Editorial

We live in a sceptical age. After the Wikileaks phenomenon it is hard to be naïve about the news.

On the third day of his trial, which began on Monday, for the massacre of 77 people in Norway, last July, Anders Behring Breivik began his testimony.

Come August 1, this year, Trinidad and Tobago’s (T&T) twelve-year-old Dangerous Dogs Act will finally come into force.

The northern Colombia city of Cartagena de Indias, the location of the 6th Summit of the Americas, and once a major slave-trading port and subsequently the home of large numbers of people of African descent, would certainly have been of interest to leaders of Caribbean states attending the conference.

What is now clear about events in Syria is that the government of Bashar al Assad may have already come to terms with the inevitability of its demise.

With World Press Freedom Day approaching on May 3rd, the collective mind of the press will be focused on the restraints that continue to be in place on the media and the government’s own approach to openness.

Those who have been following the saga of the Tobago Hill ponds would have been afforded a little light relief amid all the earnestness of the Budget debate last week. 

As the 35-nation Summit of the Americas gets underway in Cartagena, Colombia the United States faces a long overdue reckoning on its War on Drugs.

Just prior to this weekend’s 6th Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, the Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Chilean politician, José Miguel Insulza, expressed a wish that all the countries of the continent would be present at future summits.

The silence is deafening. The silence is deadening. And as the days go by the silence eats away at the confidence some of us might have had in public officials and goes to the heart of what really is the matter with this society.

In less than a year now, Barbados will be going to the polls, following the last general elections held in January 2008.

It comes as no surprise that there are eating houses, guest houses, barbering and hairdressing services and a host of other business ‘hustles’ in the city that are in breach of municipal public health and safety regulations.

For the average struggling Guyanese,  the most noteworthy announcement made by the Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh in his budget presentation would have been the lifting of the income tax threshold substantially from $40,000 per month to $50,000 per month. 

Where else on the democratic face of this planet could we have had a sequence of events like the one which has been unfolding here over the last few weeks?

President Donald Ramotar is expected to attend the 6th Summit of the Americas (SOA) in Cartagena, Colombia, on April 14-15.

Acting Commissioner of Police Leroy Brumell was sufficiently riled by the fact that two prisoners had escaped from the Leonora Police Station lockups on Sunday, while the two police officers were likely asleep that he publicly denounced it.

After almost two years after general elections in May 2010, the coalition which formed the government under the name of the Peoples Partnership (PP) seems unable to sustain the kind of stability that would assure supporters and the population as a whole, that they are capable of effectively governing the country.

It would be a travesty, no less, if the recent revelation of an 80.5 per cent failure rate among the current batch of students at the Guyana School of Nursing were not now to result in an independent enquiry into conditions at the institution.

The ruling of the Chief Justice quashing the advice of the DPP that a rape charge be brought against the Commissioner of Police Mr Henry Greene will not summarily end the damage to the criminal justice system wrought by these proceedings and the feeling among the disempowered – particularly women in this case – that justice for them is unavailable or not easily attainable.

The EAB has spoken.  Not, one fears, that this might have much impact on our two main political parties, both of whom are long on mistrust and short on reason.