Editorial

Parliament is at the heart of our democracy, or it should be. 

A media blackout in Australia has shown the excessive control of digital platforms over the news we receive.

It was the turn of Mr Kwame McCoy, who is Minister of Public Affairs within the Prime Minister’s Office to make his contribution to the budget debate on Monday.

The announcement last Thursday that the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) was moving to implement a policy to regularise vending in Georgetown should have come as no surprise to anyone.

Is the month of February the opportune time to discuss New Year’s resolutions?

At the end of an electoral cycle where the occupants of the seat of power change and before the newcomers get down to the business of showing us what they can do, we usually embark on an excursion into political theatre.

When it was confronted on November 19, 2020 with the murky issuance of two trawler licences to a then unknown person, the Ali administration should have done what every  government committed to good governance does in such circumstances: suspend the licences and have an independent investigation done of what had transpired.

The Thursday before last President Irfaan Ali went before Parliament and told his party MPs, “The key word of my Government is ‘oneness.’” 

The winter storm that swept through Texas this week produced one of the coldest temperature snaps in a generation.

In a nation such as ours where politics has insinuated itself into almost all facets of public life, about the only subject area to get the Guyanese mind exercised will be of a political order. 

It has been accepted, at least by right-thinking people, that a high level of vaccine-induced immunity is what will steer the world away from the current COVID-19 catastrophe that has changed life as we used to know it.

Cornell’s Law School Legal Information Institute defines “domestic terrorism” as…“activities that— (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State: (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;  (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

In her capacity as both the Chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and as Prime Minister of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados, has drawn particular attention to her capabilities as a regional leader of substance.

Presented on Friday under the theme `A Path to Recovery, Economic Dynamism and Resilience’,  the 2021 budget offers some of the customary concessions  to the cost of living burden.

It was on January 7th this year that President Nicolás Maduro issued a decree purporting to establish a new maritime territory designated ‘Territory for the development of the Atlantic Façade’ incorporating our territorial waters, EEZ, continental shelf and land west of the Essequibo River into Venezuela.

With close to 2.4 million people dead from Covid-19 and more than 100 million infected, the end of the pandemic remains a distant prospect in many countries, even those with sufficient supplies of vaccines.

Last November UWI, no less, issued a release saying it was negotiating an agreement with the government here to train 20,000 Guyanese over the next five years through its Open Campus.

The number of children being trafficked for forced labour and sexual exploitation is increasing, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) latest Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, which was released a little over a week ago on February 2.

Truth be told, last Saturday night, only a handful of the endling West Indies Test cricket fans bothered to change the channel on their television sets at 9.30 pm to view the fifth day of the First Test match versus Bangladesh.

This is not the first time that Guyana has made a seemingly inexplicable slipup in its foreign policy decision making and yet, in this instance, it defies belief that the government’s recent short-lived decision to establish a Taiwanese ‘outpost’ here, a move which Beijing would have seen as amounting to the creation of a de facto embassy in Georgetown, could have ended a matter of hours later in an unseemly retreat following a swift feral blast from the Chinese.