Editorial

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’.

On January 29, 2002, Chairman of the Bar Council of England and Wales, Lord Daniel Brennan QC, told the Guyana media at a press briefing that he had recommended the Brickdam lockups be “locked up and closed.”

While the election of Senator Barack Obama does suggest that American politics has withstood the Bush years better than many had feared, his margin of victory in the popular vote – six percentage points – should give pause to anyone who believes radical change is coming to Washington any time soon.

Caribbean leaders, among them President Bharrat Jagdeo, Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago and Baldwin Spencer of Antigua and Barbuda, have been voicing, with Barack Obama’s victory, their hope that the United States will change its policy towards Cuba.

Almost on the heels of its countrywide consultations, which sought and gained consensus for the ‘Stamp it Out’ campaign, the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security has plunged headlong into a series of forums guaranteed to bring about some amount of controversy because of the subject matter: divorce.

Our governments have hastened to congratulate President-elect Obama on his victory.