Editorial

When the prices of food and oil on the world market eventually peak, and there is no indication that this will happen any time soon, there will be millions more poverty-stricken people, particularly in developing countries – not that this is totally unexpected.

The Olympics are finally over and for many sports fans life is getting back to normal.

When the Director General of the Caribbean Regional Economic Machinery (CRNM) and his team concluded their negotiations with the European Commission, he no doubt felt a sense of relief that this long drawn out and complex discussion had come to an end, and that Cariforum governments could compliment themselves on the results.

The Lost Land of the Jaguar, a three-part BBC documentary broadcast earlier this month, should be required viewing for any Guyanese who have not yet visited the interior.

Come September, one year would have elapsed since the start of a spate of allegations of torture against the Guyana Defence Force, Guyana Police Force and Guyana Prison Service.

The very painstaking work entailed by the house-to-house registration exercise has revealed the number of persons who were unable to register because they didn’t have the all-important birth certificate in their possession. 

A letter from Mr Louis Holder in our edition on Friday criticized the issuing of free tickets for Carifesta events.

Over the past several weeks, there has been a spring cleaning fervour unmatched by anything anyone in this country has seen over the past two or three decades.

Last week Thursday, Prime Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago used the opportunity of an official visit by the new Prime Minister of Grenada, Tillman Thomas, to invite the leaders of St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines to join them for discussions on deeper integration among those four countries.

Up until now the Four Year Strategic and Operational Plan ‘rolled out’ by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) last Wednesday is exactly what it says it is – a Plan, an ambitious and forward-looking Plan but a Plan, nonetheless; a work in progress.

The Ministers of Culture and Health should hang their heads in shame.

Hints of pre-1989 times have characterized the international atmosphere over the last week, as the United States fully responded to Russia’s intervention into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, populated by Russian citizens and persons of non-Georgian descent, and then into wider zones surrounding those areas.

Civil society must not allow the serious debate on crime to be diluted by anecdote or to degenerate into sterile political badinage.

Government’s recent presentation of a flurry of bills on security and law and order has quite properly raised concerns.

One can only wonder about how President Saakashvili of Georgia and his government argued themselves into launching a military attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Arrested development, besides being the name of a music group and a television series about a dysfunctional family, is unfortunately the state of life of the poor and vulnerable in this country, particularly women and children.

The Olympic Games heat up today with the start of the track and field programme.

Sex scandals are as old as Washington, what tends to make them interesting is the lengths to which the guilty parties go to create an effective cover-up.

There is a certain inevitability to the conflagration which has flared up between the Russian Federation and the Caucasus state of Georgia, once a republic of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

As Emancipation Day dawned in Georgetown, several innocent adolescents celebrated the anniversary with shouts of “We want freedom” because they were still locked up in the Guyana Police Force’s detention centre in Brickdam station.