Editorial

A fatal shooting of a black teenager in a gated neighbourhood in Sanford, Florida has renewed doubts about the systemic flaws of American criminal justice, especially when it involves black victims.

From his arrival in Cuba’s second city, Santiago, on Tuesday, to his departure from the capital, Havana on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI, spoke with all the moral authority and diplomatic skill befitting the spiritual leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.

Since the introduction of the 16% Value-Added Tax (VAT), through which the government earns billions in revenue annually, the PPP/C administration has presented a series of austere budgets, which offer virtually no relief to the poorest of the poor in the country.

The change in the relations between the sometime superpower duo of the United States and Russia then as the Soviet Union, is no better illustrated than in a conversation between Presidents Obama and Medvedev during their recent visit to South Korea.

In an interview published in the Sunday March 18 issue of the Guyana Times, Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Dr.

Considering the billions of taxpayers’ and donor money that is poured into public sector infrastructural projects and given the entrenched concerns about the poor quality of work across the board, one can expect the government to come under intense scrutiny in the 10th Parliament over how it assigns contracts, monitors work and claws back money from errant contractors.

There is no subject on which we have received more correspondence between the 1980s and the present than noise nuisance, the letter in yesterday’s edition about the Buddy’s Pool Hall being the latest.

The ongoing investigation into journalistic malpractice at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is a timely reminder that news is not simply the transcription of what has happened but something created by people who spend their professional lives condensing large amounts of data into readable copy.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the gunman who killed three French paratroopers and a rabbi and three young children in Toulouse, a “monster.”

Andy Hunte is dead at two months old. He died on Tuesday night as a result of being caught in the crossfire of physical abuse being meted out by one of his parents to the other.

It is a sign of the still very much closed character of China’s communist governance and political structure, that much of the world will have been surprised by the sudden dismissal from its ranks of one of its senior political operatives. 

More than five years after the Chinese investor Bosai assumed control of seventy per cent of the bauxite mining operations at Linden, the community continues to endure numerous broken promises from the company regarding the installation of an extractor system to significantly reduce the volume of dust that rains down from the kilns.

If nothing else, the contretemps over the $90M allocated to the Guyana Police Force for the sustenance of its men and women in the election period underlines the fissuring in the esprit de corps and deep-seated grievances at various levels of the force.

Cultural policy and more particularly the preservation of the nation’s material heritage was one area which none of the political parties had much to say about prior to the election, and with all that is going on in the political field currently they certainly have not applied their minds to the matter since.

Four days ago the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by a Goldman Sachs executive announcing his decision to leave the bank because its business culture had become “as toxic and destructive as  have ever known it.”

The guarded language of the communiqué emanating from the 23rd Inter-Sessional Meeting of CARICOM Heads of Government, held last week, provides little insight into the deliberations in Paramaribo, following a few weeks of intense criticism of the state of the Community.

One of the most ignorant sayings of all time is that attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “Those who can ‘do’, those who can’t teach” as it seeks to negate the teaching profession and the fact that most persons who ‘do’, unless they were born geniuses, are only able to ‘do’ because they were taught how to ‘do’.

In the last fortnight or so the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington and the increase in intensity of the Syrian government’s military assaults on its citizens, has raised fears that the Middle Eastern arena can well become the source of large-scale warfare, involving more than the regional combatants.

If the Nigerian intellectual and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is right, sub-Saharan Africa may be closer to the most serious post-colonial political upheaval than it thinks.

With over three months of his administration having elapsed, there will be ever growing interest in where President Ramotar stands on issues and what he stands for.