Editorial

The timing of the Guyana Public Service Union’s decision to serve the government with an industrial action ultimatum will not do the Guyana Teachers’ Union any favours.

On Sunday men arrived in tinted SUVs and suits to turn the sod on a new hotel project and in the process begin what will very likely be the burial of a weekly Guyanese tradition.

The chaos across the globe which characterised 2023 has continued into 2024.

J’accuse, the well-known French phrase, which translates to “I accuse” in English, is noted for its historic newspaper reference.

Older folks will remember the red glow of the huge vertical neon sign attached to the northern outer wall of the upper flat of the Rendezvous Restaurant located at 77 Robb Street in Georgetown.

At a time when the economic trajectory of Guyana may appear to be heading in a potentially positive direction – a circumstance that is dictated, chiefly, by evidence that the country’s oil wealth is beginning to bring about some measure of socio-economic transformation, we are witnessing – or at least so it seems – the emergence of trends that are known to attend such changes in countries blessed with relatively sudden shifts in economic fortunes.

Well, who can argue against the Georgetown Seafront and Resort Convention Centre to be built along Carifesta Avenue over the next three years?

On Tuesday we published information contained in a February 9 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies about Venezuela’s military build-up in Ankoko as well as on its Atlantic coast.

Emile Zola’s 1873 novel “The Belly of Paris” is centred around the capital’s once large food market of Les Halles which sadly moved to the suburbs in 1969.

The ruling party has never been noted for its aesthetic sensibility, but what most distinguishes it is the fact that whenever confronted with an open urban space it is overcome by the compulsion to fill it with a concrete monstrosity.

Let’s get one thing straight. However and whenever the teachers’ strike ends, the lesson learned will include the fact that around here nothing really changes, and the maxim that talk is cheap truly applies.

On the morning of the 19th January, while the West Indies were still licking their wounds from the First Test defeat by Australia at the Adelaide Oval, Cricket West Indies (CWI) CEO, Johnny Grave was on a Zoom call with former England captains Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain, joint hosts of the weekly Sky Sports cricket podcast.

To seek to pretend that the current industrial action by teachers across the country is some kind of political contrivance, part of the wider pattern of political ‘cat-sparring’ that intermittently afflicts the nation, is to indulge in monumental self-delusion. 

On January 25th this year, a Brazilian federal judge ruled that miners Vale and BHP and their joint venture Samarco must pay 47.6 billion reais (US$9.67 billion) in damages for a 2015 tailings dam burst.

“I suspect the GTU …  have found themselves in this box and they would be pushing to have hopefully the Ministry of Labour and the chief labour officer … extricate them from there,” Labour Minister Joseph Hamilton was quoted by the state newspaper yesterday as saying.

The two hardest Cabinet portfolios are arguably the ministries of health and education.

Autocrats in power for any extended period with oppression as part of their CV will rarely leave office willingly. 

In the fairy tale ‘’The Steadfast Tin Soldier’’ by Hans Christian Andersen, the central figures are a tin soldier – the last of a batch of 25 and made one-legged because the tin ran out – and a paper ballerina formed executing a pirouette, with one leg drawn up.

Last Friday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that US prosecutors had overreached their boundaries when they applied United States laws to groups of people, many of whom were foreign nationals, who allegedly defrauded FIFA, a foreign organisation based in Switzerland.

It was always inevitable that, at some stage, Banks DIH Ltd.,