Editorial

The West Indies defence of their T20 World Cup title, branded by Cricket West Indies (CWI) as Mission Maroon, as expected, has ended catastrophically.

No member country of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has come even close to experiencing the litany of tragedies and trauma which Haiti has, historically, had to endure.

Draft amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA) have finally been released by the PPP/C government after more than 15 months of inexplicable dawdling.

President Irfaan Ali winged his way to COP26 in Glasgow last week without the nation having much idea about what Guyana’s climate change plans were.

The news last week that the Government of Guyana had earlier this year written to Chinese Ambassador Cui Jianchun requesting a loan of upto US$1.5B for six infrastructure projects perhaps went over the heads of many readers.

Buoyed by the presence of the Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs, the top brass of the Guyana Police Force participated in a symposium last Saturday discussing Integrity in Policing.

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.