Editorial

In what must be an unprecedented decision in our region, the High Court of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court system has, one year after the general elections in Antigua and Barbuda, declared the results in three seats held by the government party invalid, including that of the Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer.

It was predictable that the US Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released on March 1, would be critical of the Government of Guyana’s counter-narcotics performance during 2009.

When a life like Sangeeta Persaud’s is lost so tragically to the country, the humdrum dilemmas of every-day life and the posturing of politicians seem so irrelevant and meaningless.

If an award existed for the most unmitigated drivel uttered by a member of Cabinet this year, then Education Minister Shaik Baksh would have won it hands down last week.

Minister of Education Shaik Baksh bluntly declared this week that his ministry will not tolerate violent students in school.

Unexpected as the recent round of diplomatic turmoil in the Middle East, caused by Israel’s recent actions in Jerusalem may have seemed even to the United States, they cannot be said to be entirely surprising.

Mid-March will be remembered for its murders. A Brazilian miner was shot dead after he was robbed of raw gold by armed bandits at his mining camp at Black Water in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni.

Friday’s opening of the revamped lock-ups at the Brickdam Police Station represents a small victory of sorts for the various groups that have lobbied for years for the bringing of this facility into conformity with basic norms of decency and respect for human rights.

Anyone who read our reports on the Georgetown Zoo should have been disturbed by their content.

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.