Editorial

For most Guyanese, at home and abroad, this Christmas is one of great uncertainty.

A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, decided in the face of a threat of a vote of confidence in his new government, to ask the Governor General of Canada to suspend sittings of the Parliament for a month.

How many reports on trafficking in persons does this country need?

It is heartening that swiftly upon his return President Jagdeo has once again immersed himself in the details of the flooding in the country.

The staff of the Guyana National Bureau of Standards  − hard-working, rational people − for the last few years have been trying to persuade the rest of us to comply with the law, move into the modern era and adopt the metric system that they say 96% of the world is using or in the process of converting to.

The statistics are not unexpected, given what occurs on a daily basis, but seeing them in black and white somehow still causes incredulity.

Regional leaders this week ensured that they are not going gentle into the close of the year, with a mind-spinning round of summitry in Costa do Sauípe in the Brazilian state of Salvador.

After a long history of costly failures within the US government, in Europe and beyond, a recent report by the Genocide Prevention Task Force offers new hope that shrewd diplomacy may alter the political landscape in which genocide takes place, and that concerted international efforts may be able to forestall mass killings through early intervention in the sorts of political quarrels that have typically escalated into genocide.

The political situations in Ghana and Zimbabwe represent interesting contrasts on the continent at the present time.

The story had all the ingredients of a great murder mystery − affidavits; bribery; confessions; death squads; executions; a foreign embassy; illegal guns; hit lists; mobile telephone records; political parties; rogue policemen; torture chambers; video tapes and more.

This season’s lashings of rain and the flooding that has followed have again exposed how dangerously vulnerable the capital and the coast are to catastrophic inundation as in 2005 when there was immeasurable loss to householders.

It seems the political landscape in Guyana is undergoing change, which is saying something considering that we have been stuck in the same time-warp for almost the last five decades.

For a long time deportee has been a bad word, not just in Guyana but in every country that has what the developed nations call “a migrant population.”

Here we go again! The latest word on the report regarding the alleged Fidelity/Customs fraud is that the investigation is now finished and that, as of last Friday, the report has been completed and awaiting the scrutiny of the President.

In an impressive display of solidarity with Cuba, all 14 leaders of the independent Caricom states attended the Third Caricom-Cuba Summit in Santiago de Cuba on Monday and awarded an honorary Order of the Caribbean Community to ailing ex-President, Fidel Castro, in recognition of his role in fostering closer ties between Caricom and Cuba.

Although most of Washington has functioned in crisis mode for the last few months, the transition of Barack Obama, from President-elect to President, has gone ahead with the calm professionalism that characterised his long presidential campaign.

December 27 will have been a year since the assassination of Mrs Benazir Bhutto, then on the brink of resuming the leadership of her country after her removal by the military, and then the politically forced demitting of office by General-President Musharraf.

Community policing is a public good. It has the potential to contribute measurably to human security and public safety.

Defeat for Wednesday’s parliamentary motion seeking wider TV access for Lindeners confirmed that the PPP/C government is in lockstep with authoritarian and undemocratic measures that it once inveighed so militantly against.

Given the endless litany of murders and the pressures of the season, our report on the draft education bill − which barring the accompanying manual and regulations is complete – slipped by without notice.