Editorial

Pressed at Wednesday’s Europe Day event on why local government elections have not been held, President Ramotar had this to say: “As far as local government elections is concerned I cannot be oblivious to the political situation that exists in this country and further I say not.”

As we reported the week before last, Attorney General Anil Nandlall answered US Ambassador Brent Hardt’s comments on the state of media freedom in this country in the first instance by saying that press freedom should be taken in the context of the evolutionary process of the country, and that “not so far in the distant past” all kinds of aberrations occurred ‒ some of which he listed ‒ including the denial of newsprint.

President Xi Jinping’s decision to send troops to Xinjiang province in order to strike a “crushing blow” against terrorism marks a troubling resurgence of a political crisis that has been simmering for years.

In one of the many curious coincidences thrown up by human existence, ANR Robinson, the former Prime Minister and President of Trinidad and Tobago, and Norman Girvan, the Jamaican development economist and Caribbean public intellectual, both dedicated regionalists, died on the same day, April 9, 2014.

A police officer, personally ‘investigating’ a robbery committed against a relative of his, goes outside of his jurisdiction, picks up an underage witness and removes him from his parent’s home without his parent’s permission, places a gun into his mouth and shoots him and yet this policeman has not been charged.

Towards the end of April, President Obama visited a number of countries in Asia and the Pacific, a trip obviously designed to reassure their leaderships that in the face of a China which is on the brink of becoming the largest economy in the world, that the United States still considers itself the major power in those areas.

Nothing can gainsay the continual retrogression of media freedom in Guyana under the administration of the People’s National Congress (PNC).

On Wednesday night, a 15-year-old boy, Alex Christopher Griffith was shot in his mouth allegedly by a policeman who at last word was under close arrest.

Last week the Government of Guyana revoked the work permit of the head of the USAID Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project, Glenn Bradbury, for activities contrary to the immigration laws of Guyana.

Last month, in a scene few novelists would dare to write, an Iranian woman spared the life of her son’s murderer seconds before his execution.

In an extraordinary editorial, last Saturday, the Trinidad Guardian excoriated the President of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Sir Dennis Byron, for calling on those countries that have not yet accepted the CCJ as their final court of appeal, “to fully realise our independence by acceding to the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ.”

On Sunday last, a resident of Nonpareil, East Coast Demerara hanged himself after killing his wife of 11 years, reportedly by strangulation.

The PPP/C administration has never given the impression that it sets much store by foreign affairs, as a consequence of which it has never invested the kind of resources which would have allowed it to frame a policy reflective of this country’s longer term interests, or build up the expertise which would allow it to respond in anything other than an ad hoc way to unanticipated situations.

The extent of the Guyana economy’s dependence on the gold mining sector is set to grow significantly when two news investors, Guyana Goldfields Inc of Canada and Troy Resources Inc of Australia come on stream here in 2015.

Whichever way it is twisted and turned, what the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, Mr Nigel Dharamlall was recorded as saying at a meeting last week of Toshaos and Community Support Officers (CSOs) at the Guyana International Conference Centre (GICC) must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Once in a while the government does something which no one can find fault with.

Earlier this month, after an investigation that lasted five years and cost more than US$40M, the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,000-page analysis of the CIA’s use of torture concluded that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was unnecessary.

Jorge Domínguez is a professor of political science at Harvard University.

Finally, obviously frustrated by the inane and groundless statements being made with regard to the 911 service, if it could be called that, the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) has fired back a salvo that hit the target.

Followers of political changes in the region will have been observing the battle for succession in the People’s National Movement (PNM), the party formed by Dr Eric Williams, which has only had two political leaders since the mid-1950s – Williams himself and Patrick Manning who gave up the leadership on account of ill health.