadening. And as the days go by the silence eats away at the confidence some of us might have had in public officials and goes to the heart of what really is the matter with this society.

In less than a year now, Barbados will be going to the polls, following the last general elections held in January 2008.

It comes as no surprise that there are eating houses, guest houses, barbering and hairdressing services and a host of other business ‘hustles’ in the city that are in breach of municipal public health and safety regulations.

For the average struggling Guyanese,  the most noteworthy announcement made by the Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh in his budget presentation would have been the lifting of the income tax threshold substantially from $40,000 per month to $50,000 per month. 

Where else on the democratic face of this planet could we have had a sequence of events like the one which has been unfolding here over the last few weeks?

President Donald Ramotar is expected to attend the 6th Summit of the Americas (SOA) in Cartagena, Colombia, on April 14-15.

Acting Commissioner of Police Leroy Brumell was sufficiently riled by the fact that two prisoners had escaped from the Leonora Police Station lockups on Sunday, while the two police officers were likely asleep that he publicly denounced it.

After almost two years after general elections in May 2010, the coalition which formed the government under the name of the Peoples Partnership (PP) seems unable to sustain the kind of stability that would assure supporters and the population as a whole, that they are capable of effectively governing the country.

It would be a travesty, no less, if the recent revelation of an 80.5 per cent failure rate among the current batch of students at the Guyana School of Nursing were not now to result in an independent enquiry into conditions at the institution.

The ruling of the Chief Justice quashing the advice of the DPP that a rape charge be brought against the Commissioner of Police Mr Henry Greene will not summarily end the damage to the criminal justice system wrought by these proceedings and the feeling among the disempowered – particularly women in this case – that justice for them is unavailable or not easily attainable.

The EAB has spoken.  Not, one fears, that this might have much impact on our two main political parties, both of whom are long on mistrust and short on reason. 

A fatal shooting of a black teenager in a gated neighbourhood in Sanford, Florida has renewed doubts about the systemic flaws of American criminal justice, especially when it involves black victims.

From his arrival in Cuba’s second city, Santiago, on Tuesday, to his departure from the capital, Havana on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI, spoke with all the moral authority and diplomatic skill befitting the spiritual leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.

Since the introduction of the 16% Value-Added Tax (VAT), through which the government earns billions in revenue annually, the PPP/C administration has presented a series of austere budgets, which offer virtually no relief to the poorest of the poor in the country.

The change in the relations between the sometime superpower duo of the United States and Russia then as the Soviet Union, is no better illustrated than in a conversation between Presidents Obama and Medvedev during their recent visit to South Korea.

In an interview published in the Sunday March 18 issue of the Guyana Times, Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Dr.

Considering the billions of taxpayers’ and donor money that is poured into public sector infrastructural projects and given the entrenched concerns about the poor quality of work across the board, one can expect the government to come under intense scrutiny in the 10th Parliament over how it assigns contracts, monitors work and claws back money from errant contractors.

There is no subject on which we have received more correspondence between the 1980s and the present than noise nuisance, the letter in yesterday’s edition about the Buddy’s Pool Hall being the latest.