Editorial

On Friday afternoon a huge blaze engulfed the Parika Market, consuming not just the stalls within the complex but also those on the roadside as well, destroying many dozens of income sources in the process.

Tomorrow an estimated 200 million viewers around the world will sit down to watch the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVIII (that’s 58 for normal people).

Rice farmers from Regions Two, Three, Five and Six met Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha on Wednesday to discuss the problems they were facing in the industry.

The training of nurses in this country has been, over the years, worrying, to say the least.

In the initial hours of entering Guyana, first time visitors and those travellers, including returning Guyanese, who have not been here in a while, are greeted with a high-level of energy permeating the society.

What appears to be a significant reconfiguration of some of the longstanding administrative arrangements that inform the working of the country’s Public Service is reflected in the recent disclosure that the Office of the President, is, in effect, being decentralized.

Last week, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) succeeded in its appeal over a judge’s decision to reject its attempts to seize the assets of two families of central Trinidad allegedly linked to drug trafficking.

On Thursday President Irfaan Ali travelled to Berbice and told the assembled crowd in New Amsterdam that the Office of the President would operate out of a different region every month for two days. 

Is there any point in the Minister of Finance providing economic forecasts when he is so far off target each year?

Unrest in Buxton once again manifested itself shortly after 11 o’clock on the first day of the new month.

Early last month, UNICEF published a haunting, yet largely ignored, report on behalf of the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) on which it is represented along with the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Bank Group and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.

The letters column in this publication, since its inception in 1986, has served the community as a forum where all manner of thoughts, ideas, information and valuable historical knowledge are dispensed.

The report published in the Friday, January 20th issue of this newspaper regarding the flooding in parts of Charlestown and Albouystown, the result of what the report refers to as “shoddy koker work” completed by a private contractor, is a microcosm of a deeper problem of contractors seemingly failing – whether through a competency deficit or through deliberate departure from the specifications of the contract – to properly execute the specific deliverables.

Fourteen years ago today, shockwaves reverberated throughout the Caribbean when the Trinidadian government announced that it was bailing out the CLICO parent company and some of its subsidiaries.

Most of the great cities in the world were not planned. 

Writing for the In the Diaspora column in Stabroek News on August 21, 2022, anthropologist Oneka LaBennett cited the condition of “self-devouring growth” that scholar Julie Livingston had applied to the manner of Botswana’s development.

Last week Charlestown and Albouystown experienced heavy flooding as a consequence of what Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha described as “faulty work” on the part of a contractor who had installed a steel door in the Princes Street sluice.

Jacinda Ardern’s announcement last Thursday that she was resigning as Prime Minister of New Zealand not only sent shockwaves around the world, but surely occasioned a thrill among misogynists and critics of her policies, many of whom have reviled her over the years with abuse that grew increasingly nasty, personal and threatening.

West Indies cricket fans still in hibernation – the sad truth is, they are actually in hiding – recovering from the largest margin of defeat in their 95-year history of Test cricket (the 419-run loss to Australia in the Second Test at the Adelaide Oval last month), might have stirred from their slumber last Thursday, but instantly scurried back to their cocoons upon hearing the latest news.

Just over a year after the destruction by fire of the Brickdam Police Station which used to be housed in one of our Capital’s iconic buildings, much doubt still persists about what we were told were the circumstances under which the fire occurred.