Editorial

The government is accustomed to trying to bully its opponents, vilifying them in sometimes quite unparliamentary terms.

Britain’s imperial misadventures in Afghanistan used to be known as ‘the forgotten war,’ a label well suited to the United States’ current undertakings in Helmland, Marja and Kandahar – until recently.

The late Lloyd Best, one of the pre-eminent political economists and one of the most original thinkers of the post-independence, English-speaking Caribbean, is often credited with providing the greatest illumination regarding the phenomenon of maximum leadership in the region.

We regret that the last paragraph of yesterday’s editorial captioned ‘Assessment,’ dealing with the statistics released by the Ministry of Education in relation to the results of the national Grade Six Assessment for 2010, was inadvertently omitted.

At a press conference on Monday to release the results of this year’s National Grade Six Assessments, Minister of Education Shaik Baksh said there were stronger performances in Mathematics this year as well as in Science and that English was still a major concern; he also pointed to the continuing trend of girls out-performing boys.

The major economic powers of the world have completed their discussions on global issues their their G8 and G20 meetings in Canada over the past week.

Guyana’s jungle west of the Essequibo River can be a very lawless place.

It is worthy of note that the Immigration Department can now deliver a machine readable passport in five working days to applicants.

The letter columns and the blogs are full of talk of coalitions between Guyana’s opposition parties, and one or two of the leaders have indicated possible leanings in this direction as well.

Twenty years ago, Professor Errol Miller of the University of the West Indies popularized the notion that the Caribbean was ignoring a “marginalization of the black male” and that thousands of “men in crisis” needed a boost for their dwindling self-esteem lest they become even more dysfunctional.

Someone at Cricinfo, the authoritative cricket website, must have a wickedly ironic sense of humour.

After almost a month of a state of emergency and over 70 deaths during gun battles between the Jamaican armed forces and an underworld militia loyal to alleged drug lord Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, the man whose surname quite possibly spells out his line of business, is finally in the custody of Jamaican law enforcement authorities.

Earlier this month the new British Secretary of State responsible for international development laid out the new coalition government’s policies on that issue.

Another month, another suitcase of cocaine glides unhindered through three layers of Guyana’s airport security and lands safely in the United States.

While the extraordinary levels of corruption in Guatemala’s criminal justice system have no parallel here at the moment, the excrescences in Guatemala City should be instructive to the Guyana Government which doggedly refuses to admit the extent of organized crime here even as the country is entering a potentially troublesome interregnum as the Jagdeo era meanders to an end and a new government is to be installed at general elections next year.

Last Sunday we reported that the government had advised donors against releasing funds for local government election programmes until further notice.

Anyone who has wrestled with the fiction of Wilson Harris could be forgiven for wondering whether his services to literature really merit a knighthood.

We are one week into the World Cup and the quality of the football in the preliminary, cautious skirmishes of the group stage has been, frankly, underwhelming.

The findings of recently concluded research in the United States revealed that a murder in the neighbourhood significantly lowered a child’s score on an IQ test and that the effects lasted for about a week to nine days.

The communiqué issued after the meeting last week between our heads of state and government and the American Secretary of State was entitled ‘Commitment of Bridgetown: Partnership for Prosperity and Security.’