Editorial

It is being said that the results of Venezuela’s local elections of November 23 have redrawn the political map of that country.

Forty years ago, on the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King gave one of his most memorable speeches.

News that the Government of Venezuela has sought membership of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) will have come as a surprise to most people.

While controversy still swirls around Camp Ayanganna about the Military Criminal Investigation Department’s role in the ‘roughing up’ of some serving soldiers of the Guyana Defence Force, the public seems to have lost sight of the complete lack of any kind of intelligence in last week’s deadly showdown at Cromarty on the Corentyne Coast.

In the weeks leading up to Carifesta, the divider on the East Coast highway going towards the Kitty byways was festooned with marigolds and other ornamental plants.

The complaints are flooding in from all across the country – from Essequibo, from Bartica, from West Demerara, from the East Coast, from Berbice, and above all else, from the city.

Often, when a murder is reported, one wonders what goes on in the mind of the killer.

Even as the world plunges into recession, there is one growth industry that gives no hint of slowing – Obama-watching.

Even as the world plunges into recession, there is one growth industry that gives no hint of slowing – Obama-watching.

Several weeks after the end of the American elections, a recount in Minnesota has the former Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken a handful of votes away from winning a Senate seat that would keep alive the Democrats’ hopes of having a filibuster proof majority in the upper house.

The current conflict in the Congo with an invasion led by one General Nkunda, is just the most recent example of the continuing strife in that country, officially known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since it became independent in 1960, in the wave of independence of African states that started with the transformation of the Gold Coast into Ghana in 1957.

The rising tide of trafficking in illegal narcotics and firearms over the last decade brought waves of criminal violence to this country.

Though it was tabled in Parliament quite late, the mid-year report by the Ministry of Finance for 2008 is useful as it gives an indication of whether economic targets are going to be met and the type of milieu in which next year’s budget would be presented.

Today Venezuela goes to the polls. This time it is to elect 22 governors, 328 mayors and 233 regional legislators.

In a style now recognised as typical of him, President Bharrat Jagdeo convened a consultation on domestic violence at his office on Monday last.

In Wednesday’s Project Syndicate column, ‘Connecting the solutions,’ UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his “greatest concern… that today’s financial crisis [might] evolve[s] into tomorrow’s human crisis.”

For the last six years, the French NGO Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières − RSF) has compiled a World Press Freedom Index.

The Governments of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) are now in the process of undertaking  public consultations on an initiative towards transformation of the present organization into an OECS Economic Union by 2009.

Why are more people being killed and wounded by illegal firearms each year?

While the title, Man of Letters could be easily used to describe the late Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News, Mr David de Caires, he would undoubtedly be better pleased by the sobriquet `Letters man’.