Editorial

The ongoing investigation into journalistic malpractice at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is a timely reminder that news is not simply the transcription of what has happened but something created by people who spend their professional lives condensing large amounts of data into readable copy.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the gunman who killed three French paratroopers and a rabbi and three young children in Toulouse, a “monster.”

Andy Hunte is dead at two months old. He died on Tuesday night as a result of being caught in the crossfire of physical abuse being meted out by one of his parents to the other.

It is a sign of the still very much closed character of China’s communist governance and political structure, that much of the world will have been surprised by the sudden dismissal from its ranks of one of its senior political operatives. 

More than five years after the Chinese investor Bosai assumed control of seventy per cent of the bauxite mining operations at Linden, the community continues to endure numerous broken promises from the company regarding the installation of an extractor system to significantly reduce the volume of dust that rains down from the kilns.

If nothing else, the contretemps over the $90M allocated to the Guyana Police Force for the sustenance of its men and women in the election period underlines the fissuring in the esprit de corps and deep-seated grievances at various levels of the force.

Cultural policy and more particularly the preservation of the nation’s material heritage was one area which none of the political parties had much to say about prior to the election, and with all that is going on in the political field currently they certainly have not applied their minds to the matter since.

Four days ago the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by a Goldman Sachs executive announcing his decision to leave the bank because its business culture had become “as toxic and destructive as  have ever known it.”

The guarded language of the communiqué emanating from the 23rd Inter-Sessional Meeting of CARICOM Heads of Government, held last week, provides little insight into the deliberations in Paramaribo, following a few weeks of intense criticism of the state of the Community.

One of the most ignorant sayings of all time is that attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “Those who can ‘do’, those who can’t teach” as it seeks to negate the teaching profession and the fact that most persons who ‘do’, unless they were born geniuses, are only able to ‘do’ because they were taught how to ‘do’.

In the last fortnight or so the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington and the increase in intensity of the Syrian government’s military assaults on its citizens, has raised fears that the Middle Eastern arena can well become the source of large-scale warfare, involving more than the regional combatants.

If the Nigerian intellectual and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is right, sub-Saharan Africa may be closer to the most serious post-colonial political upheaval than it thinks.

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.