Editorial

President Hugo Chavez has won the February 15 referendum on term limits with a comfortable 55% victory.

President Bharrat Jagdeo told the Guyana Defence Force annual officers conference last week:  “We have excellent security plans; the thing that we have suffered from in the past is, maybe, lack of coordination or lack of a clear establishment of the linkages between the different components.”

News that Washington police have made a breakthrough in the 2001 murder of government intern Chandra Levy will bring a measure of relief to her long-suffering family and the community that she lived in.

The protest action by some parents and students of Berbice High School on Friday is perhaps symptomatic of the times in which we live.

Four more women have died and two others came close to joining them over the past few weeks.

Ever since its creation in 1996, courtesy of a magnanimous donation by the Emir of Qatar, the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera has refused to conform to expectations.

Fiasco, farce, farrago, embarrassment, debacle, disgrace – just some of the more polite utterances following the abandonment of play on the opening morning of the aborted Second Test Match between the West Indies and England, at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, at North Sound, in Antigua.

We observed, in our recent editorial on the international and domestic preoccupations of President Obama as he assumed office, that in speaking in his inaugural address of areas of focus, he did not mention the European Union.

No one was surprised last week when several members of the Guyana Police Force Tactical Service Unit were arraigned before the Chief Magistrate on charges of bribery and demanding money with menace.

Budgets by their very nature are highly anticipated as they set out the fiscal agenda for the year and chart a course for the entire country so to speak.

The fire which claimed the lives of four family members in New Amsterdam at the end of January produced a number of comments on our website about safety in homes surrounded by grillwork.

Incidents of carnal knowledge and other gross acts involving minors have been multiplying at an alarming rate, or at least the reporting of them has, heightening awareness of the plight of our children, particularly young girls.

The grand old men of Guyanese diplomacy have both turned 80: Sir Shridath Ramphal last October, with much fanfare, and Rashleigh Jackson, last month, with considerably less public notice.

Two days ago, after a week of courting the American news networks to the point of exhaustion, President Obama held an anxious press conference, hoping to persuade a sceptical public of the need for a second economic stimulus plan.

As he initiated his campaigning to get from his Senate seat to the Oval Office two or so years ago, preaching the gospel of change, President Obama could hardly have imagined that the domestic environment in which he would assume office would be so severe.

What should the public expect from the Oversight Committee on the Security Sector that is to be established in the National Assembly?

On January 26, the entire country mourned with Lusignan the savage murders of 11 children, men and women.

If there have been problems with how democracy functions in this country, the land to our west can boast some democratic deviations of its own.

Some 76% of all recorded suicides in Guyana are committed by men.

There is a rather morbid joke about cemeteries being places that people are dying to get into.