Editorial

Having just brokered a fragile political deal in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki has issued a warning that the International Criminal Court’s decision to prosecute President Omar Bashir for war crimes “will not help to resolve the challenges that we are facing in the Sudan.”

We wrote of last week as being an ominous one for the countries of the Caribbean Community.

Twice in five months, the Federative Republic of Brazil dispatched high-level national security delegations to Guyana and other regional states. 

It is exceedingly taxing to reconcile how a government that constantly plays up its environmental credential can preside over a capital city for 16 years without decisively dealing with the festering and hazardous garbage dump along Mandela Avenue.

Last week Bolivia expelled the US Ambassador; Venezuela followed suit; the United States responded in kind; the Honduras government refused to accredit the new American Ambassador to Tegucigalpa; the Americans issued flight advisories to their citizens travelling to Venezuela; Miraflores ordered the US to reduce flights by American airlines to Venezuela; President Chávez unveiled yet another coup plot against him allegedly originating with the military and backed by Washington; the US Treasury declared it had frozen the assets of three Venezuelans – two intelligence chiefs and the former Minister of Justice Ramón Rodríguez Chacín – because they had “armed, abetted and funded the Farc…”; and President Chávez’s name was called in a Miami court where testimony was given that he had sent agents to Florida to try and buy the silence of the businessman involved in the ‘suitcase scandal’ case.

A hole in the ground, around which a wooden shed has been built and in which human beings dispose of their bodily waste, no matter how internationally accepted it is for sanitary disposal, is primitive.

With the US presidential race currently too close to call and with the Republican camp moving shamelessly away from issues to the populist appeal of Sarah Palin among white women, blue collar workers, small town folk, Christians and conservatives, it is becoming a little difficult for the more discerning observer to take a dispassionate look at the candidates’ positions on the issues at stake.

This year’s US presidential debates begin in a fortnight. In the abstract they ought to redirect the race towards  the “issues” – health insurance, affordable energy, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy – and lessen the current partisan bickering, but the history of televised presidential debates (there have been nine series since Richard Nixon first took on John F.

In the course of this week the Heads of State and Government of the Caricom and then of the Caribbean Forum (Cariforum) will be meeting in Barbados, and the Heads of the Government of the OECS are due to meet in St Lucia.

The debate over the defunct Guyana National Service seems never to have gone away.

While the decision of the DPP’s Chambers not to recommend any charges against Magistrate Gordon Gilhuys over the shooting of a policeman has been considered on its merits, it cannot be divorced from the milieu in which it has been introduced.

Tomorrow is International Literacy Day. Not that these occasions usually mean very much other than to give the topic du jour a fleeting blip on the global radar screen.

Usain Bolt’s triumphs in Beijing can all be viewed in less than a minute.

Some weeks ago, we were treated to a fairly lively but short-lived dispute – what the British might call an argy-bargy – in our letters column over the question of the late President Cheddi Jagan’s legacy.

Mr Arif Ali, a Guyanese who migrated to the United Kingdom more than half a century ago and who, during that time, has become the most successful publisher of Caribbean origin in Europe, has openly made the Government of Guyana an interesting proposal.

In his recently published book The new paradigm for financial markets – the credit crisis of 2008 and what it means the billionaire speculator, former hedge-fund manager and philanthropist George Soros paints an exceedingly grim picture of the state of the financial system today, primarily in America but also in other parts of the developed world.

The statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling last week that the British economy is likely to go through its worst experience for sixty years, will probably have come as a shock to many within the country as well as to others in the international community.

Admitting to difficulties in the implementation of the community action component of the proposed Citizens’ Security Programme, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee last month accused the Inter-American Development Bank of attempting to define the realties in Guyana.

When the seeds of Carifesta were first sowed several years before its grand inauguration in George-town in 1972, the objective was really to provide an expansive, unlimiting space within which artists of excellence from all parts and representing a multitude of art forms could exhibit their work, dialogue with each other and distil more and more of what `Caribbean-ness’ is.

A huge collective sigh of relief reverberated around the land when the police revealed that Rondell Rawlins was no more.