Editorial

After over fifty years of fighting, or civil war, even preceding the attainment of independence by the Sudan, and after about two million recorded deaths, South Sudan obtained its independence from the larger state relatively peacefully last Saturday.

Linden has long fallen on difficult times. The decline of the bauxite industry has sent the economy of what is still euphemistically referred to as the mining town into a tailspin.

When the definitive analysis of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s torpedoing of his 1969 acquisition News of the World is written it will undoubtedly conclude that the ever ruthless media baron wasn’t really concerned with the ethical transgressions of the tabloid but rather with self-preservation.

The Minister of Home Affairs appears long ago to have surrendered the lead on fighting piracy to the Minister of Agriculture.

Cricket has always been a game with political meanings. The 2009 BBC documentary Empire of Cricket explicitly chronicled its development in India, Australia and the West Indies as part of larger narratives of postcolonial self-determination.

It is a good thing that we had no great expectations going into last weekend’s meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of Caricom, at Frigate Bay, St Kitts, as we cannot really complain of any great disappointment that no decisions of any consequence appear to have been taken there.

It has been said that there are now more Guyanese in the diaspora than at home and while this may seem an exaggeration, the fact is that Guyana’s economic migrants are continuing to leave in droves for the Caribbean, North America, Europe; anywhere that will have them.

The continuing struggle in Libya, with its dual character – between Colonel Gaddafi’s government and opposition forces largely centred in Benghazi, and between Libya and the NATO forces under UN Resolution General Assembly Resolution 1973, forces us to return to this issue.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) is correct in its pronouncement that the bellyaching by the Indian cricket Captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni over what he felt were flawed decisions made by Umpire Daryl Harper in the first Test of the current three-Test West Indies vs India series has deprived Mr Harper “of the opportunity to sign off as a Test umpire in a manner befitting someone who has served the game so well since making his debut back in 1994.”

In the fullness of time, the PPP/C’s version of access to information legislation will come under careful scrutiny however urgency is not required at the moment as it is clear to all breathing individuals that no functioning system will be in place before the general elections.

While for once politics on the home front could hardly be described as lacking in diversion, our small-scale drama pales into insignificance in comparison to the one being played out to our west.

A fortnight ago, Pope Benedict held a timely audience with 2,000 representatives of the Roma – arguably the most vulnerable ethnic minority in Europe – at which he spoke frankly about their “complex and sometimes painful” recent history.

Let us not fool ourselves: the expectations surrounding this weekend’s 32nd regular meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community in St Kitts and Nevis are not great, given the recent record of procrastination and prevarication by our regional leaders.

When women in Saudi Arabia decided to buck the convention that women drivers are an aberration and launched a protest on June 17, there were, according to news reports, just dozens of them instead of the thousands that international organizations had predicted would have joined the protest.

After her People’s Partnership government’s recent celebration of one year in office, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has undertaken a reshuffle of her Cabinet, in the midst of pressures from various sides of the political and economic arenas.

Last week, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) José Miguel Insulza used his opening address at the Second Conference on the Progress and Challenges in Hemispheric Cooperation against Corruption to reflect on the role that corruption continues to play in retarding development and disfiguring democracy, particularly in developing countries.

While it may not be the final word on the horrendous 2009 torture of a 14-year-old in a police station, the ruling last week by Justice Roxane George in the civil matter brought by the boy’s mother emphatically underlined the gross violations of fundamental human rights and exposed the culpability of too many agents of the state.

There have never been many elements underlying Guyana’s modern political drama.

Earlier this month, a noisy passenger on one of New York’s busy commuter trains was approached by a female conductor.

Jack Warner, the beleaguered football supremo from Trinidad and Tobago, who had been suspended by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) pending the outcome of a bribery enquiry, appears to have thrown in the towel.