Editorial

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.

It was Ms Shaffeek and Ms Collymore in a letter to this newspaper published on Friday who asked the question where the water was going to come from to fill the water cannon included among the purchases announced in the last budget.

Long after the logistical snafus, accidents, lack of snow and other let-downs have been forgotten, the Vancouver Olympics will be remembered – at least by Canadians – for a spectacular overtime goal in the final of the men’s ice hockey. 

President Bharrat Jagdeo, Minister of Culture, Dr Frank Anthony, the Government of Guyana and Professor David Dabydeen are to be heartily congratulated on the establishment of the Caribbean Publishing House and the recent launching of the Guyana Classics Series.

Boys will be boys but would Akeem Denny have drowned in the Guyana Water Incorporated’s Central Ruimveldt Iron Removal Treatment Plant’s “backwash lagoon” on Monday if the area, which the GWI deemed dangerous, had been properly secured?

The recent decision, taken on February 23 by most of the countries of Latin American and the Caribbean, to transform the Rio Group and the Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development (CALC) into a formal institution, the Community of Latin American States, is being advanced by them as another stage in a process of regional integration to which they have formally committed themselves at various times. 

Will the arraignment last week of four male adults from Enmore Village on the East Coast − on charges of “carnally knowing” a nine-year-old girl − have any effect on the administration’s human security and public safety policies?

In the backdrop of the daily diet of crimes, El Nino, the bottomless woes of the Windies, the plight of key industries like sugar and an imminent elections season it gladdens the heart to read of triumphs which trump the bad and hold out hope for the future of entrepreneurship and the country.

Latin American and Caribbean leaders must surely get the award for being the most dedicated summiteers on the planet.

President Obama’s healthcare summit, broadcast live to a national and international audience,  must have puzzled anyone who does not grasp the importance of his proposed reforms to the economic future of the United States, and to the political prospects of his own party and administration.  

As we go to press, reports of the two-day summit attended by 32 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean, held earlier this week in Cancún, Mexico, are still filtering in.

A few days prior to Tuesday’s Mashramani Day Float Parade, sanitization workers were out in their numbers.