Editorial

After weeks of wrangling with the People’s Republic of China, Google finally closed its offices in Beijing on Monday night, and shifted its online search engine traffic to an uncensored server in Hong Kong. 

On Wednesday, the Organization of American States re-elected the Chilean politician, José Miguel Insulza, and the Surinamese diplomat, Albert Ramdin, as Secretary General and Assistant Secretary General respectively for the next five years.

Water has always been at the centre of what has been described for centuries as women’s work; cooking, cleaning, caring for children, the ill and the elderly and in some countries — Guyana among them – farming, which includes planting crops and rearing livestock.

An interesting editorial entitled `Time for a New West Indian (Caribbean) Commission’ appeared in one of our sister Caricom newspapers in Jamaica last Friday.

President Bharrat Jagdeo and then Opposition Leader Desmond Hoyte issued a joint statement nearly nine years ago in April 2001 agreeing to establish a bi-partisan Border and National Security Committee.

Two weeks ago, Mr Bob Persaud, the brother-in-law of the late Mr Satyadeow Sawh suggested that self-confessed drug lord Mr Roger Khan could have answers on the murder of Sawh, two of his siblings and a security guard in 2006.

Political arrangements in Guyana are complicated, and have been made even more complicated by the new provisions for local government elections which contain elements of both a constituency and a proportional representation system.

The first thing that strikes a visitor (Guyanese or otherwise) to Georgetown is the chaos that prevails on the roads and the noise that attends this burlesque: of cars over-accelerating and swerving, of brakes screeching, of horns uniformly blaring and (until recently) of music pulsating from every minibus.

At the beginning of the month, it was announced that John Howard, the former Australian prime minister, was the Australia and New Zealand candidate for the post of president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) from 2012 and that this would be confirmed by the ICC in June.

Exactly two years ago, a column in this newspaper had addressed the volatility of the global food supply.

As Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party held its annual conference last weekend, it was clear as the Party’s leader Nick Clegg spoke, that he was summoning his troops to be ready for another round of General Elections in Britain.

The difference in the approaches to national security and perceptions of the national interest between Guyana and Suriname were on display again last week.

Saturday’s edition of the Stabroek News carried a detailed report on one of the ambitious development programmes of the government: training single parents and helping them to start up microbusinesses so that they can fend for themselves.

The general election orchestra is tuning up already – at least for the purposes of the overture.

Nine  years ago the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg  published a scathing critique of the environmental movement which argued persuasively that despite routine doom-and-gloom  predictions by green activists, in our time “mankind’s lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator” and was likely to do so in the future.

Readers of our print copy would have been spared the online debate among bloggers arising from what we had thought to be a fairly innocuous but useful historical piece on the houses of Queen’s College appearing in our Sunday edition of March 7.

On Monday, March 8, while some organizations scurried about sending messages to the media, while newly appointed Caricom Advocate Dr Rosina Wiltshire was addressing the cancer of gender violence and later in the evening while female government functionaries and some heads of women’s groups toasted each other at a reception at the Pegasus Hotel to observe International Women’s Day, the hog-tied body of 42-year-old Jairool ‘Chico’ Rohoman was floating in a canal at Canje, Berbice waiting to be found.

In our editorial last week on ‘The OAS in the hemisphere,’ we observed that our Caricom states, in attending the Mexico conference that established the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CALC), had given little notice beforehand that they were committed to this Mexican initiative.

The crime situation and the justice system in this country were brought into focus when the Inter-American Development Bank celebrated its 50th anniversary with a party at the Pegasus Hotel last December.

Nowhere, has the risk of stagnation and political paralysis in local government been greater than in the area of financial probity.