Editorial

Scarce skills are the bane of the private sector’s existence. Not that there is any shortage of unemployed persons in Guyana.

In the March 2nd edition of Stabroek News a Trinidad Express report was carried on the harvesting of what has been described as the first-ever commercially viable onion crop in the Twin-Island Republic.

As Georgetowners sloshed around in the water last Wednesday, they must have wondered whether it might be worth investing in a wooden boat and paddles, rather than a Toyota or a Hyundai, given that flooding is becoming such a regular feature of existence.

Citizenship ceremonies in Canada and the United States are bittersweet occasions.

At the beginning of the week, the news from Havana was that Cuban surgeons had completely removed a lesion from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and that he was in good physical condition and in direct contact with his government in Caracas.

Cities are failing children, UNICEF warns in ‘The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World.’

The ferocity of recent widely publicized observations, written in a letter from Prime Minister Gonsalves to Caricom Secretary General Irwin LaRocque on the progress, or lack of it, as he perceives it, of Caricom integration, reflects an obvious frustration on the part of the Prime Minister which is not entirely inconsistent with his demeanour, but is nevertheless surprising.

On February 7 this newspaper published an editorial addressing remarks made by Labour Minister Dr N K Gopaul in another section of the media regarding what he said was the “brazen disrespect” for the country’s labour laws that obtains at some private sector workplaces and the government’s preparedness to invoke the laws of the land to ensure that those rights are respected.

While preposterous, President Ramotar’s claims earlier this month that the elections had been manipulated by the APNU and AFC to the extent that the ruling party had been robbed of 4 to 5% will have serious repercussions on the Guyana Elections Commission and public confidence in the electoral process.

It was Ms Nadia Ragnauth in a letter to this newspaper published on February 14, who reminded everybody that the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) was reported to be funding the importation of an elephant. 

In one of her final reports from the Syrian city of Homs, the American war correspondent Marie Colvin described the experience of watching a two-year old child die from a shrapnel wound.

The vituperative, smear campaign against Henrique Capriles, following his landslide triumph in Venezuela’s Democratic Unity primary, on February 12, might have had more to do with concerns regarding President Hugo Chávez’s health than the wellbeing of democracy in Venezuela.

Given the hype that usually preceded the former Minister of Health, and followed him as well, the revelation in the 2010 Auditor General’s Report, tabled in Parliament last week, that nearly $40 million in expired drugs had to be destroyed was shocking, even more so when it was made clear that there was still a large quantity of expired stock on hand pending processing and destruction.

Since the visit of President Richard Nixon and his then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Beijing in February 1972 and the subsequent re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the Peoples Republic of China and the United States, both sides have seemed careful not to act in any manner that would lead to the possibility of a breach in those relations and the extensive network of  economic ties that they have established over the years.

Relatively few people read the Annual Report of the Auditor General.

It was the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke who said: “Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it.

Last week Guyana entered the realm of the truly absurd. The last vestiges of hope that anyone might have entertained that we could inch towards a more rational ordering of our affairs, now appear to have been dashed.

As the United States readies itself for another hard fought election, the character, style and record of President Obama are beginning to take centre stage.

Angelo Dundee, the man who worked with some of the greatest names in boxing, died at the beginning of the month, at the age of 90.

Before Ms Simona Broomes and her colleagues launched the Guyana Women’s Miners Association, the average Guyanese would only have known about a few women miners, one of them being Ms Cyrilda DeJesus, who for years had been the face of women miners in Guyana.