Editorial

The January 2008 general elections having come and gone, the people of Barbados found themselves with a new government, having experienced a fifteen-year stretch under then Prime Minister Owen Arthur.

These are difficult times for the health sector, more particularly, for state-run hospitals.

Two Saturdays ago, there was a major theft from Mohamed’s Enterprise on Lombard Street.

Guyana is a land of slogans. We can all parrot them from the earlier decades: Feed, Clothe and House – by 1976, no less − and Grow More Food.

Sharp personal criticism of politicians, especially those portrayed by their opponents as glib, arrogant or incurious, has become a regular feature of our age.

Most of the continent’s leaders meet today, in Georgetown, at the 4th Regular Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).

On Monday, three Berbice men appeared in the New Amsterdam Magistrate’s Court before Magistrate Adela Nagamootoo charged with three very similar offences; all three had given their wives “lashes”; all three were at first remanded to prison then placed on bonds of a year each to keep the peace failing which they would be imprisoned for one year.

Since the General Elections of May 24th in Trinidad & Tobago, the country’s citizens seem hardly to have had a dull moment.

Early in 2008, the Ministry of Education announced that all schools should have Parent-Teacher Associations.

If nothing else, the thoughtless seven-day strike of sugar workers called on Friday by the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union will focus the nation’s attention on what is fast proving an intractable matter – the myriad problems being experienced with the flagship Skeldon factory.

Some of those who cluster round the table in the Cabinet room today are the same people who entered it for the first time in 1992.

On November 11, while millions of Europeans and North Americans bought poppies and gathered at the tombs of various unknown soldiers, during a quiet ceremony on Carifesta Avenue, the President of the Guyana Legion, Hector Bunyan, gave a dismaying account of the poverty which afflicts many local veterans.

Major General Henry Rangel, Chief of the Strategic Operational Command of the Venezuelan army, declared last week in an interview with the daily newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, that the army was “married” to President Hugo Chávez’s political project and that if the opposition won the 2012 elections, the army would not accept such a result.

Recent revelations about the Georgetown Public Hospital’s (GPH) ‘miracle’ doctor – Dr Vishwamintra Persaud – and the hospital’s management’s unswerving defence of what is quite clearly defenceless, has serious implications for the GPH’s continued credibility and could very well put its reputation at risk.

Over the last few weeks four events have occurred in our hemisphere that have been the subject of widespread comment over the hemisphere as a whole.

In what may well have been her first public pronouncement since her recent appointment, the new United States Ambassador to Jamaica Pamela Bridgewater has declared her intention to set her face against corruption during her diplomatic tenure on the island.

Amid concerns about Tropical Storm Tomas, a Stabroek News reporter journeyed two Fridays ago to the north west to report on any fallout from the outer bands of this ominous system.

Last Wednesday, parents effectively shut down Golden Grove Primary on the East Coast as well as Bagotville Primary on the West Bank over lack of water in the schools, among other things.

Twenty years ago, humiliated by the landslide election of Aung San Suu Kyi, the military junta in Burma ignored the poll, placed the newly elected leader under house arrest and decided to play a waiting game with the international community.

Just a couple of months ago, a group of individuals called the Sir Frank Worrell Memorial Committee, held an event in Trinidad, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Frank Worrell becoming the first long-term black captain of the West Indies cricket team.