Editorial

One of the underlying motifs of former PPP/C administrations was the persistent cry of corruption whether via procurement, kickbacks or questionable wholesale deal-making with cronies that stuck to these administrations like leaches.

Many readers may have seen the Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s BBC interview in which she was asked about her complimentary remarks towards the People’s Republic of China and that it was “not just Barbados that’s moving closer to China, it’s the whole of the Caribbean – I mean, investment from China has gone up many folds in the last few years.”

For the first time in its existence, the United Nations today convenes a Food Systems Summit as part of the UN General Assembly High-Level Week, aimed at addressing what has become a global crisis.

West Indies cricket fans who broke their self-imposed solitary confinement over the weekend, and returned to the reality of everyday life discovered that their nightmares of the past week were, and still are, real.

Last week’s account of the travails of Jamaica’s former Minister of Agriculture Floyd Green, whose occupancy of the portfolio crashed and burned swiftly after he had been ‘caught on camera’ transgressing the protocols associated with the so-called No Movement Day, one of the mechanisms now in place in Jamaica designed to help push back what now threatens to become a Covid-19 tsunami, would not, one feels, have gone altogether unnoticed here in Guyana.

On September 16 at around 10.30 am, a security guard with Chinese-owned Guyana Manganese Inc (GMI) at Matthews Ridge in Region One hurriedly alerted those living in the area that a reservoir had collapsed.

Last Wednesday businessman Mr Orin Boston was lying in his bed around 4 am in Dartmouth, Essequibo, when a SWAT team kicked down the back door of his home, burst into the bedroom and shot him.

There is probably no modern economic theory more thoroughly discredited than trickle-down economics.

The Guyana Teachers’ Union has succeeded in undermining its own capacity to represent the interests of teachers and has made it possible for the Ministry of Education to bypass it.

Last week, in the run up to World Suicide Prevention Day, which was observed on September 10, the Ministry of Human Services revealed statistics which were not really that surprising.

Last Sunday at 4 pm Eastern Standard Time, the sporting world paused, searched for the television remote and switched the channel.

In what must surely be one of the more peculiar of contemporary ironies, the Kingdom of Norway, whose status as one of the world’s wealthiest countries has everything to do with the manner in which it continues to manage its oil and gas resources, on Monday, went to the polls to elect a government in circumstances where, reportedly, all of the contending political parties were possessed of campaign manifestoes reflecting varying degrees of concern over climate change in circumstances where, according to one media report, “fears about climate change have put the future of the (fossil fuel) industry at the top of the campaign agenda.”

Globally, the latest World Health Organisation (WHO) figures show that there have been over 223 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 4.6 million deaths.

Last week in response to a view expressed by Mr Ralph Ramkarran in his Sunday column that the PPP had abandoned Marxism-Leninism in favour of a more social democratic stance, former President Donald Ramotar said he had to agree with the columnist’s assessment.

“Compromise is not a mediocre way to do politics; it is an adventure, the only way to do democratic politics.”

There are some things which take place in the international arena that are so bizarre they almost leave one gasping. 

As fire once again tore through part of the Amazon, members of the Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) were in Marseille, France on Sunday lobbying for greater protection of what is one of the earth’s most precious resources.

The 1973 Formula One (F1) Season, the longest in its history at the time, was down to the final race.

News reporting from across the Caribbean this past week has been weighted heavily in the direction of the decision-related challenges confronting governments at the beginning of the  second consecutive academic year since the coronavirus pandemic has, for the most part, kept the region’s children out of the classroom.

In November last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a notice stating that the Works Services Group of the Ministry of Public Works had submitted an application to the EPA for an environmental authorisation to construct a new Demerara Harbour Bridge between Nandy Park, East Bank Demerara (EBD) and La Grange on the West Bank of Demerara.