Editorial

Its that time of year again, the National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs are on.

Vice President Bharrat  Jagdeo’s recent acerbic response to the country’s sharp dip in its Global Press Freedom rating by the media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) is not in the least bit surprising.

Under increasing pressure from international organisations, the government has opened two draft bills for consultation on tightening anti-money laundering laws.

Some things certainly pass all understanding.  There was Minister of Public Affairs Kwame McCoy addressing members of the press on World Freedom Day on Wednesday indicating that a separate association which would advocate for the rights of the press would be established.

Wednesday’s decision by Justice Sandil Kissoon finding ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, EEPGL in flagrant breach of its insurance obligations in relation to the Liza-1 project is a monumental victory for citizen activism in an oil and gas sector that has been heavily cloaked in opacity which this government and its predecessor have been clearly  complicit in permitting.

Tomorrow Charles III will be crowned king in Westminster Abbey in accordance with rites some of which date back many hundreds of years.

Visit any of the high-profile supermarkets in Guyana these days and you are almost certain to find their Chillers stuffed with pleasingly presented packages of vegetables, transformed by the manner in which they are turned out, designed to catch the eye of the shopper who might well be inclined to opt for dropping well-presented vegetables into their shopping carts as a kind of try out exercise.

The account of domestic violence victim Sandy Persaud’s resort to living in hiding following a near-fatal cutlass attack by her ex-partner, published on Sunday last, so closely mirrors that of another woman from the same county last December that it’s time to ask: just what is going on in Berbice?

Last week, Geoffrey Hinton, the expatriate British computer scientist, in an interview with the New York Times (published on Monday), revealed his growing fear with developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Governments of member countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), all too frequently, find themselves in the unhappy position of having their promises meet with healthy doses of skepticism from the people of the region, that condition having derived from what has become an ingrained propensity on the part of those governments to ‘chalk up’ unfulfilled undertakings.

In its Executive Summary, the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the March 2nd 2020 General Elections expressed the hope that its work would bring closure to this chapter of Guyana’s sordid electoral history.

Last Monday, a Bill which potentially could be viewed in a sinister light was read for the first time in the National Assembly.

In a rebuttal on April 26, the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance took umbrage at the April 23rd editorial in this newspaper entitled ‘Regional anti-corruption conference’.

Home Affairs Permanent Secretary Mae Toussaint Jr Thomas was in transit to China on April 8 when she was subjected to what is called a secondary inspection by US Customs and Border Protection at Miami Airport.

There is a story told of a mother who gives her children food, shelter and nurture; the best of all she has, only to have them later ignore or ill treat her for the most part.

The tinkling of the wind chimes at the door of Test Cricket breaks the silence as an intruder swings it wide open.

Quite what to make of the reported recent remark (Stabroek News, Monday March 27) by the General Secretary of the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU), Coretta Mc Donald, that the recent incident at the Houston Secondary School during which a teacher had  “armed herself with a cutlass” had been resolved, and that the parent of the offending child and the cutlass-wielding teacher have “sorted out their differences” is difficult to say.

In the National Assembly today – one of too few of its meetings – the government intends to table for first reading the National Intelligence and Security Agency bill.

Last week Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira was in full flow on the subject of the corruption rankings issued by Transparency International.

You have to give it to Bharrat Jagdeo. He has been trying to “sell” Guyana’s rainforest since the early 2000s going around the world saying if you don’t buy our trees they may have to be chopped down.