Editorial

Once the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration had announced that there would be an official enquiry into the killing of Dr Walter Rodney on June 13, 1980, it was almost certain that neither the announcement nor the enquiry itself would pass without a flurry of public comment.

Now that the budget has been passed the PPP/C administration can now fulfil its oft-broken promise to the electorate to convene local government elections.

Sometimes one wonders whether the bureaucrats who sit in Georgetown really know anything about the basic geography of this country.

It has to be one of the great paradoxes of the digital age: as computers and the internet make our lives easier, so do they seem to make them more complicated.

Urban development cannot proceed without proper waste management and Guyana is a prime example of this.

Urban development cannot proceed without proper waste management and Guyana is a prime example of this.

Professor Norman Girvan, who passed away last week following injuries sustained during a hiking accident in Dominica had, well before his death attained the sobriquet of Caribbean Man for the extent of his academic, policy and practical work over the Caribbean as a whole.

We must wait and see just where Project Impact Albouystown takes community-police relations on the watch of Mr Seelall Persaud, the recently appointed acting Commissioner of Police.

Important questions have been raised during the budget debate in Parliament and in the Committee of Supply about major public works and whether they have been well thought out and maintained.

Vulgarity is part of life; in this country, some might say, too much part of it.

The unfairness of US criminal justice has been well-publicized for decades, but a recent book by the Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi suggests that the system has decayed to a state in which wealthy citizens – with access to good lawyers – are, for all practical purposes, exempt from entry into “the biggest [prison population] in the history of human civilization.”

The late, splendidly named Arthur Napoleon Raymond Robinson – Ray to his family and close friends, ANR as he rose through the hurly-burly of Trinidad and Tobago politics, and then, curiously, His Excellency Arthur NR Robinson, when he occupied the highest office in the land – will probably be best remembered as a heroic champion of democracy when he was Prime Minster during what has been called his country’s “darkest hour.”

Investment is to development, what water is to crops. Plants can’t grow without water; in fact, without water plants will shrivel and die.

In the midst of the shaking of the continent of Europe as Russia invaded Crimea, and tore it off from Ukraine as peremptorily as Nikita Krushchev had previously attached it to that country; and even as Britain has played a substantial role in marshalling the European position on the issue, the British government has also taken time off to continue its preoccupation with what has now come to be called Brexit.

No one in their right mind would turn down a well-intentioned initiative backed by one billion Guyana dollars that seeks to effect a cleanup around coastal Guyana.

At his last press conference on March 27th, President Donald Ramotar was asked by a Stabroek News reporter about the almost two-year-old report into irregularities at state TV, NCN and why he had not done anything about it.

There is something quite bizarre about Guyana’s foreign policy – if such it can be called.

The American comedian Stephen Colbert set off a flood of outraged moralizing in the twitterverse last week after his show tweeted an out-of-context punchline about racial insensitivity.

Even as the political uncertainty in Venezuela continues after nearly two months of protests, there are signs that President Nicolás Maduro is aware of the need to press on with a bit of high level of diplomatic activity to maintain regional and international support for his government.

On Sunday last, police in Utah, USA rescued a 23-year-old New York woman who had been knocked unconscious, abducted and forced into prostitution by her abductors.