Editorial

A sustained effort of relatively quiet European diplomacy on the part of the European Union and the Roman Catholic Church towards Cuba on the issue of human rights, has brought a result, with the Cuban Government’s announcement at the end of last week of its intention to release fifty-two persons held in prison for some years.

Expressing ‘sympathy,’ rather than apologising, to the parents of the 16-year-old schoolboy Kelvin Fraser who a policeman killed last month, Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee confessed that elements of the Guyana Police Force displayed poor training and “bad judgement” in their duties.

A grievous blow has been dealt to the mining community of Mahdia by the July 1st fire that swept through its commercial centre, razing many small businesses, causing millions in losses and leaving several families homeless.

A week last Wednesday, we reported on the contents of a press release issued by the Ministry of Education, which said that Minister Shaik Baksh was considering offering scholarships and special incentives for trained Mathematics and Science teachers as a means of promoting the two subject areas in schools.

Anyone who was a child in the Burnham era will recall the absolute unbridled thrill of a (contraband) bar of chocolate or even a tin of sardines at a time when neither could be found on the shelves of local shops.

The details of the story of the uncovering by the FBI of a ring of alleged “deep-cover” spies in the United States have already been compared in several media reports to vintage Cold War spy thrillers.

Beginning Thursday of last week in some cases, when the heavy rain which fell over the weekend started, flood waters began to be seen in part of the fairly new, booming Grove/Diamond Housing Scheme.

General Stanley McChrystal’s negative remarks about the American/Afghanistan policy as conducted by President Obama, and the President’s dismissal of his commander of the armed forces in Afghanistan have together suggested that there has been a certain amount of disorder in the making and execution of American policy on the Afghanistan intervention. 

The Guyana Police Force observed its 171st anniversary last Thursday in the midst of deepening public concern about the collapsing standards of personal and professional conduct of its members.

The denunciation on June 28th by the Inter-Religious Organisation (IRO) of the gay and lesbian film festival put on by the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) might have passed without much notice had it not been for two facts.

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.