Editorial

Some time after 1 pm on Tuesday, a tree outside the Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC) Ground at Bourda became uprooted and fell bringing down an electricity pole with wires and upsetting a swarm of bees that had probably been living in its branches.

In spite of periodic hiccups, a slow but fairly consistent positive evolution in Cuba-United States relations continues to be apparent.

From the look of things this year’s general elections campaign may well be characterized by the customary verbal vitriol to which we have grown accustomed over the years and which, during previous general elections campaigns, has served to subsume manifesto commitments beneath the din of word-throwing and name-calling on the hustings.

Governments that are as unaccountable as this one and insulated from scrutiny because of the absence of vibrant watchdog institutions tend to become even bolder in their indiscretions as their terms draw to an end.

When President Jagdeo came to office he was touted as representing youth, with a vision which would usher in a vernal season in our old, tired politics.

The political carnival which frustrated the government’s recent attempts to pass a “hanging bill” in the Trinidadian parliament had little to do with a serious debate of the issues, constitutional or otherwise.

The bloody civil conflict continues in Libya between forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and those opposed to him, with the dictator ruthlessly rebuffing the efforts to topple him and seemingly set to confound the expectations of those who had thought he would follow his neighbours, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, into the political wilderness.

In a letter to this newspaper, published on Monday last, Mr Vanrick Beresford lamented that the launching of the Men’s Affairs Bureau, held on Friday, March 4, started some 40 minutes after its scheduled time owing to the President being late.

Amidst a flurry of critical press and other comment on Caricom’s fortunes before their Inter-Sessional Meeting in Grenada on the 25th and 26th of last month, our heads of government have once again said relatively nothing about the critical issues which concern the progress of regional integration in our area.

The incident may have passed without injury to anyone; it would, however, be foolhardy to make light of the stoning of the West Indies team bus by irate Bangladeshi fans after their team had been humiliatingly beaten by the Caribbean side in last Friday’s Cricket World Cup 2011 encounter.

When Mr Sharief Khan passed away on February 22 he bequeathed a corpus of work that very few journalists here can match in terms of the variety media and capacities he functioned in and years of service.

This must be the most extraordinary campaign season ever in this country. 

The ripple effect of the ‘Arab awakening’ has now spread to a much wider area than any informed observer could have guessed at just six weeks ago.

The United Nations has warned of an impending humanitarian disaster in Libya as tens of thousands flee the bloody attempts of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime to repress the popular uprising against his despotic rule.

By this time next week, International Women’s Day (IWD) would have come and gone.

There is no doubt that the Western, or all the NATO, powers have been intensely surprised by the turn of events in the Middle East and North Africa.

Cote d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) is a West African state with a population of around 20 million.

Noting the billions that have been spent on drainage since the 2005 Great Flood, Thursday’s editorial questioned whether it couldn’t have funded a couple of extra pumps for areas inundated after last Monday’s torrential rains.

Today holds particular significance in the context of the Year of Peoples of African Descent; it is the anniversary of the outbreak of the great uprising of 1763, which also fell on a Sunday.

Some of the most resonant lines of political commentary penned in the twentieth century can be found in Gil Scott-Heron’s poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’