Editorial

An enduring challenge for any government is the interplay with its political underpinnings.

On Friday, Stabroek News printed the full text of a letter sent by Justice Franklin Holder to Chief Justice (ag) Yonette Cummings-Edwards, giving an account of the behaviour of Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Basil Williams in his court on March 23.

In a thoughtful new book the journalist Chris Hayes takes a close look at the importance of certain social norms that most of his fellow Americans take for granted.

There has been much criticism and editorializing on the performance of the APNU+AFC coalition government since the year started.

Monday’s acquittal of Wesley Carlos Payne, called “Piggy,” who had been on trial for the rape of a nurse in a ward at the Wismar Hospital in 2008, points to a seeming, continuous and alarming lack of quality investigation and prosecution.

On Sunday, at the Kensington Oval in Barbados, the eighth round of the Regional Professional Cricket League (PCL) four-day match between the hosts and Guyana was interrupted for the Twenty20  International game between the visiting Pakistanis and the West Indies .

Last week, the Government Analyst Food & Drugs Department (GA/FDD) dispatched a letter to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) to prohibit a named US-based company from facilitating transactions pertaining to the importation of consignments of foods into Guyana on the grounds that the said company had been involved in arrangements allowing for imports that do not meet the requirements of the country’s Food and Drugs Act.

Following the furore over the $605m emergency purchase for the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC), the Minister of Public Health, Volda Lawrence has provided further clarification on her role in the process.

Affairs at City Hall are becoming increasingly bizarre. Who would have thought that following the local government elections last year, when the citizenry was looking forward to a new era of transparency, accountability and rationality in the management of their capital, it would become a byword for exactly the opposite?

“Biographies of poets are hard to believe,” warned Derek Walcott in an essay on Robert Lowell, for “[t]he moment they are published they become fiction, subject to the same symmetry of plot, incident, dialogue as the novel.”

In his Budget 2017 presentation to the National Assembly, Finance Minister Winston Jordan’s report of the expected performance of the agriculture sector for 2016 painted a bleak picture.

Finally, after months of what appeared to be indecision, the government has suspended the parking meter project for three months.

David Copperfield, the American magician, master illusionist and showman par excellence is among the best in the world at the art of misdirection.

Two weekends ago a video surfaced on the internet purporting to depict an utterly scandalous verbal tantrum by a senior public servant, directed at a subordinate functionary.

On June 19, 2016, the Sunday Stabroek editorialised as follows on the deal to establish paid parking here.

The month of March marks the centenary of the end of Indian indentureship.

President Trump’s “skinny” budget is effectively a declaration of war on what chief White House strategist Steve Bannon calls the “administrative state.”

There is an ancient Chinese curse that reads, “May you live in interesting times.”

One of the most inexplicable things in this country is that regardless of how often or how long power outages are, there is never a commensurate reduction in one’s electricity bill.

Truth is stranger than fiction, or is it the other way round nowadays?