Editorial

Heartrending events involving pregnant mothers, defined by a marked lack of accountability in the healthcare sector, continue to prevail in this country, even in these modern times when elsewhere there are significant improvements owing both to science and technology, and punctiliousness and integrity.

Whether we are prepared to accept it or not, role models have had an influence of one form or another on us during our formative years.

This is by no means the most propitious moment for there to occur a publicly-aired testy exchange between two high-profile members of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR), the essence of which appears to amount to no more than a spurt of bilateral cat-sparring, as the Party prepares to elect a new Leader.

Never has the peril to the planet from fossil fuels been greater and never has the recognition been clearer that the primary contributors to this looming calamity must take radical measures to pull humanity back from the brink.

Anyone who had hoped that we would be holding local government elections this year will by now realise that is unlikely.

The stunning development and uptake of the world wide web over the past twenty odd years has had a highly disruptive effect on the newspaper industry.

It surprises not a few visitors to this country that so many official functions, both small and large, begin with a prayer.

Once again, roadside vending, the bane of every local municipality’s existence, has popped up in the news.

A fog of pessimism has been hovering over the Caribbean since early Saturday.

Several sets of circumstances are competing for public and official attention in Guyana at this time.

On October 21st,  the Clerk of the National Assembly, Sherlock Isaacs penned an extraordinary letter to the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Jermaine Figueira declaring that he would be unable to provide a clerk for the PAC meetings scheduled for today and October 25th as the clerk of that committee had developed health issues because of high stress and could not continue to provide service to that committee and all other clerks were unwilling to provide service because of the “unprofessional conduct of some members of this Committee, which is not conducive to a healthy working environment”.

At a virtual forum facilitated by the Cave Hill campus of UWI, political scientist Professor Cynthia Barrow-Giles and law lecturer Dr Ronnie Yearwood discussed the “judicialization of politics” both in this country and to a lesser extent in the Commonwealth Caribbean as a whole.

Over the years this newspaper has carried countless accounts of the most barbaric cruelty inflicted on women (and written countless editorials).

The government is committed to providing quality secondary education for all children. 

Over the past few months, environmentalists, scientists and journalists have been issuing increased warnings about the decrepit floating storage and offloading facility ‘Safer’, which sits in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, describing it as a colossal environmental disaster waiting to happen that could devastate millions of lives.

Last Tuesday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague in the Netherlands, handed down its decision on the Maritime Delimitation in the Indian Ocean (Somalia v.

It took ‘no time at all’ for the earliest wave of official information into the immediate-term probe of the Saturday October 2 fire that destroyed almost everything that was once the Brickdam Police Station, to be trotted out and thereafter to be quickly advanced to a point where the authorities could state, seemingly with monumental confidence, that it was a prisoner in the custody of the police who was responsible for the incineration of almost the entire complex.

Coupled with the imminent arrival in Guyana’s waters of the second Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) platform which is projected to extract 220,000 barrels of oil daily, the announcement by ExxonMobil that it has upped its estimate of the recoverable resource in the Stabroek Block to ten billion has triggered ululations in the halls of the government, the private sector and the select others who have begun to benefit immensely from the petroleum industry.

Over the last half century and more we have expended so much of our political energies on the issue of who should govern us, that the question of the quality of governance has received little attention.

The history of the Americas is the history of the rape of its resources, the decimation and displacement of its indigenous people, and the deliberate underdevelopment of its economies.